I can’t remember anything about the time I spent waiting; I suspect I was in a kind of trance. At about 6.15 a.m., the police came: a man and a woman, both young. I can’t remember his name but I remember hers was Yvonne. I remember it because that’s what the other one shouted, later.
‘He’s upstairs,’ I said when they came in.
It’s frightening, having two uniformed police coming through your front door. At least, I was frightened. The policeman headed up while the woman waited with me. She was talking to me, I think, but I can’t remember what she said. I don’t think I was listening. I think I was listening for what was happening upstairs.
‘Christopher,’ I heard the policeman say, then knocking. ‘Christopher, can you open the door?’ Then he shouted down the stairs. ‘Yvonne! Can you get up here a sec?’
‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said and went out of the living room.
And then. And then. And then I was up there too, on the landing in my nightdress and Christopher’s coat. Both their backs were to me and they were fighting with Christopher’s bedroom door. I can remember my ankles were cold. I remember wondering where the cold draught was coming from.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked – and I wonder if I knew already what the matter was; when I remember it, that’s the way it feels and I know I felt sick.
‘The door’s jammed,’ the policeman said. He had his radio; he was talking into it, asking for backup.
‘Christopher won’t hurt you,’ I said. ‘If you knock, he’ll probably open the door.’
‘I’ve tried that.’
‘Christopher?’ I called out to him, as I always did when I heard him come home. ‘Christopher? Christopher?’
But he did not call back.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Christopher had fed his skipping rope through his bedroom window. The rope his father had made for him when he was a boy. He’d tied the other end to the leg of the bed and pushed his desk up against the door. What I’d thought was the door closing was the desk, I think, banging against it. When I’d felt the cold air, that was when he’d opened the window so he could lower himself out.
He’d been dead only minutes when the police found him. That makes sense, because when I held him to me, he was still warm. I can’t recall if I realised then or only later what that meant. But now, obviously, I know it means that he took his life in the moments after I’d made the call to the police, which in turn means he heard me call them. He heard me betray him. That is my weight to bear along with the rest.
They found Benjamin’s body in the canal. Martin, my son, who died never knowing how much he was loved. His body hadn’t gone far, tied as it was with an oily barge rope to a broken mooring post.
Now.
Here we are.
Everything I’ve told you so far takes us up to here, to this moment. Everything I have told you is as Christopher told me. I have tried to take Christopher’s point of view because of what follows in these pages. I have done this because I was trying to understand how much he believed and how much he knew was lies. I genuinely believe that he didn’t think he was lying, not in any conscious way. This was not a coldly executed deception. I believe he absorbed his lies on the deepest possible level because he needed them much, much more than truth. I believe this because I knew him, I lived with him, I loved him, and I never saw anything that made me think he was lying, even to himself.
I thought I’d understood him. But at the inquest, I realised, I’d understood nothing at all.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave.
Upon questioning, Mother Superior Lawrence revealed that Christopher had indeed been to St Matthew’s Convent to search for information pertaining to his birth. But he had not been there at any time during the days leading up to Ben’s death nor indeed at any point that year. When she consulted the records, she found an entry in the visitors’ book for him on Friday, 28 October 1977. She remembered him. His mother had visited the convent a few months before, she said, requesting the whereabouts of her son and she had been told she would be informed should her son wish to make contact with her. Mother Superior Lawrence and Christopher had enjoyed a cup of tea together in the visitors’ room, and once Christopher had shown her his ID, she had fetched the ledger for him.
‘We talked about the two baby boys born that day,’ she said. ‘Martin Curtiss and William Hurst. I remembered his mother, Rebecca. I told him she was troubled but that she’d always sung to him, always called him Billy. And that was it. I wished him luck in his search. He set off from here so far as I’m aware intending to pursue information via the official channels, which is what he told me he was going to do.’
They had talked for about an hour, she said to the police officer taking her statement. She had told Christopher that the other baby, Martin, had gone to America because the convent had links with a church in Virginia. Martin left the convent almost two weeks after Billy. Sister Lawrence insisted that she had given no information to Christopher regarding Martin’s adoptive parents. There had been no mistake there at the convent. There had been no switching of babies, no ankle band on the wrong foot, no incorrect entry of information at the Registrar’s office.
It was concluded that Christopher must have read the ledger book upside down, taken a mental note of Martin’s birth mother’s name and address, maybe written it down later. He had a great memory. He always could sing any pop song word-perfect right the way through; always knew the title, who sang it and most of the time when it was released. He had my name and my parents’ address; he was able to trace me that way. My parents have no recollection of him calling at their home. They think perhaps they might have received a telephone call around that time but they thought it was a marketing questionnaire. They couldn’t be sure and their statement was not included in the final report.