At first it seemed married life was treating Colin and Lesley Howell well. Later they moved from their rented property in Portballintrae to a house of their own at Culmore Gardens, off the Mountsandel Road in Coleraine. Lesley joined a small Bible study and prayer group made up of young married women, many of them with small children, from various Protestant churches. They took turns to meet in each other’s houses and the newcomer was among the more outgoing. People liked her. She was thoughtful, warm-hearted and always had something to say. She was gentle and caring, and loved children. One night the women discussed who they believed could be modelled on Christ. Lesley looked up at once and said: ‘That would be Colin.’ She clearly thought the world of her new husband.
However, a few years later at the same regular gathering of women, some noticed that Lesley Howell had become quieter. As they discussed the scriptures over tea and sandwiches, she was withdrawn and at times seemed preoccupied with troubles she did not disclose to anyone. She happened to let slip the remark: ‘Colin isn’t all he could have been.’ It seemed that the man she had married wasn’t quite the saint she had once made him out to be. Most of the women in the group were slightly puzzled by her comment. But one or two others knew exactly what had been going on.
When they first moved to the North Coast, Lesley worked with the Marie Curie Foundation and for a time nursed in Coleraine Hospital, but she felt uncomfortable on the wards there and didn’t enjoy it. Some of the nurses told her: ‘Oh, you’re from the Royal. You must have a few airs and graces.’ She would have liked to return to Belfast but Howell was having none of it. His professional interests came first, although he agreed to spend more time with her at weekends and go shopping, which he disliked. When their first child, Matthew, was born in October 1984, it seemed easier all round for Lesley to stop work and stay at home to look after the baby.
Howell’s career, meanwhile, was flourishing. He got on well with his employers, Terry Boyd and Alan Logue, and he would stay with them for five years. They were both Belfast men. Logue was the son of a Presbyterian minister from North Belfast, while Boyd, like Howell, at the time was a Baptist. They owned a number of practices: in Belfast, Londonderry, Maghera and Kilrea, County Derry, Ballycastle, and three in Coleraine. They went into partnership in 1979 and having started with one surgery based on the Lodge Road in Coleraine quickly developed the practice into one of the largest in Northern Ireland. At one stage they had up to 35,000 patients on their books, and nineteen associates. Howell started off dividing his time between one of the Coleraine clinics and the Ballycastle branch, but soon he was based full time at the Coleraine Waterside clinic.
The Howells joined Coleraine Baptist Church, one of the oldest Baptist churches in Ireland. It was first established in 1795 when founding members rented a disused corn store. There were an estimated 8,500 members in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, although up to 20,000 people attended services each week. By 1830 the Coleraine church had thirty regular members, with a further seventy described as ‘not regular, who come to hear’.
There were a number of divisions in the formative years. One minister left to become a grocer over differences on church government and discipline. Membership ebbed and flowed. Most denominations benefited from a period of general religious expansion in 1859, a period which was known as ‘God’s river in spate’. In Coleraine the membership increased from seventy-three to 165 in two years but it fell again because of emigration to Scotland and the United States. Some of those who remained were struck off for a variety of misdemeanours, church records citing offences which included ‘immorality, stealing, falsehood and debt’. The pastor at the time recorded with regret that almost all the new members had gone ‘and what is worse, their evil conduct and spiritual apathy did not fail to leave its mark behind’.
As the years went by, strict rules were enforced. Seven members were expelled for poor attendance, regulations stipulating: ‘Members absenting themselves from the Breaking of Bread for three months without legitimate excuse cease to be members of the church.’
There was a split in the 1890s. The exact cause is uncertain, although official history suggests: ‘It may have been the offer of a glass of wine by a senior member to the teetotal pastor on a social occasion which caused the spark.’ After that two separate churches were maintained for a time. The local newspaper lamented: ‘Surely one strong Baptist Church in a town would serve the Cause better than two weak churches and all the more so as in doctrine and policy there is no difference whatsoever.’
But this fallout was nothing compared to the scandal which was to rock the church to its foundations a century later.
The Howells became actively involved in church affairs and soon much of their social life centred around the activities at Abbey Street. They had a fairly tightly knit circle of friends, many of them couples with young children. The church elders were quickly impressed by Colin Howell’s obvious energy and commitment. He was appointed leader of the Youth Fellowship and helped to run the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme; he would drive the church minibus, sometimes taking the children to the beach at Castlerock. He also worked as an assistant with Campaigners, the church’s uniformed youth section. No longer the reticent, slightly aloof young man he had been as a student, Howell had grown in confidence and was very popular in church circles, as Pastor John Hansford, then minister at Coleraine Baptist, confirms: ‘He was an extremely charming guy, good looking at one time and very, very plausible. Folk liked him.’
But Lesley was finding domesticity isolating and unfulfilling. She missed the challenge and the fun of working in the Royal, and the sense of worth which her nursing duties had given her. As a new mother trying to settle in an area where none of her family or old friends lived close by, she sorely missed the camaraderie of her work and the shared accommodation in Belfast. Her friend Valerie Allen remembers being very much aware of the difficulties of Lesley’s new circumstances: ‘She was a new wife and getting [learning] to be a mother [too] … She didn’t have an outlet. She was [now just] Colin Howell’s wife and had lost the place where she once shone. She had no platform for her talents.’
Always lively and resourceful, Lesley did her best not to lose her sense of humour. In a letter to Valerie just over a year after the wedding, she wrote: ‘I must say, I miss work more as times goes on, although it hasn’t been too bad all summer. But apart from the money and the work itself, it’s amazing how much more interesting your conversation is when you have something other than the rising cost of baked beans to discuss.’ By February 1985 – not long after the birth of Matthew – domestic life had more or less taken over completely, as another letter to Valerie confirmed: ‘I have decided to leave the house in its present chaotic state and write to you instead. I don’t honestly think that I am a born housewife. I cleaned my windows for the first time in over a year yesterday. Well actually, I cleaned two of them. The others will probably get done over the next couple of months. I was due a visit from the Ma- and Pa-in-law, which has been called off, so I can revert to my usual slovenliness.
‘I have been collecting all my issues of Christian Woman magazine for you to browse through, because I thought you might find some interesting articles on homemaking and also there are some very exciting articles [ones] on crocheted underpants, which have great properties of elastication, which can come in handy. Well, I know that this has hardly been a scintillating letter and now that the hubby has arrived home, I’ll have to go and make some bangers and mash.’
In spite of her jesting the young wife and mother found it hard to cope. And it was perhaps typical of her that, even with her best friend, she often tried to hide her difficulties under a mask of humour. Howell himself acknowledged his wife’s ability to put up a cheerful front when she thought it was required: ‘Depending on who she was talking to, Lesley would have smiled and said things are great. She’d give you the great picture, and maybe she’d be more truthful to others. She was good at covering up. If we were having an argument and she was really upset and someone came to the door, she’d be turning on the charm. She’d switch to being brilliant in seconds.’
Howell liked to control all aspects of his life, but Lesley was not the subservient, compliant ‘little woman at home’ he wanted her to be. She wasn’t the tidiest of housewives and was never afraid to leave the baby with him when she wanted time on her own. Her spending habits quickly became another source of conflict; she was poor at sticking to a budget and not particularly interested in domesticity. She liked splashing out on clothes and holidays. The husband of a good friend of hers recalls: ‘Lesley liked shopping. She liked clothes and style. She aspired to be like some of the other wives of dentists in the town who drove nice cars and had a nice lifestyle.’
Lesley fell pregnant again in 1986. She went through a very stressful time: her mother suffered a series of severe setbacks in her health, before having to go into a nursing home where she would die, ten weeks before the baby’s birth. Lauren, the Howells’ second child, was born on 14 November 1986. In the months which followed it is likely that Lesley suffered from some form of post-natal depression, although this was never formally diagnosed. Tensions in the marriage increased dramatically however.
Meanwhile Howell’s professional career was moving very much in the right direction. After five years working for Logue and Boyd, principally with NHS patients, he was keen to branch out and broaden his remit. He wanted to do things differently and he sounded out his employers with his new ideas – but as Howell told police after his arrest they weren’t as receptive as he had hoped: ‘I discussed changes I wanted to make within the practice, to do things better … They weren’t willing to invest in those changes …’ He decided to go out on his own. He offered to buy the Waterside practice but Logue and Boyd wanted to keep it within their existing structure. He then thought about opening his own practice in neighbouring Portstewart, but his employers objected because they considered this to be part of their patient area. Eventually in 1988 he paid £34,000 for a practice property in Ballymoney which needed major refurbishment before it could be opened to the public.
Howell was determined it would be state-of-the-art with no expense spared in the renovation and kitting out of the premises in Queen’s Street. For a young man who was not yet thirty and who had a very young family to think of – Lesley was already pregnant with their third child – it was an ambitious venture with more than a small element of risk involved. But the impulsive Howell had never been afraid to take a chance. By his own admission, he liked to live on the edge. He once visited Canada and Niagara Falls with some university friends. Howell insisted on climbing over a safety barrier and then getting down on his hands and knees and crawling along a ledge so he could get a better view of the water crashing down, apparently oblivious to the danger he was exposing himself to as well as the obvious anxiety of the rest of the party.
In some ways, it seemed that the young dentist’s approach to business was equally devil-may-care. In hindsight, Howell admitted that his business sense was not always the most grounded or circumspect: ‘I was driven by what I was doing and the quality of what I wanted to do, rather than the mathematics of “can I afford to do it”. I just believed it would work. It was an inspirational way of doing business, rather than a calculated way of doing it.’ It was inevitable perhaps that he quickly ran into financial difficulties in fitting out the new surgery. ‘One of the mistakes I made was that I equipped and maintained it [the surgery] with equipment and stuff that I couldn’t afford. It stretched me further.’ Lesley helped pick some of the furniture and chose the colour scheme.
Once the surgery was opened, he soon had more work than he could handle alone, and he brought in a second dentist. But the profit margins didn’t really improve ‘… because, as you get busier, you need to make more, buy more equipment, make more investments. You’ve got to pay another dentist. So the inspirational way never really worked.’
Given the financial pressures Howell found himself facing, it probably wasn’t the best time to invest in a bigger and more expensive family home. Yet this is what he did anyway in November 1989, buying a large bungalow on the other side of town – Knocklayde Park – for £85,000. Mortgages on the new family home and the Ballymoney practice were arranged through the Northern Bank. Soon the Howells had run out of money and were living on an overdraft. And they now had a third child to think of too – Lesley had given birth to a baby son, Daniel, six months earlier
The Knocklayde Park bungalow was a brand new property still needing fixtures and fittings and basic decoration; but, unable to afford to have anything substantial done at this point in time, the family moved in regardless. The interior work had not been completed, and a fireplace lay unfinished. They were so strapped for cash that they were unable to afford to put a carpet down. With an unfinished and untidy house and now three infants to take care of, it was more difficult than ever for Lesley to manage. A neighbour remembers once seeing one of the children in a babygro standing on the concrete floor of the hallway in a pool of urine left by the family’s pet cocker spaniel.
Howell found himself spending more and more time taking charge of the children to try and take some of the pressure off his wife. He gave up playing sport so that he could spend more time with his young family. But between making the tea, changing nappies and helping to put them to bed at night, he became increasingly disillusioned with the unending tensions and stresses of his relationship with his wife.
Soon the financial pressures were becoming intolerable. Cheques were being returned and Lesley was unable to withdraw money from the cash dispenser. The young dentist blamed delayed NHS payments for the cash-flow problems. His Northern Bank was very concerned about the situation, as Howell would later recount: ‘I remember getting phone calls from the bank manager, but that happens all the time. I remember having meetings and increasing my overdraft limit, but again that would be normal … I wasn’t very good at handling money. I was my own worst enemy.’ His money problems became so critical that he discreetly tried to sell off his new home without having to put up a ‘For Sale’ sign. He also approached Terry Boyd, his former employer, and inquired if he would be interested in taking over the Ballymoney practice where he had overspent on equipment. He urged Lesley to ease up on her spending. She feared her husband was going to become bankrupt.
Tania Donaghy, a nurse and receptionist at Howell’s Ballymoney practice, who had also become a good friend of Lesley, found herself caught up in the deepening domestic crisis. Lesley phoned one day and asked her to remove and keep whatever money was in the surgery’s cash-box. There was £400. In a later police interview Tania recalled that Lesley was very upset: ‘I am nearly sure she told me she wanted the cash because she was leaving Colin there and then. However, before Lesley got up to collect the cash, Colin instructed me to bank [it]. I felt I was piggy-in-the-middle between both of them. But I never heard them argue or fight. They were always pleasant to each other.’
But the marriage was clearly close to breaking point. Just before Christmas 1989 after the move to the new bungalow at Knocklayde Park Lesley discovered she was pregnant again with their fourth child, Jonathan. At the 1992 inquest into Lesley’s death, Howell told the coroner that his wife had struggled to accept that she had fallen pregnant again so quickly. Lesley loved all her children dearly but in the run-up to the festive season that year the prospect of soon having to care for four young children under the age of five, one of them newborn, in chaotic domestic circumstances, and with the added stress of their dire financial straits, must have been very difficult indeed for the young mother.
There was another source of deep unhappiness for Lesley at the time – perhaps the one which she found most difficult of all to accept. Around the time of Daniel’s birth in May 1989 Colin had had a fling with a married woman, an old friend from his university days. Her husband was away a lot on business and she and Howell had started a liaison which had lasted a month or so. Lesley later found out what was going on and challenged him about it. She even telephoned the woman, who assured her that the affair had ended and her own life had moved on.
But the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, and the timing of it – just after she had given birth to a third child – devastated Lesley and her already shaky self-esteem. The tensions inside the house plummeted to new depths. She wanted to move on and try to forget but the affair, however fleeting, left a serious crack in the relationship. Lesley never forgave Howell and it was never the same between them again. He thought about divorce but never seriously considered it as an option, because he was afraid of what he believed would be the stigma attached to such a course of action. And how could a man with such powerful religious convictions and so many close Baptist friends walk away from his wife and children?
By the spring of 1990, however, the relationship became even more strained. Howell was already actively on the lookout for another affair. Even though he was well aware of the impact his first dalliance had had on his wife, it seems he could not stop himself from seeking sexual gratification elsewhere. It was undoubtedly a form of escapism and he didn’t seem to care what the consequences might be for his family.
This time it was a young mother called Hazel Buchanan, an assistant at his daughter Lauren’s nursery school, who caught his eye. She was the wife of a police officer, Trevor Buchanan, a constable and scenes-of-crime officer in the then Royal Ulster Constabulary. The couple, who had two young children, Andrew and Lisa, also lived in Coleraine and were members of the same Baptist church as the Howells, where Hazel sometimes looked after the younger set at the children’s Sunday School. She was shy, impressionable and careful about her appearance. She looked well, but those who knew about the affair at the time often wondered what the attraction was and why the confident, demonstrative and ambitious Howell, a dentist, should have fallen for this particular lady who lived on the opposite side of the town.
Hazel had a sheltered upbringing in the country. Her parents were God-fearing Baptist folks – just like Howell’s. She was an excellent mother and a seemingly dutiful wife. She had little personality but was clearly seduced by his charm and intellect. She and Colin Howell had already made each other’s acquaintance through church circles, and they would chat when he dropped off little Lauren to the Mulberry Bush Nursery School at Mountsandel, Coleraine, where his young daughter would spend most weekday mornings. At one time Hazel had also been a patient at the dentist’s clinic. Gradually, the relationship began to develop.
It was in the water at the swimming pool of the Riada Leisure Centre in Ballymoney that the affair proper took hold. It was early summer 1990. Lesley, who was pregnant with Jonathan and resting at home, had arranged for the children to have swimming lessons, and Hazel took her two along as well. She was one of a number of mothers in attendance, but Howell was the only father there. Most of the other women sat and had coffee as they watched their children in the pool, but Hazel was keen to learn how to get her breathing right while doing the front crawl. She was impressed by Howell’s swimming technique and she soon found the confident and charming father to be a willing instructor, holding her waist high with both hands as she practised her strokes.
As the weeks passed the two began to flirt. One afternoon as he held her up in the water he noticed her skin was more slippery than usual: she had been using a particularly rich body moisturizer and before he could stop himself he ran his hand over her upper legs, and then across her pubic area towards her stomach and back again. Half expecting a slap on the face, he excused himself at once: ‘If I’m having wrong thoughts about you, you’ll have to forgive me.’ But he was relieved, as well as heartened, when the young mother responded: ‘I’m not so innocent myself,’ before she gently pushed him to one side, leaving him standing, as she swam away.
That day in the deep end of the pool an invisible line had been crossed and it was not long afterwards when they kissed and embraced for the first time. It happened after they had taken their children out for a walk on the beach at Castlerock on an outing with other families organized by the church’s Children Special Services Mission. Afterwards in the bathroom at his home as they were washing the sand out of their children’s hair and toes Hazel rubbed her hand on his arm. Before they knew it they had stepped into one of the bedrooms, out of sight of the children, and were kissing and touching each other.
They quickly found an excuse for Howell to call over to the Buchanans’ house at certain times. He played in a church music group and was handy with the guitar. Hazel said she wanted him to teach her some new chords. He would come to the house with sheets of music and strum away while she sat at the opposite end of the sofa with her own guitar resting on her knee and tried to follow what he was doing. Trevor once arrived home unexpectedly and was not impressed. Even though the pair had always anticipated how he, and they, would react if he suddenly appeared unannounced Trevor realized almost at once the guitar lesson was not as innocent as it looked. ‘Hello, Colin,’ the young policeman said, as he summoned his wife to the kitchen. Hazel tried to explain that it was all very harmless and said she wondered why her husband could get into such an agitated state. Suspecting that Howell’s motive for being there was not restricted to music, Trevor left the house and drove off in a fury.
The first time they had sex together was early summer 1990, probably in June. It was in the Buchanans’ home. Trevor was out, but Howell brought his guitar with him just in case. Hazel was dressed in a denim miniskirt and a low-cut, sleeveless blouse. The heavy scent of her perfume was an irresistible invitation. Years later, he would identify this as the moment when he got caught up in a fatal tangle that was just as much her making as it was his: ‘I was walking into the spider’s web …’ Then and there they made love and both enjoyed it. But once it was over Hazel went into immediate denial, feigning surprise that it had actually taken place at all: ‘Did that really happen? Did that really happen?’ she questioned her lover who had just made his debut in the marital bed. Howell would recount to police after his arrest : ‘I remember saying to her: “We’ve just had sex. Do you want me to explain it to you?” ’
The affair continued with the couple stealing moments together whenever possible. Typically Howell was not averse to taking chances and sailing very close to the wind when it came to seeing his lover. On three occasions he actually would insist on coming to the house when Trevor was there, asleep in bed, having come back from night duty. Once Hazel had pleaded on the telephone with the headstrong dentist not to come, but he just could not resist taking the risk anyway. He arrived in the utility room to take his nervous lover into his arms. Years later he explained to police: ‘I knew Trevor had a gun. It was just to see her. When you don’t see much of each other and it’s full of passion … You plan to see each other, then realize you can’t. It was just to see her.’
Sometimes Hazel would tell her husband she was going shopping and then rendezvous with her lover in nearby towns such as Ballymena. They would also arrange to meet while out running and cycling on the roads as part of their keep-fit routines. Sex was usually once a week – sometimes at Howell’s clinic at night when all the staff had gone home, and sometimes at Hazel’s house when Trevor was out. The Buchanans’ garden backed on to Mountsandel Wood, a forest area on steep slopes beside the River Bann. Wearing his running gear, Howell would disappear from the road into the trees, before emerging again to climb the perimeter fence of the forest and sneak quietly through the back door. Sometimes he even climbed through the bedroom window.
The couple’s movements in public were always well choreographed and nobody suspected a liaison, even when they appeared together. Friends remember meeting Colin, Lesley, Hazel and the children in the centre of Coleraine, when Lesley was on crutches after falling and breaking a bone in her foot. They thought the other woman was there to assist Lesley but later realized this was not the only reason.
Trevor’s brother Gordon Buchanan remembers how he and his wife Donna called at the house at Charnwood Park one afternoon. The two brothers took their children for a walk to a nearby rugby pitch, leaving the wives on their own. There had been no hint of any marital discord but by the time the men returned Hazel had taken off on her bicycle, leaving Donna on her own. Trevor was not pleased, as Gordon recalls: ‘I can only speculate now where she was going. Trevor seemed overly anxious and agitated as it was getting dark and, looking back, I think he had an inkling that Hazel was having an affair … For most people, it would be unthinkable to leave a visitor in the house on their own and head off on a bicycle. It was downright rude. There had to be some other reason for doing that. It left us uncertain about the relationship generally – we thought it was so bizarre.’
The Buchanans’ neighbours often noticed Howell driving past the house in his Renault Savanna estate car and parking outside. It happened several times a week, mostly when Trevor was away. The couple managed to spend time together on church away days as well. On one occasion a group of church friends and their children went on an outing to Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast. Trevor was on duty and no doubt preoccupied with baby Daniel. Lesley stayed at home and had a sign up on the kitchen wall which read: ‘Boring wife – Tidy house’. But Howell and Hazel spent most of the afternoon on their own away from the main party. There were other trips as well, one to a stately house in Donegal, just across the Irish border. Hazel’s church duties involved helping to organize the days out and if the proposed dates did not suit Howell because of his dental commitments, she would see to it that the dates were changed so that he would be able to come along too.
The lovers quickly devised their own secret method of maintaining lines of communication. He would tap in her phone number and then hang up just before her push-button telephone rang out. When she heard the faint click from the phone, she would know it was Howell wanting to talk and would ring him back as soon as she could. If the conversation lasted more than ten minutes, the call would automatically be registered on their itemized telephone bills. This meant that after every nine minutes they put the receivers down and took turns to call each other back. The discussions often lasted for over an hour and were usually late at night or in the early hours when their children and Lesley were asleep and Trevor was out on duty.
Hazel was asked by the police in 1991 after her husband’s death why she had the affair. She said that when she, Trevor and the two children had moved to live in Coleraine in March 1986, she had found it difficult living away from her wider family circle back in Omagh. It took at least two years, she claimed, before she and Trevor felt more settled in the area. She explained that she was by nature very quiet and did not find it easy to mix socially: for a long time she didn’t go out much, and if she did she was always accompanied by Trevor. Then in January 1989 she had found the part-time job as an assistant at the nursery school, five mornings a week. It was here, she claimed, that she began to develop a more independent outlook, working with the children, meeting other young mothers and making friends – one of them Howell, whom she recognized from the church.
Recalling the impact Howell quickly made on her life, she told police: ‘Really from this time onwards, I began to … [realize] there was more to life than merely being in the home. I found myself … not depending on Trevor as much. Trevor saw a change in my attitude for which, for the most part, he was not in favour of – he preferred me as I was before. This initially led to arguments between us and, at times, a lack of communication set in. We did not huff, as it were, but felt no real closeness. I could see that Colin was a different type of person from Trevor in that he was friendly, more outgoing and easy to talk [to], with plenty of chat …’
In the summer of 1990 Hazel became sick, and a pregnancy test confirmed that she was carrying a baby. But who was the child’s father? She was sleeping with both her husband and her lover at this stage. Howell, as usual, hadn’t cared too much about taking precautions when they made love. Around that time when she was having sex with Trevor a condom had burst – so in theory it was possible that he was the father. But Trevor had brown eyes and dark hair. What if the baby had blond hair and blue eyes, just like Howell’s children? More telling still, what if the child emerged with an unusual genetic feature which ran in Howell’s family: syndactyly, a fairly rare hereditary condition whereby some of the toes or fingers are ‘webbed’, i.e. still fused together by ‘webs’ of skin. What would Trevor make of it if the baby was born with a rare foot defect?
Hazel told her lover she could not cope with nine months of uncertainty and the subsequent fallout if the baby was obviously his. Even though Howell had initially insisted that he would claim full parental rights if it was proved he was the father, he ultimately relented and agreed that they should arrange an abortion. In many ways he would have been happy to keep the child but he feared that the pregnancy might end the relationship with Hazel which was so vital to him now as to be bordering on obsession.
Early one morning in late summer 1990 Hazel slipped out of bed as her husband slept beside her. She dressed without making a sound, gently closed the back door, opened the garden gate and hurried through Mountsandel Forest to the end of a road where Howell was parked.
The lovers were facing an unexpected crisis and Howell quickly and quietly put in place arrangements to deal with the emergency. After all he had found himself in this situation before and he knew who to call, and where to go. They would have to go away for a day or two. Later that morning, Trevor would find a note from his wife stuck on the bathroom mirror, which read: ‘Going through a really hard time. Don’t worry about me. Don’t try and find me. I’ll be back in a few days. I love you. Hazel.’ Howell didn’t have to leave a note. Instead he told his wife he was going to a conference in London and the night before, he left two of his children with one of his sisters in another part of Northern Ireland before returning to Coleraine in the early hours to pick up Hazel.
Soon afterwards, the lovers were speeding down the M2 motorway towards Belfast International Airport. They were due to catch an early morning British Airways shuttle flight to London Heathrow. Hazel hoped that none of the other departing passengers would recognize either of them as she and Howell slipped into their seats in different parts of the cabin. The tickets for the flights had been bought at a travel agent’s outside Coleraine, where Howell was confident nobody knew him.
Disembarking from the aircraft, making their way through arrivals and boarding the Tube for the city centre, they were still careful to keep their distance. They got off at Ealing and she followed him, looking over her shoulder to make sure there were no familiar faces or Northern Irish accents in the immediate vicinity. As they walked into the reception of the clinic, a young lady in a white tunic behind the desk greeted Howell with a smile: ‘Good morning, sir.’ Running her pen down the list in the appointments book, she ticked off the name and accepted an envelope stuffed with banknotes. ‘Would your friend like to come this way?’
That night the couple stayed at a B&B close to the clinic where Hazel had the procedure the following morning. The staff did not want her to leave that day because of the after-effects of the anaesthetic, but the confirmed tickets for the return journey meant that they had no choice but to go. Howell literally had to hoist Hazel upright as she staggered to a waiting taxi. On the flight back to Belfast, she felt weak and tearful, but everything had gone to plan, as they had hoped. By the time they reached Coleraine, Hazel was virtually out on her feet with exhaustion, feeling guilty but still hugely relieved that an unsuspecting Trevor would never know anything about the abortion. She passed off the fairly substantial bleeding she suffered in the days which followed as a particularly heavy period.