Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived (13 page)

I went through the motions of getting money out of my pocket, but then grabbed the fags and did a runner. Afterwards, I thought, Shit!, because I knew there was no need for it. I felt absolutely shit, and sorry for the shopkeeper.

Not long after that, I saw Hayden and he had a message, ‘Mum wants to meet up with you in McDonald's tomorrow at 12.'

‘Yeah, all right then,' I said.

So she rolled up, which I thought was a good opportunity to sit down and try and sort something out sensibly and clear the air. She waltzed in with her friend, Dawn. I don't know how she had managed to become involved.

‘Hiya,' I said to Mum.

She returned the greeting and gave me a look of concern. ‘God, you look ill,' she remarked.

Sarcastically and without any fuss, I said, ‘Well, you would, too, if you had to live off a tin of macaroni cheese a week.'

‘Do you want a McDonald's?' she asked.

My stomach practically growled in response to the thought that I was about to have some food. I was dying to say yes, but all I could muster was a curt ‘No thanks'.

I was almost kicking myself under the table, but I knew that as soon as she bought me that meal she would be trying to buy me back. No, I'm not having it, I thought. All the time I was sitting there, I was seeing these people eating chips. And then Dawn, sensing she was imposing, moved about in her seat uneasily and said, ‘I'll leave you to talk. I'll go and get a coffee and bring it back.'

I thought Dawn would perhaps make herself scarce for ten minutes or so while we talked, but two minutes later there she was, trundling back towards us. I fumed to Mum under my breath, ‘So we're supposed to sit
here and talk about things openly and you brought your mate along. You wouldn't appreciate it if I brought my mate along, would you?'

Mum shifted her steely gaze away from me and answered awkwardly, ‘No.'

My body language was screaming at my mum's friend to leave us alone. Casting her a hostile look, I asked, ‘Exactly why are you here anyway, Dawn?'

She broke her silence with a barely audible, ‘Well, your mum asked me to come along because she thought you were going to bring David Baxter.'

What is it with you and David Baxter? I thought as I replied, ‘I don't want anything to do with him.'

Accusingly, Mum pointed her finger at me and said, ‘You've been ringing him, because Hayden says.'

I took in her remark with open-mouthed disbelief, before replying, ‘Yes, and Hayden is a bullshitter, because that's not the case. I haven't. Yes, I've got his number, but I haven't got credit on my phone to ring.'

Just as I had felt disbelieved by everyone over the Huntley attack, here was my mum bolstering my doubt in her even more. She threw another knife into my heart with her sharp words: ‘I don't believe you.'

At that point, I thought we were going to have a
full-blown
argument, but all of a sudden she was all
nicey-nicey
. ‘Do you want to come home?' she asked me.

Sensing the lack of love, I said, ‘No.'

As if I was some down and out, Mum sullenly asked, ‘What are you going to do?'

‘I'm going back to the place where I'm staying and I'm fine, don't you worry,' I told her. ‘You get on with your life and I'll get on with mine.'

Dawn, trying to be the emissary of peace, made an impassioned plea. ‘Hailey, come home. Come back, don't be silly.'

‘No,' I spat. ‘I may be frigging starving, filthy, no clean clothes – I have worn the same clothes for a month, but they have been washed every single night, you know. Hand-washed. They may have been washed with Fairy Liquid and not proper detergent like you use, but I'm fine. You know, without all the material things, I'm a lot happier than I used to be at home.'

I believe that meeting at McDonald's was nothing more than a spying mission on my mum's part to see if I had been in touch with my dad, and that was the fear that drove her to meet me – nothing else. Her fear was that I might have told him about family life but I made my feelings clear, telling her, ‘I don't want anything to do with him. I've washed my hands of him. I've got my own life, right, OK?'

That little sermon said, I got up, walked out without casting my mum a fond or even worried farewell glance and went back to the open house. The fixation my mother had with David Baxter escaped me. Why she had to accuse me of being in contact with my
biological father I do not know. I don't even want to examine what it was all about, although, down the line, my path would cross with David Baxter's.

So I was back at the open house. I felt really guilty about not having any money to contribute to the house, to which they would say, ‘We don't care, you're all right.' But, I had about two of those fags I'd run off with and gave the rest to the others because, I explained, ‘I can't pay you anything.' And they told me, ‘Don't be daft.'

The lad whose place it was was really nice and if anybody knocked on the door he would come down the stairs – I was sleeping in the front room – and he would say, ‘Don't worry, Hailey, I'm just going to see who that is at the door.'

Although the people living there were on drugs, they were not taking drugs from early in the morning until last thing at night. They would just have a few joints and a drink. It was that sort of environment, but where else could I stay? That was the first time that I tried speed. You put it in a Rizla paper and ‘neck' it: drink it down with something fizzy. Every night I couldn't feel it doing anything to me, but they would say, ‘Well, your eyes are a bit wide open.' And obviously I couldn't get to sleep, because that is what amphetamine does to you. The following morning I would wake up feeling like absolute crap and a bit disappointed.

About a week or two after that dire meeting with my mum at McDonald's, I saw Hayden and he told me,
‘Mum wants you to go home so she can talk to you.' He said something along the lines of: ‘Mum has got some money for you at home. She wants to speak to you. Go to the house, nobody's in.'

He gave me the keys and I set off. I walked all the way from Cleethorpes to Humberston. From where I was staying, near the train station, it was a good couple of hours' walk. I had my size-five Rockport shoes on. I'm a size six, and halfway my feet were killing me, so I ended up walking the rest of the way barefoot. Talk about the return of the prodigal.

Anyway, I got home and discovered I'd lost the keys, so I tentatively knocked on the door, expecting Mum to answer. When one of my brothers opened up, I was knocked for six and my heart missed a beat. No sooner had I stepped inside the house and the door was closed behind me than he started to have a go at me.

‘You've been on drugs. You've run away from home,' he accused me.

‘Yes, I have, and I'm not going to deny it. Yes, I have,' I answered.

‘You little bitch, I hate you. You little cow! I'm going to have you,' he blasted.

As frightened as I was, I managed to say, ‘Listen, I've come to sort it out with Mum. I'm sorry if I've caused any heartache or what have you.'

‘Don't give me that. You'll do the same next month,' he said.

‘No, no, I won't,' I promised. I was so scared of him I would have said anything to talk my way out of it.

‘Just go to your room,' he roared

But I stayed downstairs with him while he ranted and raved at me for about half an hour.

I just sat there in tears, thinking, You bastard, I hate you. Then, retaliating, I shouted, ‘I'm going to kill you one day.'

When my mum came in, my brother couldn't wait to spill the beans. ‘She has just said that she is going to kill me, she is going to knife me and she is going to stick a knife in my back when I am asleep.'

I exploded, ‘No. I just said, “I am going to kill you.”'

‘I'm having the police, Mum. I'm going to have the police,' he said.

‘If you want to call the police, you call the police,'my mum told him.

‘Good. I've about had it now and I'm pissed off,' I shouted. ‘If you want to call the police, you call the police, mate.'

‘Well, what's been going on?' Mum asked.

When I explained to her, she had the nerve to tell me, ‘You shouldn't be winding him up then. You've only got yourself to blame.'

I was stunned by her refusal to see the reality of the situation. ‘Oh, for God's sake,' I said to her. ‘I've just come home to try and make it up with you. You're saying that you want to speak to me, me and you on
our own, and then, when I arrive, he is here and he lays into me. He's very good; he knows what he is doing with it.'

All I got again was: ‘You shouldn't wind him up. You've only got yourself to blame.'

The police were never called, and that was that. For the time being, I remained at home despite the shitty atmosphere.

In a merry-go-round of being kicked out and returning home, I found myself constantly saying sorry, then she would kick me out again and the cycle would repeat itself. It was like being attached to a yo-yo, but it was my mum's ego that I was connected to. She was a control freak and I was her fix.

Eventually and inevitably, it all came to a head when I was 15. Right, enough is enough, I thought. Both my parents used to manipulate my friends' parents by saying, ‘It's Hailey that is naughty. It's Hailey that is on drugs.' I wasn't on drugs every day or even every six months. We used to get into a group and smoke it. Feeling peer pressure, I thought, Well, I've got nothing to lose, I'll go for it. I was scared when I took it. What happens if I die? I thought. But I enjoyed it and carried on smoking it, though I would only have a drag of it like a cigarette.

I didn't drink every single day. I used to earn my money from my evening waitressing job and go down the local shop, where the lady used to serve me with
my alcohol and say, ‘As long as you are sensible with it, then I don't care.' She was really nice, but I suppose I would have thought that because she was selling me booze. Friends of 16 or 17 were stopping me and saying, ‘Hailey, will you go and get me such and such?'

I never asked her for spirits, because then she would have stopped serving me for taking the mick. I would only want four tins of lager or some alcopops. I never used to get so totally off my face that I ended up in hospital, not once. I would have a drink and, most of the time, when I came back you wouldn't know that I'd been drinking. Mind you, you could tell I'd been drinking when I was on the way home, because my friends and I would be laughing and joking all the time. But as soon as I got home, I would go straight to my room.

A
S
I
GOT OLDER,
I
STARTED FEELING MORE SECURE, SAFER AND STRONGER IN MYSELF.
I would think, No, I don't need to cut my arms and I don't need to take overdoses and try and kill myself. I would think, Well, I am here whether anybody likes it or not, so I might as well live life to the full. I was fed up with people calling me horrible names and insulting me. ‘Look at you, you have got a sweating problem' or ‘I heard that Hailey wets the bed' – things like that. Somehow I managed to pull myself together, and I put a lot of my progress down to my part-time waitressing job. I'd started this, working just on Sundays at first, when I was 14.

The job, at the Coach House pub, in Humberston, needed very little in the way of academic skill, but it
brought me on a lot and slowly I started to come out of my shell. I was happy for the first time in a number of years, working for the landlady there, and she paid me
£
30 a shift.

I worked hard and I felt quite proud because I had a bit of responsibility. I took a first tentative step towards looking after myself properly by going out to buy some make-up and a pair of jeans that looked nice. I even surprised myself when I demoted the trainers of my brother's that I'd been wearing and took to high-heeled shoes. Then I decided I wanted to have my hair permed and to let it grow long again.

But, although the job was restoring my confidence, I was still having trouble at home. One evening I was getting ready to go to work, and I put on my black trousers and my white shirt and tied my hair up in a bobble. I did my make-up and, even though I say it myself, I looked really nice. Sorry if that comes across as ‘I love myself', but it was better than being
self-deprecating
, as I had been for so long up until then. Anyway, one of my brothers came up to me and we started arguing. He ended up pushing me on to a chair, which broke into what seemed like a million pieces. I was on my back across this chair and he had me by the scruff of my neck. I can't remember what the argument was about, but it kicked off with him calling me a little bitch and accusing me of things. All I could say was: ‘I haven't done anything wrong.'

So many times I got punished for something that I'd never done. That evening I got to the pub 20 minutes late and the landlady asked, ‘Hailey, are you all right?'

Even though I had make-up on my white shirt and my hair was bedraggled, I told her, ‘Yeah, I'm fine, thanks.'

‘Has one of your brothers had a go at you again?' she asked in a knowing way.

‘Yeah,' I answered meekly.

She tried to bolster my confidence and said, ‘Don't worry about it.'

I felt totally crap, but, as soon as I was serving meals, people would be saying, ‘Thanks ever so much.' The praise from these patrons of the pub was a great boost. I was receiving praise from total strangers; praise that I needed but wasn't getting at home.

I'd been in contact with social services a few years earlier, of course, but I wasn't receiving any help from them now. I was on my own – a lost soul. Here I have to give credit to the children's charity ChildLine. At this stage, I used to ring them about four times a week and they gave me really helpful advice, as well as great solace and reassurance. In fact, the lady on the phone was so nice that I used to think, I wish I could come and live with you; you are a nice person and you don't shout and you don't grab people by the scruff of their neck.

No one from social services gave me follow-up support. It's talked about a lot but I don't think this sort of support exists as much as people would like to think
or the media portrays. Social workers always say, ‘We have learned from our mistakes' or ‘We have had a valuable lesson and it won't happen again.' How many times have we heard this? It's just a euphemism for: ‘Sorry, we fucked up and we're covering our arses by saying the words you want to hear us say.'

I began to work at the pub on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings from about seven o'clock until midnight or one o'clock in the morning. After my shift, the landlady would drive me home or she would call a taxi for me. Saturday was just glass collecting, cleaning ashtrays and tasks like that. The landlady also showed me how to pull pints and use the till, so I started doing this too. I looked much older than I was and would quite easily have passed for someone in their late teens.

By now I wasn't going to school any more. I had been expelled in bizarre circumstances. There was a break-in at the school and a video recorder had been stolen. Rumours were going around that I and two other girls were responsible.

It was true, but for three weeks I said nothing to anybody about it. Mum and Dad had been told that I was involved, but nothing was said to me until I came home after school one night and my mum broached the subject. ‘You have been quiet, Hailey,' she said. ‘I've spoken to PC Woods and asked him to come round tomorrow.'

To cut a long story short, I said to her, ‘I'm going to tell him that I stole the VCR with these two girls.'

Feigning surprise with a holier-than-thou look, she asked, ‘Oh. Why?'

‘Well, there's no denying it. I have done it,' I replied.

‘Oh, no, Hailey,' she said. ‘You're a fool. It will go on your record.' She wasn't very happy with me.

I confessed to PC Woods, ‘Look, three weeks ago the school got broken into, a video recorder got stolen. It was two of my friends and me.'

Without any ceremony, he said, ‘You are under arrest.'

At the police station, I found that the other two girls had been brought in and they said to me, ‘Why did you want to admit it?'

I think the police and my mum colluded in trying to teach me a lesson. The idea was: ‘Put her in the cells for a while and she won't do it again.' So they kept me locked up from about nine in the morning until about five in the afternoon and then I was given a warning and sent home. I was also grounded for about a month, and during that month I was suspended from school.

I was called back to the school with my mum for a meeting with the headmaster. ‘Why did you do it?' I was asked.

‘I just hate school,' I answered. In reality, though, I loved it because there were people that I knew and it was somewhere I could escape to. ‘I really don't like coming,' I lied.

By now, Mum was practically crying and said to the headmaster, ‘Please don't expel her from school. The
guy that used to live down the road from us sexually abused her in the school grounds.'

What I couldn't grasp was how she felt able to use the allegation about Huntley to exploit being sexually abused on my behalf. I look back and wish she had kicked up more of a fuss and dug her heels in and believed me more. Had she trusted my word more then, she could have gone to the press, or even stuck posters up in the neighbourhood or put leaflets through everybody's door. But now she was using my ordeal as a reason for me not to be expelled.

As far as the break-in was concerned, I said, ‘I'm sorry. I'll pay for any damage and I'll pay for the broken window. I'll pay for the VCR and if there is any damage I'll pay for a new one.'

I put my honesty before anything else, and that should prove I am not a liar. Besides, I thought, if I admit it now, I won't get in as much trouble, rather than leave it and find six weeks down the line that they know it was me because of CCTV footage. That would have been far worse.

By this time, Mum had bought a house in Cleethorpes, an old police house that she had moved into with Wayne and that they were doing up. She had somebody come and tile the floor for her because she didn't know how. They were there for about two or three days, and there was nobody in the house apart from these two guys and me.

I said, ‘Can I make you a cup of tea or anything?'

One of the tilers asked for two sugars, but made a thing about it, saying, ‘Two sugars, please, but don't stir it because I don't like it sweet.' I was looking at him rather confused. You don't like it sweet, I thought, so why do you have sugar in it in the first place?

‘It's all right,' he chirped. ‘I'm just winding you up.'

‘All right then,' I replied.

So I made them some tea and, because nobody else was in the house, I spent all day sitting there talking to them and making them cups of tea.

Later that day, there were some other builders at the side of the house putting in a window. My brother Ben had come in earlier and one of them remarked to him, ‘I bet you enjoy coming here every now and again?'

‘Why?' Ben asked.

This builder went on about spying on me and my brother said, ‘She's not my sister, she's a fucking little slapper and a whore. I fucking hate her.

He wasn't saying all this openly in front of me, as I was in the kitchen at this point. He told the builder, ‘She's just a little slapper and she takes drugs. What a whore she is. We don't like her. She treats this house like a hotel.'

It was a regular complaint of his. Admittedly, I
did
use the house like a hotel. But between seven and pub closing time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights I was getting off my backside and working. Not a lot of
15-year-olds do that, because they get their mum and dad to pay for everything, but I didn't want that.

My knight in shining armour was Colin, who had heard the conversation and now said to Ben, ‘You're the fat kid at school that nobody likes, aren't you?'

My brother was taken aback. ‘Sorry?'

Colin had a face like thunder as he said, ‘I have sat and watched Hailey, and she is a really nice girl and she has been making us cups of tea. You are the fat bastard at school that nobody likes and you can only pick on your sister.'

In a desperate attempt to deflect this attack, Ben could only come up with: ‘Don't talk to your employer like that!'

‘Listen, mate,' Colin told him, really angry by now, ‘you are
not
my boss and, as soon as this floor is finished and I get paid, I'm off.'

The next thing, Ben left, and soon afterwards, when the tiling was all done, I helped the guys mop the floor. Now I said to Colin what I had meant to say before Ben came in: ‘Why don't you pop in for a drink at the Coach House one night?'

‘Yeah,' he said.

‘I work there on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and sometimes on a Monday,' I explained.

When Colin came into the pub, I pulled him a pint and we got talking. I looked mature for my age and he thought that, because I was serving people alcohol, I had
to be 18 or more, and didn't ask how old I was. No one in the pub mentioned anything about my age to him. And I wasn't about to say I was only 15, as the pub would have got into trouble for employing me. This explains why later Colin was to be charged with unlawful sexual intercourse.

One night, there was a rare family do when Mum, Hayden and me went to a pub called Shoeberts in Cleethorpes. Mum had asked some friends and family to come along. Auntie Bet was there with her granddaughter Leanne, and my brother Adam rolled up. He and Leanne ended up going out to a nightclub, and later on she told me that they had sex.

I was sitting there in the pub when Colin walked in. This time I didn't really look at him twice. I sat drinking with Mum and then, as it dawned on her that Colin was there, she exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, that's my tiler. That's Colin. Come and have a drink, Colin.'

‘I'll buy them,' Colin said, and bought everybody a drink. Then my mum bought him a drink and said, ‘Why don't you come back to ours for a coffee?'

‘No, no, I am all right,' he said.

By this time, I had changed my mind and taken rather a liking to Colin. I went to the toilet and, when I came out, opportunely we ran into each other. But, when I asked him to call me, he looked at me as if I was playing with him.