A Dark Secret

by Casey Watson

  A hand on my shoulder stopped me. It was Colin’s. Reaching across from his end of the powwow. ‘Sam,’ he said, touching his own temple, ‘I think I’m getting something now, from my superhero senses. Sam, tell me, if you can. The bad man. Is it Sean?’

  Comprehension had dawned even before Colin said the name. Dawned even before his hand had touched my shoulder. Perhaps I had superhero senses too.

  And perhaps I needed to listen to them better.

  Oh God. All this time. All this long, long time. Sean. If I’d been the sort to swear, I would have sworn now, no question.

  But it was as if I wasn’t even there.

  Sam nodded at Colin. Fixed his gaze on him, and only him. ‘So will you help me? You need to help me. We need to kill him.’

  Chapter 23

  By the time we got Sam back home, he seemed to have gone into shock. It might have been partly because of the long scary walk, in a place he didn’t know well, in the early-morning air – not to mention the nature of what he’d planned to do. But my hunch was that it was more likely fear. Fear of having run away with my neighbour’s dog, and what consequences that might mean for him. Fear also of the consequences of having finally divulged his secret. If so, he had taken on board what I’d taught him about consequences, and how terrible an irony was that?

  While I took Sam back indoors, Colin ran up the road to return Flame to Mrs Pegg – no worse, and perhaps better, for his unscheduled adventure. He’d bounced around excitedly in the back of Colin’s car on the way home – like the puppy he’d not been in a long time. So at least one of the duo had had their best morning ever, then, I thought ruefully. And I could tell by the way Sam kept absently stroking him that Flame had and would continue to play a big part in helping Sam to cope. Well, as long as Mrs Pegg would let him.

  I helped Sam off with his coat (he was white as a sheet now, and shaking, and I suspected he might well be sick, too) and his backpack, which – unsurprisingly – weighed a ton. ‘Goodness, you packed for every eventuality then!’ I quipped, hoping to help hold him together by keeping things light. But, to my consternation, he burst into sudden, racking sobs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he cried, burying his face against my middle. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take them. Honest, I didn’t! Honest! I just thought just in case!’

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I said, pulling back a little so I could see his face. But he wasn’t having any of it, and refused to move his head.

  ‘Shhh,’ I soothed, wondering what the ‘them’ referred to. What things he might need ‘just in case’. But, right now, that wasn’t important. ‘It’s okay, Sam,’ I said. ‘Shush, now. Let’s get you sat down before you fall down. Come on. Into the living room. Colin will be back in just a moment. Don’t worry, okay? Everything is going to be alright now, I promise.’

  Even as I said it, I realised how empty my promises must sound. Me – his trusted carer – who had misinterpreted everything, and instead of being the protector I was meant to be – and thought I’d been – had unknowingly sent him straight into the lion’s den. It still beggared belief. Yet now he’d said it, it made sense. Perfect sense, in fact, which made the fact that I’d been blind to it almost incomprehensible.

  But perhaps I’d been as guilty of stereotyping as the next person – Sean Gallagher had been presented to me as a big friendly bear character; an innocent, a gentle child in a too-big adult body. Perhaps the very last person you’d associate with sexual abuse. But I knew better. As I should. I was trained to know better. Yet so readily had I been primed to accept the alternative narrative (not least because I’d had run-ins with more abusive drug dealers than I cared to remember) that I’d ceased to think critically and just accepted it.

  But there would be time enough for soul-searching and dissecting everything later. In the here and now we needed Sam to tell us everything he could. And just as I’d sat Sam down on the sofa, having helped him out of his muddy trainers, I heard the sound of the front door closing. Colin appeared in the living-room doorway moments later.

  ‘Mrs Pegg sends her love, mate,’ he said to Sam immediately. ‘She said not to worry about Flame, okay? She said she knew you’d take care of him and is glad you’ve tired him out for her.’ He took off his jacket. ‘Anyway, alright? How you doing? Bearing up?’

  Sam nodded. Colin’s return seemed to perk him up a little. Well, in truth, perk him up a lot. Because once his fellow superhero sat down in the armchair opposite, it was as if Sam was a dam with the finger plucked out.

  And as I listened to his stream of words – of the bad man and how he’d tricked him, and how he’d made him do things he didn’t want to, and how he dare not tell anyone, ever, or he’d hurt him more – I knew two things for sure. The first was that there was no question that Sam was telling us the truth, and the second was that I hoped it wasn’t exhausting him too much because I knew he would have to tell it at least once again and, much more likely, more than once. To strangers.

  Which made it seem doubly important that he deal with as much as he could today so, under cover of making us all drinks and getting biscuits, I slipped out into the garden, to phone Kim Dearing and ask if she, or someone else, could come round and see him here, now, today.

  Ideally her, though. Even though I knew she might not be on duty. But, happily, she answered her mobile at the first ring.

  ‘Is there any way you could get over here?’ I asked, once I’d given her the gist. ‘I know you’re probably up to your eyes, but I’d really love it if we can strike while the iron’s hot. Not give him too much time to think and get frightened all over again. I’m also all too aware that this whole thing could drag on for ages and if the hard part could be done now – as in you taking his official statement – he’ll at least have got the worst of it out of the way.’

  ‘Oh, the poor lad,’ Kim said. ‘But your timing is good, at least. I can be with you within the hour. Though if it goes to court now and, from what you’ve told me, it might well do, there’s obviously going to be more of the same down the line.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘We can cross that bridge when we come to it. It would just be great if he can get this bit done and we can put it behind us. And at least we know who the perpetrator is, so that should help.’

  ‘Well, in theory,’ Kim said. ‘Not sure it’ll speed things up any.’

  ‘But won’t he be arrested?’

  ‘Probably,’ Kim said, ‘but just for questioning, initially. There has to be evidence and, without an admission, getting that can be a pretty lengthy process. But don’t worry about that now. I’ll make some calls and I’ll be over. Case of one step at a time, at least for the moment.’

  Rather than huffing and puffing in frustration – which I felt like doing, because I knew what a protracted business was probably ahead of us – I took a few deep breaths after hanging up the phone. I knew it was just the inevitable response to the situation, because my rational self knew that in cases like this it was never as simple as a child pointing the finger at someone and then everything being cut and dry, and – abracadabra – the bad man goes directly to jail.

  In real life, children told lies. Or, to use the modern jargon, ‘alternative truths’. Especially children who’d had traumatic childhoods. In real life, there were children who were so messed up inside that they made wild, false allegations simply to get their own way. I’d seen and heard it myself, hadn’t I? More than once.

  But in this case, I just knew that that wasn’t the case. That Sam was telling the truth, which made me feel bad all over again, because we’d literally handed him over, into the arms of a monster. No, not for long, and I had no evidence that they’d even interacted, but he’d been there, for a bit, at least, and just the fact of him being there must have been terrifying for Sam.

  I returned to the living room, where Colin was showing Sam something on his phone. Some YouTube
video or other – presumably to try and distract him. And now I had to break the news to him that the ordeal wasn’t yet over. That he had to tell it all to the policewoman he’d met before, as well.

  His face crumpled and I hugged him on the sofa as he cried.

  ‘You remember how important she is, sweetheart?’ I reminded him. ‘I know it’s so hard to tell, but you’ve done the big job now. You’ve told me and Sampson and that was really, really brave. But the trouble is that, though Sampson is a superhero, obviously, we aren’t in the police, which means we can’t do anything yet. Whereas Kim can arrest him and help fix things for you. She just has to know the story like we do, okay?’

  ‘Exactly. You’re such a brave boy, Sam,’ Colin added, reaching into his shoulder bag and pulling out a hard-backed A4 notebook. ‘So d’you know what I’m going to do while we wait for Kim to get here? I’m going to draw a picture of you in my special pad – a portrait of you, yes? So I never forget what a real-life superhero looks like.’

  I was utterly bemused. What an idiosyncratic and brilliant diversion. I made a mental note to add it to my armoury of skills right away. I was then impressed, as Colin flicked through to find a blank page to draw on, to see that it was indeed a special pad, as opposed to a pad he was just calling special, full of sketches and drawings that were really detailed and masterful – the kind you might expect from a fan of Marvel heroes and comic books.

  Colin then took a well-used pencil from an inside pocket, licked the end of the lead and began to draw. Though not for long. He put the pad down and, as we both craned our necks to see what he’d done, re-sited himself cross-legged on the floor, all the better to capture Sam’s ‘heroic profile’.

  And that’s how we still were when Kim Dearing arrived, fifty-odd minutes later.

  I went to let her in, and asked if we could stay like that too. ‘You know, sitting in the living room, informally, as we are?’

  ‘Of course,’ Kim said. ‘Did you prime him that I was coming?’

  I nodded. ‘Well, as well as I could, of course. It won’t be easy for him to go through it again, obviously.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, before following me back into the room, where she acknowledged Colin, and took the armchair he’d vacated.

  ‘Hello, Sam,’ she said. ‘I hear that you’ve been the bravest little boy ever this morning! You collected the dog, went for a long walk to do your very best thinking, and then you decided to do a very scary, very courageous thing – am I right?’

  Sam scrubbed at his eyes before looking across at Kim. ‘I told them the truth. But now you have to go get Sean, because he might kill auntie Maureen.’

  ‘He won’t, Sam,’ Kim reassured him. ‘He absolutely won’t, and, anyway, it’s okay because you will never have to worry about that again. Someone will take Sean away so that everybody is safe, okay? Now, I know you’ve told Casey and Colin, but now you need to tell me. Can you do that? Can you tell me again what Sean did to you?’

  ‘He hurt me. He hurt my winkie.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, writing. ‘When was this, Sam? When did he first hurt you?’

  Sam thought. ‘It was after we made friends. A bit after that. He gave me chocolate biscuits when Mummy forgot we were hungry. He said it was a proper game, like Lego and colouring in.’

  ‘Your brother and sister too? He gave them food? Played games with them?’

  Sam nodded. ‘He gave them food, but he never played with them, like we did. He said they were babies and babies were tell-tales. He said he only wanted to play with me because I was a big boy.’

  ‘Did you tell him not to touch you? Did you say you would tell your mummy?’

  ‘I did, but it was no good because Sean was very big. He said he would choke my little sister and kill her if I told on him.’

  ‘Did you stop wanting to be friends then?’

  Sam frowned. ‘Yes. But I couldn’t. He said if I did he would grab me from my bed one night and take me far away where no one would ever find me.’

  Sam had begun crying again, but still Kim pressed on.

  ‘How old were you, Sam, when Sean started hurting you?’

  Sam extended an arm and let his hand hover in the air. ‘This big,’ he said. ‘Only little. It was for ages.’

  ‘And did he hurt you only when you slept at auntie Maureen’s, or did he come to your house and hurt you there too?’

  ‘At first it was just at their house, but when I told Mummy I didn’t want to sleep there any more, he came round so he could hurt me at my house instead.’

  ‘And where were Mummy and your sister and brother when this happened?’

  ‘They weren’t there.’

  ‘I understand that, but where might they have been? Did you know?’

  Sam seemed to find this hard to answer. Then it seemed to make sense to him. ‘He came when I was in bed. I was sent to bed a lot.’ He glanced at me here. ‘When I was naughty. Mummy let him come up to my room because he brought me buns and biscuits. She didn’t –’

  He stopped, but I could provide the end of the sentence for him – either with ‘know’, which perhaps she wouldn’t have. Or ‘care’.

  ‘Sam, this is important,’ Kim said. ‘So you must think hard before you answer. Did you ever tell Mummy that Sean was doing things to you?’

  An emphatic head shake, followed by a broken sob. ‘I never.’

  ‘Can you tell me why, Sam?’

  ‘I nearly. Once I told him I would tell. But he’d made me touch his winkie too. And –’ he touched his tongue. I winced. ‘And he said I was a really bad boy for doing that and, if Mummy found out, I would go to kids’ jail forever and never see anyone again.’

  This simple explanation – he’d not articulated this before – made me want to alternately weep, and to punch something, hard. And there was more, too. The mystery of the dog cage. Apparently it had indeed started out as a one-time punishment. Sam had hit his little sister and his mum had called him an animal, and had dragged him out into the garden and thrown him in the cage, where she’d told him he could stay till he was sorry. She’d drawn the bolt across, but hadn’t bothered with the key and padlock that was looped through the wire. Sam had though, and before long had squirrelled it away, realising that if he could lock himself in there it could become a sanctuary from Sean.

  ‘He wouldn’t dare try and get me out of there,’ Sam said, ‘because people would be able to see him.’ Not least his own mother, I thought, from her upstairs windows.

  So it was that the cage became Sam’s safe place. He soon took to locking himself in there on an almost daily basis, and when his brother or sister would come out to giggle at him being in there, he would bark and howl and pretend to be a dog to make them laugh – or, as time went on, to go away. He would also beg his mum to use the cage as a punishment rather than sending him to bed because he knew Sean dare not try anything when he was in there.

  ‘Can I ask a question, love?’ I asked, glancing at Kim, who nodded. ‘Was Sean around all the time? Or just sometimes? I thought he lived away.’

  ‘Not then,’ Sam said. ‘That only happened a little while ago.’

  Kim noted this. ‘And now I have another question for you, Sam. Another very important one. And my last one, because then we’ll be finished. So I want you to think hard about this one, okay? Did you ever tell your auntie Maureen about what Sean did? Did she know?’

  Sam nodded immediately. ‘I never told her though,’ he added, anxiously.

  ‘I understand that,’ Kim said. ‘But how do you think she knew?’

  ‘Because she saw. And after that she helped me.’

  ‘She helped you? Did she tell someone for you?’

  Now he shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So how did she help you?’

  ‘One time I slept there. This was before I lived in
the dog cage.’ Lived in the dog cage. Oh, my, I thought, oh, my.

  ‘Slept at your auntie Maureen’s?’

  ‘Yes. She’d make us up beds on her settees.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Sean used to sneak down and take me up to his bedroom,’ Sam said. ‘And one night I cried, and she heard me, and she found me.’

  ‘Found you in Sean’s bed?’

  Sam’s tears were falling in an unbroken stream now. A sniff. Another nod. ‘Sean was touching my winkie and auntie Maureen screamed at him and hit him lots of times. Then she took me off him and carried me into her bed instead.’

  ‘And what did she say to you, Sam? When she did that?’

  ‘She said I’d had a really bad dream. And that she would always look after me. And I could sleep in her bed all the time if I wanted.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No, I wanted to, but I felt safer in the dog cage. Till he left.’

  ‘You mean when he went away? When Sean went away?’

  ‘Yes. For most of the time he didn’t live there anymore. And when he wasn’t there I went round to auntie Maureen’s. Auntie Maureen was nice. She didn’t hurt me. Not ever. She said she loved me.’

  ‘And did she speak to you again, about the things Sean had done to you?’

  ‘No, she said I mustn’t think of it. That it would make me feel sad if I did. She told me to do the counting thing instead.’

  ‘The counting thing?’

  ‘Sam counts things up to a hundred,’ I explained.

  ‘She said if I ever had a bad thought, I shouldn’t say anything about it. Because if I said about it to anyone, it would make it grow bigger in my head. She said I should just count things like cornflakes, or buttons, or beads. And when I got to a hundred the bad thoughts would go away again.’