Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

Dr Manelli has advised that the bulk of this report should be a description of my personal recollections of what took place, though it may also include transcripts of our conversations or other material where she feels that is appropriate.

I agree to do this only on the understanding that the contents of this report will remain confidential.

DI James Clemo

In the UK, a child is reported missing every 3 minutes.

www.missingkids.co.uk

The first three hours are most critical when trying to locate a missing child.

www.missingkids.com/keyfacts

My ex-husband’s name is John. His new wife is called Katrina. She’s petite. She has a figure that can make most men drink her in with their eyes. Her deep brown hair always looks shiny and freshly coloured, like hair in magazines. She wears it in a bob, and it’s always carefully styled around her pixie face, framing a pert mouth and dark eyes.

When I first met her, at a hospital function that John was hosting, months before he left us, I admired those eyes. I thought they were lively and sparky. They flashed around the room, assessing and flirting, teasing and charming. After John had gone, I thought of them as magpie’s eyes, darting and furtive, foraging for other people’s treasure to line her nest.

John walked out of our family home on Boxing Day. For Christmas he’d given me an iPad and Ben a puppy. I thought the gifts were thoughtful and generous until I watched him back his car out of the driveway on Boxing Day, neatly packed bags stowed on the back seat, while the ham went cold on the dining table and Ben cried because he didn’t understand what was happening. When I finally turned and went back into the house to start my new life as a single mother, I realised that they were guilt-gifts: things to fill the void he would leave in our lives.

They certainly occupied us in the short term, but perhaps not as John intended. The day after Boxing Day, Ben appropriated the iPad and I spent hours standing under an umbrella in the garden, shivering, shocked, while the new Cath Kidston Christmas slippers my sister had sent me got rain-soaked and muddy, and the puppy worked relentlessly to pull up a clematis when I should have been encouraging it to pee.

Katrina lured John away from us just ten months before Ben disappeared. I thought of it as a master plan that she executed: The Seduction and Theft of My Husband. I didn’t know the detail of how they kindled their affair but to me it felt like a plot from a bad medical drama. He had the real-life role of consultant paediatric surgeon; she was a newly qualified nutritionist.

I imagined them meeting at a patient’s bedside, eyes locking, hands grazing, a flirtation that turned into something more serious, until she offered herself to him unconditionally, the way you can before you have a child to consider. At that time, John was obsessed with his work. It consumed him, which makes me think that she must have done most of the running, and that the package she offered him must have amounted to a seductive proposition indeed.

I was bitter about it. My relationship with John had such solid and careful beginnings that I’d assumed it would last for ever. It simply never occurred to me that there could be a different kind of ending for us, which was, I now realise, extremely naive.

What I hadn’t realised was that John didn’t think like me, that he didn’t view any problems we might have had as normal, surmountable. For him things boiled under the surface, until he couldn’t cope with being with me any more, and his solution was just to up and leave.

When I rang my sister right after he’d gone she said, ‘Didn’t you have any idea at all?’ and her voice was strained with disbelief. ‘Are you sure you paid him enough attention?’ was her next question, as if the fault was mine and that was to be expected. I hung up the phone. My friend Laura said, ‘I thought he was a bit detached lately. I just assumed you guys were working through it.’

Laura had been my closest friend since we were at nursing college together. Like me, she hadn’t stuck with bedpans and body fluids. She’d quit and switched to journalism instead. We’d been friends for long enough that she’d witnessed the birth and growth of my relationship with John as well as its demise. She was observant and forthright. That word ‘detached’ stayed with me, because if I’m being really honest, I hadn’t noticed it. When you have a child to look after, and when you’re busy developing a new career as well, you sometimes don’t.

The separation and divorce tore me apart, I’ll admit to that. When Ben disappeared I was still in mourning for my husband. In ten months you can get used to some of the mechanics of being alone, but it takes longer for the hurt to heal.

I went round to Katrina’s flat once, after he’d moved in with her. It wasn’t difficult to find. I pressed on her door buzzer, and when she answered the door I snapped. I accused her of being a home-wrecker, and I might have said worse things. John wasn’t there, but she had friends round and, as our voices rose, the three of them appeared behind her, mouths open, aghast. They were a perfectly groomed Greek chorus of disapproval. Glasses of white wine in hand, they watched me rage. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I never quite got round to apologising.

You might wonder what I look like, if my husband could be lured away by such a pert little magpie. If you saw the press conference footage, you’ll already have an idea, though I wasn’t at my best. Obviously.

You’ll have seen that my hair looked straggly and unkempt, in spite of my sister’s efforts to tame it. It looked like witch’s hair. Would you believe me if I said that under normal circumstances it’s one of my best features? I have long, wavy dark blond hair that falls beneath my shoulders. It can be nice.

You’ll certainly have noticed my eyes. That’s the close-up shot they replay most: bloodshot, desperate, pleading eyes, red-rimmed and puffy from the tears I’d shed. You’re going to have to take my word for it that normally my eyes look pretty: they’re wide and very green and I used to think they flattered my pale, clear skin.

But what I really hope you noticed was the smattering of freckles across my nose. Did you see those? Ben inherited them from me, and it always pleased me beyond measure to see that physical trace of myself in him.

It would be wrong of me to give you the impression that the only thing I was thinking about was Katrina, when Ben disappeared. On the afternoon when it happened, Ben and I were walking the dog in the woods. It was a Sunday, and we’d driven out of Bristol and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge to reach the countryside beyond.

The bridge traversed the Avon Gorge, a great crevasse in the landscape, carved out by the muddy-banked River Avon, which Ben and I could see flooding its basin far below, brown and swollen at high-tide. The gorge was the boundary between city and countryside. The city hugged one side of it, teetering on its edges, and the woods hugged the other, trees running densely hundreds of feet down steep cliffs until they petered out beside the riverbank.

Once we’d crossed the bridge, it only took us five minutes to be parked and loose in the woodland. It was a beautiful late autumn afternoon and, as we walked, I was relishing the sounds and smells and sights it offered.

I’m a photographer. It’s a career change I made when I had Ben. I walked away from my previous incarnation as a nurse without a single regret. Photography was a joy, an absolute passion of mine, and it meant that I was always looking at the light, thinking about how I could use it in a photograph, and I can remember exactly what it was like as we walked that afternoon.