Chapter 18
When I was a young girl, my absolute favourite pastime was reading. I loved stories, I loved books, I loved disappearing into them, and would enjoy nothing more than to lose myself for hours in a fantasy world, where I would naturally become one of the main characters.
My speciality was always the same one: doing good, fighting evil and putting the world to rights generally. I remember glancing up one day, from my usual position curled up on the sofa, surprised to find my mum was also in the room with me, along with two of the neighbours. And they’d been there, chatting away over tea and cake, for quite a while.
‘Look at her,’ Mum had laughed, ‘completely oblivious to the real world. You know, Casey, if you’re not careful you’re going to turn into one of those characters. One day I’ll come in and you’ll have been swallowed up into the pages.’ And she made a sucking sound – swoosh! – and there I was, gone.
And, oh, how I’d wished she was right, and it could happen. I loved my mum and dad and my life and my sister, but, oh, how the thought of that had thrilled me. I so wanted to be just like Nancy Drew (as a girl, Carolyn Keene was my favourite, favourite author) or George, from The Famous Five, with my faithful dog, Timmy. Someone who always knew just what to do in order to make everything right.
That’s just how I felt now, I realised. That I was on a very important mission. Only this time it would be one without lashings of lemonade and faithful dogs – this was to be one in which the characters were real people, and where the ending hadn’t already been written.
And even though that meant I might be on a hiding to nothing, I was confident. And I was also excited. I could only see good coming from this. I just knew that if I could reunite Tyler and his mother (even if it was going to have to be from beyond the grave) it would be the start of a healing process for him.
Within a few days, I was well under way, too. I had by now been given copies of all Tyler’s records; a mixture of original copies of all new and recent documents, as well as historical files which would have included every piece of paperwork from the day he was found with his mother’s body and through the process of him being placed with his dad. The case was closed shortly afterwards, once social services were satisfied about his well-being, so there was a gap before the more recent tranche of paperwork, when the case was re-opened following the knife incident in the spring.
I had everything spread out on the dining table now, and I was busy poring over every word while Tyler was upstairs having a bath. We’d not long finished dinner and Mike was sitting opposite me, helping himself to bubble and squeak – we’d had it for tea with some sausages and there was still plenty left in the pan. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he chirped as he scooped a spoonful onto his plate. ‘Quick, while Miss Marple over there isn’t looking,’ he added, pretending to be talking to himself.
I laughed and put down the file I was currently reading. ‘I can see you, love. I’m simply choosing to ignore you. Have all you like. It’s your waistline after all.’
I picked the file up again and sighed, glancing towards my mobile. ‘I wish Will would phone,’ I said. ‘It’s been days. Or was I supposed to be calling him? I can’t remember if I was meant to ring him. Do you think it’s too late to give him a quick call now?’
I had spoken to both Will and John the day after the funeral and told them of my plans to track down Tyler’s birth mother. Will had been really positive, too – all for it, in fact. And right away promised to try and do some digging. ‘His dad must know,’ he reasoned. ‘They were bound to have told him where she was buried – or where her ashes were scattered – because there would have been a presumption that they might like to take Tyler to visit, wouldn’t there? If I’d been the mother’s social worker, I’d have expected that. And it doesn’t really matter that he had nothing to do with her by that point, because it would have been done in the interest of the child.’
When I spoke to John, on the other hand, I got slightly less enthusiasm for my endeavours. But I suppose I’d expected that even before I made the call.
‘It’s just I’m not sure it’s our remit to do this, Casey,’ he pointed out. ‘Whatever good it might do, it’s also opening a new can of worms, and we have no way of knowing what the repercussions might be. It could be that rather than closing a book, it’s opening a new one, with all the attendant upset and potential for hurt. Which is fine – if it ultimately leads to closure for him, but to do this right now? Is this really the best time? When everything else in his life’s up in the air?’
‘But is there going to be a better time to do this?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ John replied, very firmly. ‘The best time to do it, to my mind, is when his future is more settled – that’s the time to start digging in the past. When he’s placed long term, say, and he’s settled and has the future mapped out a bit. Or, if that’s the way things pan out, when he’s back with his father.’
I noticed the ‘father’ rather than the ‘parents’ and I pounced on it.
‘You really, honestly think that that might still be a possibility, John? Because I don’t. Not for a second. She’s wanted him gone from the outset – that was why she pressed charges over the knife thing. And I’ve seen nothing since to make me think his dad is even trying to change her mind. So she’s got what she wants, hasn’t she? She’s even tried to turn his brother against him. I think there’s as much chance of him going home as the proverbial pig taking wing, that’s what I think.’
‘I know,’ John said. ‘I know. You’re probably right. But even so …’
‘And have you any sighting of a long-term family on the horizon yet?’ I asked him, unwilling to concede now that I had the bit so firmly in my teeth.
Again, a negative. Yes, it seemed the wheels were well in motion, but placements for 12-year-old boys with a record of aggression weren’t generally many to the pound.
‘So there might not be a good time any time soon,’ I persisted. ‘And it’s not as if I have to share anything I find with Tyler unless and until we all agree it’s something we should share. How about that?’
At which point he held his hands up – we were on the phone, but he made a point of telling me he was doing it – and agreed that I could give it a go.
But that had been a few days ago now and so far I’d heard nothing. Not from John – though I wasn’t expecting to – and not from Will either.
Mike looked at me now. ‘Casey, you know as well as I do that Will told you to give him a few days. And that as soon as he knew anything he’d ring you. And in answer to your question, yes, it is too late to ring him anyway. So you’ll just need to be patient for a bit longer.’
Which left me in limbo, which was not a place I wanted to be. Because no matter how carefully and thoroughly I had scrutinised the files, I hadn’t been able to find any clues that would lead me to Fiona’s final resting place. Which I could understand. With everything else going on – the key thing being having a three-year-old apparently orphaned – it wasn’t surprising that his then social worker hadn’t made a note saying, ‘Oh, yes, and the mother’s buried at …’ And I knew there might be a good reason for that, too – mother and son might have had separate social workers. There might have been a more long-standing one, whose remit was to take care of Fiona herself, and a new one, brought in during the pregnancy possibly, whose sole responsibility was to Tyler. And when and if it did come up – say, Tyler’s father had asked in passing – it would probably be the sort of detail that would have been passed on vocally.
And, in that regard, I could only hope Will had had more luck. I knew from John, who’d already spoken to him by the time he’d spoken to me, that Will had at least made an appointment to pop round and see them. And, as Mike had pointed out, all I could do while that happened was be patient, and, because I did value John’s wisdom and saw the rationale behind his reticence, try to keep a lid on Tyler’s hopes as well.
Tyler had gone back to school the previous morning and seemed, so far, to have got on okay. We’d kept him off for a couple of days after the funeral, which felt the right thing to do, both because of his emotional fragility and to allow his head wound to heal a bit – and he certainly couldn’t do PE for a while yet. But it was important to get him back into school and bonding with his peer group; he would heal mentally just as quickly there as he would at home, and I knew the distraction of school would be good for him.
We’d also talked a little more about the teddy bear.
‘Why did you feel you were too big to take him to bed with you?’ I asked him, while we cleared the tea things the night before his return to school. It was a little detail that had been on my mind since he’d told me about it. He couldn’t have been more than ten or so at the time – perhaps younger – and when I remembered back to Kieron and his friends, those notions of things ‘being babyish’ didn’t kick in till much later.
‘Cos of Alicia, of course,’ he said, but almost matter of factly, which was encouraging. ‘She was always telling me I was pathetic to have a teddy bear.’
‘But what about Grant? Didn’t he have a teddy bear?’
‘Course he did. But he was younger, weren’t he? An’ I know she just used to do it to wind me up, like everything else. Like she’d tell me she’d have him off me and put him in the charity bag when I was in school. So I hid him away.’ He shrugged. ‘Seemed safest.’
‘And then forgot all about him when you moved?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, I didn’t forget him,’ he said defensively. ‘Well, I s’pose I kind of did,’ he admitted, ‘what with moving into the new house and everything. But he should be there somewhere, shouldn’t he? But don’t ask her, ask Grant,’ he added, suddenly anxious. ‘She’ll say she can’t find him and then bin him just to be horrible,’ he said.
And, sadly, I suspected he might be right. ‘Well,’ I said, ruffling his hair, ‘we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed, won’t we? But even if we can’t track Billy down, we can buy your mum a new teddy, how about that? Because, to be honest, love, she won’t mind at all. Shall I tell you something about mums, Tyler? They watch over you, always. Whether they’re there or they’re not there, whether they’re alive or they’re gone – that’s what they do – they watch over you for ever.’
‘You know Cam?’ he said, which broke my heart – as if I could ever forget him. ‘He told me that as well. He said his mum told him that when his nan died. She had a star and everything. He showed me once. She’s on the handle of the saucepan. She was good at soup,’ he added, by way of explanation.
Call it the saucepan, call it the plough, call it anything you wanted, but there was something in the constellations that was in the right place, clearly, because finally, by that Friday afternoon, the one just after Firework Night, my patience was rewarded.
Tyler had gone off to school full of excitement about the secret place we were taking him after school that day. And as I waved him off it occurred to me that in the past couple of weeks we’d seen not an inkling of the behaviours that had been responsible for him coming to us; that he had – for the moment anyway, in the midst of all this trauma – become a markedly different boy. He’d yet to reach adolescence, yes, and there would be challenges ahead for whoever ended up providing a home for him – I didn’t doubt that. But, for the moment, he was (to use the holy-grail adage) no trouble at all. So much so, that the only reason I was paying much attention to his chart was because he was keen to earn his points, finish paying my dad’s tenner back and get enough together to buy credit for his phone.
I went back into the kitchen and looked at it now, at all the completed pages filled with ticks, held together with a fat bulldog clip, all bristling with different-coloured page separators. They were evidence that he had moved through all the various levels he’d needed to in order to complete the programme. He was the first kid we’d had in ages who’d completed the entire process and I felt so proud of how he’d managed to achieve that. Soon, the pages would have a golden top sheet, signed off by John Fulshaw himself (which always thrilled the children no end) after which he’d be awarded a formal certificate which would be presented to him at a celebratory party.
But that was something to think about in a couple of weeks rather than now. Right now we were off to Riley’s and I was really looking forward to it. After the emotional intensity of the previous week it would be a tonic, I knew, just to have a glass of something in one hand and a sparkler in the other, going wheee! with Tyler and the grandkids. She’d kindly invited us all round to her house, where David was going to put on a firework display and a bit of a bonfire, while she and I were in charge of jacket potatoes, pie and peas and – the pièce de resistance – my homemade ginger cake with toffee sauce. I was just about to get out my baking apron when the phone rang.
‘Oh hi, John,’ I said when I realised who it was. ‘Have you got some news for me?’
‘Indeed I have,’ was the response, and I noticed his gleeful tone. ‘And you might want to sit down while I tell you all about it. It’s quite a story, actually.’
Intrigued, I took myself and my mobile into the dining room and sat at the table. ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘Do go on.’
And what a story it turned out to be, as well as exactly the kind of news I’d been hoping for. It turned out that Will, despite his silence, had been quite relentless in his quest for knowledge about Tyler’s mum. First off, he had been round to the Broughtons for the visit John had told me about, though on that occasion he’d been mostly rebuffed. No, they didn’t know anything, and no, they didn’t want to be involved in anything.
‘Pretty much as predicted, then,’ I noted.
‘Yes, but then he had some success,’ John went on, ‘in that after what turned out to be quite a simple search through social services, he found out that Fiona had been cremated – a council-run, council-paid service and cremation, organised jointly by her old social worker and her drugs counsellor.’
John went on to tell me that Will also knew the whereabouts of her remains. Her ashes had apparently been scattered in a memorial garden in a crematorium just 25 miles away from us, in a small village close to where she’d died.
‘Sounds positively sylvan,’ I remarked.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ John agreed. ‘But there are villages and there are villages, and I happen to know this one – and it’s not very “escape to the country-esque”. But the more interesting find –’
‘There’s more?’ I asked excitedly.
‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘It turns out that one of the permission forms – I think something to do with the hospital formally releasing the body – was signed by someone with the same surname as Fiona.’
‘Really?’ I could feel my investigator-gene kicking in now.
‘Yes, and of course Will assumed at first that it might be a parent, now deceased. But he thought he’d check, so he trotted back round to the Broughtons where Tyler’s father’s reaction was apparently unexpected.’
‘In what way? Why unexpected? What did he say, then?’
‘Nothing. Just closed down. Gave Will the same story he had in the first place. That he didn’t know anything about it –’
‘But in such a way that made Will sure he did?’
‘Got it in one. And also told him he should leave well alone.’
‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Which would be like a red rag to a bull to me. So what happened next? Did Will press him?’
‘Not right away. And then, just before Will had planned to call Tyler’s dad again, he got a call in his office. From Alicia.’
He paused then. Probably to breathe, but the suspense was killing me. ‘Go on then! Tell me, tell me!’ I almost squealed at him.
‘I’m trying to! And you won’t believe what she told him – Fiona has a sister.’
‘What?!’ This was incredible news. ‘How could no one have ever known that?’
‘Half-sister,’ John clarified. ‘And very easily. I think the only reason it’s come out now is because Alicia’s seen an angle here. That the existence of this woman might well take the heat off them.’
Which, I thought sadly, really did put the lid on any notion that Tyler might ever be going back home again. But right now I was more interested in hearing about this sister whose existence had been unknown to social services. ‘So what happened next?’ I asked John.
‘Will went back to speak to Tyler’s father, obviously – just caught him, in fact, before he went back overseas. And it seems she’s a good bit older than Fiona, and was – and still apparently is – a heroin addict too.’
‘So he’s still in touch with her?’ I asked incredulously.
‘No, he hasn’t seen her since before Tyler was born but still occasionally hears tales about her, through an old school friend of his. Apparently she lives in a world where, if you get in debt with a dealer, you lose your legs, and the last contact he had with her – so he says, anyway – was just after he left Fiona and she threatened to have him “done over”.’
‘Wow!’ I said. ‘Who’d have thought it? So Tyler has an aunt. We know where his mum is, and he has an aunt!’
‘Er, Casey,’ John said, ‘hold your horses. From all that – from all I’ve told you – the two snippets you comment on are that he has an aunt and we know the name of the chapel of rest? Did the rest go straight over your head? You know, the bit about the fact that his aunt is a hardened heroin addict? The fact that Alicia has all but admitted that she’s washing her hands of Tyler? The bit about …’
‘No, no, of course not,’ I said quickly. ‘I twigged the Alicia bit straight away.’
I knew John was teasing me, but he was right, of course. All that other stuff wasn’t as important to me right now as the fact that I had what I’d set out to find – a place where we could go and lay flowers for Tyler’s mum. And, with luck, his old teddy as well. ‘John, I heard it all,’ I reassured him. ‘And no doubt we’ll have to revisit some of it, but bloody hell – what a turn-up, eh?’
‘Well, yes, Casey, it is. But I’d go easy on the we found you an aunt bit if I were you. In fact, I’d counsel that you don’t even mention it. From the sound of things, it’s unlikely she’ll remember anything about Tyler and his circumstances, and when I was talking about cans of worms the other day I meant it. We could have a found an enormous can of worms right there.’
‘I know what you mean, John,’ I said, ‘and I agree absolutely – Tyler does not need another heroin addict in his life. But I’m thinking ahead here. I’m thinking about that long-term foster family. I just think that if he does have another living relative we’d be doing him a disservice if we didn’t check it out. We owe him that much at least, don’t we?’
I could hear John sigh at the end of the phone, but it was only a mildly exasperated sigh. ‘Already in hand, Casey. In hand as we speak. Will has an address and I believe even a potential mobile phone number, with which – if it’s the right one – he’s currently trying to make contact. To see how she feels about it,’ he added, ‘which could go several ways. And one of them might involve the word “off”.’
‘But, equally, might not be,’ I felt it was my duty to point out.
‘And equally might not be,’ John admitted.
It was very childish, but I did a Tyler and punched the air then. No, okay, so it hadn’t been my own super-sleuth endeavours that had brought all this to light, but it had been me who had set the ball rolling in the first place, hadn’t it? So I deserved at least a small pat on the back, didn’t I? Result. I’d have something positive to share with Tyler at long last, and I couldn’t have felt happier. So I punched the air again.
‘But remember what I said,’ John cautioned, having presumably read my mind. ‘This is unlikely to be an aunt in the “remembering birthdays and bestowing unsolicited gifts” mould. So don’t go off half-cocked and mention her to him, will you? Please don’t risk getting his hopes up, not just yet.’
‘As if I’d be that daft,’ I reassured him. ‘John, you know I wouldn’t do that.’
‘I know,’ he chuckled. ‘You’re far too much the old pro. It’s just that I can almost see the glint in your eye from down the phone line.’
And he was right there. He knew me too well.