A Stolen Childhood_A Dark Past, a Terrible Secret, a Girl Without a Future by Casey Watson

Author:Casey Watson [Watson, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007543090
Goodreads: 23525879
Publisher: Harper Element
Published: 2015-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Our local family centre was a large converted guest house. It was in a residential area, and externally it looked just like its neighbours, so if you passed it you might not even realise what it was, let alone have any notion of what, on any given day, might be going on within.

All sorts happened here, of course – some of it routine, some of it sad, or bad, or shocking – from birth parents making halting overtures to children currently in the council’s care, to meetings such as this, where troubled children had a safe space to speak out. And in a place designed not to scare or overwhelm them.

The family room, into which we’d brought Sam, was the epitome of cosy. It was a room for all seasons, with a low, book-strewn table and squashy armchairs at one end, and a well-stocked play and ‘chill-out’ area, with Disney posters on the walls behind it, and full of toys, books, puzzles, board games and beanbags. It always reminded me of the corner I had created in my classroom, back when I was a school behaviour unit manager. There it had functioned as both a place to shut the world out, and a place to bring it in, sometimes, too – as challenged children, locked into negative behaviours, could dare to imagine the world beyond their own troubled environment.

Sam was still in anticipatory mode – part excited, part nervous – something I’d noticed from his choice of attire. He’d opted for an assemblage of favourite clothing items, including his dog-walking anorak (despite the warmth of the day), and, though he had nothing to put in it bar a carton of juice and a banana, his Spider-Man backpack. Always good to know your favourite superhero has – literally – got your back.

I had been to this type of interview before, with a number of children in our care, but as each child is different, each situation unique, you never really knew how they were going to go, so Sam’s demeanour as we sat down meant nothing. I knew, both from knowing Sam and from my experience of similar encounters, that the smallest thing could send the chat off in all kinds of directions or, as sometimes happens, shut it down immediately. We started well, though. After ten minutes of ‘getting to know you’ time with all of us, the CID officer, Kim (to whom I gave a mental ‘high five’ for immediately noting the significance of the almost empty backpack), seemed to instinctively understand Sam’s capacity. And, better still, seemed to have inspired his confidence. And that despite looking not a bit like a superhero. If anything, with her gentle voice and soft, unhurried manner, she looked more librarian than hard-bitten copper – though I didn’t doubt she’d seen more than enough time on the streets wrangling hard-bitten criminals into submission.

But now it was time to step up a gear. And, in picking the precise moment when Sam alluded to her being a kind of superhero, she chose her moment well.

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