The Little Prisoner (22 page)

The psychologist also recommended books for me to read which opened my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t alone in the world, there were other people who understood it all. After years of being told that reading meant putting on airs and graces, I was suddenly reading books all the time. It was as if my brain had been starved for years and years and now I had to stuff as many pages into it as possible.

One of the books I read was
A Child Called It
by Dave Peltzer and I was inspired by the way in which he had got his life together after his abused childhood. I knew a lot of people who had read it and said they couldn’t believe that everything he had written about his mother was true, but I believed it because I had been there too. I could imagine every single scene that he described.

‘You
have
to read this book,’ I told my psychologist on my next visit. ‘You absolutely have to read it. There must be a school somewhere turning out these people, because they’re all the same.’

‘What people?’ He took the book from me, looking puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘People who do these things to children. They must all come from the same place. They do all the same things. Everything his mother did I can imagine my stepdad doing.’

It took a year of psychotherapy before I felt able to seriously think of going to the police. You can’t overcome a lifetime of fear overnight and I changed my mind a hundred times, but I finally decided I felt strong enough to do what I had always known I should.

‘I think I might be able to go to the police about Silly Git,’ I told Steve one day.

It was just what he had been hoping to hear. He believed with all his heart that no man should be allowed to get away with those sorts of crimes against a child and he had wanted me to speak out for years. He and his parents had kept saying things like ‘How will you feel if he does it to someone else and you could have stopped him?’

Now Steve went straight to the local police station on my behalf. There they told him that he had to lodge the complaint at the station in the area where the crimes had been committed. He drove straight there. I think he wanted to make sure he got the ball rolling before I had a chance to change my mind. He was right. I changed my mind at hourly intervals from then on, but it was too late to go back now and most of the time I knew I was doing the right thing, even if sometimes the fear became almost too much to bear.

An officer called Marie from the Child Protection Unit came to visit me first. I could see that she was more or less going through the motions and I felt guilty for bothering her. I kept apologizing and saying I was sure there must be better things she could be doing with her time, rescuing children who were in danger now rather than listening to a grown up complaining about something that happened years ago. I always felt guilty when I watched news programmes about children starving in Africa or losing limbs to landmines, thinking that I really didn’t have that much to complain about. Now I kept saying that it wasn’t that bad and that kids were probably going through worse all the time. I must have been undermining Marie’s confidence in the case with every new thing I said.

Marie asked me if my stepfather had ever been arrested and I said he’d been arrested hundreds of times but he never ended up going to prison because he always intimidated the witnesses and anyone who brought charges against him always withdrew them again under pressure. I could see that she was becoming exasperated and I realized that it did sound like a far-fetched story.

‘Pull his file,’ I said. ‘Then you’ll be able to see for yourself.’

By the time she left I think Marie was thinking about just putting my complaint on file and leaving it at that. She had explained very patiently how hard it was for the Crown Prosecution Service to actually prosecute in a case like mine. I wasn’t surprised, sure that I must be one of millions who had had terrible things done to them in their childhood, but pleased that I had at least spoken up. As long as my complaint was on record somewhere, I reasoned, Richard would be less likely to get away with the same thing again.

To my surprise Marie came back the very next day, having checked Richard’s record.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, holding a roll of paper up level with the top of her head. She then allowed it to unravel all the way to the floor. Every inch of it was covered in data about my stepfather.

‘That’s just his arrests in the last seven years,’ she said.

I felt a surge of relief, realizing that someone in authority was actually going to believe what I was saying.

‘I think we’d better start again from the beginning, don’t you?’ Marie said.

We set to work to sort out my memories and build a case that her bosses would be willing to take to court. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service will only take this on if they think there’s a reasonable chance of winning it,’ she warned me.

It wasn’t hard remembering the many dreadful things that had happened to me, but it was almost impossible to get them into any sort of coherent order as my mind jumped from one thing to the next. I could see that the more I told Marie, the more confused she became.

‘Did he do that to you when you were five or ten?’ she would ask. ‘Did it go on for a month, a year? When did that happen? How often? How long?’

So often I couldn’t give a definite answer and every question sent me off on another babbling stream of consciousness as Marie’s pen flew over the page, trying to get it all down in some form that would make sense later. Realizing that there was more than the normal amount of material to sift through, she was forced to bring in a colleague to help her.

In most child abuse cases the abuse only happens for a few years before the child is either saved or the abuser loses interest because their victim matures. Seventeen years was an astonishingly long time to have been systematically abused and made the task far harder than usual as I dredged up one ghastly memory after another.

Marie went to social services to get my file to see whether they had had any idea what was going on and what they might have been doing about it.

‘They’ve lost the file,’ she told me over the phone. ‘I’ve told them they’ve got a week to find it before I send in a team to search properly.’

I could tell how angry she was. She told me it was not the first time this had happened to her in the course of an investigation.

A week later nothing had surfaced and she sent in a team of police to go through every file in the building. They found nothing. Someone had removed every trace of the evidence.

‘What does this mean?’ I wanted to know.

‘It means his defence team will say it would have been impossible for him to have been treating you the way he did because social services were coming round all the time to check that you were alright.’

‘But they never came near me that I can remember,’ I insisted. ‘And even if they had, I would never have had the nerve to tell them what was going on.’

Undaunted, Marie and her colleague continued getting everything they could out of me, until their fingers were aching with the pain of writing.

‘We’re going to have to stop now,’ Marie told me finally. ‘We can’t put in every last thing he ever did to you or this case will last forever.’

They went away to have the whole sorry story typed up. When they came back with the typescript, Marie was armed with a pair of scissors and a Pritt stick.

‘You’ve got to go through this,’ she explained, ‘and cut it up and stick it back together in some sort of order so that the lawyers can understand it.’

I tried to do as she said, but I was still having trouble putting things in order.

‘The woman who typed this up,’ Marie told me as we went through it together, ‘has been working in the department for nearly twenty years, but she had to keep leaving the room because she was crying when she was typing up your words.’

‘So do you think they’ll prosecute him?’ I asked.

‘Who knows?’ Marie shrugged. ‘But if they don’t then it won’t be for lack of trying.’

Now that I had chosen my path forward I was determined to do as good a job as I possibly could. Marie and her colleagues were being so good I wanted to help them in every way, so that they wouldn’t end up wasting their time. We went over and over the document until we’d got it as accurate as we thought we possibly could. Marie then took it away to try to persuade her bosses that it was worth prosecuting.

She came back a few days later with a broad grin on her face. ‘My guv’nor reckons we should go after your mother as well,’ she announced gleefully.

‘Really?’ I was amazed. ‘What for?’

‘He reckons she knew exactly what was going on and we could get her for neglect.’

In the end, however, they decided that going after Mum would be too difficult and they would focus their attention on proving the case against Richard.

I was thrilled. For a short time it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I felt I was finally moving forward towards a happy ending. But then reality struck. The whole process was going to take a year to come to court, during which time Richard would know we were after him and would be doubling his efforts to find us in order to intimidate us into silence.

The police assured me that once he was arrested he would be held on remand and we would be safe. As it was, they let him straight back onto the streets.

‘You promised me you would hold onto him,’ I groaned when they told me.

‘I’m sorry, Janey,’ Marie said. ‘It was decided that he was on too much medication for them to be able to risk it. If something went wrong and he got ill in custody the whole case could fall to pieces and he could end up suing the police. We just couldn’t take the risk.’

‘But he’ll come looking for me,’ I pleaded. ‘I would never have started this whole thing if you hadn’t promised he would be put away.’

‘We’ll do everything we can to protect you,’ she assured me, and I knew she meant it. But what could she do if Richard or my brothers decided to wait outside the local school and lift Emma for a few hours, just to show me that they still had the power to do it? What would they do if the phone calls started coming in the middle of the night, or the notes came through the letterbox? What would they do if our house mysteriously caught fire in the night or Steve’s car was run off the road on the way to work?

Although I didn’t regret going to the police, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the coming months of looking over my shoulder and jumping every time I heard a car pulling up outside the house or the telephone rang or Emma was a few minutes late coming out of school.

Once inside the house I hardly ever left, apart from taking the children across the road to school, and even then I didn’t always make it, having to ask Steve or a friend to take them for me. It was as if my brain was too exhausted to cope. Every little thing Emma or Sophie asked for seemed as hard as climbing Mount Everest. If they wanted a drink I could barely summon the energy to find a beaker and fill it up.

Ideas of killing myself kept on coming to me and I wrote a long letter insisting that if I died the girls should both stay with Steve. My worst nightmare would be for Emma to be taken away and given back to my mother. I also wanted to make sure it was in writing that I didn’t want Richard or Mum or my brothers coming to my funeral.

Every evening, after a hard day at the office, Steve would have to sit and listen to me drunkenly droning on about killing myself. In the end he lost patience.

‘If you’re going to do it there’s nothing I can do about it,’ he said one night. ‘Just do it and get it over with. I’m going to bed.’

He went upstairs, leaving me snivelling in the lounge.

‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘if I am going to do it then there are a few things I need to sort out.’

I had never got round to explaining to Emma about Paul being her real dad. Steve had been doing such a great job and she was so happy with him it hadn’t seemed to be worth muddling things in her mind. But I didn’t want to leave any unfinished business. It had been five years now since we had escaped. Emma was eight and old enough to understand. I sat her down at the kitchen table after school one day and explained it all to her. She listened with rapt attention, asked a few questions and seemed completely cool with the whole thing. I thought I should make contact with Paul and reintroduce him to his daughter before I got round to topping myself.

If I was going to make contact, however, I was also going to have to give him the full story of why we had to leave and all the things that had been going on behind his back when we were living together. I knew from the one or two people that we had managed to talk to in the old area that he had got engaged and that Emma now had a half-brother. I wanted Paul to meet her again and to think about introducing her to his other child, but I didn’t know how to contact him.

Then Steve went for a lads’ night out and bumped into a bloke he used to go to school with who played football with Paul. When he found out they still played, he asked if he would give Paul his number. The bloke assured him he would and we waited for the call. When it didn’t come I was surprised, because I’d been sure Paul would call straightaway. Eventually the call did come and he told us the mutual friend had forgotten to give him the number. We met up and I told him the whole story. He was just as revolted and horrified as Steve had been, but I could almost see the pieces fitting into place in his head as he took my words in.