Cries Unheard (10 page)

When DC Kerr returned to Norma’s house at 7. 05 p. m. that first day after the two girls’ statements had been studied by Mr. Dobson at the West End police station, she amended it to add that she had ‘met’ and ‘played’ with “Mary Flora Bell’ that Wednesday morning until 1.30 p.m.

in their back gardens; that she had picked her up again at 2. 30 p. m. , and that both of them had gone to play for half an hour with “Elaine the daughter of the owner of Davy’s shop fat the corner of their street].” Returning to their respective houses ‘for about 10 minutes’, she said, they joined up again about 3. 15 p. m. and ‘played in the street [Whitehouse Road] until about 5 p. m. ” This was of course a lie:

as I would find out at last during my talks with Mary in 1996, Norma was still at this point keeping faith with a ‘pact’ the two girls had made.

“I then went over to Gillian and Linda Routledge’s house and we sat on their front step making porn-poms. As far as I know Mary Flora Bell just went into her house. I didn’t see her again until 7 p.m. in the back lane behind our house, when she was on her own. I don’t know where she had been.”

The making of the porn-poms which had really happened off and on that afternoon would remain until the end Norma’s security blanket, her proof that she had been in the presence of someone else.

As it had been in her first statement, though, most of the timing was untrue.

On the next day, Friday 2 August, another officer, Detective Sergeant Docherty, saw Mary again about further inconsistencies in her answers.

She had remembered something else now, she told him. On the Wednesday after Brian Howe was killed, she saw a little boy (whom the police called boy “A’) standing by himself in Delaval Road and ‘he was covered with grass and little purply flowers’. She had seen him often playing with Brian and also seen him hit Brian for no reason at all around the face and neck. And, digging a deep hole for herself in her attempt to lie herself and Norma out of trouble, she added: ” I’ve seen [“A” ] play with a pair of scissors like silver-coloured and something wrong with [them] like one leg was either broken or bent. And I saw him trying to cut a cat’s tail off with those scissors. “

“Those scissors Mary Bell mentioned, which we had found lying in the grass near Brian Howe’s body,” Mr. Dobson said, ‘had not been photographed or described in any of the newspapers.

“A”

was eight years old; he was the first child I saw myself, and we spent two days on him. His story, as he told it clearly enough over and over, was confirmed not only by his parents, who one might of course expect to cover up for him, but by a whole lot of other people. “

“A’ had in fact played with Brian Howe in the morning, but had gone on a family outing in the afternoon and not come back to Scotswood until 10 p.m.

“Everything ” A” had said had proved true,” Mr. Dobson continued.

“But Mary Bell had said that she saw ” A” with those scissors. How did she know about those scissors, which could have been used to make the puncture marks on Brian’s body? How could she know enough to describe exactly what they were like? Those two girls, Mary Bell and Norma Bell, had already changed their statements twice. By that time we had pretty well eliminated everybody else. I had not seen them yet but they had remained in a pocket of my mind: it had to be them, or one of them.”

On Sunday 4 August, a third police officer. Detective Constable

Thompson, questioned Norma again at home. He confronted her with having been seen by others with Mary Bell and her dog that Wednesday at times other than those she had stated. At this point Norma broke down and burst into tears. It was clear that she was by now under great pressure from her family. She asked to speak to the officer without her father being present and her father left the room before DC Thompson could stop him (police are not allowed to interview a child except in the presence of another adult). “I was down Delaval Road with Mary and the dog,” she said quickly.

“Mary took me to see Brian …” Constable Thompson stopped her, called her father back in, and said he was taking Norma to the police station. Norma said again she didn’t want her father along and again Mr. Bell agreed but was taken there shortly afterwards in another police car.

When Mr. Dobson saw Norma at 8. 10 that night she was pale and nervous.

“Her eyes darted from one of us to the other and there was this nervous smile that turned to tears at the drop of a hat,” he said.

“I

knew it wasn’t quite the moment of truth, but almost. “

After he had cautioned her, she told him that she had gone down to the ‘blocks’ by which she meant the concrete blocks on the Tin Lizzie with Mary Bell, ‘and I tripped over his head. ” Brian was dead, she said, and claimed that Mary had told her she had ‘squeezed his neck and pushed up his lungs’, and that she had told her, ” Keep your nose dry and don’t tell anybody. ” She then described how little Brian had looked and lain, and that Mary, after showing her a ‘razor’, and where she had ‘cut his belly’, had hidden the razor under a block and told Norma not to tell her dad or she would get into trouble. Asked whether she could show Mr. Dobson where the razor was hidden, she replied yes, and fifteen minutes later, taken to the place on the Tin Lizzie where Brian had been found, she pointed to a concrete block under which the police found a razor blade. When Mr. Dobson then told her to show him the position Brian’s body had been in, Norma lay down on the ground in the exact position Brian had been found.

Less than half an hour later back at the police station Mr. Dobson asked Norma in her father’s presence whether she wanted to make another written statement.

“She’d been given tea and a sandwich,” Mr. Dobson told me.

“She was very tired by then. But there was nothing for it. We had to have it.” Norma had begun to give her statement nervously, but then stopped, looking anxiously at her father. Mr. Dobson had asked her whether she wanted him to go out. She said yes, and he had a policewoman come in to sit with her.

According to this, her third statement, Norma had known nothing of Brian’s death until, walking with Mary, she had come upon his dead body after which, she says, Mary had told her she had killed him. In her second statement she had already established a series of times and names aside from Mary’s which could show her as being anywhere except the Tin Lizzie that afternoon. In this third statement now she admits to a ‘walk’ with Mary and her dog and a stay of ‘ten minutes’ at the blocks before she was back making ‘porn-poms’ at 4 p. m. : precise times and the ‘porn-poms’ would keep reappearing. After that, she says, she ‘didn’t see [Mary] for a long time. ” At quarter to seven, she said now, she joined up with Pat Howe, Brian’s fourteen-year-old sister and Mary, to look for Brian, but she left them, she says, by 7 p.m.” and went back to play with Linda until half-past eight when she went home and stayed in.

Very little in this statement was true except her joining in the search for Brian (though much earlier than she stated) and the making of porn-poms. But now too tired to keep up the logical sequence she had managed so far, she ended up with what James Dobson called ‘a whopper’. She hadn’t told anybody about what she had seen, she said, ‘cause I was frightened and if I had snitched, May could have taken anyone else’s hairn. The last time I saw Brian’, she lied, ‘was about dinner time [noon] when he was playing with Norman [his brother]. I forgot to say when we left Brian, May put some purple flowers on top of the grass that was over Brian. “

At 10. 30 p. m. ” with her father’s agreement, Norma was taken to stay at Fernwood, the county council children’s reception home, where four months later Mary would spend the two weeks of the trial in an attic on the top floor, guarded round the clock by a rota of fourteen policewomen. (” I never knew till long afterwards,” she told me, ‘that my two little sisters and [her brother] P. were there all the time while I was locked in, upstairs.” ) DC Kerr, meanwhile, was once again knocking on the door of number 70.

“Mary came to the door,” he said.

“I asked whether I could come in.

She said, “No.” I asked her why not and she said, “My uncle’s not in.”

I asked her where he was, and when she said at the pub, I told her to get him. Billy Bell was very hostile when they got back and Mary was again continually looking at him. Of course, I believed he was her uncle. I had no reason not to. And I had the feeling that this uncle was only passing through, you know, not living there. I got no further information from them that evening. ” DC Kerr was correct in his impressions: Billy and Betty Bell at this point no longer lived together: she exercised her profession almost entirely in Glasgow and, as Mary quite rightly said, was jaway’ much of the time. Whenever she went. Billy came. If he was away, too, in prison, or exercising his own trade of small-time burglaries and petty crime, his sister Audrey, who lived virtually across the street, either took all the children, or at least the two youngest, leaving Mary and her brother to perambulate between her house and their own.

At 12. 15 a. m. on Monday 5 August, just under two hours after Norma had given her third statement, Mr. Dobson went to Mary’s home with two police constables. The house was in darkness except for a blazing fire in the livingroom and the television, which was. going full blast.

“In a murder inquiry,” Mr. Dobson said, ‘you have to ignore the time of day or night. ” Billy Bell had been watching television. His wife, he said (forgetting the ‘uncle’ fable) when he answered their knock and stood across the door preventing them from coming in, was away. The four children were asleep upstairs.

“I told him I wanted to question Mary at the police station. When he refused to wake her up I told him we were quite prepared to go up and get her but that it would be easier on her if he did.” Billy Bell

* The three Bell children had been taken into care temporarily and would be released to their father after the trial.

then told them to wait outside and went across the street to get his sister. Audrey came quickly, got Mary dressed and went with her in the car to the police station.

“The aunt had talked to her very sensibly in the back of the car, telling her to speak the truth. I took them straight up to my room and got somebody to bring tea and biscuits,” Mr. Dobson said.

“But Mary didn’t seem very bothered. She was freshfaced, chirpy and confident. She was completely alert in spite of being woken up like that.”

For the next three hours, Mr. Dobson said, Mary gave an extraordinary performance. Yes, she said, she knew about Brian being dead, because she had helped look for him when he was missing. Where was she the afternoon of Wednesday 31 July? Playing with Norma. No, she never went down to the railway near the concrete blocks.

“I never go there.”

She’d been there once, a long time ago. And she’d gone down to the car park with Pat Howe and Norma ‘when we were looking for Brian’. Had she seen Brian that day?

“Yes, about half-past twelve. He was playing with his brother in Whitehouse Road.”

Mr. Dobson said he had reason to believe that she had gone to the concrete blocks about 3. 45 p. m. that day with Norma and seen Brian Howe there.

“I never,” she said. She’d gone to the park with her dog, by herself. Was she sure she had been by herself? She gave in a little:

“No, I remember, I was with Norma.” They’d come back at 4. 30.

Forensic tests had turned up grey fibres on Brian’s clothes and brown ones on his shoes.

“What were you wearing that day?” Mr. Dobson asked.

Her black dress, the one she was wearing now, she said, and her white blouse. Another of the officers present, Detective Inspector Laggan, said he had reason to believe she had been wearing her grey dress.

“No, I wasn’t. I haven’t worn it for weeks.” And no, she never played with Brian: “He’s only little.”

“I have reason to believe that when you were near the blocks with Norma a man shouted at some children and you both ran away from where Brian was lying in the grass. This man will probably know you,” DI Laggan said.

“He would have to have good eyesight,” she replied.

“Why would he need good eyesight?” Mr. Dobson asked quickly,

and she caught hold of herself at once: “Because he was…” she paused for a few seconds,”… clever to see me when I wasn’t there.”

She got up.

“I’m going home.”

Mr. Dobson said she couldn’t go home yet.

“Then I’ll phone for some solicitors,” she said.

“They’ll get me out. This is being brainwashed.”

“I have reason to believe,” Mr. Dobson continued, ‘that when you were in the blocks with Norma, you showed her something which you said you had done something to Brian with. Then you hid it. “

“I never,” she said.

“Norma showed me where this thing was. I now have it,” Mr. Dobson said.

“What was it?” Mary said.

“I’ll kill her.”

Mr. Dobson asked her if she wanted to make a written statement saying where she was that day.

“I’m making no statements,” Mary answered.

“I

have made lots of statements. It’s always me you come for. Norma’s a liar. She always tries to get me into trouble. “

All this had gone very slowly, Mr. Dobson told me. She had frequently sat silent for long moments and questions had to be repeated to her.

“Or else she fidgeted, jumped up saying she was going, she wasn’t staying there. At one stage I received a telephone call and she said, ” Is this place bugged? ” She appeared to see herself in a sort of cliche scenario of a cops and robbers film: nothing surprised her and she admitted nothing. I had her there for three hours and she just stuck to her story: she didn’t know a thing.

“Of course, it could have been true. I was not at all sure it wasn’t.

Certainly these two girls had been involved, had been there. But who did what? I had no idea. At that time we had not yet made the connection with Martin Brown and frankly, even when we did, we weren’t that much wiser. “

At 3. 30 a. m. they sent Mary back home.

“It was extremely worrying,” Mr. Dobson said.