CHAPTER 17
That was an evening of deep pain for Nana as Karen and Brian filled her in on what sort of place I was in. Brian explained about his friend’s friend after Nana’s tears had eased a bit, and also, very slowly, and gently, and brutally, why she could not just march in and get me.

“There were rumours, Ada, about times there when things went a bit far, and lads never came out. They…absconded and dropped off the map, and nobody ever saw them again. If we kick up a fuss now, they might abscond him. We need evidence to get him out, and we need to do it with back up”

“From what tha say, the police won’t be too willing”

“Then we give them no choice. If Dave can get enough, then we go in hard with the bizzies and take the place apart. If we go in on our own, he’s as good as dead”

“What do we need?”

“A tame lawyer would be nice. I have one for my contracts, but he might know a suitable shark for this”

“Hang on. Arthur, can I use thy phone?”

Ten minutes later she was talking to Roger Houston, the man I had met so long ago and who Nana had warned me off.

“Roger, it’s Ada. Aye, I’m in the Boot. Look, this is really, really important….I know tha remember my little lad, the one that went missing. Well, we’ve found him”

“Na, Roger, he’s been locked up, and worse…”

“Aye, a care home type place, but with a reputation. Listen…”

She gave him a summary of what they knew. “Now, I know tha liked the lad, and after aal these years of the two of thee coming back here I know tha never meant any harm to him, despite…”

“What the two of thee do together is thy business, tha’re adults, but they’re doing it to Stevie, and for three FUCKING YEARS!”

“Sorry. I’m just a bit, tha knows…aye, aye, if tha can, we need aal we can get. Simon? Of course. When?”

She turned to the table. “Who can stay here for a couple of days? They’re coming up. Brian, I’ve hooked thee thy shark”

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This was a hard time for me. I knew they had found me, I knew my beloved wouldn’t let me down, but I still had to live each day, survive each day. I had stopped crying over two years before, but I could still scream. Except when my mouth was blocked, of course.

Dave was already at work, with a couple of friends, and what I didn’t know was that they had been scouting the hellhole from every angle possible, until they found somewhere that they could use a long lens from. Embleton was methodical in his investigations, turning over everything from the rubbish bins to the numbers of visiting cars, and he had a friend, or victim, or associate in whatever you call his system, who had access to the Police computer, and as my evening performances were being brought to a successful (for somebody) conclusion, he was capturing faces and cars on film.

His breakthrough came at a time when I was starting to despair once more, and believing that Karen had abandoned me in shame and horror. That was the thing; they can call it whatever they like, but when you spend all day and every day being told you are a worthless piece of shit, unfit to be anything other than holes for someone better than you to fill, you start to believe it. If you were worth something, your mother, or family, or friends, would have come for you by now, so you must be that object, that toy, in reality.

So, there I was, one afternoon. I was wearing a black push-up bra under a white blouse two or three sizes too small so that my tits were almost popping the buttons, with a partly-undone tie that Charlie always made sure to collect before I could hide it, a tartan mini skirt and stupidly high sandals over black stockings, with suspenders of course. Hair in two bunches, heavily made up…I mean, how many real schoolgirls do you see looking anything like that? Charlie was on my back, grunting as he banged away at me as I tried to disappear off into the world of the clouds outside my window, looking for shapes, for fells and tarns, and trying to tune out the feel of him inside me. No, I didn’t spot any flash of reflected light, but a quarter of a mile away a photographer was doing his best not to shake too much as he wept over his long-lensed SLR camera.

He had caught many things that afternoon, starting with Charlie’s casual back-handed slap, and me as I changed, and then all sorts of interesting angles as the turd did me doggy style against the window sill. He caught both our faces, in some delightful detail. He went through four rolls of film, and that was the day that Cunningham’s empire finally started to fall down on her filthy head.

While a truly horrified photographer was sobbing in his car before reporting back to Dave Embleton, Emily was haranguing Miss Graham, trying to get her to see that I needed every possible ally, and her trump card was a simple one: I was in that place not because I had done anything wrong, but because my mother had left. She invoked my Nana’s love, and that seemed to do the trick.

Every ally, every friend, no matter how weak, was pulled into it

Embleton pulled up another shock for them all, though, the day after Charlie and the Chocolate Highway had been immortalised on film, and that was Mam.

All this time, all these years, Nana had been trying to find not just me, but her daughter, and every enquiry was met with ‘next of kin only’, and that avenue had been closed down with lies and fraud. Embleton set a team of what might now be called data miners to trawl through death records, employment records, court notices, anything that might give a clue.

Eventually, they got it, in a burial notice in a Carlisle hospital’s archives they had obtained by methods that were…questionable.

On April 14th, 1974, my mother had choked on her own vomit in a Sally Ann shelter in Workington. She had been cremated at council expense. I was an orphan, and Nana had lost a child. There is a natural order to things, which doesn’t always work out, and it is this: a parent should predecease their children.

Now, all that she had left was me, and that was still very doubtful.

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After Roger and Simon had driven up, Brian had not so much insisted as instructed that Nana move for the duration into their house on the Eden, and every few days there was a council of war. That was the term Emily coined when she was told of Charlie’s moment of glory, though she was not allowed to see the photos.

Dave had come up with an interesting list of visitors, including a magistrate and two police officers, one an Inspector, and had another revelation.

“I am sort of freelance, you know, Brian, and, well, I have an offer for the story. I’ve not spelled out where it is to them, but I could get quite a good sum…and the publicity would do us no harm.”

“ ‘Us’?”

“After what I’ve seen so far, Brian, most definitely it’s ‘us’. We just need to find the best way to crack the place open. If we get it wrong, he stays there, or worse”

Roger was smiling at this point, definitely as a shark would. “ I have some information from a…discreet source. There is a Chief Super in the area who likes to spend his weekends in London”

It was Sid who got the reference first. “Oh, dear, he’s one of the bona boys….in blue.”

Roger grinned. “Yes, Simon was sure he’d vada’d his jolly old eek somewhere, and then I came across him…in a manner of speaking…in a bona little lattie in Wardour Street”

Emily was puzzled. “English would be nice…”

Roger quietly explained. “Polari, my dear, a sort of mixture of backslang and Italian used by theatrical folk and gay men, and often they were the same, back in the days of our callow youth. Not true, Sid my love?”

Simon was nodding. “Eek–ecaf–face. So Simon thought he’d seen him before, and then I saw him in a nice little establishment for the discerning gentleman in Soho. Queer as a nine bob note, my darling”

Nana was dubious. “So he might be one of they who are hurting my boy?”

Sid sighed. “Ada, a man who like women doesn’t go for little girls, does he? Why should a gay man want a little boy? Roger, what sort of trade was he into when you saw him?”

“Oh, very Mary, our copper, very great hairy butch things, his type, all moustaches and leather. Certainly not your Stevie’s type”

Nana was thoughtful. “So what do we do?”

Save had the final answer. “I talk to the Screws again, and then I talk to our Queen of the Peelers”

Roger snorted. “Peelers…”

“No, seriously, I let him know what we have on that place, I tell him that we will be releasing it to the Screws as the coppers go in, and then if he argues I give him some more facts. What details, Roger? I can get pics if we need them”

Roger frowned. “We still have one big problem, and that is getting a warrant, and getting one issued without telling Cunningham what we are about to do”

Dave nodded. “The bitch is a Mason….”

“I’ll have a word with dear Simon. If we take this past the Magistrate’s level. I think the level of corruption we already have should give us an excuse to at least go out of area. As Dave says, we need this to be a true surprise, and I trust nobody at all around here. Leave it to us”

And so the ideas came together, and still I was in there, still hurting and being hurt.
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