The Silent Witness

by Casey Watson

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ Mike said, when I dragged his attention away from the television to point Bella’s possible activity out to him. ‘You can’t blame the kid for trying to find stuff out, can you? And re the Facebook, well, it’ll have been all over the local papers anyway, wouldn’t it? And her school will have said something about her absence, wouldn’t they? Mind you, if she’s got any sense, and she has seen things she wishes she hadn’t, then perhaps now the itch has been scratched she’ll leave all that alone for a bit. That’s what I’d tell her when you speak to her tomorrow. Don’t even go there.’

  And in an ideal world Mike was absolutely right. In an ideal world we could take in our foster kids, wave a magic wand, and cut them off from all of it. All the discussion, all the gossip – no good ever came of listening to gossip. And more importantly, all the toxic relationships they had in their past lives. And I would tell her that, too, because these kids often didn’t know what was best for them and would, given half a chance, particularly if seriously abused, sneak off, behind the wicked, nasty, child-stealing social’s back, and send themselves right back into the hands of their abusers, who, so often, heartbreakingly, they still loved and missed.

  Which was why social media was such a nightmare for social services and foster carers. How exactly did you stop any of that happening? Of the most vulnerable children, having been whisked to a place of safety, being tracked down by the very adults they had been enslaved and mistreated by?

  No, not every kid had access to a home computer, but what the majority of children did have was their own smartphone, these days – sometimes children who didn’t have a pair of shoes to their name, too. And even if you didn’t allow them access to your wifi, they had pay-as-you-go contracts, with data allowances – a 3G connection, or some free wifi, and any child was good to go. And, since the dawn of the computer age, of log-ins and passwords, to places where it was hard for you to follow.

  Still, I reassured myself, as I closed the laptop down for the night, at least none of that applied to Bella. No smartphone, for one thing, so that was one less thing to worry about. And with her mum currently holed up at Her Majesty’s pleasure, her worries were grounded not in the virtual, but the real world.

  I checked myself, not being all-knowing. Or so I hoped.

  Chapter 7

  Bella’s little spell searching the internet stayed on my mind all that evening, and was there again when I woke the next morning. It was obvious why she’d made the searches she did – those were all terms and concepts that would have been at the forefront of her mind since she was first placed in care. Someone, at some point – perhaps several different people – would have explained why she was in care and what the immediate future held for her; including the fact that what the immediate future held for her was really dependent on so many factors – and facts, or lack of them – that as things stood it was anyone’s guess.

  So it was a natural thing for her to do; specially given her obvious intelligence. But it was important that I alert Sophie Taylor right away – not least because it might have some bearing on what she’d seen.

  ‘If nothing else,’ I told Sophie when I got through to her (once again slipping the phone call in while Bella showered), ‘it would seem to suggest she’s aware of the gravity of the situation for her mother, wouldn’t it? Which suggests to me that she knows full well that she tried to kill her partner. That the “self-defence” plea isn’t borne out by what she witnessed.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have had more of a conversation with Bella about her mum,’ Sophie mused. ‘You obviously try to keep it light, to minimise their distress, but it looks like Bella’s obviously old enough and motivated enough to consider worst-case scenarios, doesn’t it? God, I wish she’d open up to us. I’m just afraid that what she might be reading could scare her even more. And, after all, none of us know what’s going to happen to her mum now. Specially with what we’re increasingly hearing.’

  ‘Have you heard something new, then?’ I asked, picking up on that immediately.

  ‘Nothing specific,’ she answered quickly. ‘Just a general feeling that there’s more to it than we know, that’s all. I’m sure John will fill you in if anything concrete emerges.’

  I quashed the urge to grill her further, knowing it would be inappropriate for her to pass on anything that wasn’t cold, hard fact. ‘Thank you,’ I said instead. ‘In the meantime, any progress with getting Bella that counselling appointment?’

  It wasn’t that I felt particularly optimistic that a counsellor would get anything more out of Bella than had been the case before she came to us, given her track record, but you had to do something. And with her not looking like going back to school any time soon, it was at least something constructive to help fill a day.

  ‘Give me an hour,’ she told me and, true to her word, she was back on the phone within the next one, with an appointment fixed for the following week, with a ‘truly lovely’ counsellor called Katie.

  I told Bella, hoping she’d at least feel a little positive about it, rather than looking upon it as yet another sneaky way of getting her to say what she’d seen. I pointed out that she might find it helpful to have someone to share her feelings with, and that seeing a counsellor – particularly a truly lovely one – was one of the things we generally considered to be useful, since it was sometimes hard to express yourself to the people you were close to and that, since she lived with us, perhaps we might now fall into that category. Or people you weren’t close to, but who you lived with, and so on. I pointed out that it might be good for her emotional health. Which obviously mattered as much as her physical health. And lots of other positive standard-issue stuff like that.

  ‘I’m not going to talk to her,’ Bella said.

  I kept the faith, however, because counsellors could sometimes work wonders, and in the meantime I could only keep on doing what I was doing: giving Bella security and space. I also found the pen and paper I’d been meaning to, and encouraged her to write. It was another thing Sophie had talked to me about when she’d called.

  ‘The first counselling session will be led by Bella herself,’ she’d told me. ‘No questions. Just a chance for Bella to talk about what she wants to talk about. Which, hopefully, will be her mother. Katie herself can only be open and honest about what we know as fact, of course. Which, as you know, isn’t as yet a great deal. And won’t be, I suppose, until Bella herself adds to what we know – or her father does. I’m sure he’s going to be formally interviewed by the police any day now, and it’ll be interesting to see what he has to say. She’s not said anything about him? About the fact that he’s out of danger?’

  ‘Not a word,’ I said. ‘And I’ve obviously not asked her.’ Since feeling her negative vibes whenever her stepdad was mentioned, I had studiously avoided mentioning anything more about it. In fact, as I suspected that to do so might be to put strain on the tentative bonds we were beginning to make with her. And the way she’d responded to the news of his coming off the ventilator made me doubly convinced that while she might not wish him dead (at least not consciously), she didn’t wish him well – her relief, I felt, was much more about how the new situation affected her mother than anything else.

  ‘Of course,’ Sophie said. ‘And that’s all the more reason to encourage her to write to her mum. Letters vetted by you, of course – you’ll obviously have to make that clear to her, as nothing will be allowed to get to her if it prejudices the trial in any way. Or at least not to put them in an envelope, so that we can read them first. Laura’s solicitor has been very clear that to protect her case there mustn’t be any reference to that night in the correspondence.’

  I could see the sense in that, but I could also imagine that that might be exactly what Bella wanted to talk to her mum about, so I said as much.

  ‘I realise that,’ Sophie said, ‘but it is what it is and we have to follow those instructions, I’m afraid. It might make it easier for Bella to accept if you let her kno
w that we are all trying to arrange a prison visit for her as soon as possible. Now that Christmas is out of the way, we can get that sorted out pretty quickly, I reckon. Everyone back in the office, caseloads getting shifted onto the correct desks. But I’m probably teaching you to suck eggs,’ she finished, laughing.

  ‘Well, I am a grandmother,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I know! And of four grandkids – jeepers, I couldn’t believe that when John told me.’

  Flattery, in all likelihood, but it still went down well. I was warming to young Sophie more and more by the minute.

  Despite Bella’s negativity about it, the following Wednesday couldn’t come too soon. It was now the second week in January and the new school term had well and truly kicked in, meaning Tyler was back in school, and doing all his usual after-school gadding about, and leaving Bella even more isolated than she already was.

  It was really helpful, therefore, that she had taken as much to Marley Mae as Marley Mae had to Bella. It meant we could do lots of things with Riley – Marley Mae usually in tow, of course – including shopping, which Bella did seem to like, particularly when I told her we could buy some nice new clothes and toiletries for her.

  She was also keen to get involved in the wedding preparations; she even helped Riley design the little name cards that would be placed on the tables at the reception so that guests knew where they would be sitting. This in itself was a boon because it gave me some time to myself, something I’d not managed to snatch since Christmas Eve, as Bella was increasingly becoming my shadow, in the way Marley Mae liked to be hers – replacing fear and wariness with what almost felt like clinginess, in what seemed like a heartbeat. Understandable, I supposed, given we were on our own so much together, and a pertinent reminder of just how much she must be missing her own mum.

  But not her stepdad. Again and again, everything seemed to point to that. And, at first glance, given his drinking and apparently well-documented violence towards her mother, this was perfectly understandable. But it definitely wasn’t a given. I had personally looked after children who had monsters for fathers (and in one case a grandfather who was pure, undiluted evil) who had abused them horribly, but were still missed and cherished. And, to our knowledge, Bella’s dad – or rather stepdad, but who had been around since she was very little – had never hurt her or abused her directly in any way.

  Yet, when I went round to collect her from Riley’s the following Tuesday afternoon, she told me something that seemed to suggest that where Bella was concerned he was the very opposite of cherished. Beside herself with excitement at the prospect of her own role in the forthcoming nuptials, Marley Mae had apparently asked Bella if she’d ever been a bridesmaid, and been responded to with a distinctly short (and uncharacteristic, at least where Marley Mae was concerned) ‘no’.

  Riley had then asked her, lightly, if she’d like to be one day and Bella had immediately begun to cry.

  ‘Just like that,’ Riley told me, while we were out of earshot in the kitchen. ‘Eyes brimming, face screwed up – seriously distressed. I calmed her down okay, apologised, told her she mustn’t cry – that no one would ever make her be or do anything she didn’t want to. Upon which she howled even more, saying she’d love to be a bridesmaid, just not ever if her mum ever married him. As in him, properly spat out. There’s seriously no love lost there, Mum, I can tell you. I know a lot’s gone on, but you just get an instinct for these things, don’t you? Anyway, it occurred to me that if she’s still with you when we get married, we should give her a special role, shouldn’t we? Give her a chance to dress up. Make her senior flower girl, or something.’

  Bless my darling daughter, I thought, touched beyond words by her everyday, matter-of-fact, pragmatic kindness. ‘You’re an angel,’ I told her, giving her a hug.

  ‘I know!’ she joked, brightly. ‘Sometimes I even trip over my own halo, it’s getting so big.’ She spread her hands. ‘Truth is, what else are you going to do with her? Put her in respite?’

  I shook my head immediately. To ship Bella off into respite care over the very weekend she was as we spoke helping arrange – unthinkable. No, she’d be there, as she should be. I wasn’t sentimental about things like that at the best of times, always smiling non-committally when friends showed me wedding pictures that were completely ruined by ‘her ex’ being in them. Or ‘that old girlfriend he had who no one even liked’, or because someone’s cousin had brought along a child that hadn’t been invited. It always tickled me, that. It was a record of a moment in time. That was how the day had been. It was life, not an artistic composition. Still, I supposed it was either a case of remembering uncherished memories, or the tendency people had to try and ‘curate’ their lives. ‘That’s what they do on Instagram, Mum,’ Tyler had one day told me, very sagely.

  ‘Exactly,’ Riley said. ‘Of course she’ll be there. So since she’ll be coming, she might as well make herself useful, mightn’t she? Anyway, I haven’t said anything, because I wanted to run it by you first. So I’ll leave that job to you. Might cheer her up a little. Take her mind off her woes.’

  But at the same time, reminding me just how desperate those woes were. And making me think of her mum, and the living hell she must be going through too.

  There was good news on that front, however. Riley’s suggestion about Bella being given her own special job at the wedding (as ‘Marley Mae’s official minder, more like’ according to Mike, who thought it a decidedly shrewd move) was sufficient to galvanise Bella into writing to her mother, something which for three days I’d been unable to persuade her to do. It was almost as if it had given her something to write about that was far removed from the things closest to her heart. Which had struck me as strange in itself, given how close they seemed, but I wondered if my telling her that her letters would have to be read by her mum’s warders had been sufficient to put her off the whole idea. In case she incriminated her mum inadvertently? I suspected so.

  On Wednesday morning, however, in the hour before Katie the counsellor’s arrival, she’d sat down at the dining room table and written at length. And, to add to the positivity I was beginning to feel about things, Sophie called too, to let me know that social services had just received a visiting order, allowing her to escort Bella to visit her mum in prison the following week.

  ‘Honestly?’ Bella asked, eyes wide, when I went in to tell her the good news.

  ‘Honestly!’ I parroted back at her. ‘As if I’d joke about something like that, missy!’

  At which she’d pushed her chair back, stood up and flung her arms around me. I hugged her back, glancing at the clock and realising that, with Katie due imminently, this really couldn’t have come at a better time. She’d be in a much better frame of mind for her session than I could have dared to hope.

  Katie herself was even nicer than I had dared to hope, too. The sort of warm, cushiony middle-aged woman you’d happily share your own problems with, too, such was the aura of kindness that she emanated, even if it was of the professional kind. As soon as she was over the threshold she gave Bella her smiling attention, refusing tea and coffee, and waving away my suggestion of biscuits with a pat of her stomach, and a cheerful ‘Thanks, but this is what twenty years of biscuits have done to me already!’

  I made them comfortable in the living room and dared to hope.

  In the meantime, with both a coffee and two chocolate biscuits – shame to waste them now I’d opened the packet – I made my own base in the kitchen, to read Bella’s letter, written in her small, artistic handwriting.

  Dear Mum

  Hi, it’s just me, Bella, catching up with you. Are you okay? I hope you are well. I hope the food is edible. I am eating very well. I miss you LOTS.

  I am seeing a counsellor today. Did they tell you that? That I have a counsellor? I’m supposed to tell her what I’m feeling about things, but I won’t speak to her, Mum. I won’t.

  All I want is for you to come home. Casey and Mike and Tyler are really nice, but I
miss you so much, Mum, I can’t wait to see you. I think I find out this week when I can come and see you and I can’t wait. Are you sure you’re okay in there, Mum? Is it like a proper prison, like on the TV? I hope it’s not, I hope it’s a nice place. Don’t worry about me, I am being really good I promise, and I won’t talk to that lady who’s coming. I will just get upset anyway.

  I have some good news! Casey and Mike’s daughter, Riley, is getting married and I’ve been helping her. Her little girl, Marley Mae (she is nearly four) is going to be bridesmaid. (There are three bridesmaids – Marley Mae, Dee Dee – who is Casey’s son’s baby daughter – and another cousin whose name I don’t know. And two page boys, who are called Levi and Jackson, who are Riley’s sons. They’re nice too.) Anyway, if I’m still here – though I want to be home with you soooooo much LLL – Casey has told me I am going to be like an extra bridesmaid, and will have a special dress and everything!

  Anyway, I asked Casey and she said if you can come home before that, I can go anyway. Perhaps she would let you come too.

  I have to go now but I love you to the moon and back. Hope to see you very very soon.

  Your bestest friend forever,

  Bella Boo xxxxxxxxxxx

  That simple letter said such a lot about their relationship. It brought tears to my eyes, even when I read it for the second time, even though it didn’t augur well for the session that was going on in the other room. You never knew; perhaps the subsequent news – that she now knew she would be seeing her mother – would make all the difference.

  I put the letter down, slipping it under the flap of the envelope I’d given Bella for the purpose, which only needed to be addressed. To where, I wondered? I could only hope somewhere leafy and distinctly un-prison-like to look at. Her visit, depending on the way events unfolded, could haunt Bella for years to come.