I shook my head, even so, because it still stuck in my throat. I understood the notion of a man controlling a woman in that way – we’d even had lectures about it during training – but even so, my instinct was still strong: how could a mother let such disgusting things happen to her child? Wouldn’t a mother do anything to protect her child from harm? Why hadn’t she taken Darby and run away? ‘I’m sorry John,’ I said. ‘But she must take some responsibility for this. It was her own daughter, for God’s sake.’
‘Oh yes,’ John agreed, and surprisingly quickly. ‘And trust me, she is most definitely taking responsibility. Through the courts. She has admitted her part, in detail –’
‘Good. Well, not so much good, as good for justice.’
He raised a hand. ‘And she’s been honest. Says she’s more than happy to be sent to prison –’
‘Really?’
He smiled grimly. ‘Oh, yes. Champing at the bit to be banged up, by all accounts. Apparently, she’s happy to do anything that will help her get away from him.’
His words began to sink in. So it was really that bad, then. ‘But what about Darby?’ I asked. ‘What has she said about Darby?’
‘That – and I quote – she is now in the best place.’
‘But doesn’t she care?’ Silly question. Given what we already knew.
‘Apparently not. As far as her mother is concerned, Darby seems to be dispensable. She’s expressed no interest in seeing her again. Indeed, thinks it probably best that she doesn’t.’
‘But she’s her daughter!’ I was aghast. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So this vile woman had simply held her hands up and said, ‘Fine, you got me, now take me away, I want to forget all about it’? But almost as soon as I bridled I remembered that, in all likelihood, you’d go back into Darby’s mother’s history and find a whole host of abuses had been visited on her too. Men like Darby’s father chose their partners very carefully. And evil was invariably not born but made.
I looked out to the fairy lights Mike had wound through one of the bushes in the garden. And which one of us had, that morning, forgotten to switch off. In the daylight, the light coming from them was barely visible. But it was still shining, reminding me of the one thing we could do. Give Darby Christmas – a little light, a little respite from the darkness, by which to see her way into some sort of future.
Chapter 7
‘Morning, love,’ Mike whispered as he shook me awake. ‘Merry Christmas.’
I smelt coffee. Smelt pine. Realised what day it was. ‘6 a.m.,’ he added, obviously anticipating my first question. ‘I knew you’d want to be up early to make a start.’
He was right. Christmas Day in our house was the most hectic of the entire year and, because I was a control freak and found it hard to delegate domestically, I always had a ton of things to do. Which was not to say I minded. The day would surely come when I had to hand the reins over. When, as with my own parents, I’d be poured a sherry and told to put my feet up. And I didn’t want that happening anytime soon.
First up, I had to play Santa Claus. I had carefully wrapped up all of Darby’s presents the night before, as she slept, and then hidden them out of sight just in case she got up during the night. Like all children of her age, she needed to believe that Santa’s helpers or, ideally, the great man himself, had delivered the gifts and placed them underneath the tree in the wee small hours.
‘What, no eggnog?’ I joked to Mike as I picked up my coffee. ‘I’ll just drink this, then, and we can then take Darby’s pressies downstairs.’
Mike shook his head. ‘No need. All done,’ he said. ‘All nicely stacked beneath the tree. And I’ve even peeled a huge pan of sprouts for you.’
Sprouts were my least favourite vegetable and my least favourite chore. Well, bar the chore of eating six of them as part of my Christmas dinner, which bizarre ritual dated back to when Riley and Kieron were little. On this one day, I had this thing that if I didn’t down a few of them, I’d no business making them either.
I grinned at my husband. ‘Okay, spill. What are you after?’
He looked pained. ‘Absolutely nothing! I did it for love. Well, and as a down payment on a leave pass for the football tomorrow afternoon. But mostly for love,’ he added quickly.
And I believed him, because we both knew it would be a particularly busy day. My parents were joining us for dinner, as were Riley, David and the kids, and Kieron, Lauren and their new baby Dee Dee.
And, of course, Darby, who had been much on my mind since John’s visit. She’d been absolutely no trouble in the intervening forty-eight hours or so, but neither had she shown very much interest in the coming revels, and I wondered about her family Christmases past. This, too, I understood, because we’d fostered all sorts of children and, difficult as it had been for me to believe it before we became foster parents, there were children for whom it really had little meaning, hard though it was to avoid.
These were kids who really did live on the edges of society. Children who were kept out of school, who had no televisions, who were part of no normal community. Children who had nothing, and no expectation of ever getting anything either; no presents, no parties, no fun. Children whose parents were so poor they actively avoided anything to do with Christmas, and children who’d been so badly abused, scarred and neglected that they didn’t really know what it was to be happy. I had a feeling Darby fitted into the latter category.
Which was why it mattered so much that we gave her a Christmas she could revisit as a happy time in her memory in years to come. And hopefully to an extent that it went some way to softening the memory of being taken away from all she knew.
Because the developments with her mother had brought it home to me that she was done with her former life now. That, although she didn’t know it, she’d in all likelihood never see either parent again. A clean break. Which, given she was still so young, was probably best. ‘Should I go wake her now?’ I asked Mike for the tenth time in as many minutes, having finished the bacon and eggs we’d prepared to set us up for the day.
He checked the time: 7 a.m. And, at long last, relented, even if it was while bearing his ‘you’re a fifty-year-old woman, for heavens’ sake’ expression. ‘Go on then,’ he said. And I was straight out of the blocks.
As Mike had already predicted, Darby was still half asleep – there was clearly no 4 a.m. badgering of parents in her repertoire. I shook her gently awake and she started, her eyes struggling to focus. ‘Father Christmas?’ she asked then, sitting upright, and presumably remembering the carrots, mince pie and sherry that we’d put out for Santa and his reindeer before she went to bed. ‘Has he left me stuff?’
‘He most certainly has,’ I said, pulling back the covers for her.
‘But Casey,’ she said as she slid her warm little body out of bed, ‘I was thinking last night. How did he find me?’
‘I sent him a letter, of course,’ I said. ‘That’s what we always do when we have children staying at Christmas.’
‘To the North Pole?’
‘Of
