I checked my phone. Woodley and I had been texting and mailing, finalising directions and details for the morning.
What I didn’t expect to find in my inbox was an email from Emma. Its title: ‘Sorry’.
To: Jim Clemo ‹jimclemo1@gmail.com›
From: Emma Zhang ‹emzhang21@hotmail.co.uk›
28 October 2012 at 23.39
SORRY
Dear Jim
I hope you read this because I owe you an explanation. If you are reading it: thank you.
I should never have done what I did. It was unforgivable. I should never have contributed to the blog and I should never have expected you to help me. It was a terrible position to put you in.
When I walked past you in the incident room this morning it was the hardest moment of my life because all I wanted to do was rewind the clock, and not do what I did, so we could still be together. When I was with you I felt happy, and protected, and I threw all that away for the worst and most stupid of reasons.
I owe you an explanation for why I did it, and here it is. It’s not an excuse:
When I was six years old my dad went outside to mow the lawn and asked me to look after my little sister. She was two. Her name was Celia. We were playing in my bedroom. I left her for just a few minutes to go to the loo. When I came back I couldn’t find her. I called my dad. He found her wedged down the side of my bed. She’d got stuck, and suffocated. She died before we got her out.
My dad blamed me for her death, but I was just a child too. What he did wasn’t responsible because he was the adult in charge, he shouldn’t have left her in my care. I didn’t know you could die like that.
But he was tough like that, always, you’ve no idea how tough he was. He never let me be a child. I miss Celia every day.
When I heard what Rachel Jenner did to Ben, how she let him run ahead, I wanted to punish her, because you shouldn’t leave kids unsupervised. They can come to harm. I thought it meant that she was a person who didn’t deserve to have a child, that she didn’t love him properly. I thought she was like my dad. I realised I was wrong when I saw the photographs she’d taken of him. They were so beautiful, I felt as though they would break my heart there and then.
I didn’t mean to do what I did. The blog sucked me in. It was a kind of compulsion, so hard to resist.
I don’t know if that’s because the FLO role was too much for me. Perhaps I’m not good at bearing other people’s problems. It freaks me out. I should have been stronger, more professional, and I should have pulled out of the investigation, but I didn’t, and then it got so hard to fight the urge to contribute to the blog because I felt so angry. I try hard to quell it, but I carry a lot of rage with me about what happened to Celia and to me, and I confused my history, and my anger at my dad, with Rachel’s present, and I wanted to punish her for his sins.
I try not to let it show, because I’m usually very good at pleasing people, and making everything right, but I’m not always a well person, and even when I work hard to keep it under control, my past messes with my mind sometimes.
I behaved in an arrogant and disgusting way, and that’s something I’ll have to live with, just like I’ll have to live with losing my career, and I deserve that.
I know we can’t be together any more, but I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me just a little, or try to understand.
I’ve told all of this to Internal Affairs. I’m in the process now. They’ve suspended me and I’m under investigation. I’m not allowed to communicate with you so please delete this after you’ve read it.
Know this though, Jim. I love you. Our times together were amazing and I’ll miss you always. So thank you.
Emma x
When I finished reading I hit ‘delete’. But then I went into my trash folder and moved the email back into my inbox.
In one of my kitchen cupboards I found a bottle of whisky, a gift from my parents when I moved in, so far untouched. Normally, I’m not much of a drinker, but that night I opened it. I didn’t bother with mixers. I drank a large quantity of it, much more quickly than I should have done. It was enough to make the room tilt before I passed out.
DAY 9
…children have difficulty determining who will harm them and who will not. For this reason, the onus is on parents to screen those persons supervising and caring for their child, and to educate their children on how to stay and play safe.
Dalley, Marlene L and Ruscoe, Jenna, ‘The Abduction of Children by Strangers in Canada: Nature and Scope’, National Missing Children’s Services, National Police Service, Canadian Mounted Police, December 2003
Hope is essential to your survival.
‘When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide’, Missing Kids USA Parental Guide, US Department of Justice, OJJDP Report
RACHEL
I logged on to Furry Football countless times that night. I was hoping to encounter Ben again, of course I was. You would have done the same thing.
But he wasn’t there. Not anywhere. I trawled the online game until I knew every inch of it, every server, every area you could play in. Overnight, avatars with foreign-sounding names came and went, and I could see the ebb and flow of the time zones as they logged on and off: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of children online from all over the world. But not Ben. I never encountered him again. Not once.
The hours searching didn’t breed any doubt in my mind, though, because my conviction that it had been Ben just grew and grew, that feeling so powerfully strong it was as if he’d actually flitted past me in his red anorak, met my eye for a second, and then gone again, just out of reach of my outstretched hand.
I wanted to tell John, I thought he of all people would understand, would feel the enormity of this fleeting contact with our child.
I called the hospital in the hope that he might have improved, that he might even be conscious. A voice that was compassionate and tired-sounding told me that there was no change in his condition. He was stable, that’s all she could confirm, she said.
I imagined him as I’d seen him the night before, the absence of him, his mind curled up tight beneath the bleeding and the swelling and the trauma. Did a very small part of me, just for a moment, envy him that oblivion? Maybe. Was it because I was finding it harder than ever to exist? Probably.
But two things kept my mind engaged that night, kept me alert, jittering. Two things nagged at me with the persistence of a noose slowly tightening around your neck.
If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then why would Ben have disappeared so abruptly from Furry Football? If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then who was looking after him while Lucas Grantham was in custody?
I passed my phone from hand to hand, my fingerprints oily on its screen. Silent, it felt to me a useless object, its very existence mocking both my reliance on it, and the isolation that bred that reliance.
I wanted a phone call from the police to let me know that they were searching properties, that they were knocking down doors and smashing windows as they looked for Ben.
I didn’t want process. I didn’t want twenty-four hours of questioning. Them and Lucas Grantham in a room, with the tea, and the biscuits, and then after that no charges brought and all that time Ben could be somewhere with nobody to care for him, nobody to bring him food, or water, or he could be somewhere with somebody else, somebody who made him log off Furry Football late at night, in a hurry.