Cries Unheard (40 page)

I couldn’t see myself with normal people. I felt I could no longer relate to people who had ordinary lives like Mr.

P.

“s daughter at Red Bank with whom I’d made friends. I remember thinking what I would I say to her now, even if she asked me a little thing like doing some dress-making with her, or go out shopping, or have lunch in a restaurant… What would I deft.

“It was after that that I was given the first medication, Hemeneverin, a knock-out drug; they give it to alcoholics, drug addicts. I knew it was just a question of time before I ran off. I knew what the publicity, the repercussions would be if I did, so I asked for this drug I wanted to be blitzed. I told the MO, ” I’m a lifer, I’ve been transferred, I hate it, and I’ll run away. ” So he said, ” You’ll have a pint of milk a day and I’ll give you something that will help you sleep and calm you down. ” I took it and it knocked me out. I walked away and became ravenously hungry and then I remember I was sitting at the typewriter and listening to music when I should have been listening to somebody’s voice, and there were Jerry and Trudi walking me around. As soon as I sat down again I went to sleep. I took it,” she said vaguely, “I think for a couple of days.”

I would find the same vagueness when I tried to talk to her about drugs twenty years later. I have no doubt whatever that she was given considerably more drugs in prison than she now wants to admit; no doubt, either, that this kind of conditioning of prisoners to strong painkillers or tranquillizers is extremely hard to break free from after release.

It was three months after she arrived at Moor Court, in September 1977, that Mary did what she had told the governor on her arrival she would do.

“It wasn’t very difficult,” she said.

“We just jumped over a fence and headed off over the fields.” A few days before, she had started talking to a girl she hadn’t known before.

“Her name was Annette and she was just a short-timer you know, a young girl who had been silly and now wanted to go home. She said she was fed up and I said I hated it and was going to run off. And she said, ” Don’t be silly, you don’t have very long to go. ” But I said I had to get out, and she said, ” OK then, I’ll go with you. “

Mary said that at the time she probably saw herself as a great organizer of escapes: she went around to a few friends and asked whether she could have this or that, a pair of jeans here, some shoes with a six-inch platform there, “Just so I wouldn’t be seen in my things ” outside”. And I told them as far as they were concerned I stole them. They all told me not to be stupid but I was beyond all that. It would have taken an earthquake to stop me.”

They planned the escape for Sunday when visiting hours started at 1. 30 p. m. with lots of people around walking in the grounds and the next head count was not until 6 p. m.

“We got to a road very soon,” Mary said.

“I had like an Afro hairstyle with twigs in my hair. We got a first lift and this fellow gave me a map, and of course I knew nothing about reading maps and was reading it upside down, and he turned around and said, ” I think I’ll drop you ladies off at the first junction. ” I think he was local and knew what was what.”

The next driver who stopped and asked where they wanted to go said he wasn’t going there. It was finally three young men who picked them up.

“The police never knew there had been three,” Mary still whispered when she said it.

“The third one must have suspected something because he told the others to stop, he was out of there. I said OK and never mentioned him when I was later questioned and neither did Annette. The other two, Clive and Keith, said they were going to Blackpool to the fair.”

The girls had noticed that the boys had a lot of tattoos and the conversation got around to prison. The girls finally admitted they were on the run and Mary told them she was doing a life sentence. A little later she told them who she was.

“Clive said, ” Christ, I’ve read a book about you,” and my heart sank, and I said, ” So what are you going to do? ” But he said, ” Nothing,” and Annette nudged me and said they’d want something but I didn’t care we were going to the fair. Annette whispered again that they wouldn’t pay for us for nothing, they’d expect something in return. But I was hyper-high, euphoric, and later when I was on the big dipper and looked down and saw the fair spread out below me and the sea beyond I thought, ” I don’t care. If I’m lifted now, at least I will have had this. “

By then they’d had a couple of drinks.

“Except for Babycham it was the first alcohol I’d ever had and I was drunk as a lord right away. I don’t know how I was standing up. We went on to a nightclub till very late and I was the only person dancing, still with the twigs in my hair.”

Were you attracted to Clive? I asked her.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

“The guys took us to a B&B on the se afront They were in one room, Annette and I in the other. That I was drunk is not an excuse, it’s a fact. Listen, I’m not a puritan or a prude. But would I give myself away like that? Sex was the last thing on my mind, that is, if I could have had anything on my mind.

Sex to me . well, you know what sex was to me: in Styal the people I was closest to I didn’t have sex with. All I remember is I was in bed and then there was Clive in the bed and I got up and there was blood all over the sheets. I didn’t feel anything and I hadn’t felt anything, so if that was it, it wasn’t much. I was absolutely paralytic. “

But you hadn’t said no?

She laughed.

“It was probably over before I could say no. People may say it’s rubbish, that it’s just convenient for me to say now I can’t remember. But, no. I can’t remember. The second night we were at his mum’s in Derby by then and she was nice [later, to protect Clive’s mother, Mary told police she had never met her] he had a go and I told him to get off and he did.”

Annette had left them by then, and in a coffee bar at breakfast the next morning Mary saw that her escape was all over the front pages.

“They’d bought me a big sort of sun-hat the day before and I pulled it down over my face and then the boys went and bought me some other clothes and some hair dye and they took me to the house of a friend of Clive’s and I dyed my hair ginger in her bathroom. Clive went out. He said he had to see somebody. Later I found out he’d gone to see this social worker he knew to ask her what he should do.”

(I had been asked by the Sunday Times to look into Mary’s escape and met thirty-one-year-old Clive soon afterwards. I also met the social worker whose advice he had sought. She knew him well and spoke kindly of him. There is no doubt that, eventually, with the offers of ridiculous sums of money from the tabloids, he succumbed to the temptation and took it, and thereby as Mary no doubt felt, betrayed her-sold her just as her mother had been selling her for years. But my impression was that he was a rather vulnerable young man who had been making a real effort to ‘go straight’ when he bumped into Mary and she had touched some nerve in him of compassion? of love? I don’t know. Certainly the relationship was inappropriate at the time or perhaps at any time. Although Mary, oddly ashamed of what happened in those three days, or with whom it happened, now claims the alleged letters from her he sold to the papers were inventions, some of the phrases, and indeed sentiments attributed to her, sound very familiar to me. ) “The woman was nice,” Mary said about Clive’s friend.

“She gave me coffee, we chatted and I played with her kid who had a monkey that could bend its arms. When Clive came back he said there was a barge I could stay on, and I said no, that I was going to London and he said OK, but we could go for a drive first and they took me to another cafe where there were boats.

“We were there in the car and I saw a policeman ride past on his motor-bike and he turned his head, probably to look at the car and, I don’t know, something clicked and I said, ” Right, I’m going now,” and Clive said, ” Right, I’ll give you a lift to the station but we have to buy something on the way,” and then it was like Hill Street Blues and Keith murmured to me, ” He’s grassed you up,” and a policeman came over and said to wind the window down on my side, and he said, ” Mary. “

“I said, ” I don’t know what. ” and before I could finish the sentence he took my sunglasses off and put handcuffs on me. I said, ” I don’t know what you are talking about, I’m only seventeen. ” And he said, ” All right, we’ll go to the station. “

“And there they found identifying marks on me: you know. It was all on record. And I said, ” Oh, God, what’s going to happen to me now? ” And the police officer said that they’d been told, and it was announced on the news too, that I wasn’t dangerous and that really they hadn’t searched the country for me, but just put out their usual absconder notice and that they only found me because I was turned in. Even so I just hoped and prayed that no crimes of any description had been committed which could be applied to me.”

“We were working in Wiltshire then,” said Carole G. ” ‘and on Sunday night we heard on the six o’clock news that Mary Bell had escaped.”

“We were just horrified,” Ben said.

“We couldn’t believe it,” Carole went on.

“We didn’t even know she’d been moved. We’d had a call, some weeks or months before, down in Dorset where we were then, to ask whether we would be prepared to have Mary to stay, to live; we didn’t quite understand what they meant: on visits, or when she was released, or what? But our first reaction was that we just couldn’t, you know. We were working, doing research, living on site fin the grounds of a school].

“But then Ben and I kept asking ourselves whether we couldn’t somehow manage after all. So actually we wanted to ring up and talk and find out more. But of course you can’t just ring up and get whoever you want. And then in the middle of thinking about that, this happened, and in the early evening we had a call from the police up north to say May had been seen catching a lift south and they had found our letters to her with our address and they wanted to tell us she might be heading our way. Well, we listened to all the newscasts and finally went to bed. We actually had a new dog, an Alsatian, and he suddenly started to bark.”

Ben said, “Carole was still pulling on her dressing-gown when I opened the door and these cops barged in and got a hold of her and we asked what on earth they thought they were doing and it turned out they thought Carole was May. And when they realized she wasn’t, they started searching the place. When they saw there wasn’t anything they were OK; they apologized and explained.”

“The police in Derby were quite nice, really,” Mary said.

“I told them that I had intended to go to London and get a job and that after a while, two months or so, I would have rung the Home Office or whoever and said, ” Here I am. I just wanted to prove to you that I could do it. “

Was that true? I asked. Did you really think it out like that?

She laughed.

“Well, not really. I just wanted to party, I think you know, be normal. But then, sitting in the police cells, with the press, so I was told, surrounding the building, I suddenly felt very old and very tired. Before the night was over I’d be in another cell in some prison or other and there wouldn’t be any smiling, understanding policemen, only the furious system I had kicked in the face. And then two screws from Moor Court arrived and told me that now I’d torn it. That it would be years before I’d be out of a high-security wing.

“You silly girl,” one of them said, quite sadly I thought, and asked what the hell I had been up to. And when, I don’t know why, I told her, she said, “Christ, I hope you’re not pregnant.”

It made me sick to my stomach. I’d never thought of that. And then they told me that I was going to Risley, Grisly Risley as it’s known, the most appalling notorious remand centre in England. Never did I think I’d end up there. “

It was while working on the Sunday Times article after Mary’s escape that I spoke to a young woman I will call her Joan who had committed a minor offence and was a short-term prisoner at Moor Court when Mary had arrived. Joan was twenty when we met, a pretty girl with a pleasant manner who brought along her one-year old baby. She had only recently been discharged, but she had not been unhappy during her few months at Moor Court.

“It was a holiday camp,” she said.

“Not bad at all. The only thing that’s bad, really bad, is if you have a baby like I had and you were separated from it. That was horrible.”

Did she feel prison had taught her a lesson? I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said fervently.

“Never again.”

Had the prisoners been told that Mary would be arriving? I asked her.

“Yes, they had,” she said.

Did you know who she was?

Joan laughed.

“No, not before she came. I was only nineteen [two years younger than Mary at the time].”

But did the other prisoners talk about Mary, about what she had done?

I asked.

“Oh, yes, they talked a lot.” And there was great excitement, she said, at the prospect of Mary’s arrival.

Did you meet her soon after she arrived?

“Yes, right away. She was intelligent, a very intelligent girl. She used to go to the library every week and get out four or five books.”

But Joan hadn’t liked Mary.

“She was different. The staff treated her like somebody different.” She had talked a lot about the kid she killed, Joan said, “But she said she’d killed only one of them, not two as was said. And that he was eight years old, just two years younger than she was at the time, and that she’d been playing with him in a playground and she’d pushed him down a bank or something…” Joan said she’d kept away from Mary because she didn’t want to hear about this. It frightened her.

Did Mary have friends? I asked her.

“She was always saying she was so alone, but she wouldn’t have had to be. There were nice girls there one could make friends with,” and then she added, with sudden wisdom: “I think she wanted to be alone.”

“She was always taking pills,” Joan said then. There was no psychiatrist at Moor Court, she said, only a doctor once a week and Mary saw him often.