‘They asked me in for interview,’ she said. ‘About Lucas.’ She whispered the name, eyes wide with disbelief, red-rimmed and bloodshot. I wondered whether that name would be whispered more now, only spoken of in hushed terms, because Lucas Grantham might be a child abductor, a predator, a monster.
‘What did they ask you?’
‘I’m not allowed to say.’
That didn’t stop me. ‘Anything? Did you think of anything? Do you think they’re right?’
‘I told them absolutely everything I could think of,’ she said.
‘Do you think he did it?’
There was a heightened quality about her, flushed cheeks and quick movements.
‘Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe, definitely maybe. I’m trying to think back over everything, in case there were signs, I’m really trying. There was nothing obvious or I’d have said before, but there are some things, little things that-’
She opened her mouth again as if to say more, and I felt as if she was going to confide something in me, give me a drop of hope, but our conversation was brought to a halt because the officer who had retrieved the books from me and John a few days earlier appeared suddenly beside us, car keys jangling in his hand. ‘DI Bennett,’ he said. ‘OK if I drive you both home together? Apparently you live reasonably close to one another.’
It was 9 am and the rush hour was abating. Bennett drove us through the city centre, where the roads were hemmed in by smog-drenched modern buildings throwing endless reflections of tinted glass back at each other, OFFICE TO LET signs, boarded shopfronts, student accommodation with jauntily coloured plastic windows, and concrete 60s edifices rotting in the pollution, graffiti-covered and stained. At street level, office workers were arriving for work, trainers on, coffees and briefcases in hand.
I broke the silence in the car. There was something I wanted to say to Miss May. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked you properly for all the effort you made with Ben last year, when we were going through our divorce. I really appreciated it. He did too.’
‘He did have a hard time.’ She gave me a wan smile.
‘Well, you helped him a lot.’
‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘They’re such little souls. It’s a privilege to be a part of their lives. You must feel so very empty without him.’
Bennett cursed at a cyclist who was climbing laboriously up the steep slope of Park Street, wobbling into our path with the effort. I fixed my gaze on the tall Victorian Gothic tower at the top, dominating the skyline, Bristol University’s most recognisable building. Beside it was Bristol Museum. I thought of Ben’s favourite things there: the ichthyosaur skeleton, a case of glowing blue crystals, a stuffed dodo and the painting by Odilon Redon.
‘I don’t feel empty,’ I said to Miss May, ‘because I know he’s alive. I know he is. But I do feel very afraid.’
My words petered away, the last few dregs of sand falling through an hourglass.
She looked out of the window, and I worried I’d spoken too freely, exposed the depths of my misery without enough filtering. It’s a line I’ve crossed many times since. If you talk too openly about terrible things people shrink from you.
Her handbag was on the seat between us. It sagged open and in the silence my gaze fell on its contents. A set of keys, phone, plastic-wrapped tissues, A4 papers folded in half, charger cable, hairbrush, a leather document wallet and yet more stuff underneath: the assorted paraphernalia of a life.
When Miss May turned back towards me, her expression was unreadable.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard.’
‘No, it’s fine. I just can’t imagine how awful it must be for you. I mean I can’t sleep at night, and that’s just me. I think all the time about how difficult he must be finding it to settle without his nunny.’
My hand went to my mouth, knuckles pressing on it, trying not to let myself break down again.
‘Sorry.’ This time the word caught in my throat.
‘Please don’t be sorry. I totally understand. I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you any more than you are already.’
I took deep breaths that shuddered and ached, got control of myself eventually.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘And you’re right. I don’t think he’s ever slept without his nunny before.’
She nodded. The light was murky in the back of the car and her face looked drab and shadowed. Behind her, through the window, prettier streets flashed past now, houses painted in pastels or mellow in Bath stone, attractive even under the flat grey sky.
When I think of it now, that moment has a filmic quality, as if time was stilling.
‘Poor little soul,’ she said.
The parting and closing of her lips was mesmerising. An unsettled feeling prickled at the back of my neck.
I glanced at DI Bennett. He was oblivious to us, concentrating on a turn he was waiting to make, indicator light thudding, his lips slightly parted in concentration.
‘Are you all right?’ said Miss May. ‘Really?’ She was peering at me.
‘I…’ I started to say something, but lost my train of thought. I was trying to deal with the unease I suddenly felt, the sense that something didn’t fit.
‘Ms Jenner?’
Her neck looked long and white as she leaned towards me. I turned away from her and towards the window as I tried to concentrate, to pinpoint the source of my edginess. I replayed our conversation in my head, and the unease crystallised into a thought, a moment of perfect certainty, a bright white light that was terrifying for its clarity.
My throat went dry.
‘Is this it?’ said DI Bennett.
The road was narrow, with cars parked on either side, and we were blocking it. We’d pulled up outside a four-storey Georgian townhouse, fronted by a broad pavement constructed from huge slabs of stone, uneven and worn. The house was part of a long, elegant crescent, which had leafy gardens opposite enclosed by wrought iron railings. The crescent had far-ranging views across the city and the floating harbour, towards the countryside beyond: trees and rooftops in the foreground, then more buildings falling away below, the glint of the river, and beyond, distant fields and hills under rolling grey skies, and on that morning sheets of rain approaching relentlessly, one after another.
And I knew then that I had only seconds to act.
What I did next, I did on sheer impulse.
JIM
I woke up with my head in a vice, mouth dried out and the urge to vomit, which turned out to be unproductive. I was still in my clothes.
Woodley picked me up at quarter past seven. It was still dark, and freezing cold. Woodley had the heaters in the car turned up full, pumping warm air around. I’d just finished fumbling with the seat belt when he tapped the dashboard with the flat of his hand. ‘Ready, boss?’ he said.
‘Are you going to put the address in the satnav then?’ I asked. ‘Or will we guess how to get there?’
He got going. Tucked into the footwell by my feet was a newspaper. I picked it up. The first page headline had moved on from Ben Finch:
SUPER STORM SANDY
Hurricane heads towards New York
Sixty million Americans could be affected by high winds, rain and flooding as super storm expected to make landfall on the East Coast on Tuesday.
I flicked through, found him on page four:
HIT A WALL?
Police investigating missing Benedict Finch still ‘pursuing multiple lines of inquiry’.
I didn’t bother to read on. It wasn’t good, but at least it wasn’t nothing, and they didn’t have news of the arrest yet. The blog was bad, negative publicity was bad, but no publicity was worse.
I dropped the paper back into the footwell.
It was dark and shiny wet on the road, taillights ahead of us blurring when the wipers swiped intermittently. We left the motorway and were immediately on country roads which twisted and turned so that oncoming headlights loomed out of nowhere, blindingly, and forced us into the side where our wheels hit deep puddles, sending spray clattering up onto the windows.