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 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.

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