he was even then deep in conversation with the head. Perhaps he wasn’t, but either way I knew he wouldn’t mind us taking refuge in his room. There was a box of tissues on his windowsill and, seeing it, I grabbed a handful. ‘Here, love,’ I said to Imogen, ‘now have a blow and wipe your eyes and then you can tell me what’s upsetting you, okay?’
She duly took the tissues and blew her nose, but it was like stopping a leaky dam. She was still crying and I suspected she would continue to do so, until such time as she got this huge weight off her chest. But the speaking bit – that was probably going to be the hard part.
‘Imogen,’ I said, taking a seat opposite her, ‘I know this is going to be difficult, now you’ve gone to that place in your head, but, honestly, it’s just a question of starting. If you can just get the first few words out, the rest will be easy, so let’s start at the beginning and get the hardest part over with. Now, before half-term you put your secret letter in my box and you knew I was going to read it – is that what’s upsetting you?’
Again I waited, resisting the urge to fill the lengthening silence, while Imogen again blew her nose and dabbed at the tears on her cheeks. ‘No, Miss,’ she said finally. ‘It’s not that.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘There. That’s a start, isn’t it? Okay, so it’s not that, so has something bad happened?’
She twisted the life out of another bunch of tissues before answering. ‘It was our Bonfire Night, Miss,’ she said. ‘My nan and grandad did a party, for a surprise.’
‘A firework party?’ I prompted.
She nodded. ‘An’ they never told me. And they invited my dad to come. And her.’
Now we were getting somewhere. And that was interesting. Were they trying to build bridges? Help effect a reconciliation? Take the school’s lead and try to get Imogen back home? How ironic. ‘Gerri?’ I asked gently. ‘Your step-mum?’
She nodded. But didn’t speak. So now I did prompt her. ‘And what happened, love?’ I asked her. ‘Did she do something? Hurt you again?’
She shook her head decisively. Wrong track, then. ‘It was the fire,’ she said. ‘And her being there. And the way she kept grinning at me. Miss, she’s horrible! And I knew why she was grinning at me, too. She was doing it to remind me. About how she could set fire to me too.’
She was getting into her stride now, fear and anger helping her to overcome her difficulties. And it was important things stay that way too.
‘Imogen, you know what you told me about how you thought Gerri was going to set fire to you? Do you think you could tell me what you meant? What actually happened? What made you think that would happen?’
And as she started to tell me, I realised that what I’d said to her was true, because once she began, out it came, like a flood.
‘My dad was away working in Italy,’ she said, ‘and was going to be away for two days. And we’d been arguing, like we always did, and she’d refused to let me have anything to eat. And when I went into my room, she locked it – all the rooms in my dad’s house have keys because of valuables –’
‘Valuables?’
‘Because my dad works away lots.’
‘Ah, okay.’
‘Anyway, she said I could stay there till I stopped being horrible and I told her I’d scream out the window so the neighbours could hear me and she told me she’d tell them I was horrible and naughty and that I screamed to get attention, because that’s what she always said she’d say if I told her I’d tell on her. So I told her I’d kick the door in and tell my dad, but she didn’t take any notice, and in the end, after hours and hours, I must have fell asleep. And then when I woke up it was really dark – it was night-time by now, I think, and I woke up and I was wet and I could smell something funny and at first I thought I must have peed the bed. I’d never done that, not since I was really, really little, but I was warm and wet and then I saw her, sitting in my chair. Which was really frightening, and when I sat up she told me I’d better not move too much because I might go up in flames. I didn’t really know what she was on about at first, but then she showed me. She had my dad’s petrol can – you know those green plastic ones you get in petrol stations? One of those. And she had this lighter. And she kept flicking the flame on in front of me, and she told me I was wet because she’d soaked me in dad’s emergency petrol and that she’d woken me up so that I would have a chance to say a prayer before she burned me to death.’
To say I couldn’t believe what I was hearing was wrong, because, for reasons that had no basis in evidence, I did believe it. But, even so, a part of me still couldn’t believe it – how could anyone inflict such cruelty on a child?
In years to come I would have that question answered, and comprehensively, but right then I asked the question that seemed the only one to ask. ‘Love,’ I said gently, ‘did this actually happen? This wasn’t just part of some horrible dream?’
‘Yes, Miss!’ she said immediately. ‘I mean she didn’t actually burn me. And it wasn’t even petrol. She’d just poured water over me. That’s why I thought I’d peed, because it was warm, but she told me it was petrol. And I could smell it. She’d put some on a hankie, so I could smell it …’
‘I’m sorry, love,’ I rushed to reassure her. ‘Of course I believe you. So what happened next?’
‘I was terrified. She kept flicking the lighter on and off. So I begged her not to burn me and she started laughing and telling me I was pathetic and telling me I had to beg some more. I had to say, Please, I’m so ugly, but please don’t set fire to me, and she kept doing that for ages and then burst out laughing again and telling me it was all a big joke. That’s when she told me about the water and said how silly I was for believing it, and said that if I told dad she really would burn me, and that it was just to show me how she would do it if she had to. That now I knew just how easy it would be, and that I should be very careful not to annoy her.’
Which was when a half-remembered thought suddenly came to me. What had the woman said to me that day, about winning all those trophies? That was it. That it was all about attention to the little details.
I took Imogen into my arms then and tried to soothe her racking sobs. No wonder she’d been stunned into silence, I thought. She must have been scared half to death by such wickedness.
Attention to detail. How easy it would be. This was a monster, and I was speechless myself.
With Kelly already looking after my kids, I used the internal phone to call Jim Dawson, and while we waited for him to arrive I impressed upon Imogen that she was not in any trouble whatsoever. And that, actually, what she’d done had been very brave and very important and that once her nan and grandad knew (I was careful not to mention her father) they would make sure she was safe.
This had brought on another intense bout of sobbing as she revealed that her nan had given her a huge telling off for stomping off to her bedroom and spoiling their party, and how fed up they were getting of her living there.
Which made me wince, but, of course, that was exactly what would happen, her wicked stepmother having done such
