At 8.36 p.m., with all other avenues exhausted, Michelle called 999, the worry leaking through her every word. WPC Esther Winner, the operator, immediately sensed this was not a run-of-the-mill missing person’s call:
WPC Winner: Where were these children last seen?
Michelle: Over at the Coldean shops at the bottom of Coldean Lane. I thought my little ’un had gone up to her friend’s. When she didn’t come back when it started getting dark I phoned her friend and her friend’s mum said she hadn’t been up there.
WPC Winner: What time were they last seen?
Michelle: About half past five. It’s not like her to go too far away unless she’s going to a friend’s house.
WPC Winner: And who am I speaking to now? Mrs . . .
Michelle: Hadaway
WPC Winner: Who’s the other mother?
Michelle: Mrs Streeter. Sorry, Mrs Fellows.
WPC Winner: Right, and they’re two nine-year-old girls?
Michelle: Two nine-year-olds
After the operator had taken full descriptions she promised she would send officers but if the girls returned in the meantime, Michelle was to call back.
Miles from Brighton, Lee Hadaway was also growing increasingly agitated. With no more news from Michelle, he decided to phone the police for a first-hand update. They urged him to make his way straight back to Brighton, a request that placed Stephen Judd in a tricky position. As he was expressly forbidden to carry passengers and already late with his deliveries, it meant that doing anything other than continuing his drops would surely see him dismissed. On top of this Stephen was once again almost at the limit of his permitted hours, so could not head back to the south coast, even if he wanted to.
Lee was adamant. He needed to get home and as each hour ticked by his panic intensified. Eventually, they bit the bullet and called Brighton police again, this time for advice. They were told, given the gravity of the situation, to go to a local police station, and get a senior officer to endorse the lorry’s tachograph to say that Judd had permission to continue driving. They did just that and a petrified Lee Hadaway was, at last, on his way home.
Over the ensuing months and years, as neighbours scatter-gunned suspicion around, Barrie’s movements – particularly his timings – came under intense scrutiny.
To some, his account did not stack up. Questions would be asked about his journeys, how long it might or might not have taken him to walk from point A to point B. Why he took so long to join the search.
In my experience as a detective, I found it is often the simple details that become blurred yet cause the biggest problems. What can appear to be suspicious anomalies are nothing of the sort. But they are a headache when pored over in a Crown Court some twelve months – or thirty-two years – later. Not everyone’s life is governed by the clock. We do not all have a perfect memory of what we did, where, when and with whom. In fact, there were occasions when I became very suspicious of too great a recall of minutiae. Almost as if it had all been rehearsed.
The truth is, people make good, old-fashioned, honest mistakes. For many, life is routine, sometimes vague. Their recollections deserve some leeway, especially if they are anxious or traumatized.
In my detective days, I would try to overcome this haziness by getting people to make their evidence as accurate as possible by fixing it to known and certain events. For example, if someone said they were watching television when they received a phone call I would want to know what programme was on and what was happening at that moment.
Were the adverts on? If so which ones?
Was it the local or national news? What were they covering?
Armed with this information I could pinpoint the relevant time.
If a person reported seeing something on a road when a bus was passing, I would want to know the bus’s number, in which direction it was travelling, whether it was before or after the bus stop. Then the bus company could narrow down the time for me, almost to the second. But often these anchors just don’t exist and anomalies are simply down to incredibly worried people just getting it wrong.
This would not be the first inconsistency that would haunt the enquiry and each would take hours, and in some cases years, to resolve; many never were.