My three Sterkarm books have many adult readers but they were originally written and published as Young Adult. Bad Girl is the first novel I’ve written with an adult audience always in mind.

Find 'Bad Girl' on Amazon

     A friend said she loved its 'audacious' plotting but kept thinking: ‘That wouldn’t happen. Nobody would do that.’ Every time she thought this, she told me, there followed several minutes of thought, at the end of which she had to admit that it could happen. She just found it hard to believe.

     Consider this blog a public service, then, because the events in Bad Girl are actually very plausible. Chillingly plausible. I did my research.

Let me put this unhappy scenario before you, while hoping that it never comes to pass: A member of your family— a daughter, a niece, a cousin— reveals that she has terminal cancer.

     She’s broke but desperately wants to take her child to Disneyland before she dies, to leave the child with one lovely, happy memory.

     Your family would organise a whip-round, wouldn’t it? Of course, they would. And you’d contribute yourself. Anything to help.

     In 2014, in Alabama, this was exactly the situation of Jenny Flynn Cataldo, a woman in her 30s. Her friends and family responded as generously as anyone could hope.

However, even if the NHS makes it hard to convince Grandad that he needs to remortgage his house to pay your medical bills, never let it be said that the UK lags behind the rest of the world in audacious fakers and con-artists.

     Take Gemma Watts, a 21-year old woman who sexually assaulted teenaged girls by simply pretending to be a teenaged boy. Like any male abuser, she first chatted them up on-line via social media, introducing herself as a boy named ‘Jake.’ Having charmed them and won their confidence, she arranged to meet them and, from her home in London, travelled around the country to do so. She was charged with offences against only four girls but police estimate that she may have assaulted as many as fifty, with long-lasting psychological damage for them.

     Watts’ ‘disguise’ was to tuck her long hair under a baseball cap and wear baggy clothes, though on at least one occasion, she did go so far as to stuff rolled up socks down her joggers. Thus transformed, she not only convinced some naïve teenagers but also some of their parents while visiting the girls at their homes. Invited in as their daughters’ new boyfriend, she sat and chatted with the parents. They, too, believed that she was a boy.

Pause there for a moment and imagine the amount of brass neck and gall that must have taken on Watts’ part. And how exciting it must have been for her, to fool the authority figures of Mom and Dad. How much fun. (She didn't even cut her hair!)

     When asked about her breasts, Watts said she had lost a lot of weight and had been left with ‘man-boobs’. Asked by one girl about photos of herself dressed in women’s clothes, Watts said she had been ‘experimenting.’ (Ooh, how exciting and daring that must have seemed to her teenaged marks.) Asked why her bedroom was painted pink, she said it was ‘because of a female cousin.’ (Why? Did Jake share a room with his female cousin? Or perhaps Watts claimed to be on a computer in the cousin’s room? But again, why?) It seems that Watts was always quick with the flannel and plausible explanations.

     I think we see ‘the big lie’ here too. Were all the parents really convinced? Totally? The questions from the girls are evidence of some doubts… Please don’t think, though, that I’m trying to blame the girls or parents. If your daughter brings home a guest, introducing him as her new boyfriend, why would you think otherwise? Even if something about this guest— his build, his movements, his voice— made you think something like, ‘He’s rather girlish,’ wouldn’t you, as a fair-minded person, be more likely to tick yourself off for being judgemental or old fashioned rather than believing that an adult woman was sitting there, out-facing you? I completely understand why the parents didn’t snatch off Watts’ baseball cap and demand an explanation. Why would they?

     Watts’ defence argued that she was of ‘a low IQ’ but looking at the degree of planning and manipulation she demonstrated, to say nothing of her quick answers to awkward questions, I am not convinced.

     And before anyone leaps up, yelling 'J'accuse!' let me make it clear that it's Watts' deception I object to. If Watts had been the teenager she pretended to be, and had introduced herself to the other girls as gay, bi or non-binary then I'd consider whatever followed between them to be entirely their business. But she lied about her age, her gender, her name and her sexuality. She completely misrepresented herself.

     As the judge in the case pointed out, it's unlikely that any of the girls in the case would have willingly had sex with Watt had they known that she was an adult, gay woman and not, as they believed, a straight teenaged boy.

In any case, it's not what Cataldo and Watts did that makes me draw a comparison between them and my book, so much as the incredible, almost unbelievable brazenness of their lies. My friend kept having to pause in her reading of Bad Girl because she could not believe that any one would get themselves into such a situation or tell such Dreadful lies that it made one Gasp and Stretch one's eyes. I think I have demonstrated that such people lie among us.

     Some of you may be disappointed to learn that there are no scammers like Watts in Bad Girl and only the lightest flourish of the cancer scam but it does feature bare-faced and brass-necked lying, of the kind suited to a book published as Johnson claims to represent our country. Lies no less breath-taking and jaw-dropping than those being told in Westminster are also being told to someone near you, right now, and backed up with falsified documents, produced with a scanner and printer.

     You have been warned.