June blew her candles out and then got off her chair and came and stood next to me for the rest of it, with her hand on my arm, which I did not understand at the time and which I understand completely now.
PART 3 — WHAT SHE SAID BY THE MACHINES
I was not in the room for the conversation the judge had with June. Nobody was except the family liaison and, later, June’s mother.
What I have is the finding, and the part of it that is mine to repeat.
For about four months, on the weekends she was at her father’s, June had been practised.
That is her word. Practised. She used it to the liaison eleven times.
She had been taught a set of sentences about me. That I shout. That I get angry about nothing. That she does not like being in the house when I am there.
None of it is true and the liaison established that in about forty minutes, which is what they are trained to do.
She had been told that she would have to say it to a lady in a big room, and that if she said it properly then Daddy would be able to look after the new baby, and that if she did not say it properly the baby would not be safe.
That is why she was crying by the water cooler.
She was not frightened of her father. She was frightened that she was about to be taken into a room and asked, and that she was going to have to choose between doing what she had been told and saying a true thing about me.
She is six. She had been carrying that for four months on her own.
And what she actually said to a judge in a corridor, holding a rabbit, was, in substance: I’m not supposed to like Tam but I do.
PART 4 — 2020
Here is why Rosamund Kerr was in that building that morning, which is the part that stops it being a coincidence.
She was not there for my hearing. She did not know my hearing was happening.
