by Casey Watson
I then sat back and listened while Danny ran through our initial discussion about the mysterious Mrs Higgins, and the subsequent potentially seismic events of previous weeks – only weeks, I thought – because, after everything that had happened since, that discussion now seemed a long time ago.
And he wasn’t that blunt, thankfully. Only as blunt as he needed to be, skirting around the concern, then, that she might do her siblings further harm, and plumping instead for the idea that, because she’d been so traumatised, upset and damaged by what had happened to her, they were worried about all of them, her included, and felt separating them would be best for their emotional health.
She didn’t buy it. I wouldn’t have either. ‘You mean they really thought I –’ she began. ‘That I would ever do something like that?’
Danny held a hand up. ‘Not of your own volition, Keeley. It wasn’t that. It was just that –’
‘I knew all along,’ she said, raising her own hand. ‘I know. I know because that sicko perve told me. I told you,’ she said to me. ‘Remember? About how he told me he knew what had happened for me to end up in care. That I was lucky they agreed to foster me, because I was already so contaminated. Yeah,’ she said, seeing our faces. ‘That was the exact word he used.’
Something crossed her features and I thought she might burst into tears then, but she didn’t. Nothing like it, in fact. ‘That absolute fucking bastard,’ she said instead.
Danny winced. ‘Keels, please don’t think it was like that, it was –’
‘That’s exactly how it was,’ she corrected him. Then she nodded, as if to herself. ‘Finally,’ she muttered. ‘Finally.’
And it was as if, having what she’d probably suspected all along confirmed at long last, another weight had been lifted from her. Then she raised her eyes to Danny’s again. ‘So go on, then,’ she went on. ‘What’s the good news on the other front? That he’s finally going to prison now?’
‘Oh, I think that’s probably a given,’ John said.
‘Better than that, Keels,’ Danny said. ‘Far better than that. The news on the other front is that, if you want to, we can re-establish contact with Aaron and Courtney for you.’ He chuckled then. ‘What am I saying? I mean that you can see them. D’oh. That’s what I mean. That you can see them. Not the little ones. Not now. We have no jurisdiction there, I’m afraid. Which is not to say they can’t contact you, you know, in the future. But you need to put that aside, for now, at least. However, with Aaron and Courtney … Well’ – he sat back and smiled a wide, happy smile – ‘Keeley, they can’t wait to see you.’ He reached out to touch her hand. ‘From the horse’s mouth, that is, too. Would you like that?’
Her eyes were like saucers now. ‘Seriously? Seriously?’
‘One hundred and ten per cent seriously,’ Danny said.
Keeley looked at me now, her eyes brimming with as yet unshed tears. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she whispered. ‘Seriously, is this for real?’
‘Of course it’s for real,’ I said, almost in tears myself now. ‘And you’ve clearly been watching way too much American TV.’
‘They really said that? They even remember who I am now?’
‘Why ever wouldn’t they?’ I said.
‘But they were only, like, six and four. God, they’ll be in high school. Aaron will, anyway. Shit. Sorry. God. What must they look like?’
‘I can help you with that,’ Danny said, rummaging in his bag again. He passed her a brown envelope. ‘Pictures,’ he said. ‘And letters too. From both of them. And Christmas cards too, I think. Go on, open it if you want to. Or not,’ he quickly added. ‘Entirely up to you, Keels. You might prefer to take them off to your bedroom and look at them in private.’
But Keeley didn’t prefer. ‘No way. I want to look at them now. I’ve been hoping and hoping,’ she said, pulling open the flap. ‘That they’d turn up on Facebook. I’ve been searching and searching … Oh. My. God. Casey, look.’
So I looked, well, after a fashion, because my own eyes were full of tears now. And there they were, beaming out at us in a series of snaps and goofy selfies, the boy just like Keeley, the girl very different. But whatever the cocktail of genes the three shared, none of that mattered. Never had. Not at all.
‘God, I can’t see for looking,’ Keeley said, brushing tears from the photos.
Which felt apt – well, for us. For all of us, as a social service. But now we did see. The whole picture. Well, almost all.
Keeley must have read my thoughts. And perhaps her own mind, as she clutched those precious photos, was inexorably drawn there. ‘What about Jade? What’s going to happen to her now?’
Perhaps feeling a bit sidelined, and wanting his own moment in the limelight, I swear John almost went to put his hand up before he spoke.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can report I have good news on that front as well. If you can cope with so much good news all at once, that is. Can you?’
Keeley winked at me. ‘Do bears live in the woods?’
Chapter 25
Christmas Eve morning, and Keeley was finally ‘offskies’. Which meant I already knew it was going to be a bitter-sweet kind of day. It would be our last breakfast too – well, as Keeley’s foster family, anyway – and, by popular demand, a feast of appropriately salty bacon and syrupy pancakes.
Listening to the banter between her and Tyler, by now such a feature of our everyday lives, it hardly seemed possible that it had been less than four months since this girl had fetched up and turned our lives upside down and that, now, it was odds on that we wouldn’t see her again. Not any time soon, I reckoned, anyway.
Which was fair enough, and exactly as it should be.
Because she was travelling some distance. Not so far that we wouldn’t be able to keep in touch in the old-fashioned way now and then – face to face rather than face to screen – and not so far that she wouldn’t be able to travel into college next term either, albeit from the other direction. But certainly a far enough distance that she could put enough of the stuff between her and the foster father who’d so wickedly betrayed her.
So much had happened in the last week, it had been like the proverbial whirlwind; a state of play that the weather had been only too pleased to emulate, the snowy idyll having been replaced by milder temperatures and the sort of blowy, squally skies that sucked all the brightness out of what little daylight we were getting. The forecast was for another freeze, though, for which I couldn’t wait. I’d finished all my Christmas shopping (we’d opted to get Keeley some top-of-the-range hair straighteners to replace the ones she, funnily enough, never saw again) and was happy to bed in for the duration.
But first, with Danny arriving soon to take her to her new home, we had to give her a proper send-off. The pancakes all flipped (and, to celebrate, a quartet of weak Buck’s Fizzes poured) we trooped into the living room to eat our breakfast, the better to enjoy the festive glow from the still twinkling tree, now in its sixth week of occupation. Tyler scooped up the framed photograph Keeley had left on the coffee table on his way.
‘God help them,’ he said, passing it to her as we all sat down. ‘You think they have any idea what they’ve let themselves in for, agreeing to have their big sister back in their lives again? I mean, like, seriously?’ he added, mimicking her intonation with impressive accuracy.
‘Shut your face, looooser,’ Keeley answered brightly. ‘Nah, I’m keeping it out so I can show it to Jade. She doesn’t know what they look like yet, does she?’
Ah, the cruel twist of social media-related fate. Keeley’s smartphone (‘Pretty much all phones are smartphones now, Mum, so you really don’t need to say that’ – quote by Tyler) was a thing of the past. I didn’t doubt some deal would be struck at some point to enable her to get her hands on a new one – possibly via her new carer, in cahoots with Danny – but for the time being it was no longer hers and no longer under contract. Instead it was in the hands of whoever minded the local police property storero
om, where, having been divested of all its crucial information, it was stuffed in an evidence bag, part of the ongoing investigation.
In the meantime, apart from the odd online session with Tyler – with necessary sub judice related legal constraints – Keeley was a bit starved of her virtual world. And if it hadn’t been exactly rosy it had definitely added value. She’d been working all the harder on her college courses as a consequence. ‘Might even get good enough to be allowed access to the barnet,’ as Tyler had it re her cutting his precious hair.
For now, though, it wasn’t just Keeley who was off to pastures new and distant. It was Zoe Sanders (formally Burke) and Jade too. To say I’d been knocked for six by this revelation was understatement indeed. Indeed, when Danny first shared the news that Zoe wanted to have Keeley back with her I thought he was winding me up. Either that or that he’d been at the cooking sherry.
But he hadn’t been joking. That was exactly what Keeley’s former foster mum most wanted. There was, of necessity, a frank debrief, with no beating about the bush. She carried enormous guilt and was keen to make amends. She knew that, longer term, Keeley was determined to be given her independence, but wouldn’t all their immediate futures be better if she and Jade were reunited under the same roof? And it wasn’t just about sisterly bonding either. A case such as this was going to attract a huge amount of media attention, particularly when Stephen Burke’s trial got under way. And couldn’t they all better support each other if they were actually with each other? And needless to say, Danny was quick to agree.
I was even more taken aback that Keeley agreed with the plan so readily. After all, the way Keeley had described Zoe Burke, I’d had her down (with the usual allowance I generally make for teenage ranting and hyperbole) as a cross between a shop-window mannequin and drying paint, not to mention a purveyor of unsolicited and terrible gravy.
Not so, it seemed. Keeley, remarkably pragmatic now, and happy to keep an open mind, was, she said, open to the idea that she might have misjudged her, not to mention able to accept that their lack of empathy might have more than a little to do with the way Stephen Burke had manipulated the situation, painting Keeley as a sexually precocious predatory young female who’d set her cap at him – while he of course, ever the caring professional, kept her, with great diplomacy, at a prudent arm’s length.
It was horrible to even contemplate how the ripples of his addiction spread their poison, even worse to know how he must have seen the advantages of taking a girl like Keeley into his home. And, in reality, Zoe Burke was yet another of his victims. Though Mike and I had both had several ‘how could she not have known something?’ moments in the early days following Keeley’s disclosures, it turned out that we were wrong. No one would ever know for sure, of course, but the police told us they were a hundred per cent positive Zoe Burke really hadn’t had a clue that her husband was a sexual deviant, not least because the ‘heroic’ adoptive and foster father been such a devious master of manipulation. The proverbial big bad wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Zoe Burke had therefore been devastated when the evidence was laid bare before her, and the ongoing investigation revealed, time and time again, just how cleverly he’d covered his tracks down the years. And when the peepholes he’d created were apparently shown to her, Zoe Burke stopped being a Burke – media attention was already by now happening – and began divorce proceedings that same day.
Not that it had been a simple process. In the weeks leading up to Christmas there had been many meetings and interviews, before it was established that Zoe Burke could continue as a foster carer, and for her to gain interim custody of her adopted daughter Jade. Only then was she returned to her.
It was at that point that, presumably after discussing it at length with Jade, she’d suggested Keeley return to her also. Mediation then followed, so they could talk through their respective issues, and following this came the news that Keeley was happy for that to happen – at least till she’d gained her Level 1 Hair and Beauty qualification. ‘Then I’m definitely offskies,’ she’d told me. And, yes, she might well be. But hopefully ‘offskies’ into a job and a brighter future.
For now, though, she had an exciting couple of days ahead. A move to a new home, being reunited with her foster sister, then, on Boxing Day, a visit to another foster family – the home where her younger siblings lived. Up to now she’d seen them once under supervision, for an emotional hour at a contact centre across town, but their next meeting was to be at their home.
‘It’s like I’m having two Christmases,’ she’d trilled happily. ‘I can’t wait!’ Though being Keeley, she couldn’t resist a Keeley-style rejoinder. ‘Even though it’s been Christmas here, like, for flipping ever.’
Fair enough. And entirely as it should be.
Epilogue
Stephen Burke had no choice but to change his plea to guilty. And had done so even before being presented with any incontrovertible evidence. No, the damning testimonies from both girls had turned out to be sufficient for him to realise that – to paraphrase Tyler – the game was up.
We didn’t spend any time following the case or trial. Mike and I, to put it mildly, were keen to move on, not least because we didn’t want it to be tea-table discussion with Tyler, and, more generally, having such horrors swirling round your brain is not generally conducive to a happy mind. Or, indeed, an aid to restful sleep. Though we were, of course, told about the outcome. Stephen Burke was convicted of several sexual-abuse-related charges and went on to be sentenced to a lengthy spell in jail.
Of more interest to us was Keeley’s ongoing well-being. Despite waving her off with high hopes for that much-deserved brighter future, I did spend the first couple of weeks in January feeling anxious that the ‘offskies’ might come to pass sooner rather than later, as she adapted to being back in Zoe Burke’s care.
But the silence remained golden, and when I next heard from Danny, in late January, he was quick to reassure me that everything was going as intended – Keeley reported that she was happy, she was regularly attending college, that she had a new, if less grand, smartphone and – Danny was apparently to make sure I knew this – ‘awesomely straight and glossy hair’.
‘Anyway, I’m in the area,’ he went on to say, ‘and I thought I’d stop by to update you properly, if you’re free?’
Which tickled me – I had really come to respect Danny professionally – and the fact that he took the trouble to do that. He would go far.
‘Of course,’ I replied. It was January. It was grey. It was possibly that day billed as being the most miserable of the year, even. Probably was. It was certainly cold. The kind of iron, bitter cold that January does best. We duly fixed up a time a couple of hours hence. ‘I’ll have the coffee on,’ I told him.
He laughed. ‘And the posh biscuits? You set the bar, so I’m banking on you …’
So it was that, a couple of hours later, I was sitting in the kitchen with Riley, who was just gathering up her things to leave, when a car slid smoothly to a stop outside the house.
Though it wasn’t me who’d seen this. It was Riley who reported it.
‘Oh, that’ll just be Danny,’ I told her.
She’d smiled then. ‘You sure, Mum? Looks more like a bunch of out-of-season trick or treaters to me.’
‘What?’ I said, standing up and joining her at the window. There to see, coming down my front path, a trio of unfamiliar children, all togged up in what looked like home-knitted scarves and bobble hats and mittens. Somewhat bemused, I scanned their faces, wondering who they might be. And was still doing so when I opened the front door.
At which point Keeley popped out from wherever she’d been hiding.
‘Surpriiiiiise!’ she squealed, throwing her arms around me, in a chilly bear-hug.
She let me go then, and introduced the other three red-cheeked visitors. ‘This is Jade. But you knew that. And this is Aaron and this is Courtney … and’ – she looked back to where Danny was now ambling down the
path – ‘this was all my idea. And Danny said we should trick you, and, well, here we are!’
Which is why I always keep a stock of posh biscuits.
Topics for Reading Group Discussion
1. Grooming a child for the specific intention of gaining their trust in order to commit a sexual act with them is against the law. However, despite calls for the government to make this law enforceable, a grey area remains. An offence is only committed if the adult defendant knew without doubt that the victim was under the age of sixteen. How can this be proven?
2. What steps do you feel could be put in place to ensure that adults cannot communicate online with children in order to groom them?
3. In this story, Keeley, the fostered child, was herself using a false persona online to entice men into buying her gifts. Although this is not exactly grooming in the legal sense, what she was doing was very close to what we consider grooming to be. Do you think young people see such things as part and parcel of life in the internet age?
4. With computers and smartphones now an integral part of life, what role do you think schools should play in keeping children safe online? Are they doing enough?
5. Recently there have been a lot of vigilante-type groups set up online showing video clips of members of anti-grooming campaigns posing as young girls to entrap groomers, then ‘catching’ the perpetrators and making citizens’ arrests. Do you agree with the tactics of such groups, or do you think that the police should be doing this themselves?
6. One way to stop people setting up fake identities online is to make it extremely difficult to create them on social media, perhaps by requiring traceable ID such as a National Insurance number. Do you think this is desirable? And if so, would it be possible to enforce it?
