Читать книгу Pure Evil - How Tracie Andrews murdered my son, decieved the nation and sentenced me to a life of pain and misery - Maureen Harvey - Страница 12

On Thursday, the day after the press conference, DS Mick O’Donnell and Brian Russell, our liaison officers, came to the house to take statements from Ray and me. The news they brought was far better than we could ever have hoped for so soon after the public appeal for witnesses.

Two people had come forward after seeing us on the television and reading the newspaper reports. It was a major breakthrough. The police had set up eight roadblocks on the Sunday night along the route that Tracie and Lee had taken. But, even though 120 of the 650 drivers questioned had been along the same roads over the weekend when Lee had been killed, none of them had seen the car chase that Tracie had described.

‘What did they say?’ I asked Brian. ‘Did they see the other car? Surely you can tell us something?’

No matter how many questions we asked, Mick and Brian weren’t able to answer any of them. It was vital nothing was leaked to the media at such a crucial stage in the inquiry, Mick told us. The less we knew about the witnesses, the less we could be tempted to say anything to the reporters who were camped outside our house. They’d also turned up at my hairdressing salon, asking staff about Lee and Tracie, and had even found out where Danielle went to school and had been chatting to pupils at the main gates, trying to find out who she was and what she looked like.

It was upsetting and annoying, but the story of Lee’s death was so big that we knew nothing would stop journalists trying to find out as much as they could about him and Tracie. We had no intention of speaking to anyone but the police and our family. But we understood why the police had to keep the details of the witnesses under wraps. It was hard, but Ray and I knew we had to be patient; we had to put our trust in the police and wait.

The interviews for our statements were done separately and, as a formality, to eliminate us from the inquiry, we both had our fingerprints taken.

When they asked me if Lee carried a knife, I said the only one I’d ever known him own was when he’d been a member of the Boy’s Brigade 13 years earlier. Alan Lee, the chap who ran the local Boy’s Brigade group, had asked the parents of all the boys for their consent for him to give one to each of the boys, which the parents had paid for. As far as I knew, Lee had kept it in a box of memorabilia which I thought he’d taken to Tracie’s.

They also asked about Lee and whether I’d thought he was happy or was sometimes moody. I said Lee had been happy until he’d met Tracie and that, yes, he had been quite moody in the months before his death. I explained that he and Tracie had rowed constantly and had split up on several occasions, but, every time Lee left her and moved back home, Tracie would stalk him and constantly phone the house.

‘They were very jealous of each other,’ I said. ‘They couldn’t live together but they didn’t seem to be able to live apart.’

‘Did Lee have a temper?’ Brian asked me.

‘Tracie was always provoking him into arguments,’ I said. ‘She’d make a saint lose it. There were times when he gave as good as he got from her in shouting matches and throwing stuff, but he never hit her.

‘Lee hated the way Tracie used to flirt with other men. It didn’t matter what they looked like or how old they were, she was man-mad. Ask Lee’s workmates, they’ll tell you what she was like. If she had a chance to pick an argument and put Lee down in front of anyone, she would. He was sick of her behaviour but he’d just storm off. They were both jealous of each other.’

That day, Ray and I left no stone unturned in making sure the police knew everything that we did about Lee’s relationship with Tracie.

Brian and Mick must have been amazed that we could recount so many rows and incidents in such detail, but it was a relief to be able to share what had been happening in our lives for the past two years. And, because Tracie’s jealousy and temper had got the better of her on so many family occasions, it was easy to remember how upset we’d all been. I told Brian that Ray, Michelle and I had never liked Tracie. There was no point in being anything other than upfront about our feelings towards her.

All the conversations I’d ever had with her had confirmed our first impressions that growing up as the product of a broken home had left her massively insecure and deeply resentful. She’d told me, the first time we’d met, that men had always let her down. It was a pattern she blamed almost entirely on her dad John, who’d married Irene in 1963 and then split from her when Tracie was eight. She said she’d never been able to shake off the feeling of rejection after he left. And she was incredibly bitter about the fact that she didn’t think he’d loved her enough to stay with Irene.

‘I think that’s why I turned into a bit of a bully at school,’ she’d told me. ‘If you hang round with people who are in control, they don’t hurt you.’

She’d told me that, as a little girl, she’d only ever dreamed about becoming a model. The reality was actually far more mundane than Tracie liked, because she’d ended up working part-time in shops after leaving Bridley Moor High School in Redditch with six CSEs. The half-baked ambition she’d had to become a nurse disappeared in a pantomime puff of smoke when she’d joined a Youth Training Scheme working with the elderly.

‘It was so sad, Maureen,’ she’d said, checking her lipstick in our sitting-room mirror one evening while she was waiting for Lee to get ready to go out. ‘I couldn’t bear to see anyone in pain. It’s a shame, really, because I’d have looked really good in a nurse’s uniform.’

She met her first serious boyfriend Andy Tilston when she was 17 but, ten months after Carla was born, she walked out on him on her 22nd birthday after announcing that the wedding they’d been planning was off. Two years later, she moved into her council maisonette in Alvechurch and, after that, she sold hair and beauty products on a market stall in Birmingham.

‘The other market traders used to call me the tart with the cart,’ she giggled.

After she met Lee, she gave up working in the Kingfisher Centre in Redditch selling wigs and hairpieces – her one and only modelling job had been modelling hair extensions for a local hair salon – and started a job as a barmaid at the Red Lion pub near her flat. Lee had bought her an engagement ring in May 1995 but, two months later, Tracie threw him out of the flat after a row.

The warning signs about her violent nature had been there right from the start. Lee had only been seeing Tracie a couple of months when he came into the salon with his face covered in cuts and bruises.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ I asked him as he made himself a cup of tea in the back kitchen.

‘Tracie,’ he said. ‘She had a mad one last night.’ Lee explained they’d had a row and agreed to split up before going out for the evening. But Tracie had followed him to a nightclub where he’d gone with his mates. When she saw him talking with them at the bar, she’d launched herself at him with a broken beer bottle, spitting at him and swearing as his mates struggled to pull her off.

On another occasion, after yet another row, about a month before Lee’s death, Tracie had seen him talking to a barmaid and bit him on the neck. Later the same night, she went up to him again and punched him twice on the side of the head. ‘You can buy me a fucking drink for this,’ she’d told Lee.

Ray and I couldn’t believe our eyes when Lee turned up and showed us the circle of ugly teeth marks and gashes on his neck. He looked as though he’d been savaged by a wild animal. When Lee met Andy Tilston, one of the first things he warned Lee about Tracie was her violent temper.

I told Brian that Lee had told me how Andy had mentioned being attacked by Tracie on several occasions and had once even pulled a knife on him. His words had struck such a chord at the time. He said she would be like a wolf when she freaked out. She always seemed to go for the neck.

The extreme behaviour Tracie often displayed when she and Lee were alone together was, in many ways, as spiteful and destructive as the mood swings we’d put up with when Lee brought her home. Tracie would seize on an innocent remark and blow it up into a full-scale argument. When Michelle and Steve announced their engagement at a family barbecue, Tracie stormed off into the house in tears.

No one knew she and Lee had been talking about getting married, but Tracie was convinced Michelle and I had hatched a plot between us to make sure that Michelle and Steve pipped them to the post. It was a ridiculous childish reaction but, even when I tried to tell Tracie that she’d got the wrong idea, there was no consoling her.

‘Michelle’s got to get in there before Lee and me, hasn’t she?’ she yelled. ‘She’s spoiled our surprise. We were going to tell the family about our engagement but now they can stuff it.’

Michelle knew Tracie’s reaction was simply because she wasn’t the centre of attention, but I was angry. It should have been a wonderful and memorable day for her but Tracie had set out to try to ruin things with her jealousy.

It had been exactly the same with Michelle’s wedding, even though we’d gone out of our way to make sure that Tracie felt she was welcome to be part of it. She and Lee kept falling out and getting back together again so we didn’t know if they’d be together for the wedding. Having asked Carla to be a bridesmaid with Paige and Danielle, because of Lee, Michelle told him that she and Steve needed to know what was happening with Tracie so they could get Carla’s dress made.

Lee understood this and told her not to bother having Carla as a bridesmaid, but, when he and Tracie got back together, Tracie asked if Carla could be a bridesmaid again. Michelle said yes again, but said it was their last chance to finalise it because they obviously couldn’t keep being messed about.

It didn’t take them long to have yet another row and split up and, this time, Michelle and Steve decided they’d had enough and told Lee that Carla couldn’t be a bridesmaid but they would all be welcome at the wedding.

When Tracie realised they’d said no to Carla, she said she wouldn’t be coming. Michelle and Steve couldn’t have cared less. But, when Tracie and Lee had another row and then got back together, Tracie made it a condition that she’d only go back with Lee if he didn’t attend the wedding.

Lee explained this to Michelle and hoped she’d understand that he was planning a future with Tracie. Michelle wasn’t very happy because, naturally, she and Steve had wanted Lee to be there, but there wasn’t much any of us could do about it.

Ray phoned Tracie as the wedding date got nearer and asked her to think about what she was asking Lee to do and to change her mind and let him come.

‘It’s got nothing to do with me,’ she’d told him. ‘Lee can do what he wants.’

I knew exactly what was going on in Tracie’s twisted mind. She just couldn’t stand the thought of Michelle and Steve’s big day overshadowing her own. It was a shame for Carla because she hadn’t been a bridesmaid before and had been really excited about the prospect of going down the aisle with Danielle, Paige and Michelle.

I was too angry to cry when Lee told us Tracie had given him an ultimatum. It was evil, the kind of incomprehensible and irrational thought process that set Tracie apart from the rest of the world. Tracie knew how much Lee and Michelle loved each other and how much it meant to all of us to be together on such a special day, but she’d set out to destroy it.

I look back and wonder how I ever managed to tolerate Tracie’s deluded sense of self-importance. Why hadn’t I just gone round to her flat and given her a good hard slap across the face? I think I just never expected Lee to give in to her. If he really couldn’t be there on his sister’s wedding day because of Tracie, then nothing would come between them.

From that moment on, I refused to speak to Tracie or have anything to do with her. Lee did come to the house on the morning of the wedding to bring presents for Michelle and Steve. He said he was sorry he wasn’t going to be there but gave his sister a massive hug and told her he loved her. It should have been a day when, as we all hugged each other, the tears we shed should have been tears of joy, not sorrow.

I’m sure even his mates couldn’t understand how Tracie managed to wield so much emotional power over Lee. We certainly couldn’t.

As I told Brian and Mick that day, she was convinced that Lee was her Mr Right. Even though the pattern of their relationship was established early on – rowing, splitting up, reconciling – they couldn’t go without each other for more than a few days. When Lee had called off the engagement, six months after they’d had a party to announce they were getting married, I told them Tracie had called at our house every day. Within a fortnight, he was back living with her again. No matter how much her sulking and explosive rages drove Lee to distraction, he was completely infatuated with her.

‘If you don’t stop seeing each other, you’ll end up killing each other,’ Michelle had told Lee, after he turned up at home one morning with an ugly scratch running the length of one side of his face. That had happened just six months before Lee’s death.

Lee had laughed. ‘It’s only a scratch,’ he’d said. ‘She just loses it. It’s the way she is.’

It was something that Tracie had openly joked about in front of us. Watching the video Fatal Attraction at our house one evening, she feigned a stabbing motion into a cushion on the settee next to Lee after the scene where the mistress is trying to kill her married lover. ‘I’d be just like that,’ she declared, whacking Lee in the face with the cushion. ‘If I couldn’t have you, then I certainly wouldn’t let anyone else.’

About a week later, we were watching television when details of a chilling road-rage incident in Kent came on the news. Stephen Cameron and his fiancée had been driving off a slip road on to the M25 when another driver had stopped them and attacked Stephen. He’d died from a knife wound to the heart.

‘God, Lee, that could have been us,’ Tracie said. ‘They’re good-looking like us… he’s dark and she’s blonde.’

Finding a child-minder to look after Carla had obviously given Tracie far more freedom than when she’d relied on Irene. I couldn’t understand why the poor kid spent so much time with the woman. Tracie only worked part-time and, even when she wasn’t going out, she seemed to prefer not having Carla around. Maybe she thought being a mum was all about dressing her like a doll in frilly ankle socks and hair ribbons rather than spending time with her.

‘She likes being at her house more than she does here,’ Tracie said, when I asked her why Carla was spending Christmas Day with her childminder. ‘She’s a really nice woman and is really good with kids. They do all sorts of stuff together. You should be pleased I’m getting to spend so much time with Lee.’

But there were plenty of times when Tracie would go out without even telling him what her plans were. She’d tell him to pick her up and would often be out when he did. When he had chicken pox and was living with Tracie, she’d even told him he’d just have to fend for himself. Just because he was off work and in bed, itching and covered from head to toe in sores, didn’t mean she had to stay in. After just a couple of days, she told him that, if he wasn’t up to going out on Friday, he might as well come home to Ray and me.

‘I’m not your fucking nursemaid,’ she told him.

Typically, she’d packed Carla off to her childminder, put on her slap and high heels and told Lee she didn’t know when she’d be back.

It was an entirely different matter if Tracie was ever ill. She only had to get a mild headache and the world would have to stand still while she went to bed.

When Danielle came to stay with us for the weekend, I usually offered to have Carla because they enjoyed each other’s company so much. There were a couple of occasions when Danielle stayed at Tracie’s when it was Lee’s weekend to have her. But, when the rows between her and Lee seemed to get more and more regular, I stopped letting her go. I knew Lee would never let her witness any violent confrontations or listen to Tracie’s foul-mouthed temper tantrums, but I couldn’t risk it.

When Brian asked Ray and me why we thought Tracie had always had such a hold over Lee, the only reason we could come up with was the sex, and the fact that he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving him or being physically intimate with another man. She loved to make Lee jealous, especially in front of his friends. I couldn’t remember a single occasion when Lee hadn’t come home and described her provocative dancing with blokes who thought she was out clubbing alone. If Lee ignored her behaviour, she’d go up to someone on the dance floor who was dancing with another girl and start dancing in between them.

In my day, she’d have been described as a prick-tease. It was the only way she knew of getting attention – the short skirts, skimpy tops and high heels got her noticed. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t particularly bright and only talked about things she watched on the telly or make-up and hair products she’d seen in magazines and wanted to try. She was a tarty blonde with a half-decent face and figure. What else did she need to get attention in a busy pub or nightclub?

Any hopes we’d had that Lee would come to his senses and end their relationship were dashed in June 1996 when Tracie discovered she was pregnant.

It was last thing we’d expected but Lee was over the moon and Tracie lapped up the attention when they came round for a meal to tell us.

‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A little brother or sister for Danielle and Carla. We can’t wait, can we, Lee?’

They both seemed so delighted that Ray and I wondered whether having a baby might force them to take a more mature attitude to their relationship. It might even be the making of them once they realised just how much hard work and responsibility would be needed to look after a little one.

But, at the back of my mind, there were nagging doubts about how Tracie would cope with pregnancy when her life revolved around going out to have a good time. Lee had already proved himself as a hands-on dad to Danielle but he knew he’d only been able to do his bit because Anita was such a brilliant mum and Ray, Michelle, Steve and I were always around to help out. And would Tracie feel the same way when her bump got so big she could no longer fit into her skimpy outfits.

It was a worrying prospect, especially as the pregnancy was unplanned and Tracie rarely went out of her way to spend more time than she had to with Carla.

Two months later, it seemed that fate had stepped in to end all the uncertainty. Irene rang and said Tracie fallen down some steps while she’d been out shopping in Redditch. She was four months pregnant and had suffered a miscarriage. Irene said Tracie was so devastated that she’d told her mum to make sure we didn’t turn up at the Alexandra Hospital where she said she’d been taken by ambulance. She couldn’t even face seeing Lee.

We all went over to her flat to see her the next day. I’d never seen Tracie looking as vulnerable and upset as she was that day. Hollow-eyed and sobbing as she sat next to Lee on the settee, she was convinced it was all her fault. No matter how much we tried to console her and tell her they could always try again, she told us she was convinced the miscarriage was a punishment. It took the best part of a month for Tracie to put losing the baby behind her and resume hostilities with Lee.

Lee was certain her dramatic weight loss – nearly two stones in six weeks – was a result of her miscarriage, but I wasn’t convinced. She was definitely eating less but didn’t appear to have lost her enthusiasm for clubbing and drinking. If anything, she was far more obsessed about her appearance than she had ever been and had even sent away for brochures on cosmetic surgery. It didn’t take me long to work out what she’d got in mind. What better excuse to get Lee to stump up the money for a boob job than the trauma of losing the baby?

‘Even Lee thinks my boobs aren’t what they were,’ she told me. ‘All this weight I’ve lost has made them go really flat.’

She’d been seeing Lee less than a year when she started going on about wanting a breast enlargement. From the moment she knew he had some shares with West Midlands Travel where he worked as a bus driver, she was like a dog with a bone. He would be the one to benefit if he cashed them in and gave her the money for a boob job, she’d told him. With bigger breasts, she’d said, he’d fancy her even more and, who knows, they might even get her the modelling break she was convinced was just around the corner.

I told Lee I thought he was mad even to think about throwing away his hard-earned cash on her and he never mentioned it again.

One afternoon, not long after the miscarriage, she turned up with Lee for lunch and started going on about her boobs. They were obviously swollen with milk, hardly the kind of topic I’d have expected her to mention at the dinner table, but it didn’t stop her embarrassing Ray.

‘What do you think, Ray?’ she laughed. ‘I suit them bigger, don’t I?’

Ray didn’t know where to look, let alone what to say. I could see Tracie was enjoying his embarrassment. Lee said nothing.

‘Come on,’ she went on, grabbing Ray’s hands and planting them on her breasts. ‘Have a good feel and tell me what you think. They’re enormous, aren’t they?’

Talking to the police about Tracie that day and going over everything that we’d had to put up with really helped all of us to put things into perspective. She’d caused so much unhappiness with her selfish behaviour and yet I’d gone on accepting her for Lee’s sake. Tracie knew how much we all loved him, but seemed to take a perverse pleasure from watching us tread on eggshells when she was around. We’d had no option but to put up with her. We couldn’t risk losing Lee. And, no matter how bad the arguments between them were, he was always prepared to give Tracie one more chance.

In the September before he’d died, he’d spent a small fortune taking her, Danielle and Carla on holiday to Portugal and, when she told him he should be spending more time with her, he’d even given up his bus-driving job.

He’d loved his job as a bus driver for West Midlands Travel and was just as popular with the regulars who travelled on his route as he was with the other drivers. One of the funniest things I remember was when Lee had been for a curry with the lads the night before an early shift. He’d been at work for a while when, all of a sudden, I heard a key in the front door and someone running upstairs – it was Lee. When he came down, I asked him if he wanted a cuppa but he said that he couldn’t stop because he was working. He’d been so desperate to go to the toilet that he’d parked the bus, locked the twirlies on it and run through the gully home! He used to call the pensioners ‘twirlies’ because they would always try to use their passes on the bus before 9.30, asking, ‘Am I too early, driver?’ All the old girls who were on his route loved him and used to say, ‘If only I was a few years younger…’

Typically, he and Tracie seeing more of each other only served to fan the flames and, not long afterwards, I’d had a call from Irene one night asking me to come and get Lee. When I turned up at the flat, Tracie was hysterical saying that Lee had punched her and thrown hi-fi equipment at her. I knew she was lying. Lee might have lost it and started chucking stuff around but he’d never hit her.

‘Just get him out of here,’ Irene shouted at me, as Lee started picking up some of his things. ‘I can’t cope with any more of this.’

‘It’s OK, we’re going,’ I yelled at Tracie. ‘And, this time, make sure you bloody well stay away from Lee. Don’t even think about stalking him and phoning the house like you usually do. It’s finished. Just stay away from him.’

Outside the flat, I told Lee to get in the car but he just ignored me and walked off. A few yards down the road, I found him sitting on a wall with his head in his hands and stopped the car. ‘You don’t want to know me, do you?’ he asked.

He looked terrible. I wanted to take him in my arms and tell him everything was going to be all right. ‘How many more times are you going to let Tracie treat you like this?’ I asked him.

Lee shrugged his shoulders and got into the passenger seat next to me. ‘It’s over this time, Mum,’ he said. ‘Take me home.’ ‘And he still went back after all that?’ Brian asked.

I nodded. The rest was history, I told him. Ray and I had begged him to stay at home and have nothing more to do with Tracie. ‘If only he’d listened to us, none of this would have happened,’ I told him. ‘Lee wouldn’t be lying in a morgue… he’d have been sitting here with us today.’

Later that same day, Michelle and I went back to Cooper’s Hill. It was something we knew neither of us could do alone but together it just seemed right. And, although neither of us mentioned it until we got into the car, we wanted to have a look round and see if we could find the knife.

It sounds mad when I think about it now. The idea that the two of us could find the murder weapon after a load of forensics officers had been scouring the area looking for it since the night of Lee’s death. I guess you do some strange things when you’re trying to cope with shock and grief. We just wanted to feel that we were doing something to help.

The police had cut back all the hedgerows and bushes at the side of the lane where Lee had stopped his car. The white tent that had covered the area where he’d been found had gone. Michelle and I poked around in the roadside ditches and in the hedges for the best part of an hour looking for the knife. There was no one else about but we were on such a mission that I don’t think we’d have noticed anyway.

We both had a cry as we stood overlooking the fields from the lane. The two of us standing side by side, lost in thought as we remembered how much Lee had loved the weeks leading up the Christmas. The present buying, the parties, going out with his mates, putting up the decorations with Danielle at our house. It was definitely a favourite time of year in the Harvey household.

‘I think Christmas is cancelled this year, eh, Mum?’ Michelle sighed as we walked back to her car.

It was another heartbreaking reminder of how all our lives had been changed. We’d lost Lee and yet we still had two little girls, Paige and Danielle, who now, more than any other time, needed to know that Christmas was still a magical time.