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RACHEL
A few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I thought Ben and I could have some closure once the trial
was over. I was lost for words, truly; because the fact of it is that we might never have ‘closure’. If
only life were that simple. There are some events and uncertainties that you take to the grave and they
threaten to tumble you every single step of the way.
If closure is a search for answers, and an attempt to clear away ambiguity, then let me tell you how
far we’ve got.
Here’s what I know for sure:
I know that in the woods that Sunday afternoon, my child willingly walked away with Joanna May,
his hand in hers. He looked up into her eyes, he trusted her, and he believed what she told him.
She took him to her car, after making him change into clothes that she provided him with. Skittle
followed them. Joanna May hadn’t been prepared for that so she kicked the dog, to make him go
away, and, in doing so, she broke his leg. Then she drove Ben away. She avoided routes where CCTV
cameras lay in wait for her.
Out of everything that happened to him in that week, Ben talks about her treatment of the dog most
of all. His mind circles around it, trying to make sense of her cruelty. What bothers him most is that
she made him leave Skittle there, in pain, whimpering on the ground. It was the first sign he had that
she wasn’t a stable person.
After that, I know very little for sure, except that it was Ben I met on Furry Football one week later.
There is a void, a seven-day hole in his life between the two events.
The evidence tells us a little more. The smashed laptop and bruising consistent with finger marks
on Ben’s upper arm indicate that her anger at finding him playing the computer game pitched her into a
state of mind dangerous enough that she drove him back to the woods and dragged him through the
darkness back to the place where she first took him.
She left him there, dressed only in his underwear and with a black bin bag to shield him from the
rain. In doing so, she humiliated and frightened him and the exposure almost killed him.
We know that once she’d returned home after that she booked a flight for late the following
morning, and packed a suitcase, and placed her passport in a travel wallet, which she put in her bag.
We also know that Lucas Grantham was her downfall, because the police phoned very early that
morning to ask her in for an interview about him. She took a gamble, and went to Kenneth Steele
House, not wanting to arouse suspicion, knowing she could still make her plane.
Though she wasn’t to know that we would end up in a car together, and that she would make a little
verbal slip, which would lead me to steal her keys.
I imagine her standing on that broad pavement outside her home as DI Bennett and I drove away,
rifling through her handbag for the keys to the flat, not finding them, and then replaying the moment in
the car when her belongings fell to the floor, and most likely putting two and two together, or at least
deciding that she couldn’t afford the time to retrieve them, or to track down a spare set. As far as the
police could tell, she made absolutely no attempt to enter the flat and gather her stuff before I got
there, probably because she had her passport in her bag already. We know that she was in a cab to the
airport only twenty minutes after DI Bennett and I dropped her off, so she didn’t dither. I like to think
it was the moment when the hunter became hunted, when her breath quickened, and she began to look
over her shoulder.
And that is the sum of all I know for sure.