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RACHEL
So here’s the thing.
What do you do when it’s just you? When you know something and nobody will listen? When you
want to do something, but you don’t know how dangerous it is, or how much you will be risking?
When you have only minutes to decide?
I was used to making decisions about my life that were based on my complicated relationships with
others.
Do I need to name them? Most of us have them. They’re generic. They could include your
resentment of parents, or a sibling, or your desire to please your family, or a husband, or your fear of
losing him. They could include your ambition, or your perception of what parenthood should be. I
could go on.
But, at 9 am on Monday, 29 October, all those things fell away. There was just me, and I had a
choice. I could believe what was written about me, that I was worse than useless, incapable of a
sensible or moral decision, and I could obey DCI Fraser’s request, and wait quietly at home for
news.
Or, I could act. I could take the certainty I felt and do something. On my own. Again. Because I was
sure.
Don’t think that self-doubt didn’t course through my veins and threaten to weaken me. Don’t think
that I didn’t consider the possible risks of acting alone. The risk for Ben, and for myself.
I fought both those things. I fought them because I knew I had to rely, purely and simply, on my
instinct as a mother.
‘Be strong,’ Ruth had said. ‘You’re a mother. You must be strong.’
And that was enough for me. I understood in that moment, on that morning, that being a mother had
given Ruth a single silken strand, strong as a spider’s web, which had tethered her to her life. It was
the string that had led her, time and time again, out of the enveloping and dangerous depths of the
labyrinth that was her depression. It had prevented her from slipping fatally and completely away into
the dark seductive folds of melancholia, and stopped her sinking into the drowsy escape of a terminal
pill overdose, or seeking a tumbling, chaotic fall from a height, and its inevitable brutal, shattering
end below.
It hadn’t stopped my own mother. She’d been overwhelmed by the love she felt, by the fear it made
her feel. Her emotions had drowned her sanity; such was their power.
But I was different.
I knew my son was alive, and I knew where he was.
So you might wonder what I did.
I opened a drawer in my kitchen and looked over the contents. I chose a vegetable knife. Short and
sharp, easy to conceal. I put it into one of the deep pockets of my coat, blade down, beside my phone.
I put the keys I’d taken into the other. Then I left my home through the studio at the back, unseen by
anybody, and I began to run.