Esme was fine. I want to say that flatly and early because it is the only thing that got me through the eleven months of proceedings. She was fed and she was warm and she was not frightened, and there is no suggestion of anything else, and there never has been.
And on the eleventh day Nell rang somebody.
Not the police. Not her brother.
She rang a woman she had met at a bereavement group in Corran in the March.
Britt Falk.
Britt and Hendrik had been trying for eleven years. Britt had lost two at around twenty weeks, in 2011 and 2013, and that is why she was in that room in March of 2015 and that is how the two of them knew each other.
Britt Falk drove three and a half hours and found a woman in a state she has described in court as « the worst I have ever seen a person, » and a four-year-old watching a portable television.
And Nell told her the child was hers.
That the father was violent. That she had run. That she could not go back and could not go to the police.
And Britt Falk believed that for four days.
She has never claimed otherwise and she did not claim otherwise in her interview or on the stand.
She took Nell and the child back to her own house in Corran and put them in the spare room and did what she thought she was doing, which was shelter a woman from that group who was in danger.
On the fifth day she worked it out.
The child said something. A name, and a road, and a dog — we did not have a dog; the neighbours had a dog and Esme talked about it constantly.
And Britt went and looked at the news.
And on the sixth day Nell Cassar was gone.
She left at some point in the night and she left the child.
And Britt Falk sat in a kitchen in Corran on the morning of the first of July, 2015, with a four-year-old at her table, and she did not pick up the phone.
She had four hours. She has said it was four hours.
And at the end of four hours she rang nobody, and she went out and bought a car seat.
She was thirty-six. Eleven years of trying. Two losses.
That is not an excuse and she has never once offered it as one. It is what was in the room.
Hendrik Falk did not know.
Not for four years. She told him the child was her cousin’s and that there was a private arrangement, and he is not a curious man and he did not ask, and I have my own view about how much a man can not-ask for four years and I keep it to myself.
He found out in 2019.
And he did nothing. For six years. And that is a separate crime and he has been sentenced for it.
What they did with her.
They moved from Corran to Wexley in 2015 and to two other places after that.
They called her Lotte. They enrolled her in school with a birth certificate obtained by Britt using a set of circumstances that took an investigator four months to unpick and that I am not going to explain in case somebody reads this and takes notes.
And they raised her, and they raised her well.
I have to say that and I have said it in a witness statement.
That girl has been to a dentist twice a year for ten years. She plays the cello badly and with great enthusiasm. She has an allergy that has been properly managed. She was read to.
She has never been hit and she has never been frightened and she has never gone without.
Every single day of it was built on a decision Britt Falk made in four hours in 2015, and the two things are both true and they do not cancel.
Now — why they moved in next door.
This is the part that everybody finds hardest and it is, to me, the only comprehensible thing that woman has done since 2015.
Britt Falk found us in 2023.
She had been looking since about 2020. It took her three years and she found us through an electoral roll and a photograph.
And then she did nothing for two years.
Because she could not. She got as far as the end of our road twice, in 2023 and in 2024, and she has said she sat in the car both times and then drove home.
And in the August of 2025 the house next door came up for sale.
And she bought it.
She bought the house next door to us because she had spent two years failing to knock on a door and she thought that if she lived eleven feet away she would not be able to keep failing.
That is what she said in her interview and it is what she said in the dock and I believe it completely.
She engineered a situation in which she could not avoid it.
And it worked. Six days.
And Lotte knew.
Britt told her the truth on the fourteenth of September, 2025, three weeks before they moved.
All of it. The garden, the game, the eleven days, the four hours, our names.
So when that girl walked across two lawns on the seventeenth of October and looked into my eyes and did not look away —
she was doing it on purpose.
