Hide and Don’t Seek

A lot of people have no social media presence. I know more and more people in the generations below me that either don’t have profiles, or have the security settings locked down so tightly their own mother couldn’t find them. But Tim Darch kept himself off the internet from the moment he started using it.

He knew to hide, and he seemed to instinctively know how. I have one photograph of him, but no photographs with him. He would always take the picture, or say something like, “Just you boys” in response to us asking him to be in it with us. Of course, this was back in the days that to get a picture you had to take a roll of film to a chemist and wait a day, or a week, for the pictures to be developed. I’d grown up with my mother being camera-shy, so Tim being the same felt normal.

Now I can look back and see the reality of the situation. He knew that being in a picture with us would be evidence, and he was already thinking about that aspect of what he was doing. But there is only so long one person can hide. I don’t think it’s possible to move through the world and exist in this century without creating footprints online. Even a single point or mark of your life, can lead to the next, and the next, and in the case of Tim, it led to my realisation that he hadn’t been an opportunist, he was a predator that knew to stay in the shadows.

I’d been Googling Tim since before ‘Googling’ was an adjective, I never found anything though. Occasionally I would find a profile or page, but it never had pictures or personal details. That was until 2020. A close friend suggested I Google Tim to put my mind at rest, and I did.

I don’t know if I’d managed to go years without putting his name into a search-bar, or if my thinking had changed sufficiently that I put ‘paedophile’ after his name, but google returned a result that took hold of my breath. To start with I didn’t notice the headline, I just scanned the article while my heart raced. I remembered to breathe and tried to do so calmly, as I was having palpitations. I scanned the article again. It was him. I dropped my phone beside me and tried to slow the speed of my thoughts. When I picked my phone up, I saw the headline, “Paedophile escapes jail sentence.”

It hadn’t just been me. He hadn’t stopped. And he was still out there. The article was dated 2017 and detailed Tim being found guilty of making and owning child pornography, some of which was category A. Tim was fined £250, £85 victim surcharge, £85 court costs, and put on the sex offenders register for five years. He’d got away with it. He’d continued to abuse children, been caught, and sent back out into the community to carry on as normal. His only punishment was to pay a fine of less than a package holiday to Spain.

I called the police. There was only two years left of him being on the Sex Offenders Register, and then he could blend back into whichever community he wished to.

Little did I know he’d already done that.