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RACHEL
Inspector Miller said that because they’d found the clothing the ‘game had changed’ and they needed
to ‘intensify their operation’. He described the woods as ‘a scene’ and said it was a CID case now.
What he avoided saying explicitly was what we all knew. Ben wasn’t lost; he’d been taken.
A stolen child is every parent’s worst nightmare, because the first thing you ask yourself is, ‘Who
would take a child?’ The answers are all profoundly disturbing. I slipped into a state of shock. John
did too. The faces of the uniformed police around us were grim and some averted their eyes, a show
of respect that was especially unnerving.
WPC Banks guided John and me into her car and drove us to the CID headquarters. At the end of
the long lane that led from the car park to the main road, photographers and journalists had already
gathered, and they thrust their faces and their camera lenses up against the car windows, trying to talk
to us, take photographs of us. We recoiled from the noise, and the flashlights. We drew away from the
windows and into each other. John clutched my hand.
It was a terrible journey. Coming away from the woods felt like an admission that we wouldn’t find
Ben; that we were prepared to leave him behind. Within minutes we’d entered the outskirts of the city,
and were sucked into its road systems. Busy dual carriageways carried us past new and old industrial
buildings, into dense traffic. In the centre the River Avon appeared, parallel to the road, murky water
flowing strongly while we lurched to a stop at every light. Plant life clung to its banks, tough and
grubby.
My thoughts refused to work coherently and I was gripped by terror, which felt as if it was
hollowing me out. My mind couldn’t face the present, so it burrowed into the past, looking for
distraction, or perhaps solace, looking for anything that wasn’t this reality. I felt John’s cold fingers
clutching mine and I remembered the first time he’d held my hand, as if that would somehow make
things right.
It happened the week after we’d met for the first time at a hospital function. John was an exhausted
junior doctor, wearing their standard uniform of oxford shirt and chinos, complete with tired sags in
the fabric after a long shift. I was a nursing student, there for the free sandwiches and glass of warm
white wine. His dark sandy hair fell over his forehead rakishly, and he had a lovely symmetrical,
fine-featured face that was handsome in an old-fashioned way. His eyes were a piercing blue, intense
and captivating. Ben was lucky enough to inherit those eyes.
Our first conversation was about music, and on that evening, when I was tired of socialising and a
little tired of life, it was a tonic. John spoke in a way that was earnest, but gentle too. He asked me if I
knew that Bristol had one of the finest concert halls in the country. It was small, he said, in a beautiful
neo-classical nineteenth-century church building, and the acoustics were spectacularly good.
He had a lack of pretension when he spoke that I liked instantly. His inbuilt, unquestioning respect
for culture transported me back to conversations overheard at my Aunt Esther’s cottage, the place I
grew up in, and suddenly I felt as if my life had been drifting for too long, and that it was time to stop.
A week later, we sat in St George’s concert hall, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s a fine, elegant
building, built on the side of lovely, leafy Brandon Hill, just a stone’s throw from the shops on Park
Street. It’s opposite the Georgian House, which Ben has since visited on a school trip, but at the time
I hadn’t known either place existed.
It was a full house. Tickets had been hard to come by. John was animated, full of information. He
pointed out the place where a German firebomb fell through the roof one night in 1942, when the