Four Waifs on Our Doorstep (26 page)

‘Have you really looked at how he’s set it out?’ she asked.

‘No. Why?’

‘Look how he’s got the farm hedging around the edge, with four Lego children and two adults inside. And then he’s got two more people over here with the dragons, down on the
ground. And look at this group of people, quite a lot of them, on this side. He’s put lots of animals around them, all lying on their sides.’ She paused. ‘And over here’
– she pointed at a separate group – ‘these people are surrounded by lots of dead animals, big, small, all sorts of animals. And there’s the same thing in the opposite
corner.’

She had me worried now. I had never really looked at all this before, but now I was beginning to catch on to what she was talking about. I dreaded what else she was going to tell me.

‘Now,’ she said, pointing at the first group, surrounded by hedges, ‘this is Sam and his family, in here, protected by this. And over here are the baddies. They’ve all
been killed now. These people over here . . .’ she explained, ‘they’re the baddies now.’

I looked at it all and I thought, yes, I can see . . . I knew nothing about play therapy, so I’d always fondly thought it was just Sam playing imaginary games. A part of me still wondered,
was she reading too much into this? Something that may not be there at all?

But I’ve read up on it since and I’ve learned that there are certain patterns that follow people’s experiences, like people who’ve been in concentration camps always
keeping their larders full of food throughout their lives, just in case.

I knew Sam had kept his Pokemon cards – just the monstery ones. He still had nightmares most nights, as they all did from time to time. He was always afraid of the dark and had to have the
light on all night. He never did talk about his emotions.

It was chilling, seeing what Alison made of Sam’s play with the farm. I’d always thought that, being the youngest, he had been the least affected by his early life, but now it seemed
he too, like the others, may have been the subject of these paedophile predators’ abuse, and still kept the aftereffects locked up inside him.

It made me all the more desperate to get therapy organised for all of them.

As all the children’s problems continued and their behaviours escalated, their need for some sort of counselling therapy seemed more acute than ever. But for all four of
them I knew the costs would be way beyond our means, so I had to try to think of a way to fund the therapy. Then I remembered that solicitor I’d met at the adoption support group, so I found
her card and rang her number.

‘Can I come and see you?’

We arranged an appointment and I went along to her office.

‘What are the chances of suing their local authority?’ I asked. ‘Because these children desperately need therapy. They’re wrecking their lives. Their wrecking
everyone’s chances at school, they’re wrecking our home life, and we can’t go on like this.’

‘Do you have any evidence of the local authority’s negligence?’

I told her about the different sets of case notes and Michael Warren being given information about my children that they had refused to give me. I explained the background of how they had
neglected the children’s welfare and safety for so long.

She agreed to take on the case and secured a pot of funding to pay for it, so we thought it was all going ahead. She interviewed us and put together a file of evidence to apply for a court case.
All we had to do was wait for a date for the case to begin and then it would be all systems go.

Meanwhile, with the other three causing their own problems at school, I had not really given much thought lately to Sam’s situation. He had done very well at his primary
school, and he never complained, even though I had the feeling he was still being bullied for his detached manner. He never really took part in things, in class or with the other children. He
didn’t want to do group activities and he refused to be in any plays they put on. It was all part of his autistic tendency that I’d never had diagnosed. He had a hard enough time with
it, I thought, without having a label.

It was Sam’s first year at secondary school, and at that time this school was renowned for its bullying. One day he came home a gibbering wreck, with a
terrible tale to tell. He was in such a state that it took us a long time to get it out of him, but what it came down to was that a group of boys had held him by the ankles from a third-floor
balustrade, hanging upside down over the open stairwell.

Had it been Carrie telling me this, I wouldn’t have believed it. Or Stacey, with all her dramatic fantasising. But the thing about any kind of autism is that the person cannot tell lies.
Everything has to be literal. So I knew that, with Sam, there was no embroidering of the truth. He was telling me as it was.

I called the school number straight away, but it was too late, the call went to voicemail. I was livid. All the more so because there was no one I could talk to till the morning, so I took my
frustrations out on everything inanimate, banging down the saucepans on the stove to get rid of my pent-up anger.

‘What’s the matter, Trisha?’ asked Mike as we tidied up after the kids had gone to bed. ‘I’ve been dodging bullets all evening.’

So I told him everything Sam had said. ‘He was so upset, poor lamb,’ I said.

‘Petrified, I should think,’ nodded Mike.

‘I can’t get that image out of my head. Him being dangled over that twenty-foot drop. How could they do that? It makes me shudder.’

I called the school first thing in the morning. ‘I need to talk to the headmistress,’ I said in my sternest voice. ‘It’s very urgent.’

‘I’m afraid she’s in a meeting at the moment. She won’t be free till half past nine.’

‘Right, I’ll come in and see her then.’

‘Well . . .’ the secretary hesitated. ‘I’m not sure if—’

‘I want to make a formal complaint.’

‘I see,’ she said sounding surprised. ‘I’ll let her know you’re coming, Mrs Merry.’

Then I rang Ken Piper, an adviser who goes to tribunals. He was as shocked as I had been to hear what had happened to poor Sam.

Mr Piper came into the school with me and when we got to the meeting room there was the headmistress, the assistant head and the chair of the board of governors. The secretary must have alerted
them all.

‘I want to make a formal complaint,’ I began. ‘Yesterday, my son Sam was held over the stairwell by his ankles by a group of children in your school.’

‘It was a joke, Mrs Merry,’ grinned the assistant head. ‘I heard about it and spoke to the children involved, so I know it was just a joke.’

I saw red. ‘Well, a good job they didn’t drop him, then. Because, what would that have been? A farce?’

‘Oh no, they wouldn’t have dropped him.’

‘I don’t think you have any understanding of my children’s needs.’

Mr Piper sat next to me, his long legs sticking out, his paperwork on his knees, and he looked shocked at the assistant head’s response. Meanwhile, the headmistress said nothing. She was
inscrutable.

‘You have no idea about my children. You do not understand complex children’s behaviour.’

The chair of governors was sat there, silent, next to the head.

‘On the contrary, Mrs Merry and Mr Piper,’ said the assistant head. ‘We’re well used to oddballs like your children.’

Still neither of the others said a word.

‘Come along, Mrs Merry,’ said Ken, ‘I think we have heard all we need to hear. It’s from the top down. Indicative.’

And we walked out together.

We stood by my car and he said: ‘You’ve got a case here, Mrs Merry.’

I sighed with the weight of everything that kept hitting me. ‘But I’m already fighting the local authority about their neglect of the children, and trying my best to cope with
everything else that happens with teenage children. I can’t, I just can’t fight the school as well.’ It was true. I felt it was all too much. I could not have gone to a tribunal
just then. I couldn’t. But I wished I had.

The only thing I could do was take Sam out of that school and find him somewhere more suitable, smaller and more caring. So he went to a private all-through school with a brilliant art
department.

‘Sam is a gifted artist, you know,’ said his art teacher at the first parents’ evening, and I was so glad that we moved him when we did.

But it didn’t solve everything.

22

S
omething strange was going on. We all noticed it. When any of us went to top up our mobile phones, we found large sums of credit already
there.

‘I’ve heard of gremlins getting into gadgets,’ said Mike. ‘But this is the other extreme.’

‘A phone fairy, or something?’ I suggested.

‘Well, I don’t know what it is, but I like it.’

‘Perhaps the phone companies are giving out more generous freebies these days?’

‘What’s in it for them?’

‘Maybe they’re lulling us into a false sense of security . . . and then they’ll strike with huge increases.’

Then I discovered it wasn’t just us.

‘There’s something very odd happening to my phone,’ said Jane one day. ‘The credit keeps going up, but I haven’t paid anything into it. Laura and Brett’s
phones are just the same. What do you think it can be?’

‘Join the club. It’s happening to us too.’

It was all quite a mystery . . . until my credit card bill arrived. That’s when I saw all the payments to our phone providers, and for a lot more numbers than just the family. I called the
bank, but they didn’t know how it had happened.

‘There does seem to have been a lot of irregular activity on your account, Mrs Merry. I have a note here that somebody in the fraud department did try to ring you, and left a message,
twice. But you didn’t call back.’

‘Really? I don’t remember that,’ I said. ‘But now I realise that so much money has gone . . . How did it happen?’

‘All the mobile phone payments were made on your card,’ they said. ‘With your pin number.’

I checked my statement again, with a calculator, and all the phone payments added up to about two thousand pounds. I looked to see if one had received more than any of the others, but nothing
jumped out at me. I just couldn’t understand who would have done this.

‘So,’ I said to Mike. ‘Somebody must have taken my card out of my bag, found out my pin code and used it to do the topping up.’

‘But why?’

‘Yes, it does seem very strange. Usually, fraudsters only benefit themselves, and most of the payments were for family phones.’

‘Who do you think it could be?’ he asked. The two of us sat there, puzzling it all through, and suddenly the penny dropped.

‘Who’s the most likely person in our family to think up a devious way to gain credit on her own phone, without attracting suspicion?’

He looked at me with an open mouth. ‘You mean Stacey?’

‘Yes. Who else would pull a trick like this?’ We had to laugh, but we weren’t going to tell her that. And it was actually very serious. I couldn’t afford to lose two
thousand pounds.

When I confronted Stacey about it the next day, she openly admitted it; brazen as you like.

‘Well, I have a lot of friends.’ She shrugged. ‘I needed to call them, but I never had enough credit on my phone. And you always say how important it is to have our phones with
us when we go out, in case of emergency, so I didn’t think you’d mind,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘I added some to their phones too.’

‘But how did you get my pin number?’

‘Oh I’ve known that for ages. I watched you use it at the checkout in Tesco’s.’

‘But why top up all our phones as well?’

‘So that you wouldn’t know it was me, of course,’ she smirked. ‘Don’t you think that’s quite clever?’

‘Clever’s not the word I’d use, Miss Stacey,’ I said. ‘It’s a huge amount of money you’ve taken from me. But never again! I’ve cancelled this card
and you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be telling you my new pin number!’

The value of money didn’t seem to be on the kids’ agenda. I suppose they had come from somewhere that had no money for anything they needed, to a home where
everything they could possibly want, and more, was generously provided for them.

That combined with their disruptive behaviour and wrecking skills made an uncomfortable equation. I don’t think most people realised just how destructive they all were, to each other, to
us as a family, to school, to their clothes, to their toys. They would be given something and within hours it would be broken or lost.

‘Where’s your phone?’ I asked Sam.

‘Oh, it got lost somewhere.’

‘But I only bought you that yesterday. It cost a hundred pounds, Sam.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

At least he apologised. I didn’t usually get that from the others.

Shopping with Stacey one day for a new bra, she caught sight of a short denim skirt.

‘Look at this skirt, Mum. Isn’t it lovely?’

‘It looks OK,’ I said, checking the price ticket. ‘It’s far too expensive, love – £70,’ I gulped. ‘And there’s hardly any material in
it!’

‘But it’s so cool,’ she said. ‘All my friends have denim skirts, and I’ve wanted one for ages, but I never saw one I liked. But I really love this one. It’s
exactly what I always wanted.’

‘What about getting the next size up?’ I suggested, holding it up against her. ‘That’s much better. The length is more attractive, and you’ll be able to wear it for
longer.’

‘But it doesn’t show off my legs,’ she wailed.

‘Sometimes, it’s better not to show off too much, Stace. Leave some things to the imagination.’

Judging from her withering expression, she thought I was too old-fashioned to have any opinion worth listening to.

‘You just don’t understand!’

But that was the problem, I understood only too well. Stacey was the ultimate believer in ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it.’

As usual, she was so persuasive that she had to have it as there was no other denim skirt in the world as good as this one. I reluctantly paid over the £70.