Groomed: Part 1 of 3: Danger lies closer than you think. Casey Watson

taken one night, following a tip-off from a neighbour about hearing screams and shouts, and that when the police and social services had attended the incident a man known to the police – a local drug dealer, Helena read out – had been arrested and charged with several offences.

      The children had been scattered pretty quickly. Keeley went to one foster family, the two next oldest to another, while the little ones, as was usual in cases like these, went to a further home and were both immediately put up for adoption. ‘It looks like the middle two are still with the same foster family,’ Helena told me. ‘And it says here that the youngest went to adoptive homes pretty quickly. Or even home singular. They might have gone together, mightn’t they? Either way, I doubt there’ll be any more to know about them now.’

      But what of Keeley? Why no happy ever after for her? And how must have it felt to be wrenched away from them all? I couldn’t quite get my head around how devastating that must have been for her, particularly if, as Helena said, she’d been so responsible for their welfare. How on earth must she have processed such a horrendous trauma? One minute being a second mummy to four cherished younger siblings, the next being cast adrift and denied any contact. How could she possibly come to terms with being allowed no contact with the brothers and sisters she had looked after since they had been born?

      ‘I honestly can’t understand it,’ I said to Mike as we chatted on into the not-so-small hours. ‘Surely it would have been better to allow them to see each other. Better for all of them, too – not just Keeley. That must have been terrible for them. It’s borderline barbaric. Maybe not so much the baby, bless him, but for the others … I just can’t believe they’d do that. It honestly beggars belief.’

      I had, of course, raised the question with Helena. I’d had personal experience of children being denied access to one another, after all. In that case because the older child, who’d been horribly abused sexually, had started behaving inappropriately towards their sibling because they didn’t know any different.

      But this didn’t appear to be the case with Keeley, who’d apparently done her best – at least as far as what Helena knew of the record went. But decisions sometimes get made based on instinct and experience as much as anything. But whatever the full picture, Keeley’s care for her little brothers and sisters had been repaid by being taken away from them. That’s how it must have seemed to her. No wonder she hated social services.

      ‘They must have had their reasons,’ Mike said. ‘And don’t forget, that’s often how it goes with long-term fostering and adoption. Maybe for the new families – the ones who ended up with the others, that is – it was part of the deal. A complete new start, with no reminders of or links to the past. Maybe that was it? To give the best chance for four, at the expense of one? These must be hard choices to have to make.’

      ‘But should they even be allowed to stipulate that? I mean, why would knowledge of an older sister hurt a child? Surely it would be a comfort to them to know they had blood family to call their own?’

      ‘Or maybe, given how little they were, it was decided it would be less complicated for them psychologically, easier for the parents, not having the spectre of a complicated older sister, social services involved in their lives, and –’