Jane Elliott - The Little Prisoner

I tried to do as she said, but I was still having trouble putting things in order.

‘The woman who typed this up,’ Marie told me as we went through it together, ‘has been working in the department for nearly twenty years, but she had to keep leaving the room because she was crying when she was typing up your words.’

‘So do you think they’ll prosecute him?’ I asked.

‘Who knows?’ Marie shrugged. ‘But if they don’t then it won’t be for lack of trying.’

Now that I had chosen my path forward I was determined to do as good a job as I possibly could. Marie and her colleagues were being so good I wanted to help them in every way, so that they wouldn’t end up wasting their time. We went over and over the document until we’d got it as accurate as we thought we possibly could. Marie then took it away to try to persuade her bosses that it was worth prosecuting.

She came back a few days later with a broad grin on her face. ‘My guv’nor reckons we should go after your mother as well,’ she announced gleefully.

‘Really?’ I was amazed. ‘What for?’

‘He reckons she knew exactly what was going on and we could get her for neglect.’

In the end, however, they decided that going after Mum would be too difficult and they would focus their attention on proving the case against Richard.

I was thrilled. For a short time it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I felt I was finally moving forward towards a happy ending. But then reality struck. The whole process was going to take a year to come to court, during which time Richard would know we were after him and would be doubling his efforts to find us in order to intimidate us into silence.

The police assured me that once he was arrested he would be held on remand and we would be safe. As it was, they let him straight back onto the streets.

‘You promised me you would hold onto him,’ I groaned when they told me.

‘I’m sorry, Janey,’ Marie said. ‘It was decided that he was on too much medication for them to be able to risk it. If something went wrong and he got ill in custody the whole case could fall to pieces and he could end up suing the police. We just couldn’t take the risk.’

‘But he’ll come looking for me,’ I pleaded. ‘I would never have started this whole thing if you hadn’t promised he would be put away.’

‘We’ll do everything we can to protect you,’ she assured me, and I knew she meant it. But what could she do if Richard or my brothers decided to wait outside the local school and lift Emma for a few hours, just to show me that they still had the power to do it? What would they do if the phone calls started coming in the middle of the night, or the notes came through the letterbox? What would they do if our house mysteriously caught fire in the night or Steve’s car was run off the road on the way to work?

Although I didn’t regret going to the police, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the coming months of looking over my shoulder and jumping every time I heard a car pulling up outside the house or the telephone rang or Emma was a few minutes late coming out of school.

Once inside the house I hardly ever left, apart from taking the children across the road to school, and even then I didn’t always make it, having to ask Steve or a friend to take them for me. It was as if my brain was too exhausted to cope. Every little thing Emma or Sophie asked for seemed as hard as climbing Mount Everest. If they wanted a drink I could barely summon the energy to find a beaker and fill it up.

Ideas of killing myself kept on coming to me and I wrote a long letter insisting that if I died the girls should both stay with Steve. My worst nightmare would be for Emma to be taken away and given back to my mother. I also wanted to make sure it was in writing that I didn’t want Richard or Mum or my brothers coming to my funeral.

Every evening, after a hard day at the office, Steve would have to sit and listen to me drunkenly droning on about killing myself. In the end he lost patience.

‘If you’re going to do it there’s nothing I can do about it,’ he said one night. ‘Just do it and get it over with. I’m going to bed.’

He went upstairs, leaving me snivelling in the lounge.

‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘if I am going to do it then there are a few things I need to sort out.’

I had never got round to explaining to Emma about Paul being her real dad. Steve had been doing such a great job and she was so happy with him it hadn’t seemed to be worth muddling things in her mind. But I didn’t want to leave any unfinished business. It had been five years now since we had escaped. Emma was eight and old enough to understand. I sat her down at the kitchen table after school one day and explained it all to her. She listened with rapt attention, asked a few questions and seemed completely cool with the whole thing. I thought I should make contact with Paul and reintroduce him to his daughter before I got round to topping myself.

If I was going to make contact, however, I was also going to have to give him the full story of why we had to leave and all the things that had been going on behind his back when we were living together. I knew from the one or two people that we had managed to talk to in the old area that he had got engaged and that Emma now had a half-brother. I wanted Paul to meet her again and to think about introducing her to his other child, but I didn’t know how to contact him.

Then Steve went for a lads’ night out and bumped into a bloke he used to go to school with who played football with Paul. When he found out they still played, he asked if he would give Paul his number. The bloke assured him he would and we waited for the call. When it didn’t come I was surprised, because I’d been sure Paul would call straightaway. Eventually the call did come and he told us the mutual friend had forgotten to give him the number. We met up and I told him the whole story. He was just as revolted and horrified as Steve had been, but I could almost see the pieces fitting into place in his head as he took my words in.

‘So all those times when I came home early and the chain was on the door… ‘ he said and I nodded, feeling sickened all over again to think of the things I was being forced to do every day of my life until we escaped.

Paul couldn’t have been more understanding or more supportive. He promised to do everything he could to help me in the trial.

Now that I was finding my courage, I made contact with my dad and my baby brother Jimmy as well. Dad was happily remarried and had a successful painting and decorating firm which gave him a comfortable life. We started to visit him, but always had to keep ourselves hidden if anyone else from his family came round in case word got back that we were in the area. My mum’s brother lived just over the road.

Dad was still living in blissful ignorance of the hell that I had been forced to live through after he left me. When I told him some of it I could see that he could hardly bear to listen, so I held back most of the details. It was then that he told me about how he used to get the dinner ladies at school to report back to him about how I was.

Even when I had explained everything to him he didn’t seem to be able to take it all in. ‘I can understand how he could do those things to you as a child,’ he said one day, ‘but how could you let him go on abusing you once you were a grown up with a baby of your own?’

I didn’t feel it was my responsibility to enlighten him any further. Perhaps it would have been kinder to have left him to live out his life in blissful ignorance about the whole thing anyway. He shook his head in disbelief when I told him some of the things Mum had done too.

‘She must have changed so much, Janey,’ he said. ‘I would never have married a woman like the one you’re describing.’