Trapped: The Terrifying True Story of a Secret World of Abuse

by Rosie Lewis

  Any delay in getting help for Phoebe wasn’t Lenke’s fault, not really. Cruelty was bound to be harder to identify if veiled behind the surface gloss of money and prestige. It was likely, I thought, that all of us drifted past abuse of one kind or another as we went about our everyday lives. Manipulative abusers kept their secrets well hidden and sometimes outsiders were too distracted or perhaps wilfully blind, unable to see beyond the veneers that had been carefully constructed.

  That night I dreamed that a sudden earthquake struck the north of England, our house crumbling with the force of its tremor. Desolately, I wandered through the ruins searching for faceless children and shouting their names, all the while knowing in my heart that there was no way of reaching them beneath the rubble. I clawed until my fingers grew bloody and still I didn’t stop but the missing little ones had fallen beyond my reach.

  I woke with a start, enveloped by a feeling of gloom. Thankfully an early text from Maxine proved to be immensely cheering. Apparently Phoebe had announced, ‘Auntie Rosie makes much better pancakes.’ Maxine said that Phoebe was looking forward to our visit and hoping I would bring some pancakes along with me. The contact reassured me that she was willing to stay in touch and the thought that, in some small way, I would remain a part of Phoebe’s life, was enough to quell the anxiety I had for her.

  One morning, not long after she left us, I went into her room for the first time since she’d gone, armed with a box of cleaning equipment and a pair of rubber gloves. Already I had received several calls about new placements but I knew I wasn’t ready to replace Phoebe quite so soon.

  Pulling open the curtains, I saw that Phoebe had taped a picture of a butterfly to the glass. She must have copied one of Emily’s stick-arounds onto a piece of paper then coloured it and cut it out. I wondered whether she did it with the same scissors she had used to harm herself on that shocking day, many months earlier. The colours had faded to brown in the sunlight and so I pulled it off.

  Turning it over in my hand, I saw that she had written on the back.

  To Rosie,

  I love you.

  From Phoebe

  Although she had reached out to me for affection during her time with us, Phoebe had never been verbally demonstrative. To be offered the proof that she had felt such fondness was deeply touching and my eyes brimmed with tears.

  Epilogue

  What a strange, bittersweet time it is when a child has moved on. In some ways it was a relief to go back to being just the three of us: Jamie, Emily and me. It was lovely to spend some undivided time with both of them but it wasn’t an easy transition to make and all of us mourned Phoebe. She had moulded herself a special place in our family and it took us weeks to adjust to the loss.

  In my mind the memory of her took on a sepia tone, as Tess and Harry had. It felt as if they all existed on the other side of a locked door, gone and yet always present, like little ghosts. Maxine was true to her word and sent regular texts during the first couple of weeks after Phoebe had moved on, assuring me that she was coping well at her new school and beginning to make friends. It was a huge comfort to learn that she had overcome yet another hurdle in her young life and I felt even more proud of what she’d achieved.

  I also had an update from Lenke, something I hadn’t expected. She said that the details were sketchy but it seemed the police had bided their time before swooping on the Steadmans’ large house in a dawn raid. Nothing damning was found after an initial search and their laptops and PCs also appeared to be clear, but after intensive analysis by the High Tech Crime Unit, officers found hundreds of images of child abuse on the hard drive. The Steadmans had clearly tried, unsuccessfully, to delete the evidence of their crimes.

  Although it seemed that they wouldn’t be convicted of abusing their daughter, it was a comfort to know that some sort of justice would be served. Robin Steadman had lost his job and now he and his wife would be registered as sex offenders. I hoped the humiliation would haunt them both for the rest of their days.

  A date had also been set for the final hearing for sometime in May 2010. Outrageously, I thought, having been charged with the possession of vile images, her parents were continuing to contest the care plan of long-term foster care. They were insistent that Phoebe should be rehabilitated into their care but there was little doubt they would fail, no matter how much money they spent on fancy lawyers, and Lenke was confident of securing a Full Care Order.

  Phoebe’s new foster carer had pencilled in a reunion date for mid-April, but in late March she wrote saying that Phoebe was still asking to come back to me, so she felt it was too soon for her to cope with a temporary meeting. I convinced myself that Maxine was simply buying time, delaying the news that she intended to cut all ties with us. Though I could understand that as a long-term fosterer she still had all the statutory visits from social workers to put up with and could probably do without yet more people to fit into her schedule, it made me sad to think we wouldn’t see her again, not only for us but also for what the sudden ending might do to Phoebe.

  But at the beginning of May, characteristic of our whole experience with Phoebe, I got yet another surprise – Maxine rang to say that she now felt confident enough in Phoebe’s attachment to her to allow us slowly back into her life. It was a cold day in mid-May when I made the journey to Birmingham to visit them. Emily and Jamie had wanted to come but I felt their presence might be a bit too much for Phoebe to cope with and Maxine had said she preferred to test the water first, and gauge how Phoebe would react when she saw me again.

  If the visit went well we had discussed the possibility of establishing a regular meeting, perhaps bi-monthly, so that the children could all stay in touch. Strangely, I felt increasingly nervous as I neared their house. Despite much of the time she had spent with us being fraught with tense emotion, or perhaps even because of it, we had developed a deep bond. It was difficult to tell what effect distance and the passing of time would have on our relationship. Although I had wanted Phoebe to transfer her attachment from me to Maxine, I secretly hoped there was a part of her that still valued the time we had spent together.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried – Phoebe ran out to the car as I pulled into their sweeping driveway, a wide smile on her face. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, as did Maxine, who was equally welcoming.

  ‘Auntie Rosie!’ she said, eager to get the car door open. As I climbed out, she wrapped me in a tight hug then pulled me eagerly into the house to show me the new wallpaper in her bedroom. I spent a lively two hours with the new family, Phoebe filling me in on all the places they’d visited and updating me on the friends she had made in her new school. All the while Maxine kept us supplied with plenty of tea and home-make cake.

  When it was time to leave I was pleased that Phoebe wrapped me in a brief hug then reclaimed her rightful place beside Maxine. There were no tears, just a pleading to bring Emily and Jamie along next time, which, with a confirming glance from Maxine, I promised to do.

  I knew I would never forget the raw horror of Phoebe’s disclosures, but seeing her so happily settled in a new, small but loving family was balm enough to soothe the memory. Maxine walked to the end of the driveway to see me off, clasping one of Phoebe’s hands. As I drove away, with the image of them huddled together and waving in my rear-view mirror, I knew I was ready to take on a new challenge.

  I resolved that when I got home I would call Des and ask him to put me back on the vacancy register.

  About a year after the move, Phoebe called one day after school to tell me that Maxine had asked if she would like to join the family officially. Social services had agreed that adoption would be in Phoebe’s best interests and Phoebe herself was tripping over her words, she was so excited. We were both crying as we spoke on the telephone and laughing at the same time.

  And so on a bright summer’s day in late summer, Maxine and Phoebe attended court for the adoption hearing. Emily, Jamie and I, having been invited by Maxine to join th
em for a celebratory lunch, waited outside. The judge presented Phoebe with a new birth certificate and when she emerged from the court she ran down the steps towards us waving the official papers high above her head, a beaming smile on her face.

  I was stunned by the change in Phoebe that day. She had gained quite a bit of weight by then and her eyes had completely lost their sunken quality but the transformation was more than physical. I don’t know if it was the passing of time that was so healing or the confidence that came with knowing she truly belonged somewhere, but she seemed to walk a few inches taller as she led the way to the restaurant, flanked by Emily and Jamie. I couldn’t have been more delighted.

  Phoebe is now in a mainstream secondary school, doing well academically, and has developed a passion for art. We still visit the family regularly.

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  Chapter 1

  Funny the little details that tend to stick in your mind, isn’t it? The day Justin, the first foster child to ever be placed with us, was due to arrive – a bright but chilly day on the last Saturday before Christmas – all I kept going back to were the same old two things. One of them was just how desperate the social worker seemed to be that we should agree to have him, and the other was the fact that I had black hair.

  And it wasn’t just me either. My daughter Riley, now 21 and so supportive of the whole project from day one, had the same head of black hair that I did. We’d both of us inherited our raven locks from my mother and one thing I knew – and I really knew so little about Justin – was that he had a very powerful aversion to women with black hair.

  I straightened his England football-team-themed duvet cover for the umpteenth time that morning, and tried to put the negative thoughts right out of my mind. I was trained to do this job, I told myself. So was my husband, Mike. Plus I already had several years of experience looking after difficult children. And this was the new career I’d chosen for myself, wasn’t it?

  But along with the anxiety, I also felt proud. I looked around me and found myself smiling with satisfaction at what I saw. I certainly couldn’t have thought harder about the way to do his new bedroom. Because one of the few things we did know was that Justin liked football, we quickly settled on that as a theme. So we’d done out the spare room in black and white and splashed out on some special wallpaper that made one of the walls look like it was a crowd at a stadium. We’d laid a green carpet, for a pitch, added a football-themed frieze, and I’d trawled charity shops endlessly for the books, games and jigsaws that I knew my own kids had enjoyed at his age. We also knew he liked movies, especially Disney films, apparently, so we’d bought him a starter pack of those too. I had agonised over every detail, every decision, every tiny item, because it meant so much to me to do everything I could to help him feel at home. The one thing I didn’t know was what team he supported, so, till I did know, I’d pinched my son Kieron’s old duvet cover for him. I reasoned that England was a pretty safe bet for any football-mad eleven-year-old boy.

  I checked the time on the big blue clock Mike had fixed on the wall. Almost eleven. They would be here any minute, I realised. And, as if by magic, I heard Mike call my name from downstairs.

  ‘They’re coming up the path, love,’ he said.

  I had met Justin already, of course, just the previous Tuesday. In fact, it had only been a week since we’d been asked to consider our first placement at that point, and only eight days since I’d left my old job at the local comprehensive school. It had been an intense week, too, with everything seeming to move so quickly, and even though the way all these things were done was still new to us, Mike and I had both felt there was a real sense of desperation in the air. John Fulshaw, our link worker from the fostering agency we worked for, had been clear: this was not something we should undertake lightly. How little did we understand then just how true his words would be.

  We’d been assigned John as our link worker when we’d first applied to be foster carers and we’d struck up a good relationship with him right away. By now we also felt we knew him quite well, so if John was anxious it naturally made me anxious too. Not that we weren’t anticipating challenges. What Mike and I had signed up for wasn’t mainstream fostering. It was an intense kind of fostering, intended to be short term in nature, which involved a new and complex programme of behaviour management. It had been trialled and was proving very successful in America, and had recently started to be funded by a number of councils in the UK. It was geared to the sort of kids who were considered unfosterable – the ones who had already been through the system and for whom the only other realistic future option was moving permanently into residential care. And not just ordinary residential care either – they’d usually already tried that – but, tragically, in secure units, many of these kids having already offended.

  ‘The problem,’ John had told me, during our first chat about Justin, ‘is that we know so little about him and his past. And what we do know doesn’t make for great reading, either. He’s been in the care system since he was five and has already been through twenty failed placements. He’s been through a number of foster families and children’s homes, and now it’s pretty much last chance saloon time. So what I’d like to do is to come round and discuss him with you both personally. Tomorrow, if it’s not too short notice.’

  As a family, we’d talked about that phone call all evening, trying to read anything and everything into John’s few scraps of information about the child he wanted us to take on. What could the boy have done to end up having had twenty failed placements in just six short years? It seemed unfathomable. Just how damaged and unfosterable could he be? But since we knew almost nothing, it was pointless to speculate. We’d know all that soon enough, wouldn’t we?

  Not that, come morning, there was much more to know. John had arrived and, as soon as I’d made us all coffee, he got straight down to the business of telling us.

  ‘It was a neighbour who alerted social services initially,’ he explained. ‘He’d been to their house several times, it seems, begging for food.’

  We remained silent, while John sat and read from his notes. ‘Family Support followed it up, by all accounts, but it seems the mother managed to convince them that she was coping okay – that she had just been through a bad patch at the time. Justin himself, it seems, corroborated this – certainly managing to convince them that the right course of action was to let things ride for a while. And then two months later, emergency services were called out to the family home by a neighbour. Seemed he’d been playing with some matches and burned the house down. Apparently the mother had left him and his two younger brothers –’

  ‘Younger brothers? How old were they?’ I asked him.

  John checked his notes again. ‘Let me see … two and three when it happened. And they’d all apparently been left alone in the house while she went off to visit a boyfriend. Seems the family dog died in the fire as well.’

  Mike and I exchanged glances, but neither of us spoke. We could both see there was more for him to tell us.

  John glanced at us both, then continued. ‘It was after that that the mother agreed to have him taken into care. Under a voluntary care order – seems no fight was put up there about holding on to him; she was happy to let him go and accept a support package for the younger two – and he was placed in a children’s home in Scotland, with contact twice monthly agreed. But it broke down after a year. It seems the people at the home felt they could do nothing for him. He was apparently’ – he lowered his eyes to check on the exact wording – ‘deemed angry, aggressive, something of a bully, and unable to make and keep friends. They felt he needed to be placed in a family situation for him to make any sort of progress.’

  He leaned back in his chair then, while we took things in. The language used could have been describing an older child, certainly – an angry teenager, most definitely – but a five-year-old child? That seeme
d shocking to me. He was still just a baby.

  ‘But he didn’t,’ I said finally.

  John shook his head. ‘No, sadly, he didn’t. Because of his behaviour, he’s been nowhere for more than a few months – no more than a few weeks, in some cases – since then. He’s physically attacked several of his previous carers and has simply worn the rest of them out. So there we are,’ he said, closing his file and straightening the papers within it. ‘Twenty placements and we’re all out of options.’ He looked at both of us in turn now. ‘So. What do you think?’

  And now here I was, just a few days before Christmas, and this child, this ‘unfosterable’ eleven-year-old child who’d burned down his home at the tender age of just five, was about to become our responsibility.

  I walked down the stairs just as I could see a shadow approaching in the glass of the front door. I noticed how smoothly my hand slid down the banister, and smiled. I’d been cleaning and polishing like a mad woman all morning, flicking my duster manically here, there and everywhere, and moving all sorts of stuff around the place. Mike, bless him, had been getting on my nerves since we’d got up, assuming, with his man-wisdom, that since I was obviously so stressed, that he’d be doing me a favour by anticipating my every next move, and being one step behind me at all times.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I’d snapped at him, not half an hour earlier. ‘How can I get anything done in this place with you on my tail all the time?’