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at others. He was always watching me, his eyes constantly searching my face for something. I tried to<br />
quell my natural reticence, to talk openly, in the hope that something I told him would help find Ben.<br />
He started by asking me about myself, my own upbringing. How that was relevant I didn’t know,<br />
but I told him. Because of my unusual circumstances, the tragedy of my parents’ death, it’s a story I’ve<br />
told a lot, so I was able to stay calm when I said, ‘My parents were killed in a car crash when I was<br />
one and my sister was nine. They had a head-on collision with an articulated lorry.’<br />
I watched Clemo go through a reaction that was familiar to me, because I’d witnessed it so often:<br />
shock, sorrow, and then sympathy, sometimes barely concealed Schadenfreude.<br />
‘They were driving home from a party,’ I added.<br />
I’d always liked that little bit of information. It meant that in my mind my parents were forever<br />
frozen as young and sociable, invigorated by life. Probably perfect.<br />
Clemo expressed sympathy but he moved on quickly, asking me who brought me up, where I’d<br />
lived, then how I met John, when we got married. He wanted to know about Ben’s birth. I gave them a<br />
date and a place: 10 July 2004, St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol.<br />
Beneath the facts my head was swimming with sensations and memories. I remembered a hard and<br />
lengthy labour, which started on a perfect scorcher of a day, when the air shimmered. They admitted<br />
me to a delivery room at midnight, the heat still lingering in every corner of the city, and as my labour<br />
intensified through the long hours that followed, it was punctuated with the shouts of revellers from<br />
outside, as if they couldn’t think of going home on such a night.<br />
Before morning there’d been the fright of a significant haemorrhage, but later, after the sun had<br />
risen high again, I felt the extraordinary joy of being handed my tiny boy, who I watched turn from<br />
grey to pink in my arms. I felt the weightlessness of his hair, the perfect softness of his temples and a<br />
sensation of absolute stillness when our eyes met, me holding my breath, him taking one of his first.<br />
I had to detail the years of Ben’s childhood for Clemo, and talk about my relationship with my<br />
sister, and with John’s family. It was painful to speak about John’s mother Ruth, my beloved Ruth,<br />
who’d become a surrogate parent to me after my marriage, and who now lived in a nursing home, her<br />
brain slowly succumbing to the ravages of dementia.<br />
I also had to talk about the break-up of my marriage, how I never saw it coming, how Ben and I had<br />
coped since then. I didn’t want to relate these things to strangers, but I had no choice. I steeled myself,<br />
tried to trust in the process.<br />
The pace of Clemo’s questions slowed as we got nearer to the present day. He asked in detail<br />
about Ben’s experiences at school. I told him they were happy ones; that Ben loved school, and loved<br />
his teacher. She’d been very supportive when John and I had been going through the separation and<br />
divorce.<br />
Clemo wanted to know how often Ben had visited his dad lately, or any other friends or family. He<br />
wanted to know what our custody arrangements were. He wanted details of all the activities that Ben<br />
did in and out of school. I had to describe everything we’d done the previous week and then we were<br />
talking about Saturday, and then Sunday morning, and what we’d done in the hours we spent together<br />
before we went to the woods.<br />
‘Did you have lunch before you went out to the woods?’ Clemo asked. There was a sort of apology<br />
in his voice.<br />
‘Is this in case you find his body?’<br />
‘It doesn’t mean that I think we’re going to find a body. It’s a question I have to ask.’<br />
‘Ben ate a ham sandwich, banana, yoghurt and two bourbon biscuits in the car on the way to the<br />
woods.’