‘Mum, a man attacked me... I'm scared'

Tammy Cohen thought her 17-year-old daughter was old enough to come back from a party alone. But then she got a phone call

- TAMMY COHEN

It’s the call every parent dreads. Except I’d forgotten to keep dreading it. Billie is my youngest child, sensible and cautious, with two far more reckless older brothers. They had successfully made it through their teenage party years, there was no reason she wouldn’t, too.

I’d become complacent. I was reading in bed when my phone rang just after midnight on a rainy Friday night in January 2014. I assumed Billie was calling to tell me she’d be late. At 17, she didn’t have a curfew, as long as I knew what time to expect her. We’d recently moved to Bounds Green, north London – a mile or two from where she’d grown up.

When she had told me she was going to a party, I was relieved that she was keeping up with her old friends. I couldn’t pick her up as my partner, Michael, had the car, but the party was only two stops on the bus. What could go wrong? You see? Complacent.

When I pressed ‘answer’ there was the sound of rapid breathing and sobs.

‘Billie?’ I said, panic bubbling. When she spoke, it was in a high-pitched tone that I barely recognised.

‘A man attacked me. I’m scared.’ There are moments that divide your life into before and after. That phone call separated the me who believed if you take precautions and use common sense you’ll be all right, from the me who knows crime isn’t something that only​ happens to other people. But it could have been a whole lot worse.

The story I got through Billie’s muffled sobs was that she’d been followed off the bus by a man, who’d grabbed her from behind and tried to drag her down a side street, battering her around the head when she screamed.