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Everything on the kitchen table was as Ben and I had left it: a snapshot of our last few minutes in the
house together.
There was a hat that Ben had refused to wear, a packet of bourbon biscuits that he’d raided just
before we left, a much-loved Tintin book and a Lego car that I’d helped him build.
His school report, received in the post the day before, lay on the table too. It had been a pleasure to
read, full of effusive praise from his teacher about how hard Ben tried, how pleased she was that he
was finding the courage to speak up more in class, and how he was gaining confidence in his
schoolwork.
And it wasn’t just the kitchen. There was nowhere in this house that wasn’t imprinted with traces of
my son, of course there wasn’t. It was his home.
Even outside, down the short, uneven garden path, I knew that there would be signs of him too: in
my garden office my computer would be sleeping, its light blinking unhurriedly. If I went out there and
brought it to life I knew the internet history would show a game that Ben had been playing online on
Sunday morning. It was called Furry Football and the aim was to play games and earn points to buy
different animals, which would form a football team. Ben loved it. I had a daily battle to limit his
time on it.
I looked at everything, took it all in, but felt only blankness. All of it was meaningless without Ben.
Without him, my home had no soul.
Nicky got busy, typically.
She’d always been like this. She was never still. If there was nothing to do, she would organise an
outing, or make an elaborate meal. Activity was her way of relaxing.
When I was younger I could happily spend an afternoon in Esther’s cottage doing nothing more than
sitting on the window seat in my little bedroom. I would trace outlines in the condensation on the
glass, gaze at the frosty trees outside, and the shapes they carved against the open sky behind them,
and watch the birds on my aunt’s feeders fighting for seed. The sharp yellow flash of a goldfinch’s
wing was a sight I longed for in the monochrome of a snowy rural winter.
Eventually, driven by the cold, I might make my way downstairs to seek the heat of the fire. Nicky
would be there with Aunt Esther. Their cheeks would be flushed from the warmth of the oven and the
exertions of whatever activity they’d been engaged in. I would admire the freshly baked cake they’d
made or smell the stew that was simmering.
Aunt Esther would take my hands, and say, ‘Rachel, you’re so cold. Have a cup of tea, darling,’ and
she would rub them, and I would feel rough gardening calluses on her palm. Nicky would say, ‘Where
are your fingerless gloves, Rachel? The ones I gave you for Christmas?’ Then I would slip away from
them, their cosy domesticity, and slink into a chair by the fire, pull a blanket over myself, and lose
myself in a book, or the dancing of the flames.
In those early days after Ben disappeared, when I was practically catatonic with shock, it was
natural for Nicky to become the functioning part of me, just as she always had done. She returned the
increasingly frantic messages that my best friend Laura had been leaving on my phone throughout the
day, and asked her to come over. She spoke to Peter Armstrong, who told her that the dog’s leg had
been broken, but he was comfortable at the vet’s after having it set. She put her laptop on the kitchen
table and spent hours online.
On that first day, she found a Missing Kids website, based in the US. On their advice, she made a
list of questions for the police. She threw facts out into the room as she learned them. They were
ghastly, notes from a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. They made me feel queasy, but she was