Angel of Death (11 page)

The following Wednesday, Sue and Peter decided they were ready to have Katie at home permanently and she was finally discharged from hospital. Sue said: ‘I felt very confident that day and I knew that the longer we left her at the hospital, the more difficult it would become to take her home.'

She said: ‘We brought Katie home dressed in the pink-and-white baby-gro Bev had bought for her. It was such a lovely, sunny and warm day again that we decided to walk from the hospital, pushing Katie in her buggy. It's only a five-minute walk and it was wonderful.'

It was a relief having Katie home for good, although Sue couldn't bear the thought of going into the nursery where the twins had slept those first few hours on the night Becky died. Peter swapped the rooms round so that Becky's cot was gone and Katie slept in the front bedroom. At least it looked and felt different and there were no awful memories to haunt them.

The next day Allitt, now a growing family friend and a shoulder for Sue to lean on, arrived at the house around lunchtime. Smiling, she picked up Katie to give her a cuddle and Sue was delighted when she offered to feed her. Sue left her sitting on the settee in the lounge with Katie on her lap feeding her with her bottle.

What a good friend she was turning out to be. Allitt was off duty and ended up staying for four or five hours. The two women were soon going on shopping trips together, pushing Katie around Grantham in her buggy.

Sue said: ‘She knew I was still a bit apprehensive about having Katie at home. It was just so reassuring having Bev around. She said to me: “You are bound to feel like that, Sue. Don't worry about it.”'

The next day Katie was snuffling with a cold and wasn't interested in feeding and, taking no chances, the emergency doctor decided she should go back into hospital, just for observation. Katie was admitted to Ward Four where she was placed in a cot in Cubicle Two. She was congested and doctors prescribed simple nose drops and antibiotics to clear up what seemed like a dose of flu.

Sue stayed with her and, by the Monday, after two nights in the hospital, Katie was much better. When doctors insisted, however, that she must stay in for about a week, Sue was reassured that Allitt was on duty and assigned to look after her little goddaughter-to-be. Katie recovered so quickly that, by Wednesday, 29 May, paediatrician Dr Nanayakkara told them they could take her home.

It was a week later before the Phillips saw Beverley Allitt again. Unknown to Sue and Peter, the police investigations had been in full swing on Ward Four for more than a month. Allitt made no mention of the police enquiries, her arrest and suspension from duty, when she popped in for half an hour for a cup of coffee. She blamed her
absence on the fact that she had been working hard.

She returned the following Tuesday, the day Peter kept a long-awaited date with surgeons to have a vasectomy – a decision they had taken even before Becky had died. She wanted to ask if she could take Katie out on a trip to visit a friend.

Sue's mother, who was in the house babysitting, asked her to wait until Sue got home from hospital; Allitt was still at the house when Sue returned. She asked if she could take James as well as Katie to the park. Sue saw nothing wrong with the request.

‘I wasn't worried at all when they went off,' she said. ‘But they were gone for ages and that's when I became anxious. After about two hours I was beginning to panic a bit, wondering if something had gone wrong. I rang Bev's house, about a mile away, but there was no reply. I just sat there and waited.'

Sue wasn't to know that Allitt was doing what she'd always done when looking after children; she had taken them to show her grandmother in the rural village of Corby Glen, eight miles southeast of Grantham, where she had lived until she started work at the hospital. She finally returned with Katie and James, four and a half hours later, by which time Sue was frantic.

‘She could see how upset I had been but she told me she hadn't meant to worry me. She said: “I just thought you could do with the break.”'

The following day, Wednesday, 12 June, Beverley Allitt called in again, arriving at about
4pm. This time she wanted to take James out for another trip.

She said she was going to pick up her friend, Tracy Jobson, who also worked as a nurse at the hospital, and they were driving to Peterborough to visit Tracy's mother. They were planning to stop at a McDonald's on the way. She turned to three-year-old James and told him: ‘It's OK, James, you can come with me.'

The little boy was delighted and rushed to put on his shoes and get himself ready even before Sue had said he could go.

Allitt casually told her for the first time about the police investigation that was under way on the Children's Ward at the hospital. It should have hit Sue like a bombshell. But Allitt announced it so calmly that to begin with, Sue didn't imagine for a minute that it was important.

‘All she told me was that some people were being questioned at the hospital. She didn't seem worried about it and she certainly wasn't nervous. She said the police had been interviewing staff. Then she told me: “I don't know what they are getting at but they are asking a lot of questions about Paul Crampton.”'

Sue knew about Paul Crampton who had nearly died after collapsing on Ward Four. She remembered how his mother, Kath, had been in tears because he had been producing too much insulin in his body.

But even now, with Allitt breaking news of a police investigation, Sue didn't suspect anything untoward.
‘I just thought it was some sort of routine investigation into what had happened. She told me it was all about Paul Crampton. It was at the time when all three of ours were in the hospital – Becky, Katie and James. I knew Paul had been very seriously ill and people had been full of praise for how Bev had helped save him.'

As she stood listening to her friend, Sue was baffled but not unduly worried. It flashed through her mind that perhaps the authorities thought someone had got into the hospital and tampered with Paul.

She could see no reason to stop James going off with Allitt and he was already excited about his impending trip out.

So, at about 4pm, the bubbly, fair-haired chatterbox they always called ‘Jampot' walked through the front door, hand in hand with Allitt. Sue watched as they drove off in Bev's white Ford Fiesta with James strapped in his seat belt at the front alongside her. This time Katie stayed at home.

What Sue didn't know was that Allitt was already effectively suspended from duty at the hospital after being sent home on ‘extended leave'. She had made no mention of her two days at the police station where she'd spent the night locked in a cell. She hadn't said that she'd been singled out by the police as the prime suspect.

Sue went back to her ironing and wondered what it was all about.

At 7.30pm Allitt brought James home. Safe and
sound. They had had a ‘great day', she said. She had picked up Tracy from the hospital and driven them both to Peterborough, to the home of Tracy's mother, Eileen, at Orton Goldhay, just off the A1. It was only a forty-minute drive but they had also kept their promise to the youngster by dropping in at McDonald's en route.

But Allitt looked unusually anxious and worried about something. She asked to have a word with Sue, just the two of them, woman to woman. (Tracy and her mother were outside, waiting in the car.) Sue led the nurse into the kitchen where Sue recalls how Allitt announced: ‘There's something I want to tell you.'

Sue wasn't ready for what she had to say but remembers how Allitt, speaking calmly, started from the beginning, saying: ‘Last Monday morning I was woken up at 7.30 by a hammering on my front door.

‘I want you to hear this from me, Sue, before anyone else gives you any gossip. When I got up, there were all these CID officers and a policewoman there and they said they wanted to talk to me. I asked them if they could wait while I got dressed and they didn't mind, but they wanted to talk to me down at the police station. I went down with them and they asked me a lot of questions and tape-recorded the interview.'

Sue was dumbstruck.

She had noticed that, all that week, Allitt was not at the hospital but she had assumed she was either on leave or off sick.

Allitt went on: ‘They've accused me of trying to murder Paul Crampton.'

Sue listened in amazement as Allitt told her the police had kept her in the cells until Tuesday afternoon.

Sue said: ‘She looked me straight in the eye and said: “Can you believe it? Me? After all the kids I have tried to save.”'

As the the two women talked Sue poured out words of comfort to her frightened friend. Yes, how could they doubt her? she said. After all, she'd seen her save her own daughter Katie with her own eyes.

Allitt went on: ‘They think it's me because I was nursing him. It's because I was there. The police asked me straight outright if I had tried to murder Paul Crampton with insulin. I told them I had not. All they kept on about was Paul Crampton.'

Allitt told Sue that she had been allowed a solicitor. She had repeated so many times that she was innocent that, finally, she had lost her temper with one policeman and told him bluntly: ‘I'm not making something up just to please you.'

Outside, Tracy and her mother still sat waiting in the car, and Allitt declined Sue's offer to invite them inside.

Tracy had been pulled in, too, for questioning by the police team, she said. The detectives had asked Tracy if she had seen Allitt doing anything suspicious with a syringe or drugs.

When she finally got home on Tuesday, the police had gone right through her home, searching
for any possible evidence. Her white Fiesta had been virtually ‘pulled to bits', stripped down by the searching detectives.

Sue listened in disbelief. Allitt threw Sue one challenging question. She pleaded: ‘Sue, how can I prove I didn't do anything to that boy?'

Sue made an instant decision to do everything she could to help her. She said: ‘I felt so sorry for her, really ever so sorry. She said she had told them everything she knew but she was worried they were going to nail her for something she had not done.'

Allitt had first been interviewed at the hospital while she was on duty, along with other nurses, she explained. But then she broke more surprising news, telling Sue that she had been suspended from duty at the hospital and given police bail.

Sue remembers: ‘She was very upset. She looked sad and drawn and worried, although there were no tears. I couldn't really take in what she was saying and, anyway, I was totally convinced that she was innocent. I didn't have a single doubt.

‘The only child that the police had mentioned was Paul – there was nothing about Becky. And, anyway, I had no idea about how many children had died or how many had been taken ill at the hospital. I knew about some of the others but, in my mind, I had just put it down, at worst, as perhaps some kind of virus.'

Sue remembers asking: ‘What could they charge you with?'

Allitt replied: ‘Attempted murder.'

Sue gasped: ‘Oh! Bloody hell!'

She was totally convinced that Allitt was innocent, a victim of some terrible mistake by the police. Sue wanted to help her prove it.

How could they try to pin something on Bev after all she had done to help so many children? How could they even think she could harm Paul Crampton?

Sue first offered Allitt the name of a solicitor whom she knew was good. Then she told her the names of two friends, David Thorpe and Ruth Lindsey, who were private detectives working in Grantham. Perhaps they could help. Allitt was delighted. Yes, she would see anyone who thought they could help her.

Peter, who had been sitting in the lounge while the two women talked in the kitchen, came in to be told briefly what had been said. He immediately added his words of comfort and support. ‘Of course we'll help you,' he told Allitt. ‘The whole idea that you could be involved is bloody ridiculous.'

Sue and Peter were so sure that the police were wrong that they even offered to pay the bill for the private investigators as a token of their gratitude for saving Katie's life.

The following day Peter, always the handyman, put back together the interior of Allitt's car after the attentions of the police as they searched it. He said: ‘It was such a mess inside. They had taken the seat covers off and there were panels hanging off. It took hours to do it but I was happy just to be
helping her.' They also kept their promise to arrange a meeting with the two private detectives.

Sue recalls Allitt finally leaving the house, with the words: Thank you for all you are doing for me. I am just glad someone is trying to help me.'

Beverley Allitt had wanted to be a nurse for as long as most people could remember. She didn't want to be just any nurse. Beverley had wanted, dreamed, longed, to be allowed to nurse children.

She was a chubby girl, plain but not unattractive, with short, cropped blonde hair. She had grown up surrounded by children in the village of Corby Glen, eight miles outside Grantham. Her love of children made her popular as a babysitter and villagers remember how she always liked playing with youngsters and taking them for walks.

The girl they knew had talked of nothing but becoming a nurse from about the age of twelve or thirteen. They had trusted her with children. They had seen her play with their children and take them for walks. They had seen her serving behind the counter of Pauline's village store to earn a few extra pounds when she was still a student at college.

They had seen her laugh, play pool and serve bar meals at the Fighting Cocks at the top of the road where she lived happily with her mother and father, younger brother Darren, and sisters Donna and Alison with whom she had shared a bedroom.

Neighbours were in no doubt that Beverley had been blessed with a normal, perfectly happy childhood. There was no hint in her background of lawlessness, rebellion or resentment. Beverley Allitt did not come from a broken home. She had not suffered the deprivation of being brought up in an inner-city slum.