This seemed to beggar belief. This man was clearly not a parent. ‘It’s all very well you telling me he can look after himself, Glenn, but Spencer is our responsibility. I need to know that we can keep him safe. It’s our professional responsibility to be sure we can protect him, and, frankly, him running around the streets unsupervised does not constitute a part of that. From what you say, we’re going to have to start locking ourselves in.’
‘I know,’ he soothed again. ‘I know that. And you’re doing great. And if you have to keep the house locked to feel secure, then, obviously, so be it. I’m just trying to reassure you that he’s not a typical eight-year-old. So if he does go missing, chances are he won’t come to any harm.’
I finished the call feeling not more but even less reassured, Spencer’s ‘trendy’ social worker obviously seeing things so differently to how I did. It wasn’t even about what harm might befall him if he managed to run away. From what Glenn had said, that was the least of my worries. It was much more about the principle of what foster care was meant to be. How could I possibly create an environment of ‘trust, mutual respect and comfort’ when I had to behave like a prison guard? Not much of any of those three in that, was there?
I gave Mike a quick debrief when he arrived home from work, not least because I had to unlock the front door to let him in. We decided against him having a further disciplinary chat with Spencer tonight. Better to enjoy tea and keep the atmosphere light in the hopes that he’d feel a little less like doing his Houdini thing. And tea went well, with Spencer chatting animatedly about his paintings, and telling Mike how much he liked drawing in his sketch book. Even his hopes of perhaps becoming an artist one day.
‘Would you like to see it?’ Spencer asked him. ‘I could go and get it now.’
‘After tea,’ Mike said. ‘Then we can sit down and go through it properly. I’d enjoy that.’
Some hope, as it turned out.
Tea was over in double quick time, Spencer shovelling food in as if his life depended on it, and me all the while feeling pleased, at least on that front. Here was a child who would willingly eat fish and vegetables. And just as Mike was filling me in about an order from work, Spencer, his plate cleared, declared himself finished. ‘Shall I go and get my sketch book now, Mike?’ he wanted to know.
‘Go on then,’ chuckled Mike. ‘You’re obviously dying for me to see it. Off you go. I’ll be done here by the time you’re back down.’
Spencer ran off happily, and Mike continued with his story. Seconds later, however, he stopped abruptly. We had both heard the front door slamming shut.
At first I couldn’t fathom it. The door had been double locked. I had the key. Then Mike groaned. ‘Shit! I went out to the car, didn’t I?’ he realised. ‘To get those papers. And left the key on the side in the kitchen … oh, shit!’
All that acting. All that desperate need to show Mike his sketch book. I felt the biggest fool, suddenly, on the planet. Spencer had been right in what he’d said to me. I had been a stupid idiot.
We ran to the door, down that path, onto the street. Spencer was nowhere to be seen.
What credulous fools we were, I couldn’t help thinking, as we ran back to the house and Mike pulled his boots on.
‘Should I phone someone, do you think?’ I asked anxiously. I could already feel panic rising inside me. It was all very well Glenn telling me not to worry about Spencer, but this was an eight-year-old, and we were responsible for him.
Mike shook his head. ‘Give me a chance to have a quick scout around first.’ He headed back down the path, then stopped and turned around. ‘Actually, do you think I should take the car instead?’
‘No!’ I couldn’t help snapping. ‘Just go! If you take the car you might miss him down an alley. Just hurry, will you? He could be miles away by now.’
Mike jogged off then, and I went back to keep an eye out from behind the window. It was only early autumn but there was a real nip in the air. And Spencer, as far as I knew, was only in pyjamas and slippers. Unless he’d whipped them off while up ‘getting his sketch book for Mike’. God, I felt such a fool. I could only hope Mike found him before I had to ring the police and report him missing, and spare us a whole round of form filling and interventions and, worst of all, the admission that we’d failed.
It was a full half hour, the minutes inching onwards painfully slowly, before Mike returned. Unhappily, however, he was alone.
‘Call the EDT, Casey,’ he said. ‘I’ve looked everywhere I can think of, but if he’s hiding it’s pointless. He won’t show himself until he’s ready to be found, will he?’
The EDT – or Emergency Duty Team – are a 24-hour on-call service, dedicated to social services. They are the first port of call in situations like this. They would provide us with back-up and advice and, most importantly, log the incident so that there was a permanent record on file of what had happened – something that was particularly important in cases of violence or harm, or a child reporting something untrue. I ran to the locked cabinet where I kept my fostering log book and Spencer’s details, knowing from experience that they would ask me endless questions. It made sense to have the answers on hand.
Some minutes passed before the call with the EDT came to an end. They’d wanted a physical description, obviously, plus Spencer’s home address. They also wanted any information I could give them about other people and addresses that might potentially help them track him down. That done, they then told me to call the police, so the whole process had to be repeated again.
‘So what did they say?’ Mike asked as I put the phone down for the second time. He passed me a mug of coffee.
‘Thanks, love. That they’re sending someone to us now, plus it’ll have gone out to the patrol officers. With any luck, there’ll be some looking for him right now.’
Mike shook his head. ‘Little tyke,’ he said, taking up my former position at the window. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be a regular occurrence.’
I went and joined him. His jaw was set and his face was pale with worry. ‘He’ll be okay, love,’ I said, sliding an arm around his waist. ‘Like you said, he’s probably hiding. He’ll show himself eventually. He won’t want to be out long in this cold. He’s just trying to teach us a lesson, isn’t he? That he can beat the system. Get one up on us …’
‘Exactly!’ he said with feeling. ‘And where does that leave us? What leverage do we have to help change his behaviour if he has the means to flout the rules whenever he doesn’t like them?’
‘Plenty,’ I said. ‘If he wants to play hardball then so will we. We must. While he’s still young enough to have his behaviour modified.’
‘In theory,’ said Mike, peering into the blackness.
It was another two hours before there was a knock on the front door. Two hours in which we’d done nothing productive bar drink more mugs of coffee and fail to find something to distract us. This wasn’t one of our own kids, but it didn’t matter: we were in loco parentis, and our charge – the child who social services had entrusted to our safekeeping – had run away, which wasn’t a nice feeling. Didn’t matter how much we’d be reassured that there was nothing we could have done to stop him (which we would be) – if something happened to that little boy I would never forgive myself.
We flew to the door together, to see a policeman-shaped shadow behind the glass, and, to my immense relief, an eight-year-old-boy shape as well.
‘Spencer!’ I cried out as soon as I saw him. He was indeed in just his pyjamas and slippers. ‘Oh, Spencer. God, you must be freezing! Come on, come in.’
Spencer’s