‘The other market traders used to call me the tart with the cart,’ she giggled.
After she met Lee, she gave up working in the Kingfisher Centre in Redditch selling wigs and hairpieces – her one and only modelling job had been modelling hair extensions for a local hair salon – and started a job as a barmaid at the Red Lion pub near her flat. Lee had bought her an engagement ring in May 1995 but, two months later, Tracie threw him out of the flat after a row.
The warning signs about her violent nature had been there right from the start. Lee had only been seeing Tracie a couple of months when he came into the salon with his face covered in cuts and bruises.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ I asked him as he made himself a cup of tea in the back kitchen.
‘Tracie,’ he said. ‘She had a mad one last night.’ Lee explained they’d had a row and agreed to split up before going out for the evening. But Tracie had followed him to a nightclub where he’d gone with his mates. When she saw him talking with them at the bar, she’d launched herself at him with a broken beer bottle, spitting at him and swearing as his mates struggled to pull her off.
On another occasion, after yet another row, about a month before Lee’s death, Tracie had seen him talking to a barmaid and bit him on the neck. Later the same night, she went up to him again and punched him twice on the side of the head. ‘You can buy me a fucking drink for this,’ she’d told Lee.
Ray and I couldn’t believe our eyes when Lee turned up and showed us the circle of ugly teeth marks and gashes on his neck. He looked as though he’d been savaged by a wild animal. When Lee met Andy Tilston, one of the first things he warned Lee about Tracie was her violent temper.
I told Brian that Lee had told me how Andy had mentioned being attacked by Tracie on several occasions and had once even pulled a knife on him. His words had struck such a chord at the time. He said she would be like a wolf when she freaked out. She always seemed to go for the neck.
The extreme behaviour Tracie often displayed when she and Lee were alone together was, in many ways, as spiteful and destructive as the mood swings we’d put up with when Lee brought her home. Tracie would seize on an innocent remark and blow it up into a full-scale argument. When Michelle and Steve announced their engagement at a family barbecue, Tracie stormed off into the house in tears.
No one knew she and Lee had been talking about getting married, but Tracie was convinced Michelle and I had hatched a plot between us to make sure that Michelle and Steve pipped them to the post. It was a ridiculous childish reaction but, even when I tried to tell Tracie that she’d got the wrong idea, there was no consoling her.
‘Michelle’s got to get in there before Lee and me, hasn’t she?’ she yelled. ‘She’s spoiled our surprise. We were going to tell the family about our engagement but now they can stuff it.’
Michelle knew Tracie’s reaction was simply because she wasn’t the centre of attention, but I was angry. It should have been a wonderful and memorable day for her but Tracie had set out to try to ruin things with her jealousy.
It had been exactly the same with Michelle’s wedding, even though we’d gone out of our way to make sure that Tracie felt she was welcome to be part of it. She and Lee kept falling out and getting back together again so we didn’t know if they’d be together for the wedding. Having asked Carla to be a bridesmaid with Paige and Danielle, because of Lee, Michelle told him that she and Steve needed to know what was happening with Tracie so they could get Carla’s dress made.
Lee understood this and told her not to bother having Carla as a bridesmaid, but, when he and Tracie got back together, Tracie asked if Carla could be a bridesmaid again. Michelle said yes again, but said it was their last chance to finalise it because they obviously couldn’t keep being messed about.
It didn’t take them long to have yet another row and split up and, this time, Michelle and Steve decided they’d had enough and told Lee that Carla couldn’t be a bridesmaid but they would all be welcome at the wedding.
When Tracie realised they’d said no to Carla, she said she wouldn’t be coming. Michelle and Steve couldn’t have cared less. But, when Tracie and Lee had another row and then got back together, Tracie made it a condition that she’d only go back with Lee if he didn’t attend the wedding.
Lee explained this to Michelle and hoped she’d understand that he was planning a future with Tracie. Michelle wasn’t very happy because, naturally, she and Steve had wanted Lee to be there, but there wasn’t much any of us could do about it.
Ray phoned Tracie as the wedding date got nearer and asked her to think about what she was asking Lee to do and to change her mind and let him come.
‘It’s got nothing to do with me,’ she’d told him. ‘Lee can do what he wants.’
I knew exactly what was going on in Tracie’s twisted mind. She just couldn’t stand the thought of Michelle and Steve’s big day overshadowing her own. It was a shame for Carla because she hadn’t been a bridesmaid before and had been really excited about the prospect of going down the aisle with Danielle, Paige and Michelle.
I was too angry to cry when Lee told us Tracie had given him an ultimatum. It was evil, the kind of incomprehensible and irrational thought process that set Tracie apart from the rest of the world. Tracie knew how much Lee and Michelle loved each other and how much it meant to all of us to be together on such a special day, but she’d set out to destroy it.
I look back and wonder how I ever managed to tolerate Tracie’s deluded sense of self-importance. Why hadn’t I just gone round to her flat and given her a good hard slap across the face? I think I just never expected Lee to give in to her. If he really couldn’t be there on his sister’s wedding day because of Tracie, then nothing would come between them.
From that moment on, I refused to speak to Tracie or have anything to do with her. Lee did come to the house on the morning of the wedding to bring presents for Michelle and Steve. He said he was sorry he wasn’t going to be there but gave his sister a massive hug and told her he loved her. It should have been a day when, as we all hugged each other, the tears we shed should have been tears of joy, not sorrow.
I’m sure even his mates couldn’t understand how Tracie managed to wield so much emotional power over Lee. We certainly couldn’t.
As I told Brian and Mick that day, she was convinced that Lee was her Mr Right. Even though the pattern of their relationship was established early on – rowing, splitting up, reconciling – they couldn’t go without each other for more than a few days. When Lee had called off the engagement, six months after they’d had a party to announce they were getting married, I told them Tracie had called at our house every day. Within a fortnight, he was back living with her again. No matter how much her sulking and explosive rages drove Lee to distraction, he was completely infatuated with her.
‘If you don’t stop seeing each other, you’ll end up killing each other,’ Michelle had told Lee, after he turned up at home one morning with an ugly scratch running the length of one side of his face. That had happened just six months before Lee’s death.
Lee had laughed. ‘It’s only a scratch,’ he’d said. ‘She just loses it. It’s the way she is.’
It was something that Tracie had openly joked about in front of us. Watching the video Fatal Attraction at our house one evening, she feigned a stabbing motion into a cushion on the settee next to Lee after the scene where the mistress is trying to kill her married lover. ‘I’d be just like that,’ she declared, whacking Lee in the face with the cushion. ‘If I couldn’t have you, then I certainly wouldn’t let anyone else.’