by Paul Ilett
On my tenth birthday, when I was blowing out my candles, I wished I could go home. I squeezed my eyes together and wished so hard, because it was all I wanted. The next day, after school, my social worker was waiting in the front room and said she wanted to talk to me about something important. And I sat there with a huge smile on my face, trying not to giggle, waiting for the good news. My wish had come true. But she started saying something else. She said she had some sad news, and that you had been very ill and the doctors had tried to help you but they couldn’t. And that you had died. I didn’t believe her. I kept saying she was wrong, that you had told me I would only be in care for a while and that I could go home eventually. And then I started crying and screaming at her for lying to me. It just didn’t make any sense. How could it? We had our whole lives ahead of us. I was only 10. How could my mum be dead when I was only 10? You said I would be home soon. I was supposed to be coming home.
I knew I was different after that. I could feel it. Even though I was still only little, I knew I wasn’t the same. It was more than just grief. There was something inside me that had changed, it was an emptiness, like I was hollow and to be honest that horrible feeling has never really left me. Of course, I needed someone to blame it all on and so I put my foster carers through absolute hell for the next few years. But they stuck with me and cared for me, even when I was smashing up their home or spitting in their face or arriving back at midnight with the police in tow. They just seemed to love me whatever I did or however horrible I was. I’m so ashamed of that now because they deserved so much better. I always knew my foster carers weren’t really to blame for anything. They were just an easy target and I did eventually begin to realise that.
But then I started to hear things, snippets of conversation on TV (before the channel was quickly changed) or adult discussions which ended abruptly when I entered the room. I began to get the impression that there were other people out there in the world, somewhere, people who really were to blame for what had happened to you. There’s a picture of you, the one you had taken for the cover of Attitude magazine a few months before you died. It’s such a famous picture now, your pale face and big eyes, and there’s something very sad about your expression. After you died it sort of went viral, I saw it everywhere almost every day. It was on posters and trendy t-shirts. I knew that it meant something and that you were important for another reason, not just because you’d been on a soap. I decided that somehow I would find out the truth, and if there were other people who really were responsible for your death then I would make them pay.
But I didn’t let it take me over. Actually, once I had calmed down I started to do a lot better, at everything. I finally accepted that I wasn’t going home, and that I needed to commit to this life I had with my foster carers. I started to pay attention at school and it turned out I was quite academic. Who knew? And I started making friends, too. I joined clubs and got a paper round and even learnt to bake. My life finally became bearable. No, not bearable. Enjoyable. I actually started to enjoy my life, just for what it was. I was having fun and normal fun, too, rather than something that ends up with a ride home in a police car. None of my friends ever knew the truth about me, of course. It’s difficult keeping secrets at that age, but I knew it was important. It was about this time that I had a talk with my foster carers and social worker, too. After all those years, and everything we’d been through, it didn’t feel right calling my foster carers by their names anymore. So I asked if I could call them Mum and Dad, and they said I could. I hope you don’t mind, but it just felt really right, for all of us. You would like them, though, I promise. You really would.
With the placement happy and stable again, social services started to let other people write to me. I started to get letters, photographs and presents from Auntie Pat and Uncle Adam. It was strange after all those years, like I was getting messages from another world that didn’t exist anymore. And then we were allowed to visit. It was hard seeing Auntie Pat that first time, because I’d forgotten how much she looks like you. She talks like you too. We were very awkward with each other at first, but Mum and Dad gave us plenty of space and before long we were chatting and catching up, and then crying and hugging, and then laughing and crying. But it was happy crying.
And a few months after that I was allowed to see Uncle Adam too. He’d only just left Eastenders and was about to move to Cardiff to work on Doctor Who. It was strange seeing him again because he’d been the only constant in my life. Even though he’d only been on TV and he was playing a character, I’d been able to see him every week. And it felt like I was keeping in touch with him all along. And then I was taken to visit him at his house and I was suddenly star struck. Here I was with this man I’d known since I was a baby but he was also this big star off the telly, and he’d made me lunch and had photographs for us to look through. Pictures of you I’d not seen before. You were so beautiful. And after a while he began to feel familiar again, like the Uncle Adam I had grown up with. But I was still a little star-struck. I still am, to be honest. He’s amazing. You would be so proud of him, of everything he’s achieved and the way he handles life. He still talks about you like you really were his big sister and I can tell how much he loved you, how much it still hurts him that you’re gone. He doesn’t give much away, not about how he’s feeling. I know other people think he’s a bit of a cold fish, but I can tell when he’s sad. There’s something in his eyes, something that changes.
I was 15 when I finally found out the truth about how you had died, about what the Daily Ear had done to you. I had internet access at school and my curiosity finally got the better of me. I began to look you up during class. Wikipedia can be very useful for revision, but it can also be the worst thing in the world when you’re reading about someone you know, someone you love. It was harder than I thought it was going to be, reading your entire life stripped down to bare facts. But then I read the sub-section about press intrusion and your final moments at Beachy Head and I realised I hadn’t been told the whole story. I left school that afternoon and rather than walking home I got on the tube and went straight to see Uncle Adam. Luckily he was at home and he took me in and phoned Mum and Dad and they came to the house. They called Auntie Pat, too. And they all sat me down and talked me through everything, the whole story. I asked question after question, and they answered everything. For the first time, they were all really honest with me. I guess they thought I was old enough to know the truth. Or maybe they realised I would find out anyway, and they would rather tell me themselves then have me stumble upon some awful website where I’d get the wrong version of the story.
So they told me about Jason stalking you, screaming abuse at you in the streets to get the pictures he wanted. They told me about Colin’s obsession with your private life, printing every detail of every man you as much as looked at. They told me about your depression, the accusations of drug use and Valerie’s claim that you often left me home alone to go out drinking and partying. None of it was true, of course, but it was repeated over and over and was eventually considered an accepted truth. It ruined your reputation and then your career. Your life, or at least the Daily Ear’s version of your life, became a public obsession and the Ear’s readers just wanted more and more. I doubt they even cared that most of it was made up. They told me how Leonard Twigg had overseen it all, knowing each ‘Pearl Martin exclusive’ pushed his sales through the roof. The public would scream their disapproval at how you were being treated, but the next day they’d see your face on the front page and buy the Daily Ear all over again. After you died the country was in uproar and it would have been easy to put the Daily Ear out of business. People just had to stop buying it. But they chose not to. It seems the public can lie just as much as a newspaper.
Auntie Pat told me other things too, like everything you’d done to keep me your little secret. She showed me all the cuttings of you proudly walking me around Hyde Park in a stroller, just a few weeks after I was born. They made the front
pages of most of the tabloids, and they are lovely pictures, too. Probably the only public pictures I’ve seen of you actually smiling and looking happy; you the proud parent and me in my buggy, a little clone of my mum. All the stories point out how I’m the image of you, that I have your famous pale complexion, your big blue eyes and wisps of brown hair. Only it isn’t me in the buggy. The whole photo opportunity was something you and Auntie Pat set up to trick the press. It’s cousin Benjamin. He’s only a couple of months older than me and has the colourings from your side of the family. But from that day everyone’s been looking for the wrong girl. You hid me in plain sight so I could walk home from school, go to the park or even appear in the school play and no one would ever suspect that the little black girl was Pearl Martin’s daughter. Auntie Pat also told me about my biological father and explained that your relationship with him was brief. She said he’d never wanted to be a part of my life and that just because a man can be a father it doesn’t mean he can be a dad, and I guess that’s true of him. But she also said he could have made a small fortune if he’d decided to out himself as my father, and the fact he hadn’t showed he was doing his bit to keep me a secret. So I guess that’s something.
That night, after that enormous conversation and all of those secrets had been revealed to me, I went home finally knowing the truth. The Daily Ear had killed you. And I finally had names for my hitlist: Colin, Valerie, Jason and Twigg. You see, everyone thinks Project Ear is something new, something Uncle Adam dreamed up a few months ago because this government inquiry into newspaper ethics isn’t going anywhere. But Project Ear is my baby, my mission. That day, three years ago when I was 15 and lying in my bed with all of this new information swirling around my head, that was the day Project Ear was born. Because what no one seemed to realise is that by hiding me away in perfect anonymity for all those years, I had been given more than just a quiet life. I had been given the perfect opportunity to beat them from the inside. I could teach those bastards a lesson, every single one of them, because none of them would have a clue who I was. I could walk straight up to Jason or Valerie or any of the others and they would have no reason to think I was your daughter. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed obvious what I should do. I would get a job at the Daily Ear and I would find out everything about them. I would be helpful and smiling, efficient in my job, reliable and only question them just enough to make it seem like I was a person worth actually talking to. And then I would get them to open up to me, to trust me and then let them brag about their lives and careers or share some secret with me. Perhaps they’d tell me something from their past, or give me access to their emails or calendars. I would expose every slimy, hypocritical, embarrassing, unethical or illegal secret they had stashed away in their past and I would do it all from the inside.
I spent the next three years secretly planning. I researched all the main players, went on work experience at local papers and other companies owned by Harvey News Group and even learnt shorthand and typing at evening class to make me more useful in an office environment. After I’d finished my A-Levels, I picked the one media course that I knew would offer me a 6-month attachment in a genuine national newspaper. No one else wanted the Daily Ear (my course is full of broadsheet readers) and so I was selected automatically. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I was in! I spent my first month as the Ear’s news desk secretary, and Colin pretty much handed me his secret on a plate. Within days it was obvious he was having an affair. Plenty of people have a mobile phone and a lot of people have two (one for work and one for personal use). But Colin had three and I noticed early on how guarded he was about that third mobile phone and that he never took it home with him. He always left it locked in his desk in the office and the calls he took on it were private and certainly not from his pregnant wife. Part of my job was to make all the hotel bookings for Colin and his team, and I began to notice how often he would tell me exactly where to book him a room even if it was 20 or 30 miles away from where he actually needed to be. It was going to be pretty easy to catch him out, the only problem I had was how to do it.
And this is where Uncle Adam comes into the story. He was visiting London to do some interviews for the new season of True Blood and I was meeting him in his hotel room for dinner. Anyway, he was trying out a new ‘friend finder’ app on his phone and somehow worked out I was at the Daily Ear offices. When I arrived at his room, he didn’t ask me about it straight away. He let me string out this whole complicated story about my day at the Guardian but he knew it was complete rubbish. And once it was clear I was lying through my teeth and had something to hide, he fixed me with this cold stare and said, “Now, why don’t you tell me about your day at the Daily Ear instead.” You really know when there’s no point lying anymore, and that was one of those moments. So I slowly told him everything that I’ve just told you. I explained my great plan, and how I was going to teach them all a lesson. I told him how someone needed to do something, and that it wasn’t right that they’d all just walked away from what happened to you like it didn’t matter, with no consequences at all. And I told him how I owed it to you, to your memory, to make sure they paid.
And then he gave me the most astonishing telling-off that I’ve ever had. He didn’t raise his voice or use strong language, of course. He just very firmly and clearly told me I was being an idiot, that I was completely out of my depth and that you would be very hurt that I was throwing away my quiet, normal life for a taste of revenge. He talked at me for about 10 minutes straight. He made it clear that I was wrong and that I needed to stop what I was doing immediately. And to be honest, everything he said made absolute sense. I knew that on so many levels he was right. But it’s not a case of right and wrong. It’s about justice, the sort of justice that Chris Lackie and others denied you. And it’s about a little girl who had to grow up without her mum because a greedy, rich family and a group of self-absorbed journalists benefited from ruining an innocent life. So I told Uncle Adam that I loved him but that there was no way I was turning back. I had spent three years planning this and if he really loved me he would walk away and let me carry on. Because there was no way I could stop.
We talked for more than an hour, the same conversation round and round. He told me I was about to ruin my own life, that I was exposing myself to the same media interest as you. “Have you any idea how many years they’ve been trying to find you?” he asked. “How many journalists, and not just the Ear. We’ve built a brick wall around you, to keep you safe, to keep all the information about you safe. But if you do this, not only will they know who you are but you’ll have handed them a ‘public interest’ argument on a plate. They will tell the world that Pearl Martin’s daughter is emotionally unstable and obsessed with revenge. And you will never know a moment’s peace or privacy again.”
“They won’t find me,” I replied, innocently. “I know I can upload all of this anonymously. They will never know it was me.”
But they would, he said. “Do you really think the British press will walk away from this, not knowing who was behind it? Do you really think the Daily Ear team will just accept that it’s a mystery they will never solve? Sweetheart, they will work out it was you and then they will find out who you are. And everything your mum did to hide you away, to protect you from the sort of life she had, it will all have been for nothing.”
He was just desperate to talk me out of it, but he couldn’t. My mind was set, my plan was already underway and there was no going back. I was willing to face the consequences no matter how awful because I needed to do this, to hurt them as much as I possibly could. Eventually Uncle Adam had to accept he was fighting a losing battle. And then he did the most amazing thing. He went into his bedroom and made a call in private. I assume it was to his husband. He was gone for about 15 minutes and when he came back he sat down again and said, “Right, change of plan. I’m not going to stop you, I’m going to help you. I will invest in Project Ear. I’m going to give you a budget and people and al
l the resources you’ll need. But on one condition.”
And that condition was that I let Uncle Adam take the heat. He would be the public face from the start and take complete responsibility for it. Once his people had gathered all the evidence he would launch Project Ear with a press conference and keep up his public profile throughout the whole thing to make sure no one at the Ear or elsewhere in the press would think to look for anyone else. He was going to make sure I stayed a secret. I couldn’t ask that of him. I said no. I would never forgive myself. I know you wouldn’t forgive me either. But he made it clear it was the only way he would allow me to continue. And so I went home, feeling awful. I was so ready to sacrifice myself that I hadn’t ever considered the impact this might have on the people I love. The people who love me. But as I lay in bed that night, my greedy need to have revenge got the better of me. Suddenly I loved the idea that my project was going professional, that I would have people to help me find all those hidden secrets (like who Colin was having an affair with). I’m so sorry, Mum, but I went back to Uncle Adam the next day and I said yes. I said yes I wanted him to help me. And after that, to be honest, the Daily Ear really didn’t stand a chance.