Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived (14 page)

A
T THIS STAGE
I
WAS UNAWARE THAT
C
OLIN WAS SEPARATED FROM HIS SECOND WIFE AND THAT HE HAD TWO CHILDREN BY HIS FIRST WIFE, TWO BOYS
.

A couple of days went by before he called me. When I heard his voice, my heart almost missed a beat. ‘Hiya, it's Colin here,' he said. ‘Hope you're OK. Hey, was this a wind-up the other night, you giving me your phone number?'

Without having planned it, I said, ‘To be honest, I was wondering if I could take you out for a drink sometime.'

‘Yes,' he said, then, ‘Are you
sure
this isn't a wind-up?'

‘No,' I reassured him. ‘Look, if you want to take me for a drink sometime, then let me know.'

‘Yeah, all right,' he said.

I still didn't think he believed I was being serious.

Anyway, we ended up having a few drinks and I was really beginning to like him. As we got to know each other better, over drinks and meals, Colin introduced me to his friends and all the local pubs. Then, before long, people I knew myself were seeing us together.

As I began to trust Colin more, what had happened to me in my life just came out. He didn't bat an eyelid, but he did say that he'd suspected all was not well when he saw me moping about the house when he was working for my mum. To be honest, I think it would have been obvious to a lot of people that my life had caved in.

‘Why don't you move out?' Colin suggested.

I still hadn't revealed my age. I couldn't very well say I was still a schoolgirl, so I told him that, as I hadn't got the deposit for a house and I couldn't afford to rent a place, I was just going to have to stay at my mum's house until I could save up some money for a deposit.

It was the summer of 2001 and I was permanently excluded from school on 28 June, having turned 15 that April. Colin was 34. At that stage, we had more of a friendship than anything else. One night, when we'd been seeing each other for a couple of months, we were in the pub and I told him about my mum, about how I didn't get on with her and the love/hate relationship we had.

That same evening, I plucked up the courage and told Colin about that bastard Huntley. Taken aback at my determination to get justice, he said, ‘You wouldn't think you had been through that, to look at you.'

It was ten to six as we strolled towards the car, and I thought, I'll be in for about seven. Not that I had to be in for then. We lingered around talking and wondering whether to go somewhere else for another drink. Then my phone started ringing.

I answered it and Mum's unmistakable voice said, ‘It's only me.'

‘Are you all right?' I asked.

‘Yes,' she said, and then, ‘Whereabouts are you?'

‘I'm in Cleethorpes,' I told her.

At this she went mad and shouted, ‘Get your fucking arse home,
now
!'

‘What's the matter?' I asked defensively.

‘Just get home
now,
' she barked.

As Colin was there, I summoned up my best behaviour and asked her, ‘Look, what is all this about? Just tell me.'

Colin heard both sides of the conversation because I was standing right next to him, so I said to him, ‘I'm not bullshitting, this is what she is like.'

Then Mum started going on about my biological father, David Baxter. Hayden had mentioned to me that he had seen our real dad and, curious, I'd asked what he was like.

‘Why don't you come along and meet him?' he said. I accepted his invitation.

At that time, Hayden wanted to go and live with his father, which is why Mum was on the phone to me now: she was under the impression that I was with David Baxter and that I wanted to live with him too.

She went on, ‘Get back home. I'm going to pack your bags and they'll be in two bin bags out the front, in two minutes. So you better get home now.'

‘It's going to take me ten minutes to get home,' I said.

‘If you are not home in two minutes, your bags are going to be packed,' she threatened.

Feeling abandoned, I tried to call her bluff by saying, ‘In that case, pack my bags then, but I've done nothing wrong. You're shouting on about David Baxter.'

‘You want to live with David Baxter,' she yelled.

‘No I don't,' I said guardedly.

‘Yes you do,' she replied.

‘Well, even if I did, I don't even know him,' I countered.

‘If you ever come back to this house, I will fucking do this and I will fucking do that,' she threatened me.

Colin was standing there listening and the bewilderment on his face told me what he was thinking. Apologetically, I said, ‘I told you what she was like from the start. I don't want to go back there.'

As luck would have it, he was moving to Hull in the next three days because his family were there. ‘Feel
free to come with me if you like,' he offered. ‘Go and get your stuff from the house and give your mum your keys.'

I tried to stifle the alarm that must have been written on my face at the prospect of going home and saying, ‘I'm moving out today, even though I'm only 15.'

I couldn't go back home and give my mum the keys because I didn't have any of my own. And if I were to pack my clothes she would demand to know where I was going.

‘I'm not going back there,' I told Colin. ‘I don't care. She can throw out all my possessions.'

That night we stayed in a hotel and the next day we drove over to Hull, where I met Colin's family. We ended up renting a house in Clyde Street. It was like the Bronx, but we couldn't afford anywhere better.

Colin started working in a fish factory and I started working in a gift shop, pricing gifts. I was being paid
£
30 a day, cash in hand. Colin was on a weekly wage.

After a couple of weeks, we were starting to get into a routine, but during that time my mum had made no efforts to contact me.

Colin would pick me up from the shop after work, and one day when he turned up, quite out of character, he asked me coldly, ‘Is everything all right?'

I gave his steady eyes a searching gaze. I was looking for a telltale sign of what was wrong as I said, ‘Yes.'

‘What's the matter?' he probed. ‘You seem to be a bit
quiet and a bit distant. Was it that meal we had last night? Was it no good?'

Lost in my thoughts about what he could be getting at, I replied touchily, ‘No, no, no, it was fine.'

When Colin's brother came round to our house later that evening, he asked me, ‘How are you, all right?'

‘Yes,' I said.

I knew in that split second that something was going to come out about my age. Then Colin asked me, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?'

‘No,' I said, on my guard now.

‘Are you sure?' he pressed.

‘Yes,' I insisted.

Colin looked at me and asked again, ‘Are you sure you have got nothing that you want to say?'

I brazened it out once more, saying, ‘
No
, nothing whatsoever.'

Pain was etched across his face as he opened a newspaper and then put it down in front of me. The headline read: ‘Bring my daughter home, she is only 15'. Beneath it was a big picture of me when I was 12.

My mum wasn't telling me to come home: she was asking for her daughter to be brought back home… to a home she had told me not to come back to.

She had checked her phone bill and seen that I had been calling Colin from the house. And it was equally clear to her that Colin had parted from his wife before
he had met me. Somehow his wife knew that he was seeing somebody called Hailey. This much my mum had found out.

So this plea for me to be returned home that was plastered across the newspapers had already been put to the police. It turned out that they had advised my mum, ‘Don't go to the press,' but she had gone ahead and done just that.

I started crying and blubbered to Colin, ‘Look, I'm so sorry; I know I've landed you in a load of crap. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it to come out like this.'

‘Why did you lie to me?' Colin croaked, a confused look on his face.

He couldn't understand why I said that I was 19 when I was 15, but all I could say was: ‘All this crap that was going on at home was bad and then I got feelings for you.'

I'd known he felt the same but if I'd said, ‘Oh, by the way I'm only 15,' he would have gone, ‘Ta, ta.' Never in a month of Sundays would he have said, ‘Oh, OK.'

‘That's why I never mentioned it,' I told him.

My going missing as a minor caused a nationwide alert that I had been abducted. And, because it was big news, Colin's solicitor called to find out if I was the missing Hailey and Colin confirmed that I was.

‘Listen, come in and see me,' the solicitor said. We went to his office and he said, ‘What we need to do is this: I will come with you to the police station and you
hand yourselves in and explain what has gone on and we will get things sorted out.'

I felt really bad and I was thinking, Why did I lie about my age? I knew that, if Colin had known I was only 15, he would have gone, ‘Right, nice meeting you, see you later,' but of course he had no idea.

The solicitor told us that there was nothing that could be done that night. Instead, he advised us to go back home and said that we should come back to his office first thing in the morning and he would drive us to the police station in Grimsby.

He had already made the appointment and Colin's sister-in-law had already called the police to confirm, ‘Colin is here with me and Hailey is with him. We are coming in tomorrow morning.'

When we arrived, there were about 50 uniformed officers standing outside the police station. Someone must have been selling tickets!

We ran the gauntlet of hate and managed to squeeze into the building. I walked in first and Colin followed. One of the policemen greeted us sarcastically, ‘Now then, Colin, your time's up. We knew we would catch you one day.'

If only they had deployed half this mob against Huntley, things might have ended differently.

Anyway, Colin stood up for himself and said, ‘Nobody has caught me, mate. I'm handing myself in. I can explain what this is all about.'

Well, the good old social services that had blundered and let me down in the past had spotted the newspaper articles about me and come running. Where were they when I was all but dumped by everyone? So they were in on this one for the easy ride, reuniting a lost soul with her family.

I don't particularly care how social services became involved. Who wants a load of lesbian Marxists chasing after them? I think they were called in by a police officer before our meeting. Anyway, they called my mum at home and after all her chasing about after me and all her crocodile tears she said cheekily to them, ‘Don't bother sending her back here, because she has caused too much trouble.'

I was incensed and thinking, Yesterday you were pleading in the papers, ‘Bring my daughter home, I love my special daughter so much,' and now that I am actually back in Grimsby, now I am here, you don't want me back home.

Anyway, I ended up staying with the landlady of the Coach House, Mandy Addison, first at her mum's house, which she was looking after while her mum was on holiday, and then at the pub. The night we returned to the pub we'd just had a pizza and a bottle of WKD, a Vodka-based drink, when it was bang, bang, bang at the door. Mandy's boyfriend got up to answer it and I was shaking because I was already a bag of nerves.

It was a policeman, and he tested my patience to the
limit when he said, ‘Excuse me, Hailey. Come over here. Sorry, you have to come with me, but you shouldn't even be here. You've run away from home for the second time.'

My ears couldn't believe what that callous woman, my mum, had done. She had lodged another complaint that I was a runaway and she wanted me back at home. Her Jekyll and Hyde character was beginning to piss me off, and the revs were off the clock, as Colin would say.

‘No, I haven't run away!' I protested. ‘I've been staying here for a week. I'm staying here now.'

But the policeman insisted, ‘No, you're not. Your mum wants you home.'

Was I going loopy? I said, ‘Hang on a minute; she didn't want me a week ago. I am not a rag doll that she can pick up when she wants me and put me down when she doesn't.'

My pleas were falling on the deaf ears of the law, as the officer just said, ‘Yes, yes. Now get in that car, you're coming home with me.'

Mandy stuck up for me by saying, ‘Now hang on, I have already spoken to Hailey's mum and she was champion for her to stay.'

To this, the policeman responded bombastically, ‘No, she is not. She has said that Hailey has run away from home again.'

This was ludicrous, and all I can think is that my
mum was jealous that someone else was having the pleasure of my company. She didn't want David Baxter getting me, yet she threatened to chuck me out and said I should go and live with him.

Anyway, this policeman had a really shirty attitude and in the end he got me in his car. My mum had told the police to pick me up from the pub but she had also said they should take me to her brother's house, so I had to direct him to my Uncle Kev's place. Amazingly, she had the police doing her bidding as if they were her private army. I mean, if she had this much power now, what had gone wrong over the Huntley allegation? How come she hadn't been able to get them moving then? I'll tell you why: because she wanted her 15 minutes of fame, that's why.

We arrived at Uncle Kev's house around one in the morning, and I think he was aware I was coming. So there I was on his doorstep with my little rucksack.

At about nine o'clock the next morning, he said to me, ‘Leave your rucksack on, get this helmet on and your coat, and jump on the back of my bike.'