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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ