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RACHEL<br />
On Sunday night, after dark, I still thought of nothing apart from the fact that Ben had been gone for<br />
one week. Seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight hours, thousands of minutes, hundreds of<br />
thousands of seconds. And counting.<br />
My thoughts were suddenly full of the woods as if, now that seven days had passed, the memories<br />
had swollen, and germinated into a vivid sensory overload.<br />
The bright blue sky and the kaleidoscopic intensity of the backdrop of beautiful, colourful, crisp<br />
autumn leaves replayed in my head like a movie reel. I saw Ben’s flushed cheeks, the gauzy mistiness<br />
of his breath, floating momentarily, a piece of him, of his warmth, in the air, then evaporating into<br />
nothing.<br />
I would have seen more, lost myself in those memories, but my phone rang. It was the police,<br />
letting me know that a DC Woodley, my interim FLO, was on his way to call on me. They apologised<br />
for the lateness of the call. It was already half past eight at night.<br />
DC Woodley arrived at nine. He was very tall and very skinny with an elongated neck and a large<br />
nose. He looked as if he was about seventeen years old.<br />
He introduced himself awkwardly, and then he said that we should probably sit down, and he<br />
licked his top lip nervously when he said it.<br />
At my kitchen table we sat under the stark central light. Unlike my sister, I didn’t think to make the<br />
room cosy by switching on other lights, or boiling a kettle. I’d lost my social niceties a week ago. I<br />
only wanted to hear what he’d come to tell me.<br />
‘We’ve arrested somebody,’ he said. ‘We haven’t charged them yet, but they are at Kenneth Steele<br />
House and they are under arrest.’<br />
‘Who?’<br />
‘Lucas Grantham. Ben’s teaching assistant.’<br />
My mind curled around this information and then recoiled at the ghastliness of it. Lucas Grantham<br />
spent all day of every weekday with my son. He spent more hours with Ben than I did. And I didn’t<br />
know him at all; he was a stranger to me.<br />
For DC Woodley, and his patient, insistent questioning, I tried to remember anything I could, any<br />
mention of Grantham that Ben had made, but there was nothing beyond the entirely bland. Ben had<br />
hardly ever mentioned him, favouring Miss May, who he had known for longer.<br />
I scraped my mind for my impressions of him. They’d been fleeting. We were only a few weeks<br />
into term after all, and Lucas Grantham was new to the school, like the headmaster. I forced my mind<br />
to work back through any memories of him when I’d collected Ben’s schoolbooks from school just a<br />
few days before, but I had none really, just the vaguest sense of him being there at all. And then those<br />
thoughts were interrupted by a question that I had to ask:<br />
‘If Lucas Grantham took Ben, then where is he?’<br />
‘We’re undertaking extensive searches at his property, and at properties he’s associated with.<br />
We’re doing everything we can to locate Ben. In the next twenty-four hours we’re going to be<br />
questioning everybody around him. I’m afraid I can’t give you any more information than that at<br />
present, but we wanted you to hear this from us, and not from anybody else. Please know that we are<br />
doing what we think is best in order to return Ben to you safe and well. That’s our priority.’<br />
‘Do you believe that?’<br />
‘That we’re doing our best? Yes. Absolutely. I’d swear on my mother’s life.’