‘WELL,’ ASKED THE LADY IN THE CARE HOME, WHO HAD SOMETHING OF CRUELLA DEVIL ABOUT HER, ‘HAVE YOU HAD SOMETHING TO EAT?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I snapped.
She replied coldly, with all the grace of a concentration camp commandant, ‘Well, if you don’t have something to eat now, it will go on to your report.’
‘What report?’ I asked.
Taunting me, she replied, ‘You will have to be force-fed if you don’t eat for a certain amount of time.’
I decided to meet this ice queen halfway by saying, ‘No, I’ll eat in the morning,’ but it was something like one o’clock in the morning now.
My compromise seemed to have melted some of her coldness away, and she said, ‘Well, as long as you eat breakfast in the morning, then.’
‘Right, OK then,’ I said.
She told me where my room was and warned me, ‘Mind, take your bag with you, lock the door and make sure none of the other kids come down and nick your stuff.’
By this time I was thinking, Well, I’ve got nothing to take, really. All I owned in the world was a pair of trousers.
Morning soon arrived and there was a lot of hustle and bustle as everyone was going out. One would say, ‘I am off to my singing lesson,’ and another, ‘I am off to my ballet lesson.’ What a perfect little life you have got, I thought. I know it sounds horrible, but there was this little girl there, really posh, and she said, ‘I’m off to my dancing lesson. Would you like to come?’ Just shut up, I was thinking, as in reality I was oozing with jealousy.
These were a carer’s own children, and they were going to their dancing lessons. I was wishing that I could just be normal, like going swimming on a Saturday.
I brushed my teeth, cleaned round my room, took my bag and locked my door. I was still thinking hard when one of the carers said to me, ‘Hailey, what are you doing today?’
‘Can I go out?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never been in one of these places before. Are you allowed to leave the premises or are you held prisoner, sort of thing?’
She shook her head frantically from side to side as she replied, ‘No, no, we couldn’t do that, because you can ring the police and say that we’re holding you hostage. No. You can go out. Once a week we give you pocket money, £9.’
It was all falling into place. ‘Right,’ I said. So they could force-feed you but weren’t allowed to keep you prisoner. Very strange.
She asked, ‘Would you like yours next week or now? Because if you have it next week you can have £18, but if you want it now you can have £9.’
Holding in my excitement at the prospect of being able to leave the place and being paid to do so, I replied casually, ‘I’m going to go to my friend’s and she only lives around the corner. I want to take a video with me and we could watch that and have a pizza.’
‘Have your £9 now, then,’ she said. ‘But take your stuff with you, though, Hailey, because I don’t want anybody going in your bag and nicking it.’
I was on cloud nine as I replied, ‘Yeah. OK. Put my stuff in my bag, right. See you later.’
As I sauntered out of the door, her voice trailed off as she said, ‘Right. Remember, be back for curfew at five o’clock.’
I had the stare of a fashion mannequin as I said, ‘OK, yeah.’
On the bus from Grimsby to Hull, I ended up drinking. Knock, knock, knock… I was back at Colin’s house. He told me to go back to Michaela’s, so I went there and I ended up staying, and she called social services again. I didn’t return to the care home.
I expected to go through the pillar-to-post scenario again, as Michaela phoned social services to tell them I was back at her place.
Then, in the local corner shop near Colin’s house, there was a poster on display with the heading ‘WANTED FOR KIDNAPPING’ and a photograph of Colin’s face. I found out from Michaela that Colin had gone into this shop and asked, ‘Who put that up there?’
‘This woman with short dark hair,’ came the reply. That description fitted my mum.
‘Take it down,’ Colin demanded.
She could only have got hold of a photo of Colin from one of two places: the police or his ex-wife. To be honest, I don’t think Colin was bothered that much about it, because he thought, I haven’t really done anything wrong.
It was my mum behind it all. She had gone round Hull putting up posters saying that Colin was wanted for kidnapping and giving the Crimestoppers phone number. My picture was plastered all over the place as well. She was even going around knocking on strangers’ doors saying, ‘Do you know this bloke?’ She wasn’t claming underage sex was going on; she was just wallowing in self-pity, saying, ‘He has kidnapped my little girl.’ Oh, what a shame she never applied as much effort when Huntley assaulted me.
Colin never kidnapped me. I was the one that kept running back to Hull to be near him, and I was now at Michaela’s again, not far from Colin’s. Several times she said, ‘I’m going to call social services.’
There was one point when I pleaded, ‘Please, don’t.’
She asked, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘Because they will just end up picking me up and taking me back.’
I was beginning to understand the consequences of Michaela calling them. To her credit, she told me, ‘Hailey, I am getting wise to it now and if this carries on I will put my foot down,’ but she still continued to call social services and the police and say, ‘Yes, Hailey is here and she is fine.’
By this time, Colin had started a new line of work. He had saved some money from working in the factory, had a phone installed in his house and was now working as a plumber. After a short while, he got a house in a nice area and I moved in with him. We were living together legally now, as I was 16 and Colin had had his bail conditions relaxed so that I could live there.
Before that, Colin had been on bail for supposedly kidnapping me. He was meant to have put me in the back of his car and taped me up. Then the brown stuff hit the fan in a farcical manner, as a direct result of my mum’s poster campaign.
Michaela is married to Colin’s brother, Ken, and they have a daughter called Louise. There is a similarity between Colin and Ken because they are brothers. There is a third brother Peter, and there is a strong resemblance between all three of the brothers. Anyway, one night before I moved in with Colin, I was upstairs at Michaela’s when Louise and her dad got out of the car and skipped into the house.
Vindictively, my mum called the police and said, ‘I have just seen Hailey and Colin running into this Michaela’s house.’
Next thing, knock, knock, knock, ‘Is Hailey here?’ It was the police.
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Where’s Colin?’ they asked.
Colin’s bail conditions at the time were that he should have no contact with me. So what my mum was saying to the police was that he was in breach of these conditions. Although I would like to make it clear that on that particular night I was not with him, and at any other time, whenever there was any contact between us, it was me who approached him, not the other way around.
What brought all this about was a previous occurrence when I was in Cleethorpes. I’d gone to McDonald’s and met up with Colin’s brother, Peter, who was with his kids, and he wanted to know how I was getting on.
As it happens, Mum’s friend Dawn said she was parked outside McDonald’s and that she saw me getting into a car with a man and driving off. She said I got in the car with Colin. In fact, I had got in the car with Peter.
That was when Colin got arrested. At the time he was staying in a bail hostel in York and it was there, incidentally, that the so-called ‘hard men’ who branded him the ‘paedophile from Hull’ attacked him on two separate occasions. Unbeknown to them, the well-spoken, well-groomed man I had come to know had been brought up in the tough back streets of Hull. The son of a hard-living, hard-working and unbreakable fisherman, Colin was well capable of looking after himself. And, for sure, these hard men ended up being wounded far worse in these confrontations than he was.
As a result of being arrested for this further alleged abduction, the next day Colin had to go to York Magistrates’ Court to face the charge that he had abducted me for a second time. He was unfairly made to look very bad.
Colin and his solicitor were there in court, but the witnesses were not, and this little old magistrate sitting there with her glasses on asked, ‘Where are the witnesses?’ She was told, ‘They are busy at work.’
The argument put to the court on behalf of Colin was that, if the witnesses were sitting behind the car in question, how could they identify him from the back of his head alone? The magistrate said, ‘I am not having a kidnap charge put on him just by identifying somebody by the back of the head. It could have been anybody. We will leave it on file for the next court case. Go back to your bail hostel.’
The solicitor said that, because Colin had been arrested while staying at the bail hostel, no other bail hostel in the county would take him. This problem was soon solved when his solicitor told the court that Colin’s family would take him.
‘Whereabouts?’ he was asked.
‘In Hull, he has got his mum’s; he has got his brother’s and sister’s; he has aunts and uncles.’
The magistrate told the solicitor, ‘You pick an address and he can stay there.’
So he did, and all bail restrictions were thrown out. Colin could have his own house again and I was able to live with Colin officially. It was thanks to my mum and Dawn – albeit unwittingly.
Before Colin attended court on the abduction charge, a lot of criticism had been heaped upon him because he appeared in court over a domestic incident with his then wife, Christine. According to Colin, a row between the pair of them flared after she asked Colin to ‘chuck’ her shoe to her. Instead of passing it, he tossed it across the room so she could catch it, but, he told me, it accidentally caught her on the knee. That is how it all started.
Colin’s account was that he said matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, sorry, duck. Are you all right?’ and that Christine replied, ‘Yes, don’t worry about it.’
The resultant graze caused to her knee by the shoe was to set in motion a chain of events that would see Colin’s unblemished record become tarnished. The week after the shoe-throwing accident, Christine’s sister came round to their home and said to Colin, ‘You want to keep your hands to yourself, chucking a shoe at my sister.’
In disbelief, Colin said, ‘What are you on about?’
‘You know, chucking a shoe at my sister,’ she said.
Colin innocently admitted, ‘Yes, I did. She asked me to chuck her a shoe, so I chucked it.’
She replied, ‘Oh! Well, she told me that you got it and you whacked it on her leg.’
Colin ended up going to court because, after he finally split from Christine, he went round to see her one night and took her some shopping. He still took food to her because she had no money.
According to Colin, this time when he called, Christine was in the bath. When she came out she was in her dressing gown and started screaming and shouting. She launched a scathing attack on him, saying, ‘What’s this I’ve heard, you’re going out with a new girl? What’s she like?’
‘What can I say?’ he replied.
‘Well,’ Christine pressed him, ‘what’s she like? What does she look like?’
Colin only fuelled her fire when he began, ‘She’s a pretty…’
Colin said that Christine cut him short when she started hurling things across the dining table. Colin, saying he had left his suitcase in the car, went to go out of the front door and, according to Colin, she smacked him in the face three or four times. Colin told me he resisted any temptation to lash out, but, when she punched him in the mouth and bit his thumb, he had no choice but to defend himself and he slapped her across the face.
Subsequently, I saw bite marks on Colin’s thumb – it looked like a dog had savaged him. It was the first time he’d hit a woman and he admitted that he shouldn’t have done it. ‘I was bang out of order for doing it. But she just kept smacking me and smacking me,’ he said.
Colin went out to his car but, because he’d had a drink while waiting for her to get out of the bath, he wasn’t going to drive the car. He had a clean licence apart from being given penalty points some years earlier for speeding.
As he sat in the car, Colin believed that, even if he did drive off, Christine would phone the police and inform them that he had had a drink. So he took no chances and flung the car keys into some bushes so that he wouldn’t be able to drive away.
The only thing he could do was to sit there in the car outside the house. Then there was a tap, tap, tap on the car window. A policewoman was leaning down, looking in, and when Colin wound the window down she told him, ‘Colin, you are under arrest for smacking Christine.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
On smelling alcohol on Colin’s breath she added, ‘Hang on a minute, you’re also under arrest because you are drunk in charge of a vehicle.’
Well, in order to be drunk in charge of a vehicle, you have to have possession of the keys, which of course Colin didn’t have.
‘I haven’t got the keys,’ he told her.
Miffed, she said, ‘What do you mean, you haven’t got the keys?’
He said the car hadn’t been locked and he didn’t know exactly where the keys were, which was true, of course.
When he finally went to court on these charges, matters were still pending regarding the charges the police lodged against him in respect of abducting me. Here we have a man whose only conviction before all of this was for speeding and now he faced an array of charges that threatened to send his life spiralling out of control.
When Colin appeared in court over the assault against Christine, he stood firm in his plea of not guilty, on the grounds that he did not batter her as she claimed, although he unreservedly admitted slapping her. He admitted this on the basis that they take into consideration what she had done to his face and thumb.
I remember seeing him the day after they had the fight. His mouth was bruised black and blue and his hand still had teeth marks in it.
When we got to court the lawyer said to Colin, ‘Have a look at these pictures.’
After viewing them, Colin said to me in a daze, ‘Honestly, Hailey, she was black and blue. Her whole face was like… her eye out here, but I never did that. I will put my hand on my heart and I will admit that I did slap her across the face…’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘But only after she had punched me in the mouth four times and bitten my fingers.’
Colin’s brother was in court and he said, ‘You have got these other charges relating to Hailey pending. What are you going to do?’
Colin said, ‘Well, I haven’t done that and I am not going to stand there and say I have committed it when I haven’t.’
Christine’s doctor was called and he confirmed to the court, ‘Yes, she came to me.’
Colin wasn’t happy about admitting to such an emotive charge. He was adamant that, sometime between him slapping her and the police being called, something else had happened, but he couldn’t prove it.
She said that Colin had kicked her in the chest and in the ribs. His lawyer had a point when he said, ‘Where are the pictures of her ribs and the pictures of her chest and her back and everything. If she is so black and blue, where are they?’
The reply was: ‘She didn’t want us to take any pictures.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, we don’t know.’
So when the judge asked Colin, ‘How do you plead?’ he reluctantly replied, ‘Guilty.’ The file in front of the judge was marked ‘Not guilty’, so this came as a surprise to the judge and he asked Colin, ‘Have you changed your plea?’
‘Yes I have,’ he said.
Then the prosecution stood up and said, ‘M’lud, please bear in mind before you say that this man can walk free today that back in 1989 he was driving over the speed limit.’
What that had to do with the seriousness of the charge Colin faced was anyone’s guess. But you can bet they didn’t wipe that from the records from 1989, though they sure as hell wiped the allegations against Huntley from 1995 onwards.