69236538256563

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