Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) (41 page)

              All I could hope for now was a successful Appeal so that I could get out and start fighting for my son again in earnest.  I knew that my application was almost ready to be lodged and when I eventually saw the draft that Phillip had prepared, appealing against both sentence and conviction on the basis of an unfair trial, it all seemed to make good sense. He had also lodged a bail application, so there was a very slim chance of release in time for the welfare hearing.

              It was knowing that these things were happening outside whilst I was powerless inside, that kept me strong.  Unlike the long-term prisoners, at worst my sentence would end in four and a half months – but at that moment, it might as well have been four and a half years.  

              We had, at this point, spent close to a million pounds on lawyer’s fees.  This seems remarkable but between all the different Courts and the expense of having off-Island lawyers, it had all dissipated very quickly.  It was amazing how little difference it had made to our situation. 

              It was an abomination of law.  It was disorder of the worst kind that had crushed my little boy and myself.  I still felt like a deer caught in headlights, unable to believe what had happened to our family. Having never harmed a hair on my son’s head I was being punished endlessly and in now, only two weeks the Family Court judge would decide whether M would go to his abuser forever. 

              Even with some of the best lawyers in England, a leading Human Rights QC, a Judge in his own right with a portfolio of difficult and complex cases, we still couldn't crack this.  It had seemed say it all when during one lunch with my solicitor and QC they had even talked of possibly having to get me out of the Island and protected, if indeed we might be encroaching on a Paedophile ring.  When level- headed lawyers talk of involving MI5, you have to wonder whether this was more than just a Judge getting it wrong.  It seemed fantastical.  It was as if I had stepped right into the pages of a John Grisham novel - but this was no work of fiction – it was a frightening reality.

              Despite the reporter from the
Telegraph
saying that my evidence was the most compelling he had ever heard, the jury had found me unanimously guilty - so what was the missing link?  It was unthinkable that someone involved in our Court case was part of a ring or maybe more than one of them.  Nothing else could solve the unsolvable and yet to prove that when one person would protect the next, had been beyond the best of lawyers.               

              A top investigative journalist was probably the answer and yet even one of
Panorama’s
most tenacious and bold reporters who I had met earlier with my solicitor, would not touch it.  He seemed too afraid of what he might find or at the very least, the conservative
BBC
who preferred at this time, to run documentaries reassuring the public that Social Workers always acted in their best interests, would not agree to explore the unthinkable, unmentionable question of Paedophilia - unless, of course, the case was high profile involving historical abuse by someone in the public eye.

              I asked myself the question over and over, but I could not find any other answer than something sinister and evil beyond evil – that the Island was protecting child abusers in order to keep its squeaky clean image when, in reality, its mantra was “Freedom to abuse children.”  I could only hope and pray that Brian and Philip would come up with an answer before the hearing that would bring M home to me and safety.  We were running out of time as each day passed.

              The cold of winter grew ever more fierce in a prison that was as exposed to the elements as was possible.  The most Northern part of the Island was a playground for turbulent weather and the howling wind raged through every crack of the poorly constructed walls.  When I had moved to Amanda’s old cell, the windows wouldn't shut properly and it had been even colder than the induction cell.  It is amazing how necessity truly does become the mother of invention because I had taped the vents over with Sellotape which had been accidentally left in my cell – a luxury usually disallowed.  This had at least kept me warmer for the one night I spent there, but I had had to sleep in nearly all the clothes I possessed.  We were now completely submerged in winter, a blanket of heavy snow lay on the ground but at least upstairs was warm when I eventually moved there.

              I continued to receive my twice weekly ten minute phone call with M.  Each time he would quiz me hard about jail and I suspected that someone was filling his head with some of the more unpleasant details.  My fears were confirmed when during one call, he started asking me about handcuffs and sniffer dogs.  Things that we had never before discussed.  I asked him who was talking to him about these things as I suspected his father was showing him pictures in a book and he confirmed his father was showing him pictures of the jail on the internet.  I hated that he was scaring him this way but there was nothing I could do about it except reassure M that I was neither  surrounded by dogs or kept in chains.  I wondered how far M’s father had gone in filling M’s head with these frightening images.  Certainly he would have got pleasure out of making jail seem as colourful as possible so that M would associate what I had done in taking him, with the maximum punishment. 

              In reality I had only seen a dog once and it seemed quite docile, just checking that people weren’t bringing illegal substances onto the premises.  Handcuffs I had yet to experience.  It seemed ludicrous that this man who was enjoying frightening, a now eight year old boy was considered the better parent.

              As the nights got increasingly colder, I began to rely more and more on my empty
Buxton
water bottle, filled with hot water from the kettle and covered in a long sock - a make shift hot-water bottle in a weak attempt to recreate some of the comforts of home.  I had also completed knitting an under- blanket for the cold hard concrete slab that served as my bed. I seemed to feel the cold even more because I rarely slept and I had always been of a slight build.

              I still hadn’t been allowed the radio that my father had brought in for me when I had first come in, but at least I had the television for company.

              It seemed crazy that the only heating was provided by pipes in the ceiling.  Everyone knows that heat rises, so naturally only the upper floor would be warm, but whoever designed the jail certainly didn’t have comfort in mind when they did so.

              It was during my third week of incarceration, that I had received the surprise letter from the girl in the UK who had read of our story in the
Times
.  She called me a pioneer for bringing the case into a Criminal Court where reporting was allowed, albeit without revealing identity.  This was how I first became known as Miss A, but ironically I was soon to find out that their attempt to anonymise me, gave me a very strong and public identity.

Chapter 17

              Brian began sending a junior solicitor to the jail rather than come himself or with Philip.  I realised why very quickly.  It had been my consistent instruction to them to appeal the Fact Finding judgement out of time, before it was too late.  The lawyers disagreed and wanted to take a conciliatory  stance, but I felt it was our only hope of beating the system, encouraged by the fact that during my criminal trial, the Judge had clearly stated that my belief that M had been abused was genuine.  It was genuine because it had happened.  No one, to date, despite the many assertions, had made a legal finding that I had coached my son.

              I knew we were already over a year out of time, but in certain cases they will allow Judgments to be appealed especially where the outcome affects the life of a child.  This was certainly the case in our situation and I repeatedly begged them, to at the very least, try.  I felt we had nothing to lose by doing so and a great deal to gain.  For some reason Brian and Philip refused to take this instruction, taking the view that it would prejudice the Family Court Judge against me and make him more likely to grant a Residency Order in R’s favour.                I remained adamant that it was the only way we could prevent this outcome and both my father and I already regretted that we had not pushed our first Advocate to do this when he had the chance.  There were clearly strong grounds for appeal and when Philip had first come on the case, he had been resolved to do this.  For some reason he then changed his mind and I suspect the reason was Brian. 

              I had always been concerned about Brian’s prior relationship with the advocate who represented the Guardian Ad Litem in our case.  This same man was a personal friend of the Judge, was seen drinking with him regularly and had come out of the same solicitor's office. He had also been the one to make the  first recommendation in Court, that M be removed from me and an Interim Care Order be made.  This he made, before the second day of the Fact Finding Hearing had even taken place, firmly nailing his flag to R's mast in doing so.

              Despite the fact that he and Kirk had some history and had worked in the same region in the UK, Brian always swore blind that this had no affect on his thinking or his desire to win the case - but it had seemed suspicious that as soon as Kirk had discovered that Brian was representing me, he immediately rang him up for a chat and I often wondered about the behind-closed-doors meetings at the Court, to which I had not been party. I had a hunch that Brian was got at, early on, though I could never prove it.  At the very least, I believe he agreed to conform with the party line and then persuaded Philip to do the same.  Sadly this happens in a lot of family cases.  It is rare to find  barristers or solicitors who will really fight the system.  They see their duty as to the Court first and the client second - probably because their future income relies so heavily on the favour of Judges.

              That day, Jeremy, the junior solicitor, had no words of comfort to offer. I gave him my usual instruction “appeal the Fact Finding” but it fell on deaf ears.  He had no sway with Brian or Philip and whilst he diligently wrote down my instruction, I knew it was an aimless exercise.  Two weeks from the Welfare Hearing that would decide M’s future – who was going to have the courage to throw a very heavy spanner in the works?  But along with my  obvious need to ensure M's future safety, there was another reason I had wanted to take this tack - a live appeal would hold up the ultimate decision.  One might say that would keep my son in foster care longer and whilst that certainly wasn't ideal for him, at least he was safe from a childhood of sexual abuse and he would still get contact with me and my father. 

              I suspected and would later discover from Social Worker notes, that M was heavily persuaded that his only way out of Foster Care was to agree to live with his father.   I couldn't put M's chilling words  to the psychologist out of my mind - "I hope Daddy won't do it again."  They knew the truth and yet they were determined to sweep it under the carpet, cover their own failings and wrong decisions and comply with whatever corruption lay behind this travesty and tragedy called Justice.

              Jeremy was a Job’s comforter.  He felt, as I did, that without taking my proposed step, it was inevitable now that R would gain residency and that nothing could be done without rocking the boat, which the senior lawyers refused to do. I could not bear to hear this, brutally unjust at best and at worst sentencing M to a childhood of long-term sexual abuse.. 

              I wondered if Brian and Kirk, the Guardian’s advocate, made some kind of pact early on?  Was this just desperation setting in and a deep distrust of all involved?  I would never be able to answer that.  But one thing was for sure, Kirk made me think of the infamous line from
Julius Caesar
, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look...such men are dangerous.”  I was certain of one thing at least -  Kirk was extremely dangerous in his connection to the Judge, his apparent misogynistic attitude towards women – (three ex-wives and counting) and his blatant bias in favour of R gaining residence.  He had supported him all the way and levied all manner of criticisms on me – from the sublime to the ridiculous – including my being a writer – insisting this demonstrated that I made things up, suggesting too that having been to Drama School in my late teens, I was a good actress in Court and duplicitous.  He even suggested that M could have read my books which had some adult humour in them. 

              M was five when he first made allegations and could barely read at all at that time.  It was difficult to interest him in books with pictures of animals and
Bob the Builder
back then.  There was no way that M could have read even one sentence of any grown up novel and they might as well have accused me of letting him read the
Times
or the
Guardian
.  But anything and everything was conjured up by this terrible man to defame, denigrate and blacken my name. That was the real fiction that was perpetrated in this madness.  My harmless fictional novels, an attempt to earn a living around the needs of M, were no better or worse than having a
Jilly Cooper
on your bookshelf or any other currently popular writer.   There was worse in the Daily paper and on the news than had ever graced any of my pages of my fiction.

              I had got the measure of Kirk from the start.  He was a tall, wiry man with a goatie beard who always closed his eyes when spoke.  He had the look of a character out of a Victorian novel and might easily have passed as a latter-day Lytton Strachey but I do not wish to romanticise someone who was so inherently evil and vitriolic.  There was nothing appealing about this man whatsoever and the Guardian himself was no better - a small, bearded, gnome who sported a cape and Panama hat.  Had the situation not been so tragic, they could easily have been the type of characters who I would have enjoyed satirising but in this situation there was nothing that could be amusing on any level. It was deep, dark, piercing evil of the worst and cruellest kind being packaged and labelled, “best interests of the child.”

              Jeremy handed me the final report of the Guardian Ad Litem.  He suggested I go through it and make notes for Brian and Philip.  He also had files of both my and R’s evidence including some witness statements.  I took them away with a heavy heart, already knowing that the Guardian’s recommendation would be for a Residency Order in R’s favour and a report based on a fabric of lies concocted to paint me in the worst possible light. 

              This same man, who had sat across from me at my home only weeks earlier saying he supported shared care, was now, contradicting this view entirely and recommending contact between M and I, supervised for one hour every six weeks.  As I read his report with a heavy heart, I suspected he hoped that if the Judge ruled so little, I would not bother to fly from the Island to the UK to take it up and they could sever the bond between M and myself.  They should have known that I would have flown to the ends of the earth to see him for five minutes.  Nothing would keep me from my son, but I hoped that even the Judge would not be so cruel as to award me such paltry contact with my son. 

              I was not considered any danger to M and there was nothing to warrant keeping me from him, except, of course, my temporary incarceration but I was still hopeful that Philip could get me out sooner and astonishing as it may seem, I felt I had more hope of release than of keeping my son at that point.  To say the Criminal Courts were fairer was an understatement.  For whilst my sentence and conviction was anything but fair, at least things had been judged on the burden of proof and not the balance of probabilities and that did give one a better chance of getting something close to justice. 

              I knew we had strong grounds of appeal because the Judge had led the jury and not allowed us to put evidence before them that would have supported my defence of necessity.  He had told them to accept the Fact Finding Judgment without question when we should have been allowed to call those who appeared at the hearing, in order that we could show it as flawed.  What is more he had acted more like a  Prosecutor, than a Judge, many times during my trial and I knew that Philip intended to play excerpts of him cross-examining me to demonstrate this.  If I could get bailed, at least I could properly prepare my case for the Family Court, but with so little time to spare, it seemed unlikely to happen before we began the Welfare Hearing.

              Kirk had done the job of R’s advocate at the Fact Finding in protecting R from being found guilty of child abuse.  He had been far more brutal in his questioning of me than R’s lawyer had been, something, I found rather remarkable given that he was supposed to represent M’s wishes and M would certainly not have wished his mummy to go to jail.

              It was also telling that at the Fact Finding R had only been questioned for two hours, even though he was the one, in effect, on trial and yet I, an innocent loving mum who had taken the responsible action of going to the authorities when my son disclosed to me, was on the stand for eight and a half weary hours.  I had a chest infection at the time and had to ask for a break to use my asthma inhaler.  The Judge had reluctantly allowed me a meagre, five minutes.

              Kirk was certainly a slippery customer.  I believed he had tried to capitalize on knowing my solicitor right from the start and had given him a false sense of what could be achieved if I agreed to let R off the hook and say I had coached my son and was thus guilty of emotional abuse. 

              I was not prepared to perjure myself whatever carrots they dangled before me.  I knew that I had never coached or emotionally abused M in any way and I also knew that Kirk with his close connection to the Judge, could not be trusted to stand by anything he said.  It would merely be a trap to ensure I never saw M again.  I was not prepared to betray M or myself by selling my soul to the devil and collaborating with the abundance of lies and corruption.

              I was repeatedly impressed upon by Brian to say that I had influenced my son and wouldn't do it again, as he tried to convince me that that would give me the best chance of keeping custody.  Had I taken the bait, not only would this have been a lie, but the Guardian would have said, I'd made an admission.  This would have strengthened their case against me and the consequences would be catastrophic.  One thing I adamantly refused to do was barter with my own integrity or that of my son.

              I believed firmly that our only hope of success was in appealing the Fact Finding Judgment and it frustrated me constantly that none of my legal team would listen to my one clear instruction but it was far too late to change horses now and replace them with new lawyers who might do the one thing I felt  had any chance of stopping a runaway train in its tracks.

              Phillip believed that it was already too late and any Application would not be allowed.  However, I have since learned that there is no estoppel issue in family cases and in lay man terms that means that a Judgment can be appealed out of time when it is in the best interests of a child.  Surely there could be no stronger reason than protecting R from child abuse.  I thought we had to try, even if we were rejected on the grounds of lateness - as the only way of protecting M from the horrors that lay ahead of him otherwise.

              With only one report in our favour, that of the most recent Clinical Psychologist, and that one only partially so, we were in the middle of an army all closing ranks around us.  From my current position of incarceration, there was so little that I could do. 

              All my legal team had to do was to send their junior as a way of avoiding being given direct instruction and I began to feel more and more helpless.  Nonetheless, that night in my cell, I went through every line of the Guardian’s report making notes - every criticism and every word, a knife through my heart, nonetheless, I steeled myself to sit up all night and attempt to point out its flaws.  Without access to files, my laptop or any of my evidence, all I could do was make comments from what I knew to be true and try to remember where the evidence was amongst the growing number of files that had accumulated on our case in
Bleak House
fashion.  We could have given Jarndyce and Jarndyce a run for their money.

              In reading his words, the Guardian’s pretence at wanting shared care, was now so clearly revealed as a rouse to try to get me to withdraw any allegations against R's father and let the Court off the hook. Having refused to take the bait, I was suffering from the full force of his wrath.