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interview her the following day. Give her and Rachel Jenner time to cool off.
FM: Did Nicky Forbes have an alibi for the Sunday afternoon?
JC: She’d told us that she was at a food fair. A big event, lots of stalls, very busy. It was research for
the blog she writes. We sent out DCs to interview all the people she might have had contact with, but
they were scattered far and wide, as you might imagine, so we knew we’d need a little time to put
together a picture of her movements.
FM: Did you speak to her husband?
JC: Again Fraser felt we should wait on that just a short while. Her strategy was to look into the alibi
first, and give the family space while we worked out whether Nicky Forbes could actually be good
for it or not.
FM: Did you agree?
JC: Absolutely. You’ve got to fit the pieces into the jigsaw in the right order. Gathering evidence is
the single most important objective when you have a suspect. That, and not being sued by your
victim’s family. You can’t just apply continual pressure without evidence.
FM: Or you could alienate the family?
JC: Exactly, and they could talk to the press, and so on. You can imagine it and it wouldn’t look good
for us. The press had jumped all over the case by then and they’d have been only too ready to have a
go at us as well. And, on a practical level, we were nowhere near understanding how the mechanics
of an abduction could have worked if Nicky Forbes had carried it out. She had a family in Salisbury
so her set-up didn’t look like the perfect profile for a child abduction.
FM: Unless she didn’t want her sister to have Ben, and she’d killed him.
JC: That was one of my hypotheses, and abductors don’t always kill on purpose, sometimes things go
wrong and it happens then, but we had to build a proper case before we could act further. I asked
Chris Fellowes, the forensic psychologist, to send me his thoughts on Nicky Forbes.
FM: But the profile that your forensic psychologist made for you, the one that fitted Fount so perfectly,
hadn’t been much use.
JC: I disagree – we were still considering the non-family abduction as a strong possibility, and that
profile could have fitted any number of suspects for that scenario. The thing about the profiles is that
you shouldn’t just attach them to one suspect. They’re a resource that you have to use as part of your
armoury as a detective. Profiles never solve cases on their own but they can make you think in
different ways sometimes, or look at people in a new light. And it’s always good to have another pair
of eyes on the case, especially when everyone closely involved is getting tired. You can be in danger
of losing perspective.
FM: What was Emma’s view on Nicky Forbes?
JC: To be honest, I didn’t see much of Emma that afternoon. I was too busy holed up with Fraser
making a plan.
FM: Did you see her that night?