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‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, holding a roll of paper up level with the top of her head. She then allowed it to unravel all the way to the floor. Every inch of it was covered in data about my stepfather.

‘That’s just his arrests in the last seven years,’ she said.

I felt a surge of relief, realizing that someone in authority was actually going to believe what I was saying.

‘I think we’d better start again from the beginning, don’t you?’ Marie said.

We set to work to sort out my memories and build a case that her bosses would be willing to take to court. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service will only take this on if they think there’s a reasonable chance of winning it,’ she warned me.

It wasn’t hard remembering the many dreadful things that had happened to me, but it was almost impossible to get them into any sort of coherent order as my mind jumped from one thing to the next. I could see that the more I told Marie, the more confused she became.

‘Did he do that to you when you were five or ten?’ she would ask. ‘Did it go on for a month, a year? When did that happen? How often? How long?’

So often I couldn’t give a definite answer and every question sent me off on another babbling stream of consciousness as Marie’s pen flew over the page, trying to get it all down in some form that would make sense later. Realizing that there was more than the normal amount of material to sift through, she was forced to bring in a colleague to help her.

In most child abuse cases the abuse only happens for a few years before the child is either saved or the abuser loses interest because their victim matures. Seventeen years was an astonishingly long time to have been systematically abused and made the task far harder than usual as I dredged up one ghastly memory after another.

Marie went to social services to get my file to see whether they had had any idea what was going on and what they might have been doing about it.

‘They’ve lost the file,’ she told me over the phone. ‘I’ve told them they’ve got a week to find it before I send in a team to search properly.’

I could tell how angry she was. She told me it was not the first time this had happened to her in the course of an investigation.

A week later nothing had surfaced and she sent in a team of police to go through every file in the building. They found nothing. Someone had removed every trace of the evidence.

‘What does this mean?’ I wanted to know.

‘It means his defence team will say it would have been impossible for him to have been treating you the way he did because social services were coming round all the time to check that you were alright.’

‘But they never came near me that I can remember,’ I insisted. ‘And even if they had, I would never have had the nerve to tell them what was going on.’

Undaunted, Marie and her colleague continued getting everything they could out of me, until their fingers were aching with the pain of writing.

‘We’re going to have to stop now,’ Marie told me finally. ‘We can’t put in every last thing he ever did to you or this case will last forever.’

They went away to have the whole sorry story typed up. When they came back with the typescript, Marie was armed with a pair of scissors and a Pritt stick.

‘You’ve got to go through this,’ she explained, ‘and cut it up and stick it back together in some sort of order so that the lawyers can understand it.’

I tried to do as she said, but I was still having trouble putting things in order.

‘The woman who typed this up,’ Marie told me as we went through it together, ‘has been working in the department for nearly twenty years, but she had to keep leaving the room because she was crying when she was typing up your words.’

‘So do you think they’ll prosecute him?’ I asked.

‘Who knows?’ Marie shrugged. ‘But if they don’t then it won’t be for lack of trying.’

Now that I had chosen my path forward I was determined to do as good a job as I possibly could. Marie and her colleagues were being so good I wanted to help them in every way, so that they wouldn’t end up wasting their