No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other
When Isobel and Alex came home from school to find their abusive father had brutally murdered their mother, their world was thrown into chaos. Plunged into a care system that neglected them, Isobel and Alex were expected to come to nothing, and had only each other to rely on.Isobel and Alex’s mother used to do everything with them. A full-time teacher, she dedicated herself to her children, partly in order to give them every possible opportunity in life, and partly to keep them out of the way of their increasingly eccentric, erratic and unpleasant father.Their father, a violent and frightening man, spent most of his time locked in his bedroom, a room the rest of the family never ventured into. He became increasingly bitter and angry at the outside world in general, and at his wife and children in particular. The local community feared his outbursts as much as Isobel and Alex did, but the neighbours saw far less of him as he became increasingly housebound. No one came to the Kerr’s house to visit.When Isobel was 15 and Alex 13, they came home from school to find police everywhere. Their father had stabbed their mother between fifty and sixty times with a sharpened chisel. As far as anyone could tell the attack was unprovoked and of incredible savagery, but the children were given the minimum amount of information. No one wanted to upset them unnecessarily.Their mother had been an only child and they had never been in contact with their father's family. There was no one else for them to turn to - except each other.This is an inspiring story of a brother and sister who only had each other, and a powerful testament to what can be achieved through courage and love.
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No One Listened
Two children. A horrific act of violence.
No one to trust except each other.
Isobel and Alex Kerr
with Andrew Crofts
Contents
Title PageChapter One: AlexChapter Two: IsobelChapter Three: AlexChapter Four: IsobelChapter Five: AlexChapter Six: IsobelChapter Seven: AlexChapter Eight: IsobelChapter Nine: AlexChapter Ten: IsobelChapter Eleven: AlexChapter Twelve: IsobelChapter Thirteen: AlexChapter Fourteen: IsobelChapter Fifteen: AlexChapter Sixteen: IsobelChapter Seventeen: AlexChapter Eighteen: IsobelChapter Nineteen: AlexChapter Twenty: IsobelChapter Twenty-One: AlexChapter Twenty-Two: IsobelChapter Twenty-Three: AlexEpilogueCopyrightAbout the Publisher
Normally my sister Isobel would have got home from school before me, but that afternoon she’d been held up because she couldn’t find her PE kit in the changing rooms and she and a friend had stayed behind to look for it. I’d been let out of class a few minutes earlier than usual and I’d walked straight home, just as I always did. If Isobel had left at her normal time and got home before me, she would have let herself into the house before the police arrived to stop her and she would have seen everything. Maybe he would even have attacked her as well.
The day it all happened was the 11th of January, 2002. It was a little after three-thirty in the afternoon so it was already on the verge of growing dark as I crossed the busy main road that ran between our home and our school. I was thirteen and Isobel was fifteen and we had been walking to and from school on our own for a good few years by then. There was nothing unusual about the journey, nothing to alert me to the waiting danger or to the horror of what had just happened behind our locked front door. I was thinking about normal, routine things like the homework I had to do and the after-school activities planned for that evening, and I was wondering what was for dinner.
The first thing I noticed as I came into our quiet road was that Mum’s red Vauxhall Nova was parked outside the house. She wouldn’t normally have got home from her job as a school teacher for a couple of hours yet and she hadn’t said anything about being early when she set off that morning, so that puzzled me.
I turned into our front garden and walked the few paces up to the house, then pulled out my front door key, just as I always did, without even thinking about it, ready to let myself in. As I lifted the key to the lock, a movement in the street behind made me turn and I saw a police car drawing up at the kerb, its vivid markings making it stand out amongst all the other parked cars. I paused for a second and watched as a young uniformed policeman, dressed in a bullet-proof vest and looking a bit like one of those SWAT teams you see breaking into people’s houses in television dramas, got out of the driver’s door. There didn’t seem to be any great sense of urgency in his movements so I turned back to the door and inserted my key in the lock. The policeman called out, making me jump.
‘No, no lad,’ he shouted. ‘Stop there. Don’t go in. Wait over there a minute.’
He walked up behind me and nodded towards the low wall that separated our front garden from next door’s. There wasn’t anything particularly dramatic in his tone as he gave me those instructions; it all seemed a routine matter to him, although I found it odd that I was being stopped from going into my own house. Isobel and I had always been brought up to be respectful of authority figures so I did as he told me without question, leaving my key still in the lock, unable to work out what was going on and unsure what to ask. It’s always been my habit to stay quiet in new situations where I am unsure of myself, and wait to see what happens rather than launch in with lots of questions, demanding to know what was going on, which is probably what Isobel would have done if she had been in my shoes at that moment.
Under my curious gaze the policeman composed himself and then politely rang the doorbell, as if he was just paying a visit. I wondered if perhaps Mum and Dad had been arguing again and neighbours had rung to complain about the noise or to express their concern for Mum’s safety. I decided I wasn’t going to interfere, in case it was Dad who came to the door; I would leave it to the policeman to sort it out.
Dad had often threatened to hang himself or set fire to the house with us all in it. It might sound melodramatic but I believed anything was possible as far as he was concerned. Maybe this time he had actually carried out one of his threats and Mum had had to call the police. Isobel and I were so worried about his threats to set fire to us that before we went to bed at night we used to try to find all the matches in the house and hide them – which was pointless really as we had no idea what Dad kept inside his room. We had never been allowed inside the upstairs bedroom where he spent most of his days and nights; we didn’t even have any idea what it looked like in there.
