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skint, but if there’s one thing they spend money on, it’s fancy electronics. The only people with machines that could still play these things were all those middle-class old folk on the other side of town, hoarding their old boxed sets of The Forsyte Saga and I, Claudius .
    Still, any chance to get that bastard under lock and key was worth the effort, so I heaved the tapes into my evidence box and kept on, poking through the cupboards till even the rubber gloves I wore disgusted me. The kitchen was a greasy pit. Revolting. I couldn’t even face the garbage can. I swear if Eddie’s birth certificate hadbeen on top of that, in a clean plastic bag, I wouldn’t have picked it out.
    Last came the bathroom. There was a stash of drugs inside the cistern, as there so often is. Good. One more possible charge. I didn’t bother with the mess of slimy bottles, or the sodden towels. I just kicked them aside to check that there was nothing underneath except more filth and mess. I broke the catch to push the window open and check the outside sill for yet more drugs, but all there was out there was heaps and heaps of ancient bird shit.
    I picked my box up and walked out. When I got in the street the fresh air hit me in the face.
    That poor boy had lived in that foul stink for four whole years. And no one had noticed. Christ alive! Sometimes I hate this country.
Linda Radlett, Foster Carer
    I have to say that he was one of the easiest boys we’ve ever had. More of them than you’d think are good as gold – often from gratitude at feeling safe. But they still worry you with their haunted eyes and inability to concentrate, as if the only thing inside their heads is trying not to upset you.
    Eddie was different. The way he responded was extraordinary for a child who’d come from a place likethat. On the very first morning, Alan said to him, ‘You’re doing a fine imitation of a concrete mixer, chomping away on that egg with your mouth wide open.’
    ‘I’ve seen a concrete mixer,’ he said. ‘On telly.’ And you could almost watch him processing the memory to work out what it was that Alan had meant. And then he giggled with delight and shut his mouth! And after that, we only had to turn to one another and say, ‘Is someone round this table mixing concrete?’ and he’d clamp his lips together. He learned fast.
    The bed-wetting too. Obviously for the first couple of nights we thought it might just stem from tension and exhaustion. But soon it was obvious that it was a regular thing, so I persuaded Eddie to settle for a bed protector over the heap of folded blankets on the floor that he felt safer on, scared of the ‘too high’ bed. But then, as soon as we got into the routine of leading him through for a pee before we turned in ourselves, hey presto! He was practically dry.
    And he asked questions all the time. Intelligent questions. ‘Why do you do it that way?’ ‘Why do you keep it there ?’ ‘How does it work ?’ It was a little like having a seven-year-old toddler trailing after us.
    And there were odder questions too. ‘What’s a blood family, Linda?’
    That stopped me in my tracks. I bustled round a bit, pouring my coffee. And then I ran my arm round his thin body to pull him close. ‘Have you heard someone saying it?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Can you tell me who that was?’
    ‘Not sure,’ he told me anxiously. ‘Might have been Rob. Or Sue.’
    ‘Oh, right!’ Well, that was a relief. He’d clearly had the little speech I’d heard some social workers give a dozen times. So I knew what to say. ‘Most babies are born into families, Eddie. Some people call them “blood families” because the baby’s made out of the same sort of skin and bone and blood and stuff as their mum and dad.’
    ‘They’re not covered in blood.’
    ‘No. They’re not covered in blood.’ I gave him a moment to digest this before pointing to the raised veins on my hand. ‘See those wriggly blue lines? That’s all my blood