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

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 was unbearable.

      I kept going over and over the same things in my mind. If the police were willing to send in a forensics team then they must think there was a chance I was right and that something terrible had happened to Julie. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to cope with finally finding out the truth, but I also knew I couldn’t go on much longer not knowing anything.

       Chapter Six

       The Search

      The following morning, Monday 20 November, five forensic officers went into the little three-bedroom house in Grange Avenue. Five men, I thought, should be more than enough to comb every inch of the place from top to bottom in search of evidence; after all, how many potential hiding places for clues could there be in such a small house? At last someone was doing something positive and it felt as if we might actually be moving towards discovering some answers to all the questions we had been endlessly asking ourselves over the previous few days.

      If anything had happened to Julie in that house during the previous Wednesday night they would now discover what it was, using all their scientific knowledge and policing experience. I’d seen lots of crime programmes on television, both documentaries and dramas, and it seemed that forensic teams pretty much always got their man. Part of me was terrified to even think what they would find, while the other part was relieved that people in authority finally believed me and were taking my fears seriously. These were people who would know what to do next, once they had established the facts; at least, that was what I told myself.