Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

Ben remembered how he’d felt after Sarah had died, and then again when Jacob had gone to live with Kale. But he’d never felt suicidal. He wondered if that said anything about him.

“What about Maggie and the boys?” he asked, feeling obscurely cheated. “How’ve they taken it?”

“Oh, okay. Maggie’s been very good. Andrew doesn’t really understand what’s going on, but I wish Scott hadn’t found me.” He pursed his lips. “Or, at least, I wish it had been someone else.”

Maggie had told Ben how their eldest son had gone into the garage and seen his father sitting in the locked car with the engine running. Ben didn’t like the boy, but he wouldn’t have wished that on him.

“What did she say about Jo?”

Colin glanced uneasily towards the door. “She doesn’t know about her.”

“Even now? She must have some idea!”

“She thinks it was pressure of work that got to me.” Colour had come back to Colin’s face, but it only emphasised its shadows.

“So aren’t you going to tell her?”

“What for? It’s finished. There’s no use upsetting her any more than she has been.”

Ben made no comment, but he was thinking about how Maggie had behaved. He wouldn’t have called it upset.

“The doctor’s signed me off work,” Colin continued, “so I think we’re going to go away somewhere in a week or two. Try and put all this behind us.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic.

Before Ben could answer, the door opened and Maggie came in. The smile could have been on her face since she left.

“I think that’s enough chat for one night. Don’t want to tire him out, do we? Doctor’s orders.”

She stood by the open door, waiting for Ben to leave. He looked at Colin, expecting an objection, but none came. Colin was looking down at his hands again.

Ben stood up. “I’ll be in touch. We’ll go for a beer before you go away.”

Colin nodded, but without conviction, and Ben knew they wouldn’t. Even if Colin wanted to, Maggie wouldn’t permit it.

“He just needs rest,” she said, after she’d ushered Ben into the hallway. “He’s been doing too much lately, that’s the problem. I’m going to make sure he has an easier time in future. No more working weekends and nights, and having to stay out with silly little bands till all hours.” She opened the front door and turned to him. “There’s been too many things pulling at him lately, but that’s over now. He needs to spend more time with his family. We’re all he needs.”

Her smile was as bright and determined as a beauty queen’s, and seeing it Ben realised that Colin was wrong. She knew. Not all the details, perhaps, not names and places, but enough. And now she knew she’d won.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. He looked around as Scott came down them. The boy regarded them sullenly, making no attempt to speak as he went past.

“Say hello to Ben, Scott,” Maggie said, but he didn’t even slow. Her smile twitched as she watched him disappear down the hallway. “He’s still a little upset.”

Ben said goodnight and left. The door clicked shut behind him. He found he had tensed himself, as though the entire house would shatter like glass.

As he went back to his car he thought that a family could stay together and still be destroyed.

The case conference was scheduled for the following week.

He’d finally begun to accept that he wasn’t going to get Jacob back. Or, if not accept, at least realise that there was nothing more he could do about it. He knew he’d have to come to terms with it and get on with his life. More than that, he had to try and rebuild one, because there wasn’t much left of the life he’d had. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier to do. He felt he was just treading water, waiting for the day of the conference to arrive.

He told himself things would be better afterwards.

The night before it was held he went to the launch party of a new magazine with Zoe. He had tried to cry off, but she wouldn’t listen.

“What are you going to do if not? Sit at home by yourself, watching telly and getting pissed while you worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

Actually, that had been almost exactly what he’d had in mind. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

The party was at a cellar bar in Soho, a dark place of blues and purples that made everyone look cyanosed. He knew a lot of the people there, had either worked or drunk with them at similar occasions. Zoe, her hair red once more, stayed with him long enough to make sure he wasn’t going to go straight home, and then disappeared into the crowd.

Ben found himself talking to the magazine’s picture editor, who seemed to presume he was there touting for work and obligingly offered him some. Then there was another photographer, an almost-friend he hadn’t seen for over a year. Talk moved on to censorship, and Ben enmired himself in an argument with a writer, a vehement man with bad breath, over the responsibility of the artist. He was enjoying it until the writer called him a commercial photographer, as if that made him some sort of photographic hack whose views were invalid. Ben began to object, but realised he couldn’t.

The man was right.

Everything that he did had a shelf-life. The fashion photographs were valid only for as long as the fashions they contained, and while some of his advertising work might lay claim to a sort of kitsch value, that was all. He was good at what he did, but what he did was nothing. It was disposable.

And he had chosen to do it.

So what did that make him? He had given up trying to achieve anything more than a technical competence because he’d believed that was ultimately all photography amounted to — a triumph of form over content, of craft over art. He wondered if the limitation hadn’t been his, if he hadn’t been blaming the camera because he’d had nothing to say. And what about now?

He didn’t know. Nothing sprang to mind, but the knowledge that he no longer even tried gave him an unexpected ache of loss. For some reason he thought of Kale, tirelessly arranging damaged pieces of metal in his search for a pattern.

Perhaps it wasn’t so much what you had to say as trying to say it anyway that mattered.

All at once the drinks felt heavy in him. He was on the verge of becoming drunk, and he didn’t want that. He put his glass down. The writer was still talking animatedly, taking Ben’s silence for acquiescence. Ben excused himself and moved away.

He looked around the room for Zoe’s red hair, but the purple lighting made colours unrecognisable. He gave up and went out.

The night was cold and crisp. The street sparkled with the beginnings of a frost, not yet white but starring the dull concrete with pinpricks of light. Already the idea he’d felt on the verge of grasping was becoming less tangible. He tried to hold on to it, but then a cab drew up and the last remnants slipped away.

As he sat back in the taxi he was already thinking about what would happen at the case conference the next morning.

It was held in the main social services building of Kale’s local authority. The room looked like an anonymous boardroom, with a long central table ringed by plastic chairs. Most of them were already taken when Ben arrived. Carlisle sat opposite him, speaking in low tones to someone whom Usherwood said was probably his manager. Next to them was the child protection co-ordinator, a grey-haired woman who would be chairing the meeting. There were several other people in the room, including a uniformed policewoman from a child protection unit, but Ben didn’t know any of them.

The only people not there were John and Sandra Kale.

The grey-haired woman looked at her watch. “I take it Mr and Mrs Kale were notified what time to be here?” she asked Carlisle.