‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that you might have been under the impression that my wife was living at our family home in Salisbury?’
‘Entirely under that impression, because that’s what Mrs Forbes informed us.’
‘I’m afraid that she hasn’t been living at that address for just over a month. She moved out at the end of September.’
He spoke quietly and clearly while my mind frantically tried to process what this meant.
‘Do you know where your wife moved to?’
‘She’s living in the cottage where she grew up. It’s in the Pewsey Vale, about a forty-five-minute drive north of Salisbury.’
‘Did your daughters go with her?’
I wondered if this had been an acrimonious separation, if he was here to cast blame on a wife he loathed, to muddy the waters around her in advance of a custody dispute.
‘No. Nicky didn’t just leave me; she left all of us.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘The specific occasion was -’ he cleared this throat – ‘the specific catalyst for her to actually pack her bags and leave was an argument we had.’
‘What did you argue about?’
‘It’s a bit complicated, but we had recently talked about having another child.’
‘A fifth child?’
His reply bounced off my surprise.
‘Yes. I’m aware that some people might think that five children is an excessive number, but Nicky wanted to try again, and I’d previously agreed to support her wish, happily I might say, because of something she’d suffered. I felt I should support her. Do I need to explain about her background?’
‘We know about that.’
‘So you understand she has a longing for a son. To replace Charlie.’
Those words felt solid to me, like a remnant jettisoned from an explosion, a twisted shard of metal, turning in mid-air, glinting.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You said you’d previously agreed to having another child, so had something changed? Did you no longer feel that way?’
He looked like a man who was having to haul up strength from a great depth.
‘My wife gives the appearance of coping, always coping, she makes a career of it, but it takes its toll. She’s become very controlling of our time. That was the source of the argument. I was trying to ask her to relax, to give us space to breathe in the house. This scheduling of the girls’ time down to the last minute affects them, and affects us too. In my view, life had become a bit joyless. We had no time to do things together as a couple, or a family, ever, and I told her that I’d begun to wonder if another baby would be too much, for both of us.’
‘How did she react?’
‘Badly. Very badly. She felt that I’d betrayed her.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘She did. She freaked out, for want of a better expression. I’ve never seen her so angry, or distraught. And I’m afraid I lost my temper, I was at the end of my tether, and I told her that I thought we might need some space from each other.’
‘And how did she react?’
‘She stormed out of the room, the expression on her face was awful, and I didn’t follow her, I let her go. Grace, our second daughter, was waiting in the hall, ready to go to a riding lesson. That’s how scheduled our lives were – we barely had time for an argument! Anyway, I didn’t want to make any more of a scene in front of Grace so I called out to Nicky that I was driving Grace to her lesson, and I cooled off a bit while I was there, and I regretted some of the things I’d said, and I hoped Nicky had too, that we might discuss things more calmly that evening. But when Grace and I got home, she’d gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Completely. She’d packed a case, and driven away. She’d told our eldest daughter to look after the two little ones until I got home but didn’t tell her why. And, unfortunately, the girls saw Nicky put her suitcase in the car, and they could see that she was very upset, so when I got back they were in a bit of a state, to put it mildly. It was a terrible shock for all of us.’
‘Have you spoken to her since?’
‘We speak a lot, but it’s very frustrating. She won’t discuss the future with me. She won’t plan or meet up to talk. She just says she needs more time. I’m trying to be patient, but I’m angry about the effect it’s having on the girls. We all love her, that’s the thing, of course we do, but we can’t always be what she wants us to be.’
If I’d judged Simon Forbes harshly at first, on the basis of his website, his profession and his appearance, then I’d been a fool. This was a sensitive, intelligent man, with apparently extraordinary reserves of patience, and he’d been hurt.
I drew breath. ‘Do you think your wife is unstable?’ I asked him.
‘She’s walked away from her children. That’s not the behaviour of somebody who’s stable.’
‘Are you here because you believe that she might be responsible for what’s happened to Ben?’
The question was painful for him, he’d had to put aside his pride to come here, and tell me this stuff, and as he struggled to formulate an answer, I watched him try to put aside his love for his wife too, but he didn’t quite manage it.
‘I wouldn’t go that far, I just thought you ought to be aware of our situation. She hasn’t even told her sister.’
‘Thank you, Mr Forbes. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
I walked him to the main entrance; it felt like the least I could do.
Outside, on the top of the steps, waxed coat done up and leather driving gloves pulled onto thick, strong-looking fingers, he spoke again.
‘I don’t know what my wife has or hasn’t done, Inspector. I can’t guess at that. I’m just telling you what I think you should know. And in return I ask that you respect our family’s dignity as much as you possibly can. I want to avoid inflicting any further pain on our daughters. Ben’s disappearance has been extremely difficult for them as it is.’
‘Have you told your sister-in-law about this?’
‘To be honest, I assumed Nicky would have told Rachel, but when I realised that wasn’t the case, I thought I would spare her this, which is why I’m here, telling you. Rachel must be going through a living hell already.’
As soon as he’d turned his back on me, I bolted back into the building and took the stairs up to the incident room three at a time.
RACHEL
On Sunday night, after dark, I still thought of nothing apart from the fact that Ben had been gone for one week. Seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight hours, thousands of minutes, hundreds of thousands of seconds. And counting.
My thoughts were suddenly full of the woods as if, now that seven days had passed, the memories had swollen, and germinated into a vivid sensory overload.
The bright blue sky and the kaleidoscopic intensity of the backdrop of beautiful, colourful, crisp autumn leaves replayed in my head like a movie reel. I saw Ben’s flushed cheeks, the gauzy mistiness of his breath, floating momentarily, a piece of him, of his warmth, in the air, then evaporating into nothing.
I would have seen more, lost myself in those memories, but my phone rang. It was the police, letting me know that a DC Woodley, my interim FLO, was on his way to call on me. They apologised for the lateness of the call. It was already half past eight at night.
DC Woodley arrived at nine. He was very tall and very skinny with an elongated neck and a large nose. He looked as if he was about seventeen years old.
He introduced himself awkwardly, and then he said that we should probably sit down, and he licked his top lip nervously when he said it.
At my kitchen table we sat under the stark central light. Unlike my sister, I didn’t think to make the room cosy by switching on other lights, or boiling a kettle. I’d lost my social niceties a week ago. I only wanted to hear what he’d come to tell me.
‘We’ve arrested somebody,’ he said. ‘We haven’t charged them yet, but they are at Kenneth Steele House and they are under arrest.’