Groomed

by Casey Watson

  The officer duly noted the difference in Keeley’s appearance. ‘Well, young man,’ he said, standing up, ‘I think we have all we need now, thanks to you.’ He held a hand out for Tyler to shake. ‘Excellent job. Have you thought about a career in the police force? Because thanks to your detective work, I reckon we’ll have her found and have her back with us all in no time.’

  Tyler couldn’t have looked more puffed up with pride.

  ‘I hope you’re right about that,’ I told the officer as I saw them both out. ‘I still have to explain all of this to social services – which I’m dreading, as you can imagine. I still can’t believe she’s done it. Let alone deceive us all this time.’

  The officer was a kind man – or very well versed in keeping spirits up. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said immediately. ‘From what we have here, she sounds like a very determined, very street-smart young lady. I think she’d have been able to hoodwink anybody if she put her mind to it, don’t you? So please try not to worry too much. Sounds like she’s the one calling the shots here. And, of course, we’ll keep you informed every step of the way.’

  I just hoped there wouldn’t be too many.

  I went back into the living room to find Mike and Tyler conducting a post-mortem. ‘Jamie?’ Tyler huffed. ‘I bet that’s not even his own name. And by the looks of his photo, he’s well old!’

  Older than Keeley, certainly, but given what she’d told me about the ‘clients’ in recent business dealings, not exceptionally so.

  ‘Does he say his age in any of those messages?’ he asked, gesturing towards Tyler’s laptop.

  Tyler scrolled for a bit, scanning for numbers. ‘Yes! Here we are. Twenty-one. So I’m right, aren’t I? Like I said, well old.’

  I wasn’t sure I’d consider twenty-one ‘well old’, but I let it lie.

  ‘Here you go, love,’ Mike said to me. He pointed. ‘Only, hang on – he says his profile picture’s an old one. Hang on …’ He read the message. ‘No, he doesn’t say he’s twenty-one. She says it’s a nice picture, and he says it was taken at his twenty-first birthday. So he could certainly be older, couldn’t he?’

  Great, I thought. ‘That may not even be a picture of him,’ I pointed out. ‘How do we even know it is? How does she know it is? This guy could be anyone!’

  Tyler shook his head then. ‘Nah, Mum,’ he said. ‘I reckon he’s legit.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  He shrugged. ‘I dunno. I just can. It’s Keeley who’s been doing the whole “alter ego” bit here. She’s basically just told him a bunch of nonsense.’

  ‘You mean lies,’ Mike pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, exactly,’ Tyler said. ‘And look how many friends she’s racked up on this profile. A right bunch of randoms. She must have been friending people in hyper-drive.’

  He scrolled through a screen of mug shots of the fake Keeley’s unwitting ‘friends’, a wall of diverse and presumably unknowing faces. Well, I thought, they called it Facebook, didn’t they?

  But why, exactly? Had she been in search of Jamie all along? ‘Why would anyone want to spend so much time making “friends” with a bunch of strangers?’ I said. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s just what she does, Mum,’ Tyler explained. ‘It’s how she spends her time – specially lately, since she’s been staying in so much. And for no reason other than she probably gets a kick out of all these blokes fancying her or something. She’s a weirdo.’

  That’s the spirit, I thought. I ruffled Tyler’s hair. And I was just wondering when or if to broach how he felt on the matter when, without warning, the laptop screen went black.

  ‘Oh for f— I mean damn,’ Tyler said, reaching for the charger cord at the back. He then looked across at the plug and groaned.

  ‘What?’ Mike said.

  ‘The plug. The switch wasn’t on. Well, that’s that then.’

  ‘That’s what?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve probably lost access. It’s doubt it’s going to log us back in automatically. You have to check a box –’

  ‘Well, no matter,’ Mike said. ‘We have what we need. And if it came to it, I’m sure the police would find a way in if they needed to. At least, I imagine so, don’t you? But we can always cross that bridge when we come to it. The bottom line is that if she doesn’t want to come back she won’t. Anyway, speaking of weirdos,’ he said, with a change in his tone. ‘What’s with that bag of mad costumes in the car? I nearly had forty fits when I opened it to see what it was.’

  Tyler grinned. Perhaps he and Mike were adopting the pragmatic approach on purpose. Perhaps they really were feeling pragmatic. I wished I was. Despite the picture we’d all now painted, of this street-smart and predatory young female, I knew I wouldn’t stop worrying till I knew Keeley was safe.

  ‘They’re me and Denver’s morph suits,’ Tyler said. ‘Zombie morph suits. Good, aren’t they? He’s borrowed them off his cousin for us to wear on Hallowe’en.’

  Which was only a couple of days away. He and Denver were taking Levi and Jackson trick or treating round the local area, while Riley, Lauren and I were doing a smaller-scale version with Marley Mae and Dee Dee, in our street. Modern Hallowe’en celebrations, eh? On the one hand, a pair of teeny, sweet-looking pumpkins, and on the other – because the boys wanted to look as gruesome as possible – a quartet of blood-spattered undead.

  Tyler frowned then. ‘Can we still do it, though? You know, if Keeley isn’t found by then? She was planning on coming with us. Well, at least,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that’s what she said.’

  Mike stood up and clapped Tyler on the shoulder. ‘No sense worrying about that yet, mate. Anyway, I’m sure she’ll be back, but if she isn’t – if she is determined not to be found, which might be the case – then, yes, Hallowe’en will still happen. There’s no need for you and the little ones to be missing out.’

  ‘You reckon she won’t want to be found then?’ Tyler asked him, closing his laptop.

  Mike shrugged. ‘Who knows, son? Who knows?’

  Mike was trying to ensure that life went on for all of us, I knew that. But as the weekend wore on and there was no news about Keeley, I couldn’t help worry gnawing away at me.

  Given the potential gravity of the situation, I’d phoned both Danny – who seemed not at all surprised by this development – and also John Fulshaw, who, knowing me as he did, and, of course, how much I’d be fretting, was at pains to reassure me we weren’t to blame.

  ‘Easy to say, but a lot harder to do,’ I pointed out, after I’d listened to him saying exactly that. ‘I mean I know what you’re saying, but the fact still is that she set this profile thingy up after she moved in with us. Why did she feel the need to do that? She hadn’t done it at her last carers – well, as far as anyone knows – so what was so bad about living with us that she felt she needed to do this?’

  ‘Casey, stop it,’ John said. ‘For one thing, how the hell do any of us know that this was the first time she’d done it? She might have loads of Facebook profiles, mightn’t she? And even if she doesn’t now, how do we know she hasn’t set up and deleted several of them? Given where they were with her when she came to us, I’d say that’s not outside the bounds of possibility, wouldn’t you? And if that’s not the case, how do we know it wasn’t one of her new college friends that encouraged her?’

  ‘The college course I persuaded her to attend,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Casey, stop it!’ John said again, more forcefully this time. ‘Look, we don’t know. We might never know, but one thing we do know is that this isn’t your fault. So worry if you must, but stop beating yourself up. Just accept that sometimes things like this just happen.’

  Yes, but not to me, was my unspoken and rather naïve response. Because, why not me? It could happen to anyone.

  When you are involved in foster care – or social services, or child protection, or in any branch of the emergency services – you are exposed to a world that many try not to think abo
ut. A world of abuse and neglect and unimaginable cruelty. And what you’re not aware of when you start out, you soon become all too aware of. Pretty much everyone who works with children in this kind of way will one day have it laid painfully bare.

  And even before that, before the day comes when you have that personal ‘this can’t be happening under all our noses but in fact does’ moment – you are given training, of all kinds, to prepare you for the day that happens, because you’re not going to be of much use to children whose lives have been blighted if you’re flapping about not being able to believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.

  So it wasn’t as if I was really that naïve about Keeley. I knew where she had come from, and how her childhood had been so horribly blighted, and I knew that for every kid who climbed out of their personal emotional abyss, many more went on to lead difficult and fractured adult lives. A few of them succumbed to drink, drugs and crime, and some never made adulthood at all. And though everyone did what they could for these children, the sad truth was that there were some for whom little could be done. They were already on that lonely road to nowhere.

  I tried to keep positive. To detach myself, even. And when that failed, to reassure myself that what everyone said was probably true – that on some level, at least, Keeley was able to look after herself. And to console myself with the facts that we did know for certain – that Keeley had been the one calling the shots (whatever that meant) and that far from being groomed by some horrible character she had both wittingly progressed her relationship with the mysterious ‘Jamie’, and willingly taken the most recent step of taking herself off with whatever funds she’d been able to coerce him into sending her. So while what she’d found might not be entirely to her liking, she did have sufficient initiative to extricate herself from it.

  ‘Well, yes. But only if that’s what she wants, Mum.’

  It was now Hallowe’en night, almost the end of half-term week, and Riley, who’d said this, was being a kind daughter; was giving me the gift of extreme patience, as I dissected what had happened for the umpteenth time since the weekend. Which amounted, up to now, to almost nothing. Bring sixteen was a big deal when it came to such matters. Again, something I knew, but was now becoming intensely frustrated by. But short of sneaking into the local police station and eavesdropping while her case was discussed, there was almost nothing I could do. I’d been told the previous morning that they would get in touch if they had anything to tell us, and since this was about the third time we’d had practically the same conversation, there was no way I could call them (or John or Danny – both busy with other cases) again. Not unless I had found out anything else that might be of use to them. Which I hadn’t. And, again, because Keeley was a minor rather than a child now, I also had to accept that the sort of resources they’d allocate to a missing child who’d disappeared in mysterious circumstances would not, as yet anyway, have been allocated to her. Yes, they were looking for her, and doing their level best to find her – to the limits of those resources – but if she didn’t want to be found, then their hands were somewhat tied, especially if she wasn’t doing anything that would make her particularly visible, like wandering the streets in the small hours, under the influence of illegal substances, or dabbling in a little light petty crime.

  I sighed. I knew all too well that what Riley said was true. ‘And I mean,’ she went on, ‘how do you know she isn’t curled up somewhere watching EastEnders at this very moment?’ She rubbed her gloved hands together. It was a bitterly cold evening. ‘Like anyone sensible flipping would?’

  I resisted the urge to point out that Keeley had never shown any interest in watching soaps. What did I know anyway? Perhaps that was exactly what she was doing. Not traipsing round the street, shivering, with no feeling left in her toes.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ I said instead, as I held open the front gate of number 57, while Lauren shepherded the girls up the path. ‘I’ve got to stop stressing about things I can do nothing about.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Riley as we followed them.

  ‘Oh, don’t you three just look adorable!’ cooed Mrs Villiers as she opened her front door – to a pumpkin and a Disney princess-witch, as it turned out, Dee Dee having refused to don anything that didn’t complement the Elsa-from-Frozen costume she’d recently inherited from Marley Mae. The only additions she’d countenanced, apart from a trowel-load of face paint and glitter, had been a couple of smears of fake blood on her cheeks.

  ‘Trick or treat!’ Marley Mae bellowed in response to this greeting, holding out the plastic pumpkin-shaped bucket she had for the purpose, and Mrs Villiers, who was a widow in her late sixties, and had seen many a trick or treater in her time, did a good job of pretending to be so frightened by my granddaughter’s whoooing and gurning that she had no choice but to hand over all the sweets she possessed.

  She grinned at Lauren, Riley and me over the girls’ heads. ‘Drawn the short straw, then,’ she said, laughing as she mimed a shiver. ‘Though by the look of their haul, you must be on the home straight, at least. Bet you can’t wait to get back into the warm.’

  ‘I wish we were,’ Riley said with feeling.

  ‘Well, you could always have a pit-stop and thaw out in here with a sherry,’ Mrs Villiers suggested. And I was just pondering doing so, because Mrs Villiers was so nice (and often lonely, I knew) when I felt my mobile vibrate in my coat pocket.

  I slipped my hand in, pulling the glove off my other hand with my teeth in order to answer it, and as soon as I saw the display – an unknown number – I just had a feeling this might be news.

  ‘Excuse me a mo,’ I said, waggling it. ‘Just got to take this …’

  ‘Is that Mrs Watson?’ a male voice asked.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said, trying to read his tone of voice and failing.

  ‘This is Police Constable Colin Heggarty,’ he said. He could have been reading out the football scores. ‘About Keeley McAlister. We’ve found her.’

  Chapter 16

  I told the officer to hold on, made my hurried excuses and, leaving Riley and Lauren to chaperone the little ones for the remaining visits, took myself and my mobile phone back down the street to our house, the better to hear what was going on.

  ‘So did she hand herself in?’ I asked him once he’d explained the gist of what had happened, which was that Keeley was now in a far-distant police station, along with her mystery man, Jamie.

  He chuckled at my choice of word. ‘Not so much “hand” herself in,’ he said, ‘as extricate herself from a less than satisfactory situation. And it was really by chance that we found her. We’d had a call to alert us to some rough sleepers in the park, and –’

  ‘Rough sleepers? You mean she’s been sleeping in a park all this time?’

  ‘No, no, not as far as we know. Only last night, apparently, and to be honest, I think she was pretty pleased to see us.’

  ‘And you arrested them? The pair of them?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ he said. ‘We simply asked if they’d both come to the station and make statements. No charges at this point, and I doubt there are going to be any. Mr Gough was in possession of a small amount of marijuana, but we’re really just crossing I’s and dotting T’s with this one. You know how it is, Mrs Watson. In case young Keeley has something more to say on the matter later.’ As in making some kind of trumped-up allegation, I thought. A wave of irritation passed through me. She really had been leading everyone a merry dance. Except it hadn’t been so merry. It had been a major cause of stress for me, and I had to repeat my mantra, ‘It’s the behaviour, not the child,’ several times in my head in order to make the irritation go away. ‘Anyway, the main point,’ PC Heggarty was continuing as I did so, ‘is what the position is now re your good selves. Are you and your husband prepared to have Keeley brought back to you? Only we’re all but done here and need to know where to take her. And, from our point of view, tonight would be good.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ I told
him. The words came out automatically. Though, in fact, were we? Mike might feel very differently, I knew. Though I couldn’t ask him because he, Kieron and Riley’s David were currently in the pub, having a ‘well-earned’ drink while watching some football match or other, after manfully clearing up our Hallowe’en buffet tea. ‘Yes, yes, of course we are,’ I said again, this time for Mike. ‘Well, that’s assuming she wants to come back, that is. Given what’s happened, that’s by no means a given. And what about this lad –’

  ‘Hardly a lad,’ he said. ‘Mr Gough is thirty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-five?’ I squeaked. ‘Seriously?’ I knew I sounded like Tyler. But, really? Thirty-five? She’d ended up sleeping rough in a park with a man in his thirties? What sort of down and out must he be? And how come? This all seemed so at odds with the profile we’d seen on Facebook that I no longer knew what to think. All I did know was that the whole débâcle had suddenly taken on a much more sinister tone.

  But PC Heggarty was quick to dampen down my by now hotly fired-up imagination. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But we don’t think it’s been quite the sort of thing you might be imagining. As I believe you already pointed out yourself at the weekend, it’s Keeley who has driven this, not the other way around. The man’s vulnerable himself. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I tell you he has mild learning difficulties.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I said, torn now by an instinctive sympathy for the man and years of experience in dealing with challenging children, for whom such a label, in a parent, could spell so much trouble. ‘Mild’ didn’t necessarily go hand in hand with ‘benign’, after all. Though it seemed this Mr Gough wasn’t known to social services for anything more worrying than being a potential risk to himself. He clearly was vulnerable; he’d been under Adult Services at various points in his adult life – though drifting under the radar from time to time on account of his always moving around. And this time into the clutches of Keeley. It could have been so much worse, I mused. For either of them. ‘And what does he have to say for himself anyway?’ I asked.