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.