Читать книгу For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice. - Ann Ming - Страница 12

On Thursday 16 November 1989, two months after our trip to Blackpool together and about a month after Andrew had gone down to London to work with his uncle, Julie was due to go to court in nearby Stockton to apply for a legal separation. I agreed to go with her, partly because we always did things like that together and partly because I thought she might need a bit of moral support. These sorts of legal procedures are always more emotional than you might expect them to be and I didn’t like the idea of her having to face it on her own. At times like that I knew Julie preferred to have me around; it was just the way we did things.

‘Andrew and me are not going to get back together, our Mam,’ she told me when I asked if she was absolutely sure this was the route she wanted to follow. ‘I’ve been to see a solicitor and he says it’s best we make it official.’

Realizing she had made up her mind and there was nothing I could do but be supportive, I didn’t say any more. She said she was going to be working the night before.

On the 15th, the afternoon before we were due to go to the court, I went down to her house to pick up Kevin just as I normally did when she was working late, making deliveries in the pizza van. She was double-checking all the arrangements as usual. She always got anxious about things like that.

‘You won’t forget to call me in the morning, will you, our Mam?’ she said as Kevin and I were leaving the house. ‘I have to be in court at ten, so we’ll need to set out around nine. Ring me about half seven to make sure I’m awake.’

‘Why don’t you come and stay at home tonight?’ I suggested. ‘Then you can take your time in the morning.’

‘No, I want to stay in my own house,’ she said casually. ‘Just don’t forget to call me at seven-thirty.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I will, and I’ll be down to get you about half eight.’

‘You won’t forget, will you?’ she said.

‘I won’t,’ I assured her, used to her always fussing like this about things like appointments.

How many thousands of times have I wished that I had kept on nagging her to come and stay with us that night? I’m sure I could have made her if I’d kept on at her for long enough, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about at the time. She was a grown-up after all; it was perfectly reasonable that she would want to sleep in her own bed after a long evening’s work. Part of me was always pleased when she showed a bit of independence anyway, and it meant we wouldn’t be disturbed by her coming in late, so I said no more.

I’d just got back to our house with Kevin when the phone rang and I knew it would be her again, because it nearly always was.

‘It’s just me again, Mam,’ she said. ‘You won’t forget to ring me in the morning, early, will you?’

‘Stop worrying,’ I grumbled. ‘I’ll be ringing you.’

That was the last time I heard her voice. There are so many things I wish I’d said in that call, but why would I have thought to say any of them since I expected to see her again in a little over twelve hours’ time? I wish I could just have told her how much I loved her. I wish I could have said goodbye properly, but that isn’t how things work. You can’t go through life treating every phone call and every conversation as if it is going to be your last.

That night I didn’t sleep well. I woke at ten past three, an odd time of night to wake. There was a horrible feeling of foreboding churning around inside my stomach, as if something bad was happening somewhere else, giving me premonitions. I told myself not to be stupid, that I must just have been having a bad dream or something, but still the feeling wouldn’t go away and wouldn’t allow me to get back to sleep. Small worries can grow like weeds in the darkest hours of the night and I hate lying in bed once I’m awake with my mind turning round and round, so I got up and tip-toed downstairs, being careful not to disturb Charlie, who was sleeping soundly.

If it had been an hour earlier I would have rung Julie to check she had got in all right from work, just to put my mind at rest, but I assumed she would be in bed by then and asleep. I didn’t want to disturb her when she was going to have to be up early anyway. I made myself a cup of tea and eventually the feeling of dread in my stomach eased a little and I went back to bed for a few hours of fitful sleep until the alarm went off.

The next morning, I got Kevin up to give him his breakfast, then dead on seven-thirty I rang Julie’s number as promised. When I got no reply I assumed she must be too deeply asleep after her late shift for the phone to penetrate her dreams. Muttering irritably to myself, I decided I’d better go down to wake her up in person. I carried Kevin out and strapped him into the car so we could drive down the road to Grange Avenue to wake his mam up and hurry her along.

As I parked and got out of the car I could see all the curtains were tightly closed upstairs and downstairs so I was pretty sure she was still fast asleep. Not expecting to be more than a couple of minutes, I left Kevin in the car and bustled up the front path. I didn’t have a key so I knocked on the door, mildly exasperated with her for putting me to all this extra trouble. My knocking had no more effect than the phone call had, and I was aware I was making a lot of noise for any of the neighbours who might still be asleep. I tried calling through the letterbox a few times.

‘Julie! Julie! Wake up. It’s yer mam.’

I pressed my ear to the door to see if I could hear any sign of her stirring but everything inside remained deathly silent; no sound of sleepy footsteps on the stairs, no answering shouts from upstairs. I didn’t want the whole street to know our business if I could help it so I went round to the back of the house to see if I would have better luck attracting her attention from there. I peered in through the kitchen window, knocked on the back door and called her name again a few times. Nothing like this had ever happened with Julie before and I was puzzled. She wasn’t that deep a sleeper normally.

None of us had mobile phones in those days, although that seems hard to imagine nowadays given how much we all rely on them, so I decided to drive down to the main road where the phone box was to give it another go. Kevin was still in the car, apparently quite contented to be driven back and forth for a while without asking any questions. He was ever so patient for a three-year-old. Once I was in the phone box, watching Kevin in the car out of the corner of my eye, I dialled her number again, not sure what I would do next if she didn’t pick up. The phone rang and rang. Still no answer.

I was beginning to think that maybe she wasn’t in the house because it seemed unlikely the phone wouldn’t wake her after so many tries. Maybe, I thought, she had gone to stay with a friend at the last minute. She was, after all, a grown woman and might have met someone during the evening and decided to go home with them, although it did seem very out of character. But why wouldn’t she have rung to tell me where she would be? She had been so insistent about me ringing to wake her at seven-thirty, surely she wouldn’t have forgotten so easily? And why would the curtains all be so firmly drawn if she wasn’t in there? Maybe, I told myself, she had drawn them before she went out. Perhaps she had fallen asleep somewhere else and just didn’t realize the time, parked up somewhere in her van maybe. All these possibilities were going through my head, but none of them seemed very likely. There just wasn’t any explanation I could think of that seemed like the sort of thing Julie would do.

I drove back down to the house, with Kevin still chattering happily in his car seat, and tried knocking and shouting through the letterbox a few more times before I noticed a man over the road watching me from his window. I went across to talk to him.

‘Have you seen our Julie?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, I didn’t even hear her coming back last night. I normally hear her coming in around one-thirty when she’s working, being dropped off by someone. I don’t remember hearing anything last night.’

You can’t usually keep much secret in a small street like Grange Avenue where so many of the windows overlook the road and night-time noises travel easily up to people’s bedrooms.

Trying not to panic or think the worst, I drove back down to the phone box once again and called a couple of her friends in case one of them had seen her or heard from her, or in case she had gone round to one of their houses unexpectedly for some reason. None of them had seen her or had any suggestion where she might be. They were as puzzled as I was. I wanted to ring the Iranians from the pizza shop to find out whether they could tell me if she had gone home after her shift, but I knew they didn’t live on the premises and I had no other number or address for them. The shop wouldn’t be open for hours yet so I knew there would be no point driving round there.

I went back again to bang on the door some more, unable to think of anything else to do. Kath, the woman who lived next door, came out to see what was going on.

‘I can’t raise our Julie,’ I told her. ‘Have you heard anything in the night?’

‘I never heard anything at all,’ Kath said.

By this time there was a feeling growing in my guts that something was seriously wrong, but I had to keep calm because I still had Kevin in the car and I didn’t want to alarm him. There just didn’t seem to be any logical reason why Julie wouldn’t be in the house or why she wouldn’t respond to my calls and shouts. I couldn’t work out what was going on and that was frightening me. I wanted to share my worries with someone else in the family, hoping they would tell me I was being stupid and that there was an obvious explanation.

I knew Gary was working as a brickie on a job nearby in Billingham, so I drove to the site to see if he had come in yet. More than anything I just wanted someone else to be with me while I tried to work out what was going on and what I should do about it. He was there when I drew up outside the site, and was obviously surprised to see me.

‘What’s up, our Mam?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know where our Julie is,’ I blurted as soon as I saw him.

‘She phoned last night asking me over,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t get in on time. I haven’t heard since.’

His boss could see how worried I was and told Gary to go with me and sort it out; he said he could manage without him for a couple of hours. We drove back to Julie’s house together. Nothing had changed. The curtains were still tightly drawn, no sign of life anywhere. We went round to the back once more and I took Kevin with me this time, not wanting to leave him in the car on his own now that the street was waking up and there were more people around. We knocked and shouted and peered in the windows again, but there was no sign of life inside.

‘I need to get in,’ Gary said, now obviously sharing my anxiety. ‘We’ll have to break something.’

There was a narrow panel of glass beside the back door, which Gary smashed and climbed through after pulling out the remaining shards of glass. I could see there was no way I was going to be able to get through such a small gap.

‘Go round the front,’ he told me, ‘and I’ll find the keys and let you in.’

I hurried back to the front door, clutching Kevin and trying to answer his stream of questions about why his uncle had just smashed his way into his mam’s house, even though my mind was miles away, racing over a hundred different scenarios, each one worse than the one before. I was struggling to keep my rising panic under control. The front door was still shut when I got there and I waited for Gary to open it. Nothing happened for what seemed to me like an age.

‘What’s going on, Gary?’ I shouted, no longer caring who I might wake up. ‘Open the door!’

A few moments later he pulled back the curtains in the front room and opened the window to talk to me. ‘There’s no keys in here, Mam,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to look upstairs.’

I stood at the window, my heart thumping in my chest as he disappeared off to search the rest of the house. He was back a few minutes later although it seemed like hours.

‘There’s something wrong in here, Mam,’ he said, his face serious. ‘Everywhere’s tidy. The bed’s all made and the kitchen’s been cleared, everything’s been put away neatly. There’s no sign of our Julie anywhere.’

Julie had always been untidy and when she got out of bed in the morning she would throw the duvet back and leave it like that until she was ready to get back into it again at night, then she would just shake it out and throw it back over herself. It was her routine and had been for years. Why would she do it all differently today? When she washed up in the kitchen she would always leave the stuff out to drain on a rack; she never dried things up and put them away. Being in a bit of a mess didn’t worry her. Sometimes if I was going down to visit her with a friend I would call first to give her some warning so she could tidy up if she needed to, but she never bothered. More times than not it would be Andrew going round with the duster when they were together, while she sat on the sofa watching him. Leaving the house like this wasn’t like her.

‘What about the keys?’ I asked Gary through the window, the feeling of foreboding inside me making my voice croak uncomfortably in my throat.

‘Can’t find them anywhere,’ he said.

Kevin, sensing our worry was starting to cry. ‘Where’s me mammy?’ he wanted to know, in his little toddler voice.

‘Pass the phone out to me,’ I told Gary, cuddling Kevin at the same time and trying to comfort him. ‘I’m calling the police to see if there’s been any accidents in the night that she could have been involved in.’

That was the only explanation I could think of, that she had been in a crash in the pizza van and was lying unconscious in a hospital somewhere with no means of identification on her. That would be why she hadn’t called to tell me. I got straight through to the station and explained that my daughter had disappeared during the night and asking if they knew of any reported accidents.

‘There’s been no incidents that we know about,’ the duty officer said, ‘and it’s too soon to report someone missing. I suggest you make the house safe and then go back home and wait for your daughter to phone you from wherever she is.’

I had wanted to hear something more proactive than that, but I could see it was all I was going to get for the moment. To make the house safe we were going to have to do something about the window Gary had broken. I went back to the man across the road and told him what was going on. He said he had some wood and would bring it over. Gary climbed back out through the window and between them they boarded it up. I was feeling so agitated, desperate to do something positive to sort the situation out, that I could hardly stand still. As a mother it didn’t feel possible that one of my children could just disappear off the face of the earth without leaving any trace of where she had gone or why; it felt as if I was trapped in a bad dream.

Kath from next door looked out again and I went over to talk to her at her back door, asking her to keep an eye on the house for me. If Julie came back, she was to get her to ring me straight away. I could see her son sitting in the kitchen with one of his friends. She promised to call me immediately if she saw anything at all.

Next I drove down to find Charlie at his catering van, fighting to keep my rising panic under control. He was already open for business, serving customers through the hatch, and he looked surprised to see me parking up and hurrying over.

‘Our Julie’s missing,’ I blurted out the moment I got to the hatch, struggling to keep the tears back, hoping he would be able to calm me down with some logical explanation.

‘What do you mean?’ He looked totally puzzled as if I was talking a different language.

‘I’ve been to the house and she’s not there. I’ve no idea where she is.’

‘I’ll close up and come home,’ he said, immediately starting to pack up. Seeing him take it so seriously I knew I wasn’t overreacting and my worry increased.

Once we were back at home I rang everyone I could think of to ask if they’d seen her. I made the calls as quick as possible, nervous that if I wasn’t careful I would be on the phone at the moment Julie tried to ring and I would miss the call. No one I spoke to had any more idea where she could be than I did. After an hour or so I went down to the pizza shop, pressing my face to the glass, my hands cupped over my eyes to try to see if there was any sign of life yet, but the premises were still all closed up and dark inside. Just a few hours before they would have been buzzing with activity and Julie would have been part of it; now the shop was as silent and deserted as her house.

The hours were ticking past. Her appointed time at the court came and went and still there was no call. Now it didn’t seem likely that she had just overslept somewhere, but what other explanation could there be? I didn’t know what to do with myself. I just wanted to find her and put my mind at rest. Charlie wasn’t saying much but I could tell he was as puzzled and worried as I was. We both knew this wasn’t like her and when you don’t have any facts to go on, your mind always tends to go straight to the worst possible explanations. Neither of us wanted to voice the fears that were beginning to grow inside us. We wanted to put that moment off for as long as possible.

In the afternoon we left Kevin with Angela and went back down to the pizza shop again. This time, to my relief, the lights were on. We could see people moving around at the back preparing the ovens and the ingredients for the evening’s orders.

‘Our Julie’s disappeared,’ I told them the moment we were in through the door. ‘Which of you took her home last night?’

We must have been sounding frantic by then, and maybe they felt we were accusing them of something, because they seemed to become evasive, all denying they knew anything, shrugging their shoulders and avoiding our eyes, which made us even more angry and panicked. They were talking nervously amongst themselves in their own language, making us wonder what they were talking about, making us feel left out and suspicious. We just wanted a simple answer to the question of who had dropped her off at the house and when. We just wanted them to help us, to give us some clue as to where she might be, what her movements might have been after she finished work the night before. Why would this be causing them such a problem? We couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on.

‘Why won’t you tell me who dropped her off last night? What’s your problem?’

I couldn’t understand why they weren’t being more helpful; every way we turned we seemed to bang into a brick wall. The police weren’t willing to accept she was a missing person yet and these people wouldn’t tell us what they knew about her movements during the night. The neighbours knew no more than we did and nor did her friends. There was no one else for us to ask. What had happened to Julie? Why were these people acting so suspiciously? It was as if she had been abducted from her bed by aliens and everyone was frightened to tell us the truth.

Gary and Charlie were both getting heated and frustrated by the Iranians’ defensiveness and I could see there was going to be a fight, so I went out onto the pavement to get out of the way and leave them all to it. There was some angry shouting going on behind me and one of the Iranians came out of the kitchen brandishing a knife sharpener, wanting to chase Charlie and Gary out of the shop. He lunged at them and there were some blows exchanged. Someone must have called the police because the next thing I knew there was a patrol car tearing round the corner and screeching to a halt outside the shop.

I tried to explain the situation, but the Iranians complained that Charlie and Gary had attacked them. After some more shouting and gesticulating, they were carted off to the police station leaving me in shock on the pavement outside.

The Iranians went back to preparing their pizzas, talking angrily amongst themselves. Everything had become a thousand times worse and I was frantic now. I needed Charlie and Gary to help me look for Julie and the police wouldn’t tell me what was going on or whether they were going to be charging them with anything. No one seemed to want to tell us anything. The whole world was going mad around us.

Charlie and Gary were kept in the cells overnight. Angela and I spent the evening alone and desperate, trying to keep things normal for Kevin. We couldn’t understand why our whole world had suddenly been turned upside down, with our family vanishing all around us. Every hour of that night felt like an eternity. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever sleep peacefully again.

Friday dawned and nothing had changed. Julie was still gone. We hadn’t heard from her since Wednesday. The police let Charlie and Gary go and when they got home Charlie told me he had hardly slept during the night because it had been so cold and they hadn’t given him a blanket. They wouldn’t even let him stop off at home on the way to the station to get some blood-pressure tablets that he needed to take every day. One of the policemen on duty had accused him of being bad-tempered when in fact he was just frantic with worry about Julie and where she might be. It was all adding to my feeling that the entire world had turned against us and wanted to obstruct our search for Julie in any way they could.

Charlie and Gary were sent home without any apology or explanation. We actually had to ask the police later what was going to happen and it was only then that they told us charges against them had been dropped. I probably would have had a lot more to say about the matter if I hadn’t been so beside myself with worry about Julie. I was desperate to get the police to help us and I didn’t want to alienate them if I could help it.

Eventually, once they realized they weren’t in any sort of trouble, one of the Iranians admitted that he had dropped Julie home at about one-thirty in the morning, and that he had seen her put her key in the door before he had driven away. At last we had a piece of the jigsaw, which we could use to start building a picture of what might have happened during the night. We now knew she had gone home and she had gone into the house. The chances that she would then have gone out again at that time of night to visit anyone else seemed small. But the information still didn’t make the overall picture any clearer; if anything it made it even more confusing. If she had been in the house at one-thirty, how could she just have been spirited away between then and seven-thirty?

The feeling of foreboding in my stomach was a hundred times worse than it had been the day before. It seemed as though I had exhausted every possibility of places to go looking for her. Something had definitely gone very badly wrong. It was time to insist that the police became involved in the search, whether they wanted to or not. The police view was that Julie had not been missing long enough to cause concern, but I didn’t care about that. Julie had vanished from behind the closed curtains of her own house and we needed them to go looking for her. We drove to Billingham police station and found a woman sergeant on the desk as we walked in.

‘Our daughter’s disappeared,’ I told her, fighting to hold myself together.

‘Disappeared?’ she asked, one eyebrow arched sceptically, her jaw methodically chewing on a piece of gum.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to report her missing.’

‘When did she go missing?’

‘I last saw her the day before yesterday, in the afternoon.’

‘It’s too soon to report her missing,’ she said, still chewing, acting as if this sort of thing happened all the time. ‘There’s probably a logical explanation.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘She probably came home from work and decided to go to a nightclub.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe she got drunk and she’s sleeping it off somewhere.’

‘For a day and a half? She wouldn’t do that,’ I protested. ‘She’s got a young child. She was due to appear in court yesterday morning.’

‘Listen,’ Charlie interrupted and I could hear from the gruffness of his voice that he was getting annoyed again. ‘Our daughter’s disappeared mysteriously and we want to know what’s happened to her. If you won’t take our statement we’ll go to the main police station in Stockton.’

Other officers were appearing from behind the scenes to help the desk sergeant with what must by then have seemed like a pair of difficult customers. They must have realized we weren’t going to just go away and so they decided to pacify us, promising they would send someone round to take a statement from us the next morning.

We hardly slept at all on the Friday night either, waiting for the phone to ring and to hear Julie’s voice giving us some logical explanation about where she’d been. My mind was whirring over all the terrible possibilities, picturing unimaginable scenes as the hours ticked past. She had never left it this long between phone calls home, never gone a whole day without speaking to us in her whole life. I knew for sure that something really bad must have happened. Someone must have taken her and be holding her prisoner, or she was wandering around somewhere with a lost memory, or she was dead. By that second day, I was thinking the worst. I felt totally helpless, half of me wanting to get out and scour every street in the area and the other half not wanting to move from the phone in case she called.

Kevin was crying most of the time, wanting to know where his mammy was, sensing the tension amongst the grown-ups. We were finding it really hard to come up with cheerful answers to his questions or to think of anything to say that might placate him. Distracting a small child when you are already distracted yourself is an almost impossible task, but we all did our best.

We rang Andrew’s mum and dad and asked them to get in touch with Andrew down in London because we didn’t have a contact number for him. There was just a chance Julie could have turned up there, although I couldn’t think for a second why she would do that on the day when she was meant to be going to court to become legally separated from him. Perhaps she had changed her mind about the whole separation thing; but if that was the case, why hadn’t she rung to tell me?

They rang back after speaking to him to tell us Andrew knew no more about where Julie could be than we did. It didn’t surprise me but it meant one more avenue of hope had been closed off.

The next morning, Saturday, a policeman and woman arrived at the house to take our statements. The young man, PC Newman, may have thought he was trying to put our minds at rest but to us it seemed that he was being totally unsympathetic and offhand in the way he talked to us.

‘She’s a perfect case of someone who would be likely to just take off,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my hackles rising at being told about my own daughter by a complete stranger.

‘I’ve been in community relations for several years,’ he said, as if he knew everything about everything. ‘She’s a typical case; she had marriage problems; she was due to go to court. She’s probably come in from work to a cold, dark, empty house and decided to make a fresh start. Knowing the boy was safely looked after by you, she’s probably walked down to the A19 and hitched a ride to London.’

‘You must be joking,’ Charlie exploded. ‘It’s totally out of character.’

‘Listen,’ I chipped in, ‘you’re dealing with a stranger, and I’m dealing with a daughter and I’m telling you as a mother that she has not just taken off to London. Something has happened to her, I know it has. I can feel it in my gut.’

I could see that no matter what we said he was never going to believe us. He just thought we were hysterical parents while he was the professional and must therefore know better. It was becoming obvious to us the police weren’t going to do anything, not until Julie had been gone at least a few days. But how could we sit around for even a moment longer without doing anything? Suppose she was trapped somewhere and needed our help? How could we stop ourselves from going mad without knowing what was going on? How were we going to be able to bear it if we weren’t actively doing something about the situation? Everything that was happening to us was the opposite of any parental instincts we might have; it was pure torture.

I considered the idea that she might have gone to London. Apart from Andrew, she only knew one person there – an old school friend called Margaret who worked with Down’s Syndrome kids. Julie had visited her the year before, the only time I can remember her travelling anywhere on her own. It had been a big adventure for her, which was one of the reasons why I had known she would never just disappear off to London without saying anything. I didn’t have a contact number for Margaret but I told the police about her and they tracked her down. She rang me after that to say she hadn’t heard anything from Julie.

On Sunday, after another sleepless night, our brains stretched to breaking point by a mixture of worry and exhaustion, we went back down to Grange Avenue to see if any of the neighbours had managed to remember anything at all that might shed some light on what had happened.

When you have no idea what is going on you tend to grasp any straw that is offered to you, however flimsy it might be. When Kath from the house next door said that a police friend of her son Mark had rung him to say they’d had an anonymous tip-off, we immediately took it seriously. The tip-off had come to the police from a woman caller who had told them she had seen a drunk woman being bundled into a car by three men behind the pizza shop in the middle of the night that Julie had disappeared. The image filled me with fear, but at least it gave a possible clue that the police might be able to follow up. When I rang them to ask about it, they were shocked that I knew anything about it at all.

‘That information should be confidential,’ I was told. ‘It was an anonymous call.’

In the end the lead came to nothing as no one else ever came forward to back up the story and the anonymous caller never rang back, so I was left feeling angry with the police yet again, feeling they had acted unprofessionally by gossiping about Julie with the neighbours when they had nothing to follow up with.

Despite this set-back we still talked and talked to anyone who would give us the time, but no one knew anything else. Every way we turned we were faced with more brick walls, not given even a single lead to follow.

Later on that Sunday, I drove down to Stockton police station, determined to keep on pestering them until I found someone who would take us seriously, who would believe that what we were saying was true and that it was impossible to think that Julie had just run off to London. I didn’t expect them to greet me with open arms, but I was past caring what sort of reactions I got by then. They could think I was the most hysterical and annoying woman in the world for all I cared, as long as they did something about looking for Julie. There’s a saying that it’s the wheel that squeaks the loudest that gets the oil first. I intended to keep on making as loud a noise as I could till they did something that would shut me up.

There was a long queue at the counter when I walked into the police station and my stomach was churning with the tension by the time I came to the front. My brain was fuddled with a mixture of anxiety and exhaustion, so when I looked up and saw the Iranians from the ‘Mr Macaroni’ pizza shop being led down the stairs, something snapped in my head. I started screaming hysterically at them: ‘What have you done with my daughter?’

Seeing them there, I assumed they must have been brought in for questioning, that they must be suspected of something. They had behaved strangely when we went to see them and now the police had brought them in. I jumped straight to the worst conclusions and probably would have attacked them physically if there hadn’t been police around to hold me back. The sergeant who had been handling the desk quickly steered me away from everyone else and took me to a side office where he introduced me to a detective called Inspector Geoff Lee. They invited me to sit and tried to calm me down. I certainly had their attention now, even if it was only because they thought I was an hysterical mad woman who was likely to attack innocent people in their station.

‘I’m telling you as a mother,’ I ranted on, ‘something has happened to my daughter. This is totally out of character for her; she wouldn’t disappear off to London. She wouldn’t even go into town on her own; she always liked company wherever she went. This is a girl I see every day; go and check with other people; ask the neighbours, they’ll tell you she’s always round at my house. Everyone knows that.’

‘We are taking you seriously,’ Inspector Lee assured me. ‘We are making enquiries. We’re going to send a team of forensic officers into the house tomorrow.’

Part of me was relieved that they were finally listening to me and believing that I might be right, but another part of me felt a terrible foreboding at the thought of what they might find once they started searching. I wanted them to take me seriously and believe me, but I didn’t want to be proved right. I would have given anything to get a call from Julie now to say she was down in London. I don’t doubt I would have given her an earful for all the worry she had caused us, but how wonderful it would have felt to be able to do that. Supposing I was never going to be able to talk to her again? The thought was unbearable.

I kept going over and over the same things in my mind. If the police were willing to send in a forensics team then they must think there was a chance I was right and that something terrible had happened to Julie. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to cope with finally finding out the truth, but I also knew I couldn’t go on much longer not knowing anything.