Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘We fell in love,’ I said, but she took no notice. She couldn’t seem to stop herself now.

‘I knew you’d have a boy the minute you told me you were pregnant. And when he was born and I went to see him and I held him, I saw Charlie in him. It was as if he was Charlie, reborn. He was so precious, and I wasn’t sure you’d be able to look after him.’

‘So you called John Finch,’ said Clemo.

‘Just to check that she was coping, that she was doing the right thing.’

‘Mr Finch says that you were rather insistent with your phone calls.’

‘Well he wouldn’t give me any information!’

I interrupted them. ‘John never said anything to me.’

They ignored me, their eyes were locked, Nicky’s gaze furious, his eyes hard like ice; their terrible dialogue unpicking yet more of the stitches that had held my life together. I was relegated to the role of spectator.

‘Nicky,’ he said, ‘did you want to have Ben for yourself? So you could look after him properly?’

‘That’s the thing,’ she said, ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want her to have him, but I didn’t want him either. He would just have reminded me every day what I’d lost, and that’s why you’re wrong.’

‘Wrong about what?’

‘For pity’s sake!’ She laughed. It was a shrill, upsetting sound. ‘Stop playing games with me! What would I do with him? Where do you think I would keep him?’

‘I think you might like to have him. I think you’ve always wanted him.’

The baldness of this, the slow, calm way he said it, made my sister pause and collect herself before she spoke again, as if she realised she couldn’t combat his accusations with emotion alone.

‘Well, you’re not sure, are you? If you’d got any actual evidence you’d have arrested me, so this is a pathetic attempt to get me to confess to something I haven’t done.’

Now she leaned across the table towards him.

‘You made me tell my sister about our family. That was low. You’re not getting anything else. I’ve told you that I’ve got nothing to do with Ben’s disappearance and that’s all you need to know. The rest is private. Why don’t you get out there and start looking for him before it’s too late?’

She got up and went into the garden, slamming the kitchen door behind her. Zhang went after her.

I was left sitting at the table with Clemo.

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to land this on you like this. I hope you understand that we have to follow everything up.’

I just stared at him, wondering why anybody would ever do a job like his and believing for the first time that he would do anything it took to find Ben.

Addendum to DI James Clemo’s report for Dr Francesca Manelli.

Transcript recorded by Dr Francesca Manelli.

DI James Clemo and Dr Francesca Manelli in attendance.

Notes to indicate observations on DI Clemo’s state of mind or behaviour, where his remarks alone do not convey this, are in italics.

FM: So if you’re happy to, I’d like to talk about your interview with Ben’s mother and his aunt.

JC: Fire away.

His manner is hard for me to decipher today. He seems more willing than usual to talk but he has a professional mask on too, he’s controlling his emotions.

FM: What an extraordinary revelation. I find it amazing that Nicky Forbes could have kept that information from her sister for all those years.

JC: It wasn’t just her; it was their aunt as well.

FM: How did Rachel Jenner react?

JC: Total shock, obviously. I don’t know what happened just after we left but I can’t imagine it was pretty.

FM: Am I right in thinking that this was a real moment of triumph for you in the case?

JC: Fraser was pleased. Yes. Especially because they’d ruled out Edward Fount, the role-play guy, that same morning.

FM: So you were right about him?

JC: Yep. When Woodley went to pull Fount in – this was while I was with Nicky Forbes – he found him waiting with a woman, another role-play member, and she gave Fount an alibi. They’d gone back to Fount’s flat together after the afternoon in the woods – shagging basically, if you’ll excuse my language – and in spite of the fact that she was nearly twice his age.

FM: And neither of them had mentioned this before because?

JC: Oldest reason in the book: she was married, to the ‘Grand Wizard’ apparently.

FM: Oh my.

JC: Yeah. A bit messy. I won’t repeat what Fraser said when she found out.

He almost smiles.

FM: So you were able to move on from that line of investigation.

JC: Absolutely. Fraser was happy with how things had gone, but she had concerns about how we should handle Nicky Forbes going forward, so she felt that the best course of action would be to re-interview her the following day. Give her and Rachel Jenner time to cool off.

FM: Did Nicky Forbes have an alibi for the Sunday afternoon?

JC: She’d told us that she was at a food fair. A big event, lots of stalls, very busy. It was research for the blog she writes. We sent out DCs to interview all the people she might have had contact with, but they were scattered far and wide, as you might imagine, so we knew we’d need a little time to put together a picture of her movements.

FM: Did you speak to her husband?

JC: Again Fraser felt we should wait on that just a short while. Her strategy was to look into the alibi first, and give the family space while we worked out whether Nicky Forbes could actually be good for it or not.

FM: Did you agree?

JC: Absolutely. You’ve got to fit the pieces into the jigsaw in the right order. Gathering evidence is the single most important objective when you have a suspect. That, and not being sued by your victim’s family. You can’t just apply continual pressure without evidence.

FM: Or you could alienate the family?

JC: Exactly, and they could talk to the press, and so on. You can imagine it and it wouldn’t look good for us. The press had jumped all over the case by then and they’d have been only too ready to have a go at us as well. And, on a practical level, we were nowhere near understanding how the mechanics of an abduction could have worked if Nicky Forbes had carried it out. She had a family in Salisbury so her set-up didn’t look like the perfect profile for a child abduction.

FM: Unless she didn’t want her sister to have Ben, and she’d killed him.

JC: That was one of my hypotheses, and abductors don’t always kill on purpose, sometimes things go wrong and it happens then, but we had to build a proper case before we could act further. I asked Chris Fellowes, the forensic psychologist, to send me his thoughts on Nicky Forbes.

FM: But the profile that your forensic psychologist made for you, the one that fitted Fount so perfectly, hadn’t been much use.

JC: I disagree – we were still considering the non-family abduction as a strong possibility, and that profile could have fitted any number of suspects for that scenario. The thing about the profiles is that you shouldn’t just attach them to one suspect. They’re a resource that you have to use as part of your armoury as a detective. Profiles never solve cases on their own but they can make you think in different ways sometimes, or look at people in a new light. And it’s always good to have another pair of eyes on the case, especially when everyone closely involved is getting tired. You can be in danger of losing perspective.

FM: What was Emma’s view on Nicky Forbes?

JC: To be honest, I didn’t see much of Emma that afternoon. I was too busy holed up with Fraser making a plan.

FM: Did you see her that night?