2. 1 An unexpected approach

Post date: 19-Sep-2015 20:27:57

When people hear that I was brought up in a children’s home they often ask me whether I ever tried to find my ‘real’ parents. I can’t really understand why they seem to think that I must be curious to know who it was who just happened to give birth to me and the idea of actually trying to meet that person quite honestly never occurred to me.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the woman whose name is on my birth certificate had other ideas when, quite by chance, she happened upon me a full fifty-five years after having left me in the care of the National Children’s Home. Bernie and I were still newly-weds, having got married five or six months previously. It was September 2006. Lucy had just started in Year 2 – or the top class of the Infants in old money – and Bernie was away at a conference in Prague. There had been a spate of arson attacks on ethnic minority families, culminating in a house fire that killed three young children and their pregnant mother. I was leading the investigation and we decided to have a television appeal for witnesses in the hope that someone would have seen something that would lead to us finding the perpetrators and preventing any more deaths and injuries.

If you read the account in the papers they say that I “made an impassioned plea” for people to come forward with information. Actually, all I did was to sit behind a desk and speak to camera, telling the viewers what had happened and asking them to think back over the past few weeks and try to remember if anyone they knew could have been involved. There was no need for any “impassioned pleading” on my part: I’m sure the public could all imagine what it must have been like for the father of the family coming home from his night shift and finding the house on fire with his wife and kids inside.

Anyway, we were pretty busy for a few days after that, with the lines jammed with people trying to get through to speak to members of the team. As usual, most of them didn’t have anything particularly useful to say and a few were just attention-seekers, but we got quite a few worthwhile leads to follow up. But that’s another story.

The day after my TV appearance, we got a call from a Mrs Harris, who wouldn’t say what she wanted except that she wouldn’t speak to anyone except me personally. The constable who answered the phone tried to persuade her at least to tell her what sort of information she had to offer, but Mrs Harris just kept insisting that she wasn’t prepared to divulge anything to anyone else. In the end, she passed the call on to me and I took it because we couldn’t afford to risk missing out on any possible lead.

When I took the phone, I got the shock of my life. Instead of telling me anything pertinent to the investigation, the woman immediately started quizzing me about myself. She asked me if my date of birth was 16^th March 1951 – which was spot on – and whether I’d grown up in a children’s home. Of course, I refused to be drawn on either of these, but it was disconcerting that she seemed to know things about me that even my colleagues mostly did not. I kept pressing her politely either to provide us with information to help with our enquiries or to get off the line to allow other people to get through, but she just kept on asking me about myself – and I kept on refusing to answer.

Eventually she gave up trying to get me to admit to those details of my life –wherever she might have got them from. Presumably, she realised that I was never going to answer one way or the other and probably deduced that if I could have denied what she said, I would have done – so then she simply said that she was my mother and she wanted to arrange for us to meet.

I was so taken aback that it was as much as I could do not to put the phone down on her without a word. However, I managed to say something reasonably polite – I’d got a room full of police officers listening in after all so I had to make a show of handling it professionally – before ringing off with the excuse that she evidently did not have anything to contribute and the line was needed for people who had.

Paul Godwin, who was my sergeant at the time and a good friend, asked what it was all about, but I just told him it was a nutter who just wanted to talk to me because she seen me on the telly. I was tempted to tell everyone to put the phone down on her right away if she rang again, but I couldn’t take the risk – however small it might be – that she did actually know something about the arsons.

I assumed that would be the end of the matter and tried to put it out of my mind, but it was strangely unsettling all the same. I was glad that the ongoing investigation kept me too busy to think about it. I was also glad that Bernie was back from her conference by the time the next development occurred a couple of weeks later.

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