Watson - The Boy No One Loved: A Heartbreaking True Story of Abuse, Abandonment and Betrayal

To my wonderful and supportive family

His little brothers, the boy saw, were both covered in shit. Theyd removed their full nappies and smeared each other in it, while their mothers dog a spiteful brown terrier was busy licking what remained from the bars of their shared cot.

He shooed the dog away and, gagging now, lifted both boys out, and then went to fetch a quilt from his mothers bedroom. Where had she gone this time? Why was she never there?

He took the boys downstairs, used the quilt to wrap them up warmly on the couch, and tuned the TV to a channel that was showing cartoons. Were hungry, the older one kept repeating plaintively. Were hungry, Justin. Please Justin. Find us some food.

There was nothing. There never was. Though he looked for some anyway. In all the cupboards. In the drawers. In the big dirty fridge. He felt tears spring in his eyes. And he also felt anger. He looked at his little brothers, at their hopeful, expectant faces. What was he supposed to feed them with? What was he supposed to do?

Then, suddenly, in that instant of despair, there came clarity. He didnt have to think. He knew exactly what to do. As if on autopilot now, he took his brothers out into the front garden, sat them down on the grass still wrapped in the grubby quilt and told them to stay where they were.

He then returned to the house and looked around the living room for the lighter. Picking it up, he calmly flicked it at the couch. He continued to do this till the couch began burning and then he went and set fire to the curtains.

The dog came downstairs then, its face all smeared with the contents of the brothers nappies. The boy ran to the kitchen, to the cupboard under the sink, where there was a container of fluid which he knew was for the lighter. Grabbing this, he returned to the living room again, and squirted the fuel all over the animals filthy face.

Taking one last look around, he walked out of the front door, closing it carefully behind him. He then joined his brothers under the quilt, on the grass, and calmly watched while both home and dog perished.

His mother was located, by the police, three hours later. Shed apparently spent the day at a friends house. The little boy was just five and a half years old.

Funny the little details that tend to stick in your mind, isnt it? The day Justin, the first foster child to ever be placed with us, was due to arrive a bright but chilly day on the last Saturday before Christmas all I kept going back to were the same old two things. One of them was just how desperate the social worker seemed to be that we should agree to have him, and the other was the fact that I had black hair.

And it wasnt just me either. My daughter Riley, now 21 and so supportive of the whole project from day one, had the same head of black hair that I did. Wed both of us inherited our raven locks from my mother and one thing I knew and I really knew so little about Justin was that he had a very powerful aversion to women with black hair.

I straightened his England football-team-themed duvet cover for the umpteenth time that morning, and tried to put the negative thoughts right out of my mind. I was trained to do this job, I told myself. So was my husband, Mike. Plus I already had several years of experience looking after difficult children. And this was the new career Id chosen for myself, wasnt it?

But along with the anxiety, I also felt proud. I looked around me and found myself smiling with satisfaction at what I saw. I certainly couldnt have thought harder about the way to do his new bedroom. Because one of the few things we did know was that Justin liked football, we quickly settled on that as a theme. So wed done out the spare room in black and white and splashed out on some special wallpaper that made one of the walls look like it was a crowd at a stadium. Wed laid a green carpet, for a pitch, added a football-themed frieze, and Id trawled charity shops endlessly for the books, games and jigsaws that I knew my own kids had enjoyed at his age. We also knew he liked movies, especially Disney films, apparently, so wed bought him a starter pack of those too. I had agonised over every detail, every decision, every tiny item, because it meant so much to me to do everything I could to help him feel at home. The one thing I didnt know was what team he supported, so, till I did know, Id pinched my son Kierons old duvet cover for him. I reasoned that England was a pretty safe bet for any football-mad eleven-year-old boy.

I checked the time on the big blue clock Mike had fixed on the wall. Almost eleven. They would be here any minute, I realised. And, as if by magic, I heard Mike call my name from downstairs.

Theyre coming up the path, love, he said.

I had met Justin already, of course, just the previous Tuesday. In fact, it had only been a week since wed been asked to consider our first placement at that point, and only eight days since Id left my old job at the local comprehensive school. It had been an intense week, too, with everything seeming to move so quickly, and even though the way all these things were done was still new to us, Mike and I had both felt there was a real sense of desperation in the air. John Fulshaw, our link worker from the fostering agency we worked for, had been clear: this was not something we should undertake lightly. How little did we understand then just how true his words would be.

Wed been assigned John as our link worker when wed first applied to be foster carers and wed struck up a good relationship with him right away. By now we also felt we knew him quite well, so if John was anxious it naturally made me anxious too. Not that we werent anticipating challenges. What Mike and I had signed up for wasnt mainstream fostering. It was an intense kind of fostering, intended to be short term in nature, which involved a new and complex programme of behaviour management. It had been trialled and was proving very successful in America, and had recently started to be funded by a number of councils in the UK. It was geared to the sort of kids who were considered unfosterable the ones who had already been through the system and for whom the only other realistic future option was moving permanently into residential care. And not just ordinary residential care either theyd usually already tried that but, tragically, in secure units, many of these kids having already offended.