Groomed

by Casey Watson

  ‘So what makes you so sure he’s behaving inappropriately with her?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Because of what she said. About a week back. About how he’d been weirding her out. I mean, he’s always weirded her out a bit, to be honest. But last week she said she came home from school early and he was in her bedroom. I mean, like, weirdly in her bedroom. Like when he shouldn’t have even been at home.’

  ‘What about her mum. What about Zoe?’

  ‘Out shopping. And he hadn’t heard her come in, and didn’t expect her, either. And she was telling me this – thinking he was going through her drawers to find her diary or something – and, of course, I knew straight away that he probably wasn’t doing that. And then she told me he was on his hands and knees fiddling about with something near one of her plug sockets, and that he made some lame excuse, and I was, like, oh God, because I knew what he was probably really up to. And that’s when I decided I had to do something.’

  My mind was reeling now. The picture she’d painted was so compelling. It was one of the most horrifying stories I think I’d ever heard. Horrifying in itself, but what made it doubly terrible was that this man was a foster carer, and not only that, he was an adoptive father as well.

  Which meant he’d have had to go through the same rigorous background checks Mike and I had – and probably even more so. Just as a foster carer he’d have had to go before a panel, and as a prospective adoptive father, which he’d been first, of course, that process would have been repeated more than once. The adoption process was long, slow and rigorous for good reason; to ensure things like this didn’t, couldn’t, happen. No system was foolproof, of course, and people changed, obviously, but it sent a chill through me to think that it looked like it had happened, and to consider the possibility that the adopting and subsequent fostering of two girls had been part of some sick plan all along. I could only pray that actually acting on his impulses had been something that hadn’t happened till much, much later – that only Keeley had suffered at his hands.

  I’d not eaten, and perhaps should, because I felt suddenly nauseous.

  ‘Does Jade know what you’ve been doing?’ I asked.

  Keeley shook her head. ‘I mean she knows how I feel about him, obviously, and I agreed that what she’d told me sounded pretty creepy. She obviously doesn’t know I speak to him and get money off him and all that. I’d never have told her that. Oh, and that was another thing. She’d had a mate round and he was, like, all over both of them, saying why didn’t her friend come for a sleep-over some time, that kind of thing. And that weirded Jade out as well.

  ‘So I had to do something. And I knew there’d be no point in telling Danny. Not yet. Or you. Not after saying what I said before and then retracting it and everything. Not till I could actually prove it.’ She nodded towards the phone again. ‘So that’s what I tried to do. That’s what we still have to do.’

  ‘By doing what?’ Mike asked.

  ‘By using my initiative.’ Keeley glanced at me as she said this. ‘I knew there was no point in saying anything about Jade, because he’d freak. So – this was by phone, right – I told him’ – she lowered her gaze now – ‘that I was saving up to buy an iPad for college, and that if he wanted to help out I didn’t mind if he wanted to do some … er … stuff.’

  She was reddening. Which I found strangely touching. It felt like an acceptance that the life she’d been living, that the things she’d been doing, had some moral question mark hanging over them after all.

  I was also aware of Mike wincing out of the corner of my eye. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘the thinking being that you could lure him into saying something that would incriminate him. But surely he wouldn’t be so stupid – and surely the evidence of the texts would be enough?’

  Keeley shook her head. ‘No, no texts. He isn’t that stupid. This was a call. I just wanted to get him to come and meet me. Actually, he is that stupid. He’s that much of a perve that he actually did. I tried last week. We went for a drive – in my lunch hour, don’t worry,’ she added. ‘But it didn’t work. I managed to get the mic on. But the sound was completely muffled by my jumper. And I would have tried again today, only there were a couple of the staff hanging around out the front. And you could tell they had their eye on him.’ She glanced at me. ‘I suppose it was them who told you I’d been speaking to him?’

  I allowed myself a nod. It was all going to be academic now, anyway. ‘But you’ve been texting, you and Jade?’ Mike said, picking up her barely charged phone. ‘Here,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘You might want to plug it in.’

  Keeley stood up and did so. And as she turned back to come and sit back at the table, I could see that it was as if a weight had been lifted from her. No tears now. Just grim determination.

  ‘You need to eat,’ I said. ‘How do elderly fish and chips sound? And while you do that, I have some phone calls to make.’

  ‘I could just about manage a fish sandwich,’ Keeley said. ‘If that’s okay?’ She smiled a weary smile.

  Mike stood up. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, nodding towards me. ‘While Keeley makes us all more coffee. Love, you get the short straw, I’m afraid.’

  There have been occasions in my lifetime when I have cried, really cried, over one thing or another – the death of my grandmother being the one that sticks in my mind most vividly. I remember feeling such overwhelming exhaustion afterwards. As if I’d run a marathon rather than just sat down and wept. Discombobulated. Drained. Slightly light headed.

  I hadn’t cried over this. I didn’t think I would – I was too angry. But watching Keeley rise from the table then, to make the coffee, while Mike organised some tea for her, I saw what looked like that same kind of emotional exhaustion. As if she was waiting for her fate to be delivered along with the fish. It made her seem her age, finally. Perhaps younger.

  I shut myself off in the living room, as instructed, and called Tyler. I explained as much as I could explain without freaking him out, and asked how he felt about sleeping over at Denver’s and going to school from there in the morning. I knew Denver’s mum wouldn’t mind. ‘I’ll get Dad to drop round whatever you need,’ I added, ‘but it’ll be about an hour before he’ll be able to get to you. Is that okay? I have a few more calls to make, and I obviously want Dad to stay with Keeley while I make them.’

  Tyler assured me that would be fine – that it suited him better, really. ‘I’d only be up in my room, wouldn’t I?’ he pointed out. ‘While the coppers are round.’

  ‘You’re a sweetheart,’ I told him.

  ‘Just being sensible,’ he assured me. ‘God, Mum, I feel dead sorry for her.’

  And perhaps a more appropriate order had been re-established in their relationship, I suspected. Which was fine, and completely as it should be.

  The next call I had to make – and definitely the most difficult – was to John Fulshaw. I wouldn’t be leaving a message on his work answerphone, either. He had long ago made it clear that, in absolute emergencies, I could call him on his mobile or his home phone, at any time of day or night. I’d rarely, thank goodness, had to do so up to now, EDT being the go-to people in most fostering-related after-hours crises. But this was new territory and I knew I should do nothing without his guidance; it wasn’t just Keeley that was involved here – a whole family looked like being torn apart.

  He answered after three rings, and, perhaps already knowing this must be serious, his answering ‘Casey, to what do I owe the pleasure?’ was already tinged with irony. Pleasure it would definitely not be. I broke the news to him as dispassionately as I could.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he finally exclaimed after listening for a long time in silence. ‘And you’re absolutely sure all of this is true? I’m sorry to have to ask, because I know you wouldn’t have called me if you doubted it, but, well, after the last time … And she’s proven herself to be quite the little actress, hasn’t she?’

  I agreed that she had, but that I didn’t doubt the veracity of her clai
ms a single bit. ‘Seriously, John,’ I finished, ‘how I wish there were some doubt. But yes, I’m absolutely convinced she’s told us the truth. Everything about it completely stacks up. The only trouble is that she has no concrete evidence. Hence her being in such a state about it all. She feels terrible, of course – responsible for putting Jade at risk – because if she hadn’t retracted her last statement we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ John said. ‘No one ever took her initial allegations seriously, anyway. No, if this is true – and I trust your instincts on this, Casey – it’s us who are the guilty ones. All of us, collectively, as a service. For only seeing what we want to. For being too focused on the potential risks fostered children can visit on their carers, and not nearly enough on the possibility that it might be the other way around. Right, then,’ he went on, with an edge in his voice, ‘you all need to sit tight there for a little bit longer, while I do what I have to do. But please assure Keeley that she won’t be in any trouble, won’t you? I’ll try to get back to you within the hour.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I will. Anything else I can tell her? Will she have to tell all of this to someone else? Make a formal statement? What’s going to happen now, anyway? I have this vision of a patrol car speeding to the Burkes’ to take Jade to a place of safety, but that’s not quite how it’s going to happen, surely?’

  ‘It well might, more or less,’ he said, ‘though that’ll depend on a number of factors, not least on whatever conversation is had with Jade herself. And I have no idea what might happen to Burke – to the Burkes, even – much less when. But yes, in the here and now, Keeley will undoubtedly need to make a statement to the police – who I’ll be ringing now – and no doubt Danny will need to take some sort of statement from her too. I’ll call him once I’ve spoken to the police, save you having to go through it all a second time. Doubtless he’ll ring you too, but, as I say, in the meantime sit tight and keep Keeley close. Oh, and for obvious reasons, keep her phone close as well. There could be crucial evidence on there, couldn’t there? Text trails and calls and so on … oh, and specially if money’s changed hands via her banking app.’ He laughed then, surprising me. ‘Hark at me. As if I even know what I’m talking about. Anyway, here we go again, eh?’

  Yes, here we go again, I thought. But not to the same place we’d been to the last time, with a hapless young man more the victim than the perp. No, this time to a place where there be monsters.

  Chapter 23

  It was like we were standing at the top of a snowy hill, and had just set a snowball in motion. It was a familiar metaphor. Often used, but, as we sat sipping coffee and grazing on the tin of Quality Street I’d decided to open early, it struck me that this was exactly what the immediate future might be like, as what we’d formed into a ball and started rolling down that hill began to pick up everything in its path.

  Most of this, of course, would involve the Burkes. It was pointless to speculate about what Zoe Burke might or might not know about her husband’s secret habit – down the decades there’d been cases of both complete ignorance, on the one hand, and full-on duplicity on the other, plus every shade of grey in between.

  What I did know, having seen the fall-out from countless undesirable domestic set-ups – inescapably, in the form of the many kids we’d fostered – was that certain evils often went hand in hand with a fearsomely good talent for deception. If Steve Burke had kept his grisly secret from all the agencies who’d grilled him, assessed him and re-assessed him down the years, it was perfectly possible that he could have kept it from his wife. Not only that – while I knew I had to keep an open mind, I just couldn’t get my head round the idea that an adoptive and foster mother would allow such abominations to go on under her roof, even if all she had was the tiniest hunch that it might be.

  It made me look at Keeley’s disdain for her in a different light too. Just as the children of divorce often transferred the blame onto the partner who’d been left, rather than the leaver, perhaps Keeley’s lack of respect for her foster mother was, at least in part, down to being so exasperated by her failure to see what was going on right under her nose.

  But none of this was for me to do more with than ponder. It would all, as the saying goes, come out in the wash, and, like dirty washing has done for centuries, no doubt be aired all over the tabloid press, too.

  ‘Do you think Steve will be arrested?’ Keeley asked over the chatter on the television. None of us were really watching it. Just staring at it, reluctant to turn it off. It was a distraction, at least, from our thoughts.

  The skin on Mike’s face was stretched tight across his jaw. As a man, having to contemplate men’s basest natures, he didn’t take this kind of thing well. ‘I should bloody hope so,’ he said. He glanced down at his watch. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the police aren’t round there even as we speak.’

  I glanced at Keeley. She looked serious, but also resolute. ‘I hope they are,’ she said. ‘I should have told the truth a long time ago. He deserves everything he gets.’ She had her mug clasped in both hands, and her glittery nail polish was catching the light as she talked. Her chin lifted slightly. ‘And I don’t care if he tells them about me taking stuff off him, either. I don’t care if I get in trouble for that. What’s the worst they can do?’

  ‘You won’t, love,’ I promised her, hoping I was right. But I must be, surely? There was no crime in taking money and gifts from your former foster parent, as far as I knew. Well, as long as you declared it on your tax return, anyway. And since Keeley wasn’t at work yet, that didn’t apply. She’d be well under the tax threshold for a good while yet, wouldn’t she?

  I almost laughed out loud at the ridiculous nature of my thinking. ‘He was the one doing wrong here, love,’ I told her. ‘And whatever part you played, even though you’re sixteen now, you’re still the minor and he is the so-called responsible adult.’

  ‘Neither of which terms comes even close to the things I’d be calling him,’ Mike said with feeling, ‘if we didn’t have rules about swearing in this house!’

  Which made Keeley giggle. But it wasn’t long before we returned to our default position, of sitting glumly, as if trapped in a particularly slow doctor’s waiting room, all of us talked out – particularly me and Keeley – pretending to watch the TV but mostly immersed in our thoughts.

  But barely forty minutes had passed before the house phone began trilling, and both Mike and Keeley looked to me to pick it up.

  It was John again. ‘Casey, the police should be with you within the next fifteen minutes. Not the officers who dealt with her before, which is a pity, but there you go. One thing we can’t control is other people’s shifts. Anyway, that’s the next step.’

  ‘For Keeley to make a formal statement to them, right? And she can do that here?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ John said. ‘And as her primary carer you’ll be needed to make a statement too.’

  ‘And Jade? What’s going to happen there? Does it all have to wait until they’ve been to us?’

  ‘Oh, not at all,’ John reassured me. ‘As far as I’m aware, Stephen Burke is being taken down for questioning as we speak. And Jade will also be removed – social services are obviously attending – and taken to a place of safety while the investigation gets under way.’

  In another scenario, I reflected, taken to a foster home just like ours; a call to the emergency duty team, a series of conversations as they went down their list and, should they end up at W for Watson, it could well have been us. I wondered if Helena Curry was on duty.

  ‘What about Zoe Burke?’ I asked him.

  ‘No idea as yet,’ he said. ‘Much will obviously depend on what, if anything, she knew. I imagine she’ll be asked to make a statement too.’

  I tried to put myself in Zoe Burke’s shoes and found I couldn’t. Assuming she knew nothing, this would hit her like a ton of bricks. Or, using my analogy, like she’d been hit by that fast-moving
snowball – subsumed by it, rolled into the greater mass of debris and, at some point – a point a fair way down the line, I imagined – released as it melted and plopped back into her life, to find it irrevocably changed.

  ‘And if she knew nothing?’ I asked John, feeling a stab of female solidarity, ‘will they just accept that and put Jade back with her again?’

  Having heard Jade being mentioned, Keeley had come across and joined me, and was now mouthing stuff at me – ‘Where is she? Is she okay? Will I be able to speak to her?’ I hushed her with my hand as John explained that he couldn’t answer that question – nobody could until the investigation into Keeley’s allegations got under way, and there was no way anyone would even guess at the bigger picture. ‘What about contact?’ I asked him. ‘Contact with Keeley, I mean.’

  Again, he told me that would probably be a no-go for the moment, it being unlikely that any legal team would allow the girls to communicate for the moment, and though I was at pains not to convey that to Keeley just yet, she wasn’t stupid; she could tell by my expression and ‘oh, I see’s’, and even as I put down the phone she’d started crying. ‘So that’s another sister I’ve managed to lose!’ she said. ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  I took her in my arms and held her tight. ‘In the short term, okay? Just for the moment, that’s all.’ I then held her away from me. ‘Come on. Buck up, sweetheart. The police will be here soon. This is about your sister, isn’t it? You’re doing the right thing. Doing a good thing. You are not going to lose her, okay? If anything, you’ll probably be closer.’

  Mike was hovering with the tissue box by now, bless him. I plucked one out and handed it to Keeley, hoping I was at least on sure ground about that. And if it turned out I wasn’t, I’d bloody fight for it. ‘Come on, dry your eyes,’ I told her. ‘And try to get your head straight. You’ve got a lot of talking to do again. You’ll need to tell them exactly what you told me. Everything. Warts and all. I know it’s going to be long and stressful, but don’t hold anything back. Think you can do that?’