VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
Camilla went about this second adoption process exactly as she had with her first baby, filling the official paperwork with lie after lie. Once again, she gave her real name, but neither the address nor email address she provided actually existed. Once again, the mobile number she supplied always went straight to voicemail.
But this time, she was dealing with a different adoption services department. And this time, there was someone handling her case who wasn’t about to take no for an answer.
STEVE McILVANNEY
We took the baby into foster care the day after she was born, and Miss Rowan left hospital later that same afternoon. I told her I’d be in touch to follow up and she said that was fine, and she was glad the baby was ‘going to a good home’. It made it sound like it was a puppy or something.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Didn’t that set off warning signals that something might be wrong?
STEVE McILVANNEY
No, not then – like I said, I was under the impression she’d never done this before. I put it down to nerves.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
She seemed nervous that day?
STEVE McILVANNEY
To be honest no, not really. She was chatty, smiling – certainly not distraught. But thinking about it afterwards, I think she did sense that comment about ‘a good home’ was a bit crass. She made more of an effort after that. I think she was desperate for me to just tick all the boxes and let her go.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
What happened next?
STEVE McILVANNEY
She’d put on her forms that she lived in Brighton, and had only been in Gloucester visiting friends. Just like she had with the first baby, though of course I only found out about that a lot later.
Intercut: sequence of images of Brighton. Seafront, Royal Pavilion, etc.
I also had no idea the address she’d given me didn’t exist – that’d never happened to me in 15 years. With the benefit of hindsight, I think she deliberately chose Brighton because she knew I wouldn’t have either the time or the budget to go all the way down there to see her. Everything was going to have to be done by phone or email and, of course, I got absolutely nowhere with either. Six weeks later, we got to the point where we needed to complete the final paperwork, and I still hadn’t managed to speak to her.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
So what did you do?
STEVE McILVANNEY
It occurred to me she might have given the hospital a different email address – the one she’d given me was one of those Gmail ones with a name followed by a string of numbers, so I thought she could have written it down wrong by mistake. I was kicking myself, actually, that I hadn’t thought of contacting the Maternity Unit before.
Cut to: hospital office, charts on wall, computers, cupboards, files, etc.
TITLE OVER: Staff Nurse Penny Curtis, Maternity Unit, Princess Alice Hospital, Gloucester
PENNY CURTIS
I’d known Steve for a number of years by then – we didn’t get many babies put up for adoption, but when it did happen it was usually Steve who handled the process. He was very good at his job – always very thorough and conscientious. I was surprised when he contacted me about the Rowan baby, though – I thought that had all been sorted out weeks before. But then he explained that he kept leaving her voicemails and she never called him back, so did I have an email address for her he could try. I asked him to hang on a moment while I had a look, and while I was doing that he just happened to mention that she might be difficult to get hold of because she was finding the adoption process harder than she’d thought it would be. After all, she would have had no idea what to expect.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
And what did you say to that?
PENNY CURTIS
To be honest, I laughed. I said I didn’t know where he’d got that from but I knew for a fact she’d had at least one previous child. That’s not the sort of thing you can hide from an obstetrician. And it wasn’t only that either – just after the baby was born Miss Rowan told me it had been ‘easy, compared to last time’, and when I asked her about the previous child she said the baby had been adopted. She said that was why she was so convinced it was the right thing to do this time as well.
Cut to: Steve McIlvanney
STEVE McILVANNEY
I was gobsmacked when I heard that – there’s simply no other word for it. She’d explicitly stated on her forms that this was her first child. I started wondering what else she might be lying about, and whether this was the real reason she wasn’t answering her phone. I alerted my manager, and we decided to search UK adoption records for the first child. It took a while because we didn’t even know where to start, but we got there in the end. And there she was: Camilla Kathleen Rowan, listed as the biological mother of a baby born at the West Bromwich Women’s Hospital on November 9th 1996.
So I contacted their Maternity Unit and got put through to a hospital administrator.
Intercut: RECONSTRUCTION: Woman at computer screen in hospital office, talking on phone and gesturing at screen, etc.
I explained to her who I was and that I was looking for information about a Miss Camilla Rowan, who was listed as having given birth in their maternity unit in 1996. So she starts looking back through the Birmingham NHS Trust computer records and suddenly says, ‘1996, don’t you mean 1997?’ So I say no, it was a baby boy born in November 1996. And she says, ‘What I have here is a baby boy born in December 1997. And it wasn’t at West Bromwich, it was at Birmingham and Solihull General.’
Cut back to Steve McIlvanney
STEVE McILVANNEY
So, to cut a long story short, it turns out there were two previous births – the boy born in 1996 at West Bromwich, who had definitely been adopted, and another boy born in 1997 at Birmingham and Solihull who no one seemed to know anything about. There were no adoption records for that child that I could find, and I couldn’t believe Camilla Rowan still had it living with her. She’d mentioned having a dog; she never mentioned having a four-year-old son. So I did some more checks on the General Registrar database of births and couldn’t find any baby registered by Miss Rowan at any time in the six months after that child was born.
That’s when I knew we had a real problem on our hands. And that’s when I called the Child Protection team.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
And what did they do?
STEVE McILVANNEY
They called the police.
- freeze frame -
* * *
Interview with Keith Phillips, Royal Mail Oxford depot
25 October 2018, 1.35 p.m.
On the call, DC C. Sargent
CS: Hello, Mr Phillips, it’s DC Chloe Sargent, Thames Valley Police. I believe you’re the person who covers the Wytham area, is that right?
KP: Yes, that’s me. The office told me you might call.
CS: Do you know the people at Gantry Manor?
KP: Mr and Mrs Swann – yes, I know them. Very private people. Old-fashioned. They’re always very polite, but they don’t chat. Not like some on my round.
CS: Do they get much post?
KP: Two or three deliveries a week, I’d say. Bills, the council, official stuff mostly. Apart from the junk mail, of course.
CS: So not much of a personal nature then?
KP: No, definitely not. They don’t even go in much for Christmas cards, to be honest.