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After the meeting in Manchester I hoped that would be the end of the matter and we could get back to our lives and forget about Valerie and her unfortunate daughter, Jane. But I was not taking into account the tenacity of a mother deprived of her child – which I assume must be how Valerie saw the situation.
I’d been careful not to give her any way of contacting me direct. Our home phone line was ex-directory – and in any case would not have been under my name. I had not divulged our address and I’d left strict instructions to my colleagues not to accept any communications from Valerie or Jane through the police. What I hadn’t thought of was how easy it is to obtain emails addresses and direct line telephone numbers for academics, who routinely put such information on their university web pages.
It wasn’t long before Bernie started receiving emails and telephone calls from Valerie, begging her to facilitate another meeting and sending messages for me. At first Bernie dutifully passed the messages on; but, when she saw how upset they made me, she soon stopped and I assumed that the calls and emails must have stopped too.
Bernie dealt with the emails easily by setting up her emailer to consign anything coming from Valerie to the Spam folder, but, as she only told me much later, the daily (sometimes more) telephone calls became something of a nuisance. Eventually she arranged with her college to be given a new number, which she carefully avoided publicising.
I can’t make up my mind whether I’m glad or sorry that Bernie didn’t tell me about all this at the time. I feel bad that she was having to put up with such harassment on my behalf, but if I’d known I might have decided to take things further – getting a court injunction against Valerie or something – which would probably have only caused a lot of trouble and heartache all round.