‘Catch me, Casey!’ she yelled as she leapt through the air from the sofa. I held out my arms and almost got knocked over for my trouble. ‘Wow,’ I said as I placed her down, ‘either I’m getting too old for this or you are actually much, much bigger than six!’
She squealed with delight. As with any little girl, age was very, very important to her. ‘I am six!’ she insisted, giggling. ‘Look,’ she said, lifting her pyjama top right up to her chin. ‘See! I don’t even got no boobies – only nipples yet!’
I gently tugged the top down. ‘Darby, love, remember what I said? Your body is private, and you shouldn’t show it off.’
She looked crestfallen – as if upset that she’d done something terribly naughty. But any further exploration of the subject would have to wait, as the knocker went and I heard Mike welcoming John.
Which was good, because at least now I’d have a little more to go on. Though what that might comprise was anyone’s guess.
‘I’ll get straight to it,’ John said after we were settled in the conservatory. ‘And it’s not good, so fair warning, Casey. They found hundreds of images online during the investigation – pictures and videos, even evidence of a pay-per-view operation. And just as many physical photographs were found hidden in the house. All depicting children – including Darby, obviously. And all very definitely being –’ He paused and shook his head, as if to try to shake off the pictures. ‘Well, you know the drill. Being exploited and abused.’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘So it wasn’t just her parents then? This was part of a bigger picture?’
John nodded. ‘Your regular common-or-garden paedophile ring, I’m afraid. The father’s still denying everything – though what good he thinks that’ll do him, I don’t know, given the evidence. Not to mention the fact that the mother’s admitted everything and is fully co-operating with the police.’
I felt a glimmer of hope. ‘What’s she said?’
‘The usual. That her husband is some kind of monster. That he is violent and controlling and that she was in fear for her life. That she was too afraid of him – and his cronies – to do anything other than exactly what he told her. Says he brainwashed her into doing everything he said.’
Shades of Rosemary West? Myra Hindley? And there were countless cases documented where women apparently ‘stood by’ and let their men abuse their children, because they were convinced that, if they didn’t, the children would come off even worse. Could this be one such case?
I shook my head, even so, because it still stuck in my throat. I understood the notion of a man controlling a woman in that way – we’d even had lectures about it during training – but even so, my instinct was still strong: how could a mother let such disgusting things happen to her child? Wouldn’t a mother do anything to protect her child from harm? Why hadn’t she taken Darby and run away? ‘I’m sorry John,’ I said. ‘But she must take some responsibility for this. It was her own daughter, for God’s sake.’
‘Oh yes,’ John agreed, and surprisingly quickly. ‘And trust me, she is most definitely taking responsibility. Through the courts. She has admitted her part, in detail –’
‘Good. Well, not so much good, as good for justice.’
He raised a hand. ‘And she’s been honest. Says she’s more than happy to be sent to prison –’
‘Really?’
He smiled grimly. ‘Oh, yes. Champing at the bit to be banged up, by all accounts. Apparently, she’s happy to do anything that will help her get away from him.’
His words began to sink in. So it was really that bad, then. ‘But what about Darby?’ I asked. ‘What has she said about Darby?’
‘That – and I quote – she is now in the best place.’
‘But doesn’t she care?’ Silly question. Given what we already knew.
‘Apparently not. As far as her mother is concerned, Darby seems to be dispensable. She’s expressed no interest in seeing her again. Indeed, thinks it probably best that she doesn’t.’
‘But she’s her daughter!’ I was aghast. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So this vile woman had simply held her hands up and said, ‘Fine, you got me, now take me away, I want to forget all about it’? But almost as soon as I bridled I remembered that, in all likelihood, you’d go back into Darby’s mother’s history and find a whole host of abuses had been visited on her too. Men like Darby’s father chose their partners very carefully. And evil was invariably not born but made.
I looked out to the fairy lights Mike had wound through one of the bushes in the garden. And which one of us had, that morning, forgotten to switch off. In the daylight, the light coming from them was barely visible. But it was still shining, reminding me of the one thing we could do. Give Darby Christmas – a little light, a little respite from the darkness, by which to see her way into some sort of future.
Chapter 7
‘Morning, love,’ Mike whispered as he shook me awake. ‘Merry Christmas.’
I smelt coffee. Smelt pine. Realised what day it was. ‘6 a.m.,’ he added, obviously anticipating my first question. ‘I knew you’d want to be up early to make a start.’
He was right. Christmas Day in our house was the most hectic of the entire year and, because I was a control freak and found it hard to delegate domestically, I always had a ton of things to do. Which was not to say I minded. The day would surely come when I had to hand the reins over. When, as with my own parents, I’d be poured a sherry and told to put my feet up. And I didn’t want that happening anytime soon.
First up, I had to play Santa Claus. I had carefully wrapped up all of Darby’s presents the night before, as she slept, and then hidden them out of sight just in case she got up during the night. Like all children of her age, she needed to believe that Santa’s helpers or, ideally, the great man himself, had delivered the gifts and placed them underneath the tree in the wee small hours.
‘What, no eggnog?’ I joked to Mike as I picked up my coffee. ‘I’ll just drink this, then, and we can then take Darby’s pressies downstairs.’
Mike shook his head. ‘No need. All done,’ he said. ‘All nicely stacked beneath the tree. And I’ve even peeled a huge pan of sprouts for you.’
Sprouts were my least favourite vegetable and my least favourite chore. Well, bar the chore of eating six of them as part of my Christmas dinner, which bizarre ritual dated back to when Riley and Kieron were little. On this one day, I had this thing that if I didn’t down a few of them, I’d no business making them either.
I grinned at my husband. ‘Okay, spill. What are you after?’
He looked pained. ‘Absolutely nothing! I did it for love. Well, and as a down payment on a leave pass for the football tomorrow afternoon. But mostly for love,’ he added quickly.
And I believed him, because we both knew it would be a particularly busy day. My parents were joining us for dinner, as were Riley, David and the kids, and Kieron, Lauren and their new baby Dee Dee.
And, of course, Darby, who had been much on my mind since John’s visit. She’d been absolutely no trouble in the intervening forty-eight hours or so, but neither had she shown very much interest in the coming revels, and I wondered about her family Christmases past. This, too, I understood, because we’d fostered all sorts of children and, difficult as it had been for me to believe it before we became foster parents, there were children for whom it really had little meaning, hard though it was to avoid.
These were kids who really did live on the edges of society. Children who were kept out of school, who had no televisions, who were part of no normal community.