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