I wept when Anita told me how Danielle had cried when she broke the news of Lee’s death. She’d told her that her daddy was in a nice place with Jesus and that he was safe so no one could ever harm him again.
At bedtime, she’d gone into Danielle’s room to see if she was asleep and found her gazing out of the window.
‘You see that star up there, Mummy?’ Danielle had asked her.
Anita knelt next to her and stroked her hair.
‘The big bright star shining up there in the sky,’ said Danielle. ‘Well, that’s my daddy’s star. I’ve been standing here looking for Daddy and now I think I’ve found him.’
Even now, all these years later, the image of Lee’s star shining in the darkness is one that Danielle finds comforting. The courage of all children who are forced to try to make sense of losing a parent is one of the most amazing and precious gifts we can ever receive. Anyone who has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of having to tell a child they’re not going to see their mummy or daddy, sister or brother again will know how humbling it is to watch them cope with their grief.
At the age of five, Danielle’s perfect, innocent, happy world was torn apart and yet her optimism and unshakeable belief in his existence, albeit in another world, helped all of us. While Lee’s death forced us, as adults, to question our faith and ask ourselves why, if there was a God, Lee had been taken from us, it was impossible to dismiss Danielle’s childish logic. If she could believe in Lee’s star, then so could we.
Anita brought her round to see us for an hour that afternoon. However heartbreaking it was to take her in our arms and reassure her that her daddy was in heaven, we knew we had to be strong for her.
One night, just before Christmas, Michelle and I decided to go back to Cooper’s Hill. It was where we both felt we could be close to Lee. As we stood together saying prayers at the spot where he’d died, I looked up at the sky and asked him to give us a sign that he was in heaven. Michelle said the same thing out loud and we suddenly saw a shooting star. It was, without doubt, the answer to our prayers that we’d both hoped for.
On Tuesday, 3 December, the police told us they had spent more time questioning Tracie. And they were keen to retrace the journey she and Lee had taken from the Marlbrook pub where they’d gone for a drink on the night of his murder.
DS Ian Johnston, who was leading the murder inquiry, asked if Ray, Michelle, Steve and I wanted to go with them. ‘Tracie’s coming,’ he said. ‘This isn’t going to be easy for you but we need to get witnesses to come forward. If she gets through this, then we’d like to hold a press conference this afternoon.’
We didn’t hesitate. No matter how hard we all knew it would be, we all needed to see for ourselves where Lee had died.
We met at the Hopwood pub on the outskirts of Birmingham. Tracie and her real dad John Andrews were in one of the police vans waiting when we arrived.
‘Do you want to stop off on the way to buy some flowers?’ I asked her.
The look on her face sent a shiver down my spine. It was a mixture of pure hatred and contempt. She was shaking violently. ‘No!’ she screamed at me. ‘No, no, I don’t.’
John stepped in between us and put his arms around her as she buried her face in his chest. She shrugged away my arm as I tried to comfort her.
‘That’d be nice, Maureen,’ John said. ‘You get some for her.’
Following the police cars along the narrow winding lanes to Cooper’s Hill, I knew that Ray, Michelle and Steve were all thinking the same thing. ‘There’s no way Lee would pull over down a pitch-black country lane,’ said Ray. ‘Not with a madman flashing his lights and giving him hand gestures when he didn’t have to. An old lady in a Morris Minor could drive in the middle of this road and there is no way even Michael Schumacher could get round her. Tracie’s story doesn’t ring true.’
It was true, as we drove along the narrow country lanes, we kept having to brake at every corner just in case there was a car coming in the opposite direction. The steep mossy banks covered with tree roots on either side rose up like walls and the bare branches of the overhanging trees formed a dense canopy in places. At times, it felt almost as if we were driving through a tunnel.
As we slowly negotiated the final series of blind bends, I couldn’t shake off Ray and Michelle’s nagging doubts about Tracie’s story. She’d told the police Lee had reached speeds of up to 70mph but we’d barely managed to get out of third gear. Nothing made sense any more.
When we pulled up behind the police cars in Cooper’s Hill, I was struck by how peaceful the lane seemed. Keeper’s Cottage, the house which overlooked the scene, couldn’t be in a more idyllic setting. Flanked by woodland, it looked out from behind a tall box hedge over rolling pasture. It seemed impossible to believe that it was here, less than a mile from Tracie’s flat, that Lee had taken his last breath.
Ray started to cry as he watched Michelle and I lay flowers on the grass verge next to the lane. There was no point trying to console him. For all of us, the grief was unbearable. The thought of knowing that we were standing just yards from where Lee’s life had ended was just too much to take in.
As the four of us stood clinging to each other, I glanced over at the police van, expecting to see Tracie. She wouldn’t get out. Even with the door open and John standing by it in the lane waiting for her, she was still sitting in the seat with her head bowed.
I watched as two police officers talked to her from outside and, after about five minutes, she climbed slowly out and stood staring at the ground as John put his arm round her. I could see she was shaking so much that she could hardly stand and, as John supported her, she continued to stare at the ground, never once raising her head.
After a couple of minutes, she put her hand back on the van door and half staggered, half collapsed back into the seat. As we watched the police van pull away, I couldn’t help wondering if Tracie’s reluctance to look at the place where she’d told police she’d held Lee in her arms for the last time as he lay dying was down to her grief or her guilt. Were her memories of what she’d witnessed too traumatic or was her reaction that of a cold-blooded killer who knew the police at the scene were closely watching her every move?
I have never felt so empty as I did on that cold December morning when I stood in Cooper’s Hill. But, however shocking it was to picture Lee lying in the road, seeing where he’d died was an important part of trying to piece together the final moments of his life. I just hoped he hadn’t suffered, and wanted to believe what the policeman on the phone had told me, that his death had been swift and painless after the fatal knife wound to his neck. Like the parent of any child who’s been murdered, I wanted to know exactly what had happened to Lee.
After the intense pain of shock and sorrow, comes the overwhelming guilt that you weren’t there to protect them. No matter how old they are, the primeval instinct to keep them from harm’s way is always as powerful as the day they were born.
Lee was 25, but he was still my baby. My beautiful, precious little boy who had grown into a handsome young man. I wanted so much to believe that, even though he hadn’t died in my arms, he had, at least, died in Tracie’s. A woman, who in spite of all the heartache she’d caused him and our family during their relationship, had at least been there for him at the end.
Unlike Ray and Michelle, I didn’t want to believe that she was the reason Lee was lying in a morgue. No matter how much I’d always disliked and mistrusted her or however unlikely her explanation about Lee’s death seemed, my determination to believe her story was actually helping to keep me strong. Her bruised and swollen face was, at the time, all the proof I needed to convince me that she, too, had been a victim of the same senseless violence that had been unleashed on my son. Could the fact that Lee had died and she’d survived really make her a suspect?
Maybe