Burnt Paper Sky by Gilly Macmillan Read Free Book Online Page B

if you end up on a case together. It was my suggestion that we keep our relationship secret for now. We’d only been together for a few months, and I figured what we did in our spare time was our business. Emma agreed. She said she wasn’t bothered if it was secret or not. She was easy like that.
    First I heard of Benedict Finch was when I was cycling in. I have a portable digital radio that I listen to when I ride. By the time I left the flat the wind and rain had eased up and, as I dropped down Jacob’s Wells Road towards the waterfront, I enjoyed the feel of the acceleration on the steep downhill and skirted round the water that had pooled around the backed-up drains.
    I barely had to pedal when I hit the flat beside the harbour, and, as I was cruising past the cathedral, I caught a 07.30 news update on Radio Bristol. It said that an eight-year-old boy called Benedict Finch had gone missing in Leigh Woods. It happened the previous afternoon while he was out on a dog walk with his mum. Police and mountain teams were looking for him. They were worried.
    The city centre proper was starting to get sticky with early Monday morning traffic, but I made good time, and I hit Feeder Road at 07.40 and cycled alongside the canal. The water level was high, the surface pocked with drizzle. A fisherman sat hunched on the bank beside the road, shrouded in waterproofs.
    Overhead, traffic roared across the stained concrete flyover, oppressively low, a grubby landmark that greeted me every day on my arrival at work. Behind it daylight was emerging, a slate grey sky with low, racing clouds that were purple above and yellow below. It was a poisonous sky: the death throes of last night’s weather. I remember thinking that it wasn’t a good night for a small boy to be missing. Not a good night at all.

RACHEL
    Inspector Miller said that because they’d found the clothing the ‘game had changed’ and they needed to ‘intensify their operation’. He described the woods as ‘a scene’ and said it was a CID case now. What he avoided saying explicitly was what we all knew. Ben wasn’t lost; he’d been taken.
    A stolen child is every parent’s worst nightmare, because the first thing you ask yourself is, ‘Who would take a child?’ The answers are all profoundly disturbing. I slipped into a state of shock. John did too. The faces of the uniformed police around us were grim and some averted their eyes, a show of respect that was especially unnerving.
    WPC Banks guided John and me into her car and drove us to the CID headquarters. At the end of the long lane that led from the car park to the main road, photographers and journalists had already gathered, and they thrust their faces and their camera lenses up against the car windows, trying to talk to us, take photographs of us. We recoiled from the noise, and the flashlights. We drew away from the windows and into each other. John clutched my hand.
    It was a terrible journey. Coming away from the woods felt like an admission that we wouldn’t find Ben; that we were prepared to leave him behind. Within minutes we’d entered the outskirts of the city, and were sucked into its road systems. Busy dual carriageways carried us past new and old industrial buildings, into dense traffic. In the centre the River Avon appeared, parallel to the road, murky water flowing strongly while we lurched to a stop at every light. Plant life clung to its banks, tough and grubby.
    My thoughts refused to work coherently and I was gripped by terror, which felt as if it was hollowing me out. My mind couldn’t face the present, so it burrowed into the past, looking for distraction, or perhaps solace, looking for anything that wasn’t this reality. I felt John’s cold fingers clutching mine and I remembered the first time he’d held my hand, as if that would somehow make things right.
    It happened the week after we’d met for the first time at a hospital function. John was an exhausted junior doctor, wearing