But for the lazy or retarded amongst you I shall sum up:

• Her brother got involved in a gang.
• They decided to stash drugs in her room.
• We burgled their house (and caught massive flack for that)
• She almost got killed.
• He got the crap beaten out of him by the gang.

Fortunately we were able to pull sufficient strings (or apply enough guilt to enough consciences) to make sure they didn’t kill him.

Since then, he’s very clearly seen the error of his ways, and she’s continued to be an unalloyed delight, her parents have finally re-married (other people, natch) and everything’s ticking along nicely. In fact, such is the success of our little fracas with the burglary that the case has been taken off my hands. Although there’s an excellent chance that that’s more to ensure I don’t kill her prematurely.

All of which means I’m out of her life, and on to some other troublesome case. Yay me!

I’ll probably have some other cases to talk about soon. But for now I thought it best to tidy up the loose ends first. Next week staff performance rating systems! You lucky lucky things.

This is where things start to go terribly wrong. They come up with a plan to gag Cassandra by tying a pillow to her face. This they do, and turn to make their escape out the window. Unfortunately, the pillow is hopelessly ineffective, which is just as well as, had it been effective, it may also have proven fatal. Cassandra collapses to the ground the moment they stop holding her and her knees land in the broken glass that has been liberally scattered across the floor.

She screams as she suffers a hundred cuts on her knees, shins and feet. In the next room, her brother wakes up. He’s just been having a nightmare and it takes him a second to realise the screaming isn’t his best friend being tortured for not telling the dinner lady he wanted custard on his apple crumble. He grabs the knife that he’s taken to sleeping with under his pillow and runs to his sister’s room.

He opens the door just as one of the burglars has dragged Cassandra to her feet, while the other one is halfway out the window. He makes a move to grab the burglar who – having nothing at hand to counter this – does the only thing he can. He shoves Cassandra at her brother and dives for the window.

There’s a sickening moment as Cassandra’s brother realises that he’s trying to catch her with the wrong hand; everything seems to skip for a heartbeat; and then – like a DVD stuck on whatever that not-really-fast-forward mode is that’s just watching the film a shade faster with no sound – everything plays out exactly as everyone is afraid it would.

Cassandra’s parents are woken up by the horrible tortured noise of a young man who thinks he’s killed the only person in the entire world he really loves. They have dialled the emergency services before they’ve even reached their daughter’s bedroom door.

And two days later Cassandra wakes up in a brightly lit hospital bedroom, the only person in the room is her brother – sporting a fresh black eye, and a couple of broken ribs that he wouldn’t let the doctors look at until his sister woke up.

The bunglers managed to make it all of three feet before one of them stabbed themselves in the foot, and collapsed on the floor. The noise of this woke Cass up, and it was only sheer terror that stopped her screaming. This was fortunate all round as the panicking burglars would probably have done something monumentally stupid if she had screamed. The burglars grabbed Cassandra, and forced her into the corner of the room. One of them watched her, and kept her facing the wall while the other searched for the drugs.

It took thirty minutes of searching the room for the burglars to find the stash of drugs, the one watching Cass had to keep her face pushed into the corner so she wouldn’t see anything. If they’d had any sense they would have found something to blindfold her with, but that didn’t occur to them at this point.

When it came time to leave, the burglars were seriously stressed. They needed to ensure Cassandra didn’t see their faces, and they needed to get back out the window without lacerating their poorly protected feet.

Let’s just say their first plan wasn’t their best one.

These people I find slightly alarming, they blunder through their lives causing mayhem to others, and are frequently so utterly oblivious that they never notice the harm they cause. I’ve made a list of jobs that incompetent people really shouldn’t be allowed to do.

I’ve had to add incompetent burglars to the list of people who endanger others with their incompetence.

The two who burgled Cassandra’s bedroom gave me great cause for alarm.

We’ve got about 48 hours before someone raids the house. That means I’ve got about 48 hours to find someone in that gang who has something left of their conscience. Which means I’ve been spending the night searching through page after page of reports on the current members of the gang. Once I’ve found a member or two who would be suitable, I’ve got to dig up their old case workers (thank god none of them are mine), and find out how to influence them into doing the burglary.

We’ve got to push these guys into performing the burglary so that someone more ruthless doesn’t do it. It’s a dangerous strategy, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

Like I said, we’ve got 48 hours, and that’s precious little time to work out a plan that will perform the joint tasks of protecting the moral standards of our clients, ensuring that no-one who is good comes to much harm and giving key actors a moral education.

No-one ever claimed this was an easy job, but this is ridiculous.

It couldn’t last; it couldn’t bloody last. It had to happen eventually; something had to go wrong with Cassandra. Well now, it has, big time. Slices of shit pie for everybody.

I’ve just come back from a meeting with the caseworker for Cassandra’s brother. He’s going down the pan fast, incredibly fast. There’s a good chance he’ll take the whole family down with him. Which is bad news for me, it’s bad news for Cassandra, it’s bad news for a whole stack of people.

Turns out the gang he wants to hang out with have some drugs, they need moving around the place. He’s volunteered. The drugs are currently being stashed under Cassandra’s bed, and it’s 3 to 1 odds she’ll be asked to move them. This is not good for me, and we need to find some way out of this fast. Usually in this situation, we’d opt for the “easy opportunity to rat someone out” escape route. But Cassandra is just too nice to her brother to drop him in deep shit. This means we’ll have to find some other way out, and we have precious little time.

I have a great deal of faith in Cassandra, but without an escape route, she could be in serious trouble.

We really really need an escape route.

Shit in a pie.

True powerlessness is watching your brother going out night after night, trying to get into the gang that hates him for being too middle class. Our sweet kid can see what her brother is doing, but she can’t see where it will end. She’s not so full of insight that she can predict the difficult end that is possibly to come. She’s simply a very good person, and she can see bad happening.

But she can’t stop it; her brother doesn’t listen to her. Her father doesn’t speak to her; and her mother doesn’t think of her as anything other than “her little Cass.” She’s so frustrated with them all she wants to scream, but experience has taught her that this won’t help.

It’s not that they don’t care; her brother sees a little sister who needs protecting from the big bad world. Her father hardly sees her at all; he’s too busy trying to provide for the whole family to be able to get to know them. And her mother is unwilling to watch her children grow up, and would prefer to pretend that they aren’t.

Being truly helpless is like shouting at the TV, except that there’s no reassurance that the scriptwriters have things all in hand, there’s simply the horrible feeling that the train has left the station, but there’s something wrong with the line.

Our sweet kid knows that things have gone wrong, but no one’s listening to her.

I’ll talk about one incident here. I chose this one because it was so elaborate, and so likely to fail that it smacks of quite incredible desperation. It relied on so many unlikely things, and must have involved pulling so many strings that I’m amazed anyone bothered. It took place during a dinner party at her father’s boss’s house.

The plumbing had been arranged to fail, so that the usual rooms couldn’t be used as a cloakroom – and the room holding the pool table had to be used. Obviously, they were relying on the party not simply being cancelled because the house was covered in water, but that part went through alright. Next it had been arranged that the boss’s wife and daughter had to rush off for a minor family emergency. Meaning our sweet kid had to step in to ferry coats back and forward to the cloakroom. There are three routes to do this and the most difficult goes over a bridge crossing the carp pond. It had been arranged that the other two routes had been covered in an oily slimy moss, meaning our sweet kid had to go back and forth over the bridge carrying coats all evening.

Now simply tempting a child into dropping a coat or two wouldn’t have been enough, they had to push it a bit further. One of the guests has brought a sample of rat poison, they’d been working late and hadn’t dropped it off. They’d even mentioned this in front of everyone.

Our poor demons had hoped against hope that the poison would prove too much temptation. Especially when they arranged for all the guests to be distracted by one of the drunken women present.

It was a masterful performance in death-defying morality, and it’s just one example of how she treads the line every single day.

It’s a feeling I imagine that parents may feel. These people are precious, and they appear so fragile; but in the end, they’re more than capable of looking after themselves. Despite knowing that you really don’t need to meddle, or interfere – you end up spending half your time keeping an eye on them. It’s like the paranoid feeling you get with a diamond ring, it’s so precious you polish and you care for it constantly – but when you think about it, diamond’s the hardest fucking material on earth (just about) nothing’s going to scratch it, so quit worrying about it.

I have one such person on my books right now; she’s a sweet kid, a real darling child. Her parents are comfortably middle class, but divorced, and always fight whenever they’re together. Her brother is a good ten years older than she is, and is desperately trying to join a gang – thank god I don’t have him on my books. But despite an unpromising background and a series of unfortunate incidents in her past, she could teach right and wrong to a professor of ethics.

Two weeks ago her dad’s boss ran over her pet cat when he came over to be entertained by her ambitious father. Her dad wouldn’t believe her, and locked her in her room for the entire evening. She cried for three days about the whole affair.

It’s been almost comical watching the demons attempt to trap the poor girl into avenging her lost pet. But, like a circus performer you know will make the jump, it still keeps your heart in your mouth watching the show.