I never liked history at school.
And now, I hate it for entirely different reasons.
“Historical.”
That word. That clinical, bloodless word the Met Police throw around like punctuation.
They use it the way most people use “not our problem.”
Because apparently, my abuse was “historical.”
So they don’t want to do anything.
I keep wondering: how long does something have to sit in silence before it qualifies for the archives?
Five years? Ten? Who decides?
You can take a child — tell him he’s going on holiday. Let him get so excited he makes a scrapbook.
He spends the whole summer walking up and down Kettering high street, collecting brochures from every travel agent he can find.
He cuts them up and sticks them into an old photo album. There weren’t many photos of him in there to begin with — so he turns the whole thing sideways, tries to make it into a book. A future in pictures.
And then you can take that child on that holiday — the one he’d go on to call “the weird holiday” for years.
You can hand him over to people who were already arranged.
You can take him to a café and make it look like nothing’s wrong.
You can take him to a shop, give him a drink, and the next thing he knows — nothing.
Then another shop. Another drink. Nothing.
Ten days. Drugged. Assaulted. Forgotten.
Brought home like lost luggage.
And apparently, that’s fine.
As long as enough time passes.
As long as it becomes historical.
I wonder if the Met has a spreadsheet for that.
A little internal memo: When does suffering become inconvenient paperwork?
They’ve known this for a while now.
And so far, they’ve investigated two things.
One was a visit — one of many — to a service station that my mother used to take me to late at night.
Back then, I thought it was something strange and funny about our relationship. A weird little thing we did. I even liked it.
Until I realised what it actually was.
The police “investigated” that. They came back with:
“No further action. No address.”
But they did have an address.
They showed me a picture of the exact place.
I said, “That’s it.”
And then they closed the case anyway.
The other thing they looked into was a man known as “Big Roy.”
A mason who used to come to the house.
They said they spoke to my mother — the witness — and after speaking to her, they decided he was probably dead.
So, case closed.
My mother. The witness.
I told them I was glad they spoke to her.
She won’t speak to me.
But I also said: when you say “witness,” do you know she was the one who arranged everything?
Apparently, they didn’t. Or claimed not to.
Either way, that was enough for them to shelve it.
And they probably sent her a nice little automated message:
Thank you for being a witness. If you need any further help or information, please call…
The Turkey holiday? Not in their jurisdiction.
So, again, nothing.
All of it — boxed up, brushed off, and sealed under that neat little label: historical.
Because here’s the thing: if I stole five million from a bank twenty years ago, would they call that historical?
Would they shrug and say, “Well, that was a long time ago”?
No. The police would be on it.
They’d assemble a team. They’d comb through evidence, timelines, surveillance.
They’d probably even watch a critically underrated Channel 4 documentary about whether I did it or not.
Because somewhere, there’s a spreadsheet that’s just dying to have those numbers back on it.
A NASDAQ entry. A blockchain trail. Some poor investment bank missing a few zeroes in its code.
They’d want to know where it went — the jets, the champagne, the girls. Or did I spend it on a modest getaway in Marbella? Either way, it must be tracked. Recovered. Entered neatly into Excel.
Because a number missing from a spreadsheet — that’s worth chasing.
But what about a child?
Try to get justice for something that happened in the same time period, but involved a child being abused — and the system shrugs.
Try to expose something that destroyed your life, and they look the other way.
Try to stop it from happening to someone else, and they pretend it never happened.
If they opened this up properly, they’d uncover something still happening now.
They’d save lives. They’d give me a chance to start mine — even halfway through it.
It would send a message:
You will be caught.
You can’t do this to children.
Because children become people.
And people break.
It would give people hope.
It would give me hope.
It would mean my mother was actually held accountable for what she did.
It would mean you can’t just do this to a child in the UK and walk away.
I would cry. With happiness.
Because it would mean I could start again.
It would mean my life mattered.
That what happened to me meant something — other than silence.
And isn’t that worth more than a few ones and zeros on a spreadsheet?
Apparently not.
Steal money, you’re hunted.
Steal a child’s life, and you’re fine.
As long as it becomes historical.
