by R. G. Adams
‘He sounds dodgy to me already,’ Dai snorted. ‘Personally, I’d arrest him on the spot, just on that description. Right, what are we going to do on this one then? I’m thinking we go out there with CID a bit later, so maybe we catch dad home from work. I’m hoping he will cooperate and go to the station, save having a scene at the house, then they’ll arrest him at the station. I’m guessing from what we know so far you won’t want him home just yet?’
Kit hesitated. ‘What do you think?’ she hedged.
‘This one’s pretty credible, I reckon. I’ve seen the statements and it’s not nice at all. I guess they’ll want to bail him somewhere else and I would have thought that would suit you right now?’
‘Yes, it would. We can see how the assessment goes and I’ll sort out contact with the kids for him once we know whether mum’s reliable. I might need to put in some extra support as well – this girl’s quite severely disabled, plus they’ve got the two younger ones.’
‘All right then. I’ll meet you there about six thirty, OK?’
‘Yep, sure,’ Kit replied, trying to sound more confident than she felt.
‘And try not to throw up in their garden, eh? They don’t like that kind of thing in Meadow View Crescent.’
‘Hilarious.’ But Kit was smiling as she put the phone down. Dai had been kind to her when she’d got queasy after helping him to remove a tiny baby from a house full of rotten food and ancient dog crap. But of course, he was never going to let her forget it.
Kit’s irritation with Jean Collins had bolstered her for half an hour, but now the panic had set back in. She searched for a distraction. In the end, she picked up her bag and found her mirror. She checked her face, because she knew that was what other women did, but she wore no make-up at all and wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to be checking for. Her long fair hair didn’t need a lot of maintenance either, just a wash and a straighten every morning and that was that. She liked shoes and jewellery, but she couldn’t be bothered with the rest of it. As far as the girls in the children’s home had been concerned, Kit’s lack of interest in her appearance had marked her out as different. Though that wasn’t the only thing that had, of course.
Kit searched deeper amongst the mess in her bag, looking for her cigarettes. She’d go outside for a quiet fag and maybe she’d feel calmer. Downstairs, she nipped through the boiler room and squeezed past a wedding party as they emerged from the registry office. After finding a spot in amongst the trees where she wouldn’t get in the way of their photos, she positioned herself so that the May sunshine warmed her back while she smoked and tried to relax. Across the car park, she took in the full view of the Sandbeach council offices. They were housed in a seventies building which had supposedly had a life span of just twenty years. As a result, the two ends of the six-storey building were dropping towards the ground and had been propped up by scaffolding ever since Kit had worked there. Inside, notices instructed staff as to where it was and was not safe to place filing cabinets. A heavy load in the wrong place could bring another portion of the floor down.
Beyond the building, she could see the neat rows of terraced houses, all running in straight lines towards the sea. The huge estates, the Coed and the Hafod, lay halfway up the hill behind the town, giving the residents an outlook so superb that it almost made up for the grim realities of their day-to-day lives. Sandbeach had been an affluent town once, and some areas were flourishing again now. But the hammering caused by the closure of the pits and the steelworks in the outlying areas had left an ugly mark on Sandbeach. Poverty, crime and ill health characterised the little town, all going on in a dark tangle against the backdrop of a coastline so stunning that it featured regularly in broadsheet travel supplements and drew the middle classes from all over Britain and beyond. Kit loved Sandbeach, though. As much as she’d liked living at Cliffside with her foster carers, she’d been glad to come home.
She finished her fag and threw the end on the ground. Over in the car park, she spotted Vernon locking his ancient car. As he got closer to her, his stony face and the handful of greasy paper bags from the baker’s over the road told her that things had not gone well in court. She felt sorry for Ricky, because if Vernon had had a bad time with Judge Peters, he was bound to pass it on. She lit another cigarette in order to give time for the dust to settle before she followed him into the building.
When she got to the office, she could see straight away that this wasn’t a good time to update Vernon about the Cooper case. His door was shut, but Ricky and Maisie sat rigid at their desks. Their faces told her she’d just missed an explosion. Kit gave Ricky a sympathetic glance.
‘Is he pissed off?’
‘You could say that.’ Ricky gave a slight smile, but he looked like he might cry.
‘You can’t really blame him, though, can you?’ Maisie started up. ‘How did you miss it, Ricky?’
Kit hesitated, wanting to defend Ricky, but knowing she did not have the time just now. Ricky was an overseas social worker, drafted in from Harare along with twenty or so others, in an attempt to plug the gaps in Child Services. The Zimbabwean staff were highly qualified, but they’d been placed in the teams that no one wanted to work in. The First Response Team had been the main contender. On top of that, they had had to find their way around an entirely unfamiliar legal and care system and a new culture within a matter of weeks. Ricky had somehow managed all this with very few slip-ups, but Vernon made no allowances whatsoever, and just the sight of Ricky’s pleasant, calm face seemed to send him into orbit. He completely overlooked how clever Ricky was, and Ricky was far too gentle a personality to stand up to him, which was exactly what Vernon needed from time to time. Privately, Kit wondered whether Vernon was a little envious of the attention Ricky got. His arrival had caused quite a stir in the department. He was tall and slender, with perfect dark brown skin and a closely cropped Afro that showed off his pretty face. His general air of fragility, as it turned out, had a lot of appeal to a building full of women who got a kick out of assisting the vulnerable.
‘I mean,’ Maisie continued, ‘you can’t just accept the explanation you’re given for an injury, you know, not when the kids are on the register. You have to check it out every time.’
As much as Kit would have enjoyed a ruck with Maisie, she could not afford to get sidetracked, even if Ricky was the first friend she had made since she’d left care. Ricky would have to fight his own battles. She braced herself, crossed to Vernon’s office and tapped on the door.
‘What now?’
Kit opened the door slightly. Vernon was at his desk, signing off closure records, which were sprinkled with the remnants of his pasties.
‘Can I have another word about this visit, Vern?’
He puffed out his cheeks but resigned himself. ‘The historical allegations? The two girls?’
‘Women.’
‘Look, it’s a colloquialism, I’m Welsh. I’m still one of the boys and I’m sixty-two.’
‘I’m Welsh, too. I can still say the word “women”.’
‘You’re Welsh-Italian. That’s different.’
‘Doesn’t affect my speech much.’
‘Makes you a stroppy bugger twice over, though. Now stop overreacting and get to the point. What’s with the Coopers? What did what’s-her-chops downstairs have to say about it?’
‘Jean Collins said dad’s fantastic. She told me to tell you to keep out of it. She wants it NFA’d.’
‘Well, she can sod off for starters.’ Vernon’s expression was brightening at the possibility of a row. ‘I’ll go down and have a word with her manager right now. I’m in just the right frame of mind to tell her where she can get off. Bleeding cheek. So, have you looked at the file? Have you spoken to Dai Davies?’
‘Yes. Two younger kids, nine and six, nothing of any significance. Older child Lucy’s fourteen and severely disabled. Minimal communication, or
possibly none.’
Vernon tipped his chair back and raised his eyebrows at Kit. ‘Same age as the alleged victims and no communication? Better be extra careful there then,’ he said.
Kit nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. Dad’s going to be arrested and bailed to another address anyway, so contact depends on mum.’
‘What’s bothering you about it most?’
‘All of it. I mean, what do I say to mum? How the hell are we going to tell her and how am I supposed to work out whether we can trust her?’
‘Maybe you’d better let Dai tell them. He’s done all this any number of times. You can talk to her after they’ve gone about the allegations, but just roughly. Don’t give her any details – the police won’t like it; it might screw up their investigation. Just be clear that it’s historical sexual offences we are talking about, and that it involves kids. We can see what else she needs to know further down the line, when you’ve got a relationship going with her. At this stage, you just want to know –’ he counted it out on his big fingers – ‘whether she understands the offences and whether she is willing to cooperate with us. You need to get an idea what their relationship is like, that’s the important bit. Is he in charge at home? Can she stand up to him if need be? If he gets convicted, is she determined to stand by her man and all that crap? If so, she’s in trouble with us, isn’t she? And make sure you get Dai to run PNC checks on them both, soon as, see if there’s been any domestic abuse, anything like that. Right? Now go and speak to Legal, for God’s sake. I know you’re nervous and I can see why. But the best thing you can do is to make sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row, because if it kicks off when you break it to the mother, you need to be ready, OK?’
‘Yes. OK.’ Kit got up to go. Vernon was sifting through a bag in a desperate search for a last pasty. He found one and looked up, pausing to speak before he threw it into his mouth.
‘Make sure you talk to the kids, won’t you? Especially Lucy.’
‘Of course,’ she told him. That was the one thing she knew she could get right.
Chapter 2
By the time Kit reached the Coopers’ street, the heat still hadn’t died out of the day. Looking about, she couldn’t spot Dai anywhere. She turned her car round at the end of the cul-de-sac and then drove back and pulled in diagonally opposite the Coopers’ house.
She opened the car window. Just time for a quick fag. The day’s heat had stuck her shirt to her back. A thunderstorm was overdue, and she longed for it to freshen the air. Kit felt closed in by the rows of houses she could see spreading in every direction. The sea wasn’t visible from this part of Sandbeach; the estate could have been anywhere, you wouldn’t even know it was near the coast. She couldn’t understand the point of living there. She started to feel the pull to be at the beach, to get air into her lungs and cold water onto her sticky skin. She promised herself that she’d pick up her stuff and go down for a swim after this visit, holding the idea in her mind as an incentive to get her through what was coming.
Kit’s nerves had settled a little now. Would they ever go away altogether, in this job? Every single child-protection inquiry she’d been out on so far had been an absolute nightmare: furious, aggressive parents, sobbing kids and all hell let loose the second the social worker got a foot in the door and waved an ID badge. Kit remembered the whole thing only too well from her own childhood. Except that, when the social workers finally came for her, Tyler and Danny that last time, she hadn’t been sobbing. She’d been relieved. Christine had put all of them in and out of care so many times by then, using it like a free B & B. Every time she was fed up with the kids, she’d simply chuck some of their stuff in binbags and leave them outside a police station or the council offices. One Christmas Eve, she couldn’t even be bothered to do that, and had just put the five of them out on the street, where they’d sat on the kerb shivering in the dark, until one of the neighbours had phoned the out-of-hours social worker to come and pick them up. Once they were out of the house, Christine would always switch her phone off, lock the door and retire to bed with a bottle of vodka.
And there had been the other times, when someone would report her for one thing or another – leaving the kids alone or being drunk or whatever. Those times were worse. A social worker would arrive to remove them, and Christine would jump at the chance to take the moral high ground, reacting with outrage, screaming and shouting about her rights and refusing to have her precious children taken from her. A fair bit of furniture would usually get thrown before the social worker managed to get them out of the house.
In the end, a social worker had come along who had actually stayed for a couple of years. Carmel had had the sense to see that the plan of ‘rehab to home’ was nonsense for the Goddard kids. Realising that Kit couldn’t possibly study in Redbridge House, unless she wanted to get beaten up on a daily basis, Carmel had talked Menna and Huw into taking her, their last foster placement before retirement. Kit’s near-perfect grades had been achieved at least as much for Carmel as for herself.
Kit brought herself up short. She couldn’t think about this now, she needed to focus. She glanced around the close. The overheated tarmac was giving rise to a rich smell that wafted in through her car window, sticky and delicious. Children’s voices rang out around the close, coming from gardens where little ones could be seen splashing in paddling pools and tottering on the steps of water slides. Some older boys were playing on bikes in the road, yelling at each other, but not swearing, Kit noticed. The houses were neat and modern, all placed at peculiar angles, because of the need to squeeze as many as possible onto the plot, she supposed. There were deliberate differences in their shape and layout, but this did nothing to overcome the feeling of them all being pretty much the same. Kit took in the Welsh-slate house numbers, the decorative lamp posts, the hanging baskets, the wooden blinds at the windows. From the vantage point of an outsider, she recognised it as a scene of affluent suburban normality. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of the idea that a sexual predator might live like this, might come home from the office to a list of dad jobs – power-washing the decking, reinflating the sinking paddling pool, tending to the Moroccan chicken on the gas barbecue, bottle of beer in hand. As soon as she thought it, she felt a pulse of irritation with herself. She knew full well that this was exactly what a determined paedophile might do – taking years, perhaps a whole lifetime, to carve out that perfect niche of respectability, which in turn encouraged trust and therefore easy access.
Her attention turned to the Coopers’ house. She examined it carefully, but it told her nothing much. It was mostly similar to the others on the estate. The house was one of the larger, detached ones, with a big ground-floor extension to the side that had taken a lot of what would have been the garden, but otherwise it fitted the mould. The only other visible difference was the red Fiat Doblo parked on the drive. It was adapted to take a wheelchair and it stood out a mile, a lump of a thing compared to the sleek Audis and Mercs sitting outside the other houses.
At that moment, a black BMW swept past her and drew up on the Coopers’ drive next to the Fiat. Kit put the car window up and slid down a bit in her seat. She watched, curious to get a look at Matt Cooper, the details of the referral running through her mind once more. She caught a glimpse of a tall, well-dressed man as he got out of the car and went to the front door. She didn’t know what she had expected. But he looked ordinary enough. No, more than that, he looked pleasant, maybe even attractive. Kit was cross with herself as soon as she thought that, because it was the type of thing that Jean Collins would say, and she would have despised Jean for it. But somehow, with sexual offences, it was quite hard to resist the thought. Though she would sooner have died than admit it to Jean.
The door opened before Matt Cooper got to it. A slim woman with blonde hair stood there waiting for him, smiling. They hugged on the doorstep and went in together, his arm around her shoulder. Kit saw herself
from outside now, sitting in her car, watching the daily routine of the family, her mind full of suspicion. How could she just walk in there and smash it all to pieces? Whatever happened afterwards, they would never recover from what was going to take place in the next hour or so. And did she even have the right, based on something that two women claimed had happened all those years ago? Jean Collins’ warning rang in her ears; she started to feel afraid. Was what she was about to do going to end her career before it had even started? She tried to imagine how Mr Cooper was going to react. At least he wasn’t likely to turn violent. He had too much to lose for that.
Another car pulled in behind Kit’s and Dai Davies emerged, along with a woman, probably in her forties, of average height and build. The woman had cropped hair and acne-scarred skin. Dai came across and leant down to Kit’s car window, giving her a reassuring smile. He was perspiring heavily, whether from the heat or his nerves she could not tell. Her own heart was racing now, and she would have done anything, anything at all, to avoid going into that house. But Dai raised his eyebrows to indicate that they needed to get on with it. Kit gathered her courage and got out of the car to join the others on the pavement.
‘This is Kit Goddard,’ Dai said. ‘Kit, this is D.S. Beth Mackay from CID. I suggest we let her handle the first part, get Mr Cooper out of the way, and then we can go through things with Mrs Cooper. OK with you, Beth?’
‘Sure.’ Beth Mackay smiled at Kit. ‘Don’t look so worried, love. I won’t stand for any nonsense from him, and I don’t care who his father is either. I’ve had every senior officer from the Chief Constable downwards bending my ear about this Len Cooper today. I’m sick of the sound of his name already.’
Kit was extremely relieved to hear Beth’s bullish tone. She’d had a couple of bad visits with officers who were so young and inexperienced that they’d had even less of a clue about what to do than she had. This had resulted in some nasty incidents, especially when Maisie was in the lead. But Beth clearly wasn’t that type. Someone must have decided to send the big guns this time. Though, come to think of it, she didn’t know whether that made her feel better or worse.
