The Silent Witness

by Casey Watson

  ‘Well they’re idiots,’ I said firmly. ‘And what utter nonsense. Don’t they realise? Libraries are one of the cornerstones of a civilised society. I read that somewhere,’ I added. ‘Probably in a library book, come to think about it …’

  This elicited a ghost of a smile. I decided to seize this new moment. All these moments were still steps on the longer journey, after all. ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘I’m not cross about Facebook. You know you did wrong, and that’s good enough for me. And you know, as long as you don’t put our address on it – same as with your mum – you can write a letter to Ruby, too – every day, if you like. And she can write back to you, care of social services. But listen, love, might you have accidentally told Ruby where you’re staying? You know, have you told her our address?’

  She lay still for a moment, then screwed up her eyes. ‘I did …’ she said, finally. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, Casey. I did. We were just chatting …’

  ‘What, in a private message?’ I asked hopefully.

  She frowned. ‘No, on her timeline, under a comment. Just under a comment to each other, not on the main thread, to everyone … so it’s not like people would see it automatically or anything … but … oh, I’m such an idiot.’

  She might as well have been speaking to me in Finnish. ‘But her friends could still see it …’

  ‘Yes, but not properly. Not without clicking on the “replies” button. Oh, God, I’m so sorry. She was just asking how far away I was.’ She heaved herself back up to a sitting position. ‘And I only said your road … not your number – I didn’t even remember the number, so I wouldn’t have done. It was only because her auntie lives round here, that’s all … and she thought she might know it …’ She wiped her eyes against the backs of her hands. ‘Why? Does it matter? I can delete it all. I can do that straight away. I’m so sorry. I thought you’d be cross because I was looking at all the horrible things people have been saying … I didn’t think it was –’

  ‘Have they?’

  She nodded miserably. ‘About my mum. And my dad, too. But mostly my mum. I hate them. They don’t know anything!’

  Antennae all a-twitch now, I reached out to comfort her. ‘Hey, hey,’ I said, drawing her to me again. ‘Let’s not even given them a second thought. You’re quite right. What do they know? Nothing. About anything. Which is exactly why they are best ignored.’

  And because I could sense we had arrived at a new level of openness, I decided to back-track a little, for fear of saying something that might slam the door shut again.

  ‘Listen,’ I said again. ‘Let’s just sort out what we can. You know, you putting where you’re staying up on Ruby’s Facebook. Let’s get that sorted, eh? And you know, it’s not even about you. It’s just that Mike and I have to be very, very careful about things like that – about who knows where we live. Because of all the other children we look after, it has to be kept private.’

  Bella nodded and sniffed. ‘Well, if I go back on I can delete it all right now. Would that help?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, rising from the bed and holding out my hand. ‘And maybe you could message Ruby and explain you’ll write to her – the old-fashioned way – instead. Come on, kiddo,’ I said, ‘let’s go and do some damage limitation, then, shall we?’

  The question, of course, was where the damage had been done. Who had seen what. Who had decided what. Who had said what. What network of connections flowed out from those timelines. What wider feeling was prevalent re Bella’s parents. Mostly about my mum, Bella had said, re all the vitriol.

  This time, I would hover very closely.

  Chapter 10

  If Bella’s response to seeing her mum had been both emotional and regressive (her appetite was extremely poor for the next few days – in solidarity, perhaps?) her response to news of her stepfather was entirely different.

  ‘He’s been discharged from hospital,’ Sophie told her, at the beginning of the following week. She’d come round specifically for the purpose of imparting this news.

  Bella’s reaction was immediate. ‘He hasn’t gone home to our house, has he?’ she wanted to know. She looked anxiously at me. ‘They wouldn’t let him, would they? There’s all the forensics! And what if he’s seen where I’m living?’ She was becoming increasingly agitated. ‘He might be angry at me and come looking for me!’

  So, finally, the reasons why Bella should avoid putting stuff on Facebook had sunk in. And she was right. Her father could have seen her whereabouts as easily as anyone else. Not that our joint foray onto the site had borne much other fruit; not in terms of actual intelligence. Well, other than the fact that Bella – not long twelve – had already amassed some three hundred-odd friends, including old friends and new friends and various mums of friends, too, because, she told me, ‘Mums always like to be friends with you if you let them. It’s so they can see what you’re up to once you’re a teenager.’

  I had elicited Tyler’s view on that point. ‘Course they do,’ he’d told me, looking surprised that I’d even asked about it. ‘She’s completely right. How else d’you think they’re going to keep an eye on them. D’oh, Mum!’

  He’d then gone on to point out that people used social media in different ways. Some used the ‘don’t put up anything you wouldn’t want your granny seeing’ system, which obviously meant much of interest to interested adults was filtered out. ‘Anyway, we’ve got WhatsApp and Snapchat for important stuff now,’ he added, winking mysteriously.

  I didn’t enquire further. There was a whole cyber-world I didn’t yet know about, and I could barely keep up with what I did know about, even with the various social media seminars that were put on for foster carers. Anyway, what was of more interest to me currently was that Tyler had explained that Bella had probably got her privacy settings set to ‘friends’, and that unless she configured it differently, if she wrote on someone’s timeline, or tagged them in a post, not only they but also their friends could see what was written, even if they weren’t friends with Bella herself.

  Which meant that, in theory, a lot of people could have found out where we lived, particularly if they had a vested interest in doing so.

  I was unable to answer Bella’s question, however, so had to look to Sophie, who was already shaking her head. ‘No, he hasn’t, sweetie,’ Sophie said to her. ‘Well, apart from to get stuff, of course. I believe he’s rented a flat somewhere locally.’

  Because the family home was still a crime scene, I wondered? Oh, how I wished we were allowed to know more of what was going on, however inappropriate – and therefore unlikely – I knew that to be. In another life, I would dearly love to be a detective. ‘But why on earth would you think he’d be angry with you anyway?’ Sophie asked Bella.

  ‘Because,’ Bella said, looking increasingly irritable now, too, ‘I never went to visit him in hospital, did I?’ She went on, in a tone that suggested it had been much on her mind since, ‘I went to see Mum in prison, didn’t I? But I never went to see him. He probably thinks I hate him, or something.’

  ‘I’m sure your dad understands why you didn’t,’ I said, privately wondering if her reasons for not going had been as clear-cut as they’d seemed at the time. He’d been her stepdad for almost all her life, after all. Was there a part of her that still loved him? The sober him, at least? Certainly something to reflect on. ‘But don’t you worry, love. If you aren’t ready to see him yet then you certainly won’t have to.’

  ‘Of course you won’t,’ Sophie reiterated. ‘It’s entirely up to you. Perhaps you’d rather write to him. You can do that instead, if you like. Perhaps you’d find that easier? Same as with your mum – put anything you like, and Casey will cast her eyes over it. I’m sure he’d be glad to hear from you, don’t you think?’

  To which Bella responded that she would. But then didn’t. Over the next three days, she wrote twice to her mother and once to her friend Ruby, but the letter to her stepdad remained unwritten. And I found myself wonder
ing even more about the court case that I knew was being prepared, which would impact so greatly on Bella’s future, but about which we knew so little. And that comment she’d made – my dad, but it’s mostly been about my mum – and how we knew so little, period. What exactly had been the events leading up to that day? Was there a real chance the contents of the note by the ‘concerned citizen’ were correct; that they held the greater truth?

  What was becoming clearer by the day was that Bella wasn’t going to be joining the local comp any time soon. And perhaps that was the correct way; suppose she started, began to settle in and then another upheaval happened? A court case could take months to prepare but it could equally, if reasonably cut-and-dried, take substantially less than that to come to trial. And at that point, Bella’s world might implode yet again, and she could end up on a completely new trajectory – either back with her mother or in a new long-term foster placement or even, depending on the outcome, an adoptive home. So, much as I thought school would be the best place for Bella in the short term, given that she simply wasn’t robust enough at the moment, I knew events might overtake my plans to see her there.

  Which left the two of us spending a great deal of time together. An unhealthy amount of time, truth be known (and far too much housework-and-toddler-focused), so I decided I needed to find more constructive ways to occupy her.

  Getting her out and about was a key goal. If there was a chance of integrating Bella into school I was anxious to grab it, and I knew it would happen much slower, if at all, if she remained indoors, hiding away from the world for too long.

  For starters, I decided we needed to book a half-term holiday. We’d been toying with the idea anyway, as we liked taking Tyler away, but had sort of shelved the idea because of the wedding being imminent, both on a prohibitive-cost and a too-much-to-do basis.

  ‘And you think I can now just go and book a week off?’ Mike pointed out, when I ran my idea by him that evening, as a bolt-on to the details of Sophie’s visit.

  ‘Can’t you jiggle things?’ I asked him hopefully. ‘Do some swaps? Offer to do some overtime, maybe?’

  He looked at me with every bit as much disdain as I’d anticipated. Which was quite a lot, given he’d already booked off the week after Riley’s wedding, so we could look after their three while they snatched a few days away for a honeymoon.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he grumped. ‘Though don’t hold your breath.’

  And, of course, I did hold my breath, albeit mentally rather than physically, though I reined myself in on planning where we’d go and what we’d do – well, bar making it clear to a disappointed Tyler that it wouldn’t be skiing – on the ‘prohibitive-cost-and-quadruple-it’ basis.

  And, in the meantime, anxious to get Bella out and about locally, I spent as much time as I could ferrying her to both Riley and Lauren’s, the former as she loved helping make favours for the wedding, and the latter so she’d be comfortable enough with Lauren that she’d be happy to go to dance classes when they resumed.

  I also took her down to my sister Donna’s café, the latest ‘in a line of unwitting Victorian child-labourers’, as she usually put it, such was their enthusiasm for stacking the dishwasher, cleaning trays and wiping tables. This latter was a double plus, as Bella was soon happy to be left there to ‘do a shift’, giving me a much needed time-out to whizz into town for a breather, or run some errands for my mum and dad. Or, occasionally, just sit in a heap.

  It was after returning from one such sortie a couple of weeks later that another idea struck me – one that, once I’d thought of it, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of before.

  Donna’s café had a little bookcase library in the corner, of the increasingly popular ‘donate and take away’ variety, which meant she had a rolling stock of all sorts of reading material for the regulars to choose from.

  I’d returned from dropping my mum home at that point when there tended to be a lull on a weekday – after the lunchers had mostly gone home, but before the mums-and-kids after-school rush hour.

  Bella was down on the floor in front of the bookcase, surrounded by books, which she was presumably tidying and ordering before restocking. Except she wasn’t. Out of sight of Donna, behind the till, she was cross-legged on the floor, apparently lost in some huge hardback tome.

  I gestured to Donna, who leaned over the counter to see her.

  ‘I’d have given money to see mine that interested in reading,’ she whispered. ‘Any chance she gets, she’s got her nose in one of those books.’ She leaned further over the counter. ‘I just hope it’s not something entirely inappropriate,’ she added. ‘You never know what’s going to end up in there, not with some of our flipping regulars. I had to prune out Fifty Shades last week, so’s not to offend the WI ladies. Though, between you and me, I suspect one of them might have sneaked it in. Ahem. Naming no names, of course …’

  Bella was in fact reading a Harry Potter book. Much thumbed, so probably old.

  ‘Haven’t you already read that one?’ I asked her, squatting down to say hello.

  ‘Oh, about six times,’ she replied. ‘But you never get tired of reading them again, do you?’

  I thought her ‘you’ in this case was a bit of a royal ‘we’, at least where my personal HP habits were concerned. But my ignorance about the young wizard was obviously my problem, not hers. And that’s when it hit me. The library. Why didn’t I enrol her at the library? We had an all-singing-all-dancing library in town these days, courtesy of a sizeable chunk of lottery funding.

  I was just about to suggest it, when she went on. ‘I just love Harry Potter. One of my big dreams is to go to King’s Cross one day …’

  ‘King’s Cross?’ I said, wondering why on earth anyone would want to go to such a historically grim part of London. Then the penny dropped. ‘Ah, you mean the station!’ I said. ‘That’s where they go through a wall, isn’t it?’

  ‘Though the portal on platform nine and three-quarters,’ she clarified.

  ‘It actually exists, then?’

  ‘Lord, Case, your ignorance is unbelievable!’ Donna chipped in. ‘Where have you been for the last twenty years?’ She grinned at Bella. ‘Ignore my peasant of a sister,’ she added, laughing. ‘She wouldn’t know who Dumbledore was if her life depended on it.’

  ‘And her life might depend on it, mightn’t it?’ Bella said, smiling back.

  Which, of course, gave me another idea. Perhaps that was what we should do with our half term – or at least part of it. Go to King’s Cross, so she and I could both see it for ourselves. Why not? If such a thing – place, portal, whatever – did exist, Tyler would be beside himself with excitement as well.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘in that case, we’d better see if we can get ourselves there, hadn’t we? And with half term coming up …’

  Bella was on her feet in seconds. ‘Oh my God, can we really? Really? And of course it exists, silly! There’s a Harry Potter shop there too, and you can have photos taken on a broomstick, wearing the special scarf and everything. My friend went and she said it was magical. Oh my God. Can we really? I’m so excited!’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Mike said that evening when, tea done with, I told him all about having enrolled Bella at the big library and, having laid the ground, run my London plans by him as well. ‘First up, it’ll cost an arm and a leg, and secondly, it’ll be hell on earth traipsing round London at half term. And thirdly,’ he added before I could interrupt him with my pre-prepared flood of positivity, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to take the time off in any case.’

  ‘What about one of the weekends?’ I suggested, having already anticipated this obstacle.

  He shook his head. ‘Now that really would be lunacy. Less trains, more traffic, more people … Casey, that’s an insane idea and you know it.’

  I was just about to suggest that he lighten up and try to live a little when he put a hand up. ‘But you could always take them yourself,’ he said.

 
; ‘What, on my own?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s London. Because it’s miles away. Because I might lose one of them. Because it’s –’

  ‘Tyler’s fifteen, love, not five. He’d be a help, not a hindrance. And that way I get to keep some annual leave days for the week in Spain we’re going to need when the Wedding of the Century is over.’

  ‘Oh, do stop calling it that,’ I said. ‘You know how much it winds Riley up.’

  ‘It’s meant to. But I’m serious. Wouldn’t you rather that than me trailing along behind the Potter fan club, grousing and moaning?’

  I would rather have a week in Spain on the horizon than pretty much anything, I decided. Whenever it turned out that we were able to take it. Which, given Bella’s open-ended stay, might be a bit of a way away yet. But by then it would be summertime … and hot … and away.

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I am definitely warming to the idea.’

  ‘And you could always take your mum to London with you,’ he suggested.

  I gave the idea at least half a second’s thought. My mum, who thought a trip to the big department store in the adjacent city was a major expedition these days. Bless her, but no. She might even try and head right through into Diagonal Alley, or whatever it was called. I shook my head. ‘Now her I would lose,’ I said.

  Chapter 11

  Bella’s excitement about the impending trip to London eclipsed just about everything over the coming days, including her anxiety about her stepdad. And as I’d now confirmed Tyler could bring Denver along too (so he wouldn’t be ‘completely swamped by girls’) he was pretty excited as well.

  As for me, I was just grateful that provided I booked trains at very specific times, and installed us in a small, basic hotel at some far-flung end of the Underground system, the trip would still leave me with an arm intact, even if not a leg. And, privately, though I was making much of the gruelling expeditionary nature of our adventure, this was strictly for Mike’s ears. I was actually quite excited myself. Some youngsters have a pre-university gap-year to prepare themselves for the coming slog – I was having my own, pre-wedding stress gap-weekend.