A Dark Secret

by Casey Watson

  And, depressingly, it also pointed to his unique suitability for grooming. ‘Why does it so often come down to this?’ Christine commented, echoing my very thoughts.

  I glanced across at the green expanses beyond the park gate, to the people strolling around in the sunshine, going about their daily lives. And I mused on the dark perspective my job so often gave me – of the darkness that always existed beneath the surface.

  ‘Why indeed?’ I agreed. To which neither of us had an answer. ‘Well, I’ll do my absolute best to get this fast-tracked,’ Christine said instead. ‘I’ll speak to my manager as soon as I put the phone down, in fact. We need to get this made official so that an investigation can take place. Anyway,’ she added, ‘how about you? How are you coping with everything?’

  I decided not to mention my respite requirements until we next spoke – I didn’t want her to waste any of her limited time looking into that for me when there were far more important enquiries to be made. ‘Just fine,’ I reassured her. ‘And I’ll call Colin now. Get him up to speed before I email you both later.’

  I did exactly that. And Colin was predictably bullish. ‘You know,’ he said, once I’d outlined Sam’s night-time disclosures, ‘there’s one way we might get more immediate answers. Why don’t we just go and visit the neighbour?’

  ‘Mrs Gallagher?’

  ‘Exactly. It was her who alerted us to the family situation, after all. And if she’s been that involved with them, she might have seen stuff that could give us some clues, mightn’t she?’

  ‘Wouldn’t someone have already interviewed her?’

  ‘I highly doubt it,’ he said immediately. ‘It would have hardly been a priority, after all. Not now the children have been removed to a place of safety and the mum’s in hospital getting treatment. Why would they? It would only become a factor if charges end up being made against her, wouldn’t it? And right now, as far as I know, that’s not on the table. But this changes everything, doesn’t it? And if anyone knows about the comings and goings in that household, my money is on her.’

  ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ I said. ‘We could ask her all sorts and, like you said, if anyone knows, it’ll be her. Assuming she’ll talk to us. Do you think she’ll see us?’

  ‘I don’t see why she wouldn’t,’ Colin said, ‘though we’ll obviously have to tread carefully. Confidentiality is key, so we can’t mention Sam’s disclosures to her – at least not at this stage. So we’ll have to be careful about what we ask or say.’

  I felt a bloom of positivity. I knew the cogs in social services turned slowly, and this could help no end, if it happened. It was also right up my street – a bit of private detective work? Bring it on. ‘Oh, of course,’ I said, ‘we could just, you know, play it as a catch-up visit. Say we are trying to build up a solid background for Sam’s benefit, and that we just need a kind of picture of how they lived, and …’

  Colin laughed. Loudly. He clearly had my measure. ‘Easy there, Columbo,’ he said. ‘Give me a day or two to run it all by my manager and work out what we need. In the meantime, do you need me to come out for a visit? Take Sam off your hands for a couple of hours or something?’

  I had a million ants in my pants by now, and wanted to go and see Mrs Gallagher immediately, so the thought that it might be a while away dampened my excitement somewhat. ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Well, okay. If you think it might be a while before we can go, then, yes, I imagine that Sam would love to see you in the meantime, and of course it would give me a bit of a break. When were you thinking?’

  ‘Couple of days? Where are we now … let me see … how about Thursday? Around ten? And now I’d better fly. If I hear anything in the meantime I’ll call you, but, if not, I’ll see you then. Oh, and best not to mention any of this to Sam yet. If at all. Or am I teaching my grandmother to suck eggs?’

  I obviously chided him about the ‘gran’ bit, but he was right in his assessment. Sam might really miss Mrs Gallagher and, if I told him, he might want to come along as well, which obviously couldn’t happen as it would potentially stop her from opening up to us. So when I ended the call and headed into the park to meet Sam I was already decided. If we could pull off a meeting it would be strictly between me and Colin.

  Sam was pink-cheeked from running around and throwing balls for Flame to catch. And, as had become the norm now, full of chatter about the fun they’d had together. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said breathlessly, as he clipped on Flame’s lead, ‘when I’m sixteen, I’m going to live in a big, golden castle on a hill. I’m going to have a dog just like Flame. I might even call him Flame, actually. And he’s going to protect me from all the bad men who live in the woods.’

  ‘They don’t sound like very nice woods,’ I observed.

  ‘Because they’re proper woods. Not like these woods. They’re forests. Big bad forests.’

  And as I digested this imaginative foray – the curious light and shade of it – I thought no. Because this little conversation was, in itself, enough to convince me that I had to push this. I had to find out who had hurt this little boy, and then do my very best to try to repair the damage that had been inflicted on him.

  In the here and now, in the real world, I would be Sam’s Flame.

  Chapter 12

  As promised, Colin called to take Sam out the following Thursday. And, to my delight, for almost double the couple of hours he’d first proposed. They’d first gone down to the park to walk Flame, then, having returned her, back again to play football. They then headed on into town, where they’d had a mooch round a couple of shops (the games shop and the toy shop – he’d returned to me bearing Lego) after which they’d had lunch at the local burger joint.

  I’d spent the time productively, of course, in the best way I knew how – by tackling a job I’d been meaning to get around to for a while now, attaching a few dozen buttons (I’d ordered a job-lot on the internet) to several shirts and a couple of blouses. It was a tedious task – made all the harder by my ropey supermarket reading glasses – but was at least improved by the soundtrack of golden oldies from my trusty radio.

  And there was also news to sing about on their return. While Sam was out of earshot in the downstairs loo, Colin waggled his mobile at me. ‘Just checked my emails,’ he told me. ‘The visit to Mrs Gallagher has been approved.’

  He had other news too, which he was quick to sketch out before Sam returned to us. ‘He’s opened up to me a little more about what he told you.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, pleased to hear this. ‘How come? In what way?’

  ‘We were in the games shop,’ he said. ‘And he was enthusing about some creepy-looking computer game or other, so I took it as an opportunity to mention that I knew he’d been having nightmares. I told him I knew because you had to report things like nightmares, so we could all plan together how best we could help him with them.’

  ‘And he was okay with that?’

  ‘Absolutely. In fact, he took me aback a bit, to be honest, because he just came out and told me he had nightmares because of all the bad things in his head – about the bad man who used to hurt him. Just like that.’

  ‘That’s encouraging. And?’

  ‘That was it, I’m afraid. When I asked him what they were he said he wasn’t allowed to say. So I left it at that. But it’s a positive that we got that far, isn’t it?’

  I agreed that it was. And it made the visit to see Mrs Gallagher feel even more positive. Sam had now opened up, albeit it only a little, to both me and his social worker. Mrs Gallagher had known him well. They’d had an ongoing relationship. Was there a chance that he’d opened up to her too?

  Which meant the day of the visit couldn’t come soon enough. And when it did (I’d roped in Kieron – and, of course, Luna – to babysit, after dropping Dee Dee at school), I was like a cat on the proverbial hot tin roof.

  I’d been surprised at how well Sam
had taken the news that I had to go out for a meeting, and that Kieron would be looking after him for a few hours. After all, this was another bit of new territory for him. But watching him at the window, looking out for my son’s arrival, I realised he was quite looking forward to it.

  ‘When is he going to get here?’ he whined. ‘He’s taking ages. We’re going to go hunting,’ he added. ‘We’re going to hunt for old tennis balls.’

  ‘Are you really?’

  ‘And we might take a picnic. And some dog biscuits. To reward them. Shall I get my gear on?’

  ‘Not just yet, sweetie. I imagine he’ll want to stop for a cup of coffee before you go on your adventure.’

  Sam’s expression darkened. ‘But it’s too long!’ he declared with a huff. A huff that could so easily turn into a puff, and then a rage, and a full-on blow-the-house-down scenario. ‘Now, now,’ I said firmly. ‘Remember what we’ve said? About being a big boy and waiting for people to be ready to do things first? Without getting angry about why you might have to wait a little bit?’

  The moment passed. And I was pleased. We really were making strides with him. ‘I’ll be a good boy,’ he said. ‘I want my good-boy stars, don’t I? Can we say ten minutes? That’s a long time. But I promise I won’t get angry.’

  ‘Let’s say fifteen,’ I countered, smiling. ‘I think fifteen will be long enough.’ But, in the event, when Kieron got to us, it took no more than five, because Luna, seeing Sam, bounced around like a mad thing, and Kieron was similarly anxious to get her to the park before she did the unforgiveable and peed on my carpet.

  Which meant that they were long gone by the time Colin arrived to pick me up. And he too seemed in particularly high spirits. So much so that I suspected I’d met a kindred one in him.

  ‘So they’re looking at all outcomes,’ Colin explained, when we set off and I asked him about the education situation. ‘It all rests on the results of the assessment, of course – which is happening as soon as humanly possible, I promise – but we’re covering the bases in advance, so we’re ready. We’ve got one person contacting all the special schools, and another all the mainstream ones. Well, at least those that have a decent SENs department, obviously. That way, all the groundwork will have already been done and we can get him in somewhere as soon as we get a diagnosis.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ I said, ‘and it will be so good for him to be back in school. It must be so boring for such a young lad to be stuck at home with a pair of oldies like me and Mike.’

  Colin laughed. ‘I never said that,’ he pointed out, throwing his car around yet another corner, while I resisted the urge to grab the door handle. Hmm, I thought. He might not have said it but I definitely felt it. I’d not been so traumatised since I’d rashly agreed to take Kieron out for practice while he’d been having driving lessons. An experience I knew I’d be (reluctantly) repeating with Tyler too, before too long. Still, Colin’s energy was invigorating and, not for the first time, I felt glad to be in the presence of such an example of can-do youth. If anyone could clear a path to Sam’s future, I reckoned Colin could. ‘Ah,’ he added, as we entered a lengthy street of terraced houses, ‘it looks as though we’re heading into the estate now, doesn’t it?’

  I followed his gaze up the street, feeling the usual fluttering of butterflies in my stomach. There had been a number of occasions over the years when I’d been required to enter the ‘lion’s den’, and it was always accompanied by the same frisson of nervous anticipation. Which wasn’t to say that I was generally expecting actual lions, obviously, but there was still that moment, when it happened, where I came face-to-face with a child’s past – a past that, up to that point, I had only read and heard about. And, given the kind of children that Mike and I were often asked to take in, it wasn’t unusual to find that it wasn’t a pretty place. So whatever I was about to be faced with on the surface, I was already primed to expect that when we peeled back the layers there would be a sorry story of some kind underneath.

  This estate, on the far side of town, looked fairly typical. Dense with houses, but not garages. These homes had been built decades ago, by the look of them, when few working-class people had cars. No longer. It now had cars running along the length of each kerb, despite it being in the middle of a weekday. It was also, with the odd, very obvious exception, unloved; several of the gardens had missing fences, there was rubbish lying around all over, and lots of wheelie bins – dragged out, presumably for emptying – which were overflowing with yet more rubbish, along with satellite bin bags, some already broken into by the birds. I could hear dogs barking, lots of them – aimless canine conversation – and though I’m as far from being a snob as you could possibly be, the whole area screamed poverty and hopelessness and tired, unfulfilled lives, and that made me very sad indeed.

  ‘Bit grim round here, isn’t it?’ Colin said. Had he read my thoughts? Probably not, I decided. We worked in the same ball park, so he didn’t really need to. He probably spent more time going to houses in streets like this than me. He then glanced at the sat nav, which was telling him to turn right. ‘I think Mrs Gallagher’s is just around this next corner.’

  He took this one more slowly, of necessity – there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre – and we both let out an ‘ahh’ together.

  ‘This looks a bit nicer,’ he said as we took in the change. This was obviously a street where a few houses had been sold off a while back, because, in contrast to the ones we’d just passed, some had that unmistakeable look of private ownership. They were semis on this street, with bigger front gardens, and, though still modest, several were definitely better taken care of. Fresh paint, replacement windows, shrubs and flowers. I noted the park across the road. Perhaps that made them more desirable.

  And, it turned out, perhaps not unsurprisingly, that Mrs Gallagher’s was even more spruced up than most. We pulled up outside to see a lush, green and neatly mown lawn, bordered on two sides by the last remnants of a display of spring daffodils, with tulips thrusting up like red-bereted soldiers in between. There were gleaming white nets hanging from all the front windows and the front door – painted blue – had a brass knocker attached to it that was the size of a tea plate.

  ‘Well, this definitely looks nicer,’ I said, as I climbed out of the car. I looked to the houses left and right, both of which were outshone by Mrs Gallagher’s. ‘I wonder which one was Sam’s?’

  ‘Looks like we’re about to find out,’ Colin said, nodding across the roof of the car towards the front door. I followed his glance to see a lady was already emerging from it; she looked around sixty and was smiling and waving at us.

  ‘You must be from the social,’ she said as we walked up the path towards her. She had a soft Irish accent and curly, steel-coloured hair. ‘Ah, come along inside and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea. Though would you mind if I asked you to leave your shoes in the hallway? We don’t stand on ceremony here, but I do like my carpets clean.’

  A woman after my own heart, then, I thought, as we did as instructed. And small too – unusually, she was almost as small as me. She was also wearing a garment I’d not seen in a while – one of those sleeved, wraparound aprons my gran used to don to do her housework. There was also a string of pearls around her neck.

  The house interior was just as well-kept as the exterior. Every window ledge, every cabinet, every ornament and photograph-covered surface – of which there were a lot.

  ‘Your home is lovely,’ I said, as she showed us into a conservatory behind the rear sitting room, where a tray of tea things was already waiting on the cloth-covered table. ‘Though I have to say, it must take forever to dust.’

  ‘Oh, it does that,’ she trilled, ‘but I do love my dusting. My mother was a proud woman,’ she added, ‘and she’d turn in her grave, she would, if I didn’t keep my home absolutely spotless. Now then, make yourselves at home, while I go and fetch the tea.’

&nbs
p; ‘At home? I’m not sure I dare twitch, let alone move,’ Colin whispered with a wink as she trotted off. ‘Jeez – she could clean up on Flog It!, no question.’

  He was right. Or Antiques Roadshow, for that matter. I was still grinning when Mrs Gallagher returned, with the promised pot of tea and a plate of what looked like freshly baked fairy cakes. ‘We’re all of us the same in our part of the world,’ she went on, as if still midway through our conversation. ‘I’m from County Sligo,’ she added, as if this fact was key. ‘All the women there were the same. Oh, they would judge each other to be the Devil himself if the house didn’t smell of furniture polish and disinfectant. Now, in case you’re wondering,’ she said, nodding towards the fence bordering one of the adjacent houses, ‘over there’s where the hussy and her little ones lived. You only need to take a look at those mucky windows to know it was a house of sin.’

  It was difficult to see next door’s windows because the conservatory had Venetian blinds, but no doubt the muckiness of them would become clear eventually.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mrs Gallagher said, making the sign of the cross across her chest as she set down the teapot. ‘We’ll leave that to brew a while, will we? So. What would you like to know?’

  Colin sat forward a little, so I left him to lead the way. ‘Anything you can help us with, Mrs Gallagher,’ he said as she took her own seat. ‘Anything that might help us form a better picture of Sam’s home life. I understand that Mrs Gough suffered from mental health problems. You’ve known the family a good while, I’m told, so did she always struggle with the kids, or was it just more recently?’