The Devil You Know

by Gwen Adshead

  ‘If you had that meeting, what would your first question be, do you think?’ Peter’s voice was low and kind. Hamish flushed, and for a moment I saw his father’s face as it had been when I first sat down with him at the hostel. ‘I don’t know, just whether he’s sorry now? And … why did he do it? Why?’ The three-letter word was heavy with years of pain. Peter nodded. ‘Okay. We’ll have to discuss this further. But we’ll think about it, I promise.’ Hamish’s face fell, as if he had expected this meeting to be more conclusive. My impression was that this young man was unlikely to harm his father. But he was still not entirely adult and hadn’t fully thought through what the impact of seeing his father after so long could be – not only for him but also for his mother and brother. Such an encounter could disturb the family dynamic in unpredictable ways. I was also concerned about the impact on Ian, especially with his risk of clinical depression. In my mind’s eye, I saw him hunched on that lumpy sofa with his head in his hands, and I thought that if I were him, meeting with Hamish could be heartbreaking.

  We couldn’t resolve this overnight. There would be the usual official process of information-sharing in the team, and I’d be asked for my considered view after I’d finished my allotted sessions with Ian. After Hamish was gone, I asked Peter about the restorative justice idea. ‘Is it remotely possible?’ He looked dubious. ‘In theory, yes, but I don’t know that anyone’s done it in a case like this. It’s more muggers or burglars meeting up with people who’ve not been badly hurt. I can’t think of anyone who could facilitate this.’ It certainly wasn’t something I was trained for – and yet, when I looked back at this moment later, I would think, ‘Could I have done something more?’ But even if we had found a skilled mediator to help, what answer would Ian have given to Hamish’s great big ‘why’?

  The next time I met with Ian at the house, I thought he looked more alive, less haggard. He didn’t seem depressed and he told me he was eating and sleeping well. I commented that he appeared to be allowing himself to enjoy being out of prison now, and he agreed. As soon as we took our seats in the TV room, he wanted to hear how my meeting with his son had gone, and I filled him in. ‘He wants to ask me things? What things?’ I turned that around. ‘If you were Hamish, what would you want to ask?’ But Ian shook his head rapidly; he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He turned away from me to face the window, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes as if to hold tears in. After a bit, I spoke again, hoping to keep him engaged. ‘I can’t know this for sure, but I wonder if he wants to put a name and face to you, as you are now, so you’re less frightening to him?’

  ‘He’s frightened of me?’ I had to think how best to answer, and I put it to him that it might be that he was linked in his son’s mind with a time in his life he didn’t comprehend, a time when he felt fear. ‘Oh.’ Ian still sounded surprised, so I asked him if that came as a shock, or if he couldn’t understand why his son wanted to see him at all. ‘After what I did? Too bloody right.’

  ‘Ian,’ I said quietly, holding eye contact, ‘could you try to talk to me about that, as you see it now, with the benefit of hindsight?’ Telling me about his offence was not going to be easy, but I knew he would have had to go through it before with police, lawyers, therapists and others. As part of my assessment, I needed to know how he thought about it now. When he went through the history, I would be alert to any small linguistic ‘spikes’ that could indicate ongoing grandiosity or entitlement, a sense of injustice or a defiance of rules – all things which can indicate a present risk.

  He chose to begin back in his childhood, perhaps because it was at a distance from the offence. He started by telling me that he had always had a problematic relationship with his parents. His mother was an alcoholic, in and out of rehab and hospitals for much of his young life. When his parents divorced, she left him with his father. Ian was just thirteen, his younger brother twelve. Ian described his father as a remote and hostile parent, a man who was ‘cold as a block of ice’, adding that he was ‘shit scared of him’. I didn’t comment on that, but Ian may have sensed my interest and was quick to assure me his father had never physically or sexually abused him. I had no reason to disbelieve him. While it is true that some CSOs will perpetuate the abuse they experienced as children, it is just one risk factor. A history of sexual abuse as a child is neither essential nor sufficient on its own to cause someone to shift from victim to perpetrator.11

  Ian left school and home as soon as he could, apprenticing himself at seventeen to a builder in another city. I knew from reviewing the police record that he had had only one previous contact with the police, a caution for indecent exposure when he was nineteen. He didn’t mention that and looked embarrassed when I interjected to ask him about it, saying it was nothing, that he’d been drunk and was caught pissing in a public park at night. He said that he’d talked about it when he was in the SOTP group in prison, and loads of people had similar stories – it didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t sure that was true; many people with convictions for indecent exposure do go on to commit some other sexual offence, but the converse is also true, that many indecent exposers pose no risk to anyone. We didn’t have the time to get into it, but I did note the use of alcohol, a disinhibitor. So far, this was one of the few bicycle-lock ‘numbers’ I could discern in Ian; but useful as that model for assessing risk was, I was learning all the time that the overt absence of known factors for violence (which were so evident in lives as full of adversity as Gabriel’s or Charlotte’s, for example) could be just as telling. I had only to think of Zahra to be reminded of that. Ian and I took a break there, agreeing to pick up where we had left off in our next session.

  I returned the following week knowing what lay in store, like an ER doctor reporting for a Saturday-night shift. He resumed at the point in his mid-twenties when he met his wife, Sheila, then a secondary-school teacher. Their courtship and marriage were ‘normal’, he said, without elaborating much. ‘Tell me about her,’ I suggested, but he blocked that avenue, his body language almost a cliché as he crossed his arms over his chest and stuck out his chin like a stubborn child. ‘There’s nothing to say.’ ‘Nothing at all?’ I asked gently. He shook his head, adamant. He wasn’t going to let me see into his marriage, it seemed. Then, after a moment, he said quietly, ‘I let her down.’ He hurried ahead in the story, talking in generalities about those early years together, when they were doing up their first home and planning a family.

  He was not glib, nor did his account lapse into self-righteousness or self-pity; it was more that he seemed detached from it, as if he were describing another man’s life. He told me that when his father died, he and Sheila had come into a little money. She received a promotion at school, and they agreed he would stay at home and be a house husband for a while. Her new role meant Sheila had to work late a couple of nights a week, and I asked if it bothered him, being apart from her that much. He looked taken aback, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. It was fine, he’d encouraged her, because it was a good job, good money. He was proud of her. But he admitted that, over time, he did begin to feel irritated at having to take on more of the caring role for the boys. It was all right playing football with them or making supper together, but he’d get anxious about things like helping them with their homework, not having been much of a student himself. They would argue about TV and computer time, and he’d give in rather than enforce his wife’s strict rules. He hated being ‘the bad cop’ and ‘doing everything’. He started to feel like a single parent. I nodded to show that I understood this was not an easy role.

  ‘That’s when it started, I guess.’ He lapsed into one of his long pauses, and I sat patiently, listening to the clock ticking and the shush of the occasional car in the rainy street outside. When he began to speak again, after taking a deep breath, I had the mental sensation of linking arms with him as we both moved towards a precipice together, keeping him company as he faced the abyss. I wouldn’t interrupt him from then on, other than encouragin
g him if he faltered.

  It had begun with Andy, his eldest, then eleven years old. Ian couldn’t say when the first feeling of wanting to touch him had started, only that an image came into his head one day, just a flash of seeing his hand on Andy’s penis – not that he’d ever done it. It gave him a little ‘blip’ of warm excitement, as if imagining a distant thing could bring it nearer, make it possible. It sounded like sexual radar, homing in on a distant but definite sense of excitement, bringing to my mind what Evelyn Waugh called ‘a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me’.12

  He pushed the thought away at first, but it kept returning, getting louder. One night, after the boys were in bed and he was alone in his room, with Sheila out late again, he masturbated to the image in his mind and imagined that Andy had smiled at him, a lovely welcoming smile. Then he imagined Hamish, aged nine, into this fantasy, thinking how they all might touch each other, which was arousing for him. The thought that he could actually do it began to take hold, starting with the notion that maybe Andy would think it was an accidental touch. He hadn’t supervised the boys at bath time in years, but now he began to go into the bathroom when they were getting ready for bed. He started a water fight, which they loved – Mum would never allow it. Then he suggested they play a game of ‘submarines and sharks’ together, the boys in the water and him sitting on the edge of the bath. He told me the boys loved all this, and it became routine whenever Mum was out, the three of them making a real mess in the bathroom, water and bubbles all over, shrieks of laughter, no washing of hair or teeth-brushing required. At this point, I was able to fill in some blanks (for myself, not aloud). I’d seen enough in the court documents, but I’d also heard so many versions of this before, in other cases. The script moves inexorably towards its brutal conclusion.

  When Andy first felt his father’s hand touch his penis in the bathtub, he told a specialist police officer, trained in working with children, that he thought it was an accident. He tried not to think about it, but then it started to happen again and again. He began to feel ‘funny’ about it, ‘weird’ and embarrassed. What was Dad doing? He’d heard about sex and stuff at school and from his mates, even seen a few things online at his best friend’s house, and he began to worry that his dad was gay. Or maybe he was. But it was his father, so that was impossible. Then he saw Dad doing it to his little brother Hamish too. The brothers talked about it a bit, lying in their bunk beds late at night. I pictured these children staring upwards, whispering into the darkness, rather than facing each other as they struggled with such difficult words and thoughts. They didn’t know what to do. They knew how cross Mum would be – and Dad too. It was their secret with him. They said nothing.

  Ian had promised them a treat: they would all go to the new superhero release at the cinema next time Mum was out. Sitting between his sons, Ian put his hands down both the boys’ trousers while they were watching the movie. The boys said that they were stunned – and terrified in case anyone around them saw. Ian told me that his memory of this incident was that his sons consented; after all, they didn’t move and they didn’t rebuff him, they just watched the film. At home, as he was putting them to bed, he got them both to touch his erect penis, like in his fantasy. They did it, without argument. Hamish and Andy recalled that after that night, he gave them extra pocket money and other treats, telling them they were ‘good boys’. It was another familiar line to my ear – as was their mother’s testimony.

  Sheila had been preoccupied with her challenging new job and considered herself lucky that her husband was so good with the kids. In hindsight, she realised the boys had become quieter and more irritable during that time. Then one night, Andy had a blazing row with her ‘over nothing’, and for some reason smashed a new toy, a gift from his dad, into little pieces. It was particularly shocking because he was always the better behaved of the two boys, the responsible big brother. Ian was a real help that night, Sheila recalled to the police later. He calmed everyone down and cleaned up the mess, assuring her that it probably ‘just hormones’ – ‘You know, boys will be boys.’ He’d been a stroppy teen himself. But Andy wasn’t a teenager – he was eleven. After that incident, she had tried to cut back at work, but it was hard: there was an Ofsted inspection coming, and everyone had to do extra hours.

  Then the night came when Sheila was out of town at a conference, and Ian tried to have anal sex with Andy, in front of Hamish. Ian rushed through this part of the story, and I didn’t press him. I had read the witness statements from the boys, which gave me the gist, their words eloquent in their terseness. After the assault, Andy barricaded himself and his brother in their bedroom. Ian told me he knew he’d gone too far and was panic-stricken. What would happen? He lay awake all night. But the boys got up the next morning and left the house for school. Nothing was said. A few days later, Sheila received an emergency summons from the boys’ school. Andy had disclosed to a trusted teacher what had happened at home. Hamish was brought in, and he confirmed it.

  Ian talked about that last day in his former home, how it stretched into a long, terrible evening. Sheila was working late again. The boys didn’t come home after school, but at first he thought they might be at a friend’s. His mind was confused and his heart started racing as the hours went by and they still hadn’t returned. He rang Sheila to check with her what was happening, but she didn’t answer her phone. He tried her several times again, without success. Then he tidied up the house and started to get dinner ready, hoping that at any minute the front door was going to bang open, the boys chattering and their schoolbags thumping onto the bench in the front hall. As the minutes passed, he realised that wasn’t going to happen. He understood, he said, that it was over. ‘What was over?’ I asked quietly. It was my first question since he’d begun this painful chapter. ‘Life,’ he said. That was when he first thought of killing himself, initially contemplating a desperate night drive down to Beachy Head, Britain’s infamous suicide spot on the Sussex coast. But it would be far simpler to take an overdose of paracetamol, washed down with whisky. He scrambled in the medicine cabinet, shaking out the pills into his hand, pouring single malt into a coffee mug and chugging it all down. Then the doorbell went. It was the police. When Ian opened the door, he was obviously drunk. He told them he’d taken an overdose, adding, ‘I’ll be dead soon, don’t worry.’ That struck me as odd. Don’t worry about what? That he’d do more harm to his children? That he’d put up resistance? They bundled him into the car immediately and took him to the hospital.

  I understood from Ian’s probation record, which included some of the police reports and trial transcripts, that Sheila didn’t hesitate or question what the boys had said; she called the police and took the children to her parents. She did not go home or contact Ian – they never spoke again. Like so many mothers before her, she was full of self-recrimination, telling the police, ‘I’ll never forgive myself.’ I noted that after Ian’s arrest, social services had thoroughly investigated the poor woman for failure to protect her children, as a matter of course. This may sound heartless, but both in the group I worked with back in the 1990s and subsequently, I have seen many married CSOs who abuse not only their children but their grandchildren, sometimes with their wives’ assent and co-operation. These couples would not only reject the idea that the man was a paedophile, they would also not classify his behaviour as a sexual offence. Both husband and wife think that the man of the house can do what he likes with his partner and children. On the other hand, I have assessed numerous parents who download child pornography and who would deny they are deviant and be genuinely baffled by the idea that their own children could be at risk from them. They don’t see their children as sexual objects precisely because they have a parental relationship with them.

  When Ian and I met for our final session, we returned to the subject of responding to Hamish’s request to meet. Ian was ambivalent at first; he talked about wanting his son’s forgiveness if he could get it, but commented that even
then it would not be over for him. How could he forgive himself, even if Hamish could? What purpose would it serve for the two of them to meet? He had wiped out their future when he made Hamish complicit in his abuse. He felt that he understood Andy’s rejection more; he knew what it was like to be Andy and break off all relations with one’s father. After some discussion, he announced that seeing Hamish would be too much for him. He could not give his son what he wanted, not now. I relayed this decision to Peter, who was much relieved and told me the whole team of professionals involved with Ian’s case had felt this would be the best outcome. Hamish would be disappointed (but he had got over worse, was the unspoken comment). Maybe someday things would change, I offered, when Ian had made a new life. One day he might be able to contemplate a meeting. Peter looked at me, his humanity tempered with a realism born from long experience. ‘Maybe.’

  Later, the image of Ian came back to me, sitting on that old sofa by the window, head bowed and spirit crushed, wrestling with his shame. I reflected on how complicated forgiveness is and how little space there is for it in our justice system, thinking again about restorative justice and whether it could have worked for Ian and Hamish. Keeping Ian in prison had done what, exactly? Our society had shown him and the world how much we hate the crime of sexual assault on children. But ten years of imprisonment had cost us the best part of £500,000. Could we have achieved the same result or better by keeping Ian in a community house for offenders, wearing an electronic tag? Resources might have been allocated to giving both him and his whole family, separately or together, a lot of therapeutic time to work through this grievous assault on their security and love. Such therapy would not assume reunification or even forgiveness. However, it would have ensured both father and sons got the help they needed, and the terms of the sentence would still have controlled Ian and conveyed societal condemnation of his actions. I have to think that spending a decade in prison was a contributing factor to his story’s conclusion.