Angel of Death

by John Askill

  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.’

  9. Beverley — the Angel

  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.

  The locals had seen her walking with her family to the village church of St John the Evangelist where they remembered her taking her confirmation vows when she was fourteen. They had seen her fall in love with village boy Steve Biggs, a strapping 6ft 2ins roadworker who was to become her fiancé.

  Corby Glen lies in the valley of the River Glen, set in some of the finest sheep-farming country in Lincolnshire. Around 450 men, women and children live in this unspoiled corner of England. It’s a place where everyone knows everyone else, and people stick together in times of trouble. There’s the tiny junior school where Beverley had been a pupil until she was eleven, a post office, Pauline’s store as well as a Co-op supermarket, a large village square which has stood unchanged for centuries, a church dating back to 1319 and three pubs, the Glaziers Arms, the Woodhouse Arms and the Fighting Cocks.

  The council’s travelling library van stops in the village square every Monday, and the mobile fish and chip shop parks there on a Tuesday night. On the hill above the village stands the comprehensive school where Beverley Allitt first spoke of being a nurse.

  Jobs no longer abound on the local farms where only a handful of men can count on earning a living from the land. Beverley Allitt’s father, Richard, worked for the Hay Wine Co. which has its warehouse round the corner from the village square. Otherwise, most of the villagers commute to and from local towns.

  Locals still boast there’s a community spirit in Corby Glen that’s alive and kicking. That sense of belonging is evident every October when farmers gather from all over the country for the annual village sheep fair and auction. The whole village turns out to see the spectacle. There’s a sheep-fair dance, a fun-fair for the children, military bands, clay-pigeon shooting, tug-o-war competitions, art and craft displays, pony rides and sheep by the thousand.

  The village celebrated the 750th sheep fair on 10 October 1988 and, to mark the event, the entire population gathered in the village square to be photographed for posterity. It was a unique historical occasion and every single one of the villagers, all 446 of them, were there. Beverley Allitt stood beside her fiancé, Steve Biggs, to the right of the picture, with Steve sporting the moustache she had insisted he grew.

  The framed photograph still hangs in the entrance of the Woodhouse Arms. A separate photograph was taken of forty-six people who had lived in the village for at least fifty years. Among them was Beverley’s grandmother.

  Beverley Allitt was a popular figure in Corby Glen where her parents were respected by all; there had never been a hint of scandal in the family.

  Her father’s boss at the Hay Wine Co., Jeremy Marshall-Roberts, recalled: ‘Beverley used to babysit for us when she was younger. She always had this affinity with children. She loved them, they liked her.’

  Round the corner from the Allitts’s tidy, red-brick semi, with its blue, glass-panelled front door, net curtains upstairs and down, and neat garden on three sides, lies Pauline’s village store where Beverley had helped out at weekends when she was a teenager. Pauline recalled: ‘Everyone always knew that Beverley wanted to go into nursing. She was always a popular girl. She’d worked here at the shop and knew a lot of people.’

  Her grandmother, Dorothy Burrows, got used to the sight of Beverley arriving at her home in Bourne, Lincolnshire, with children, toddlers, and even babies, from the village of Corby Glen. On Sundays when Beverley’s parents, Richard and Lillian, visited Grandma Burrows, Beverley would often take along a neighbour’s child.

  Dorothy had seen many of the children grow up. Some of them had even continued to visit with Richard and Lillian when, to her grandmother’s delight, Beverley finally realised her ambition to start work at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. There had been months of training, studies and exams to pass, duty on the geriatric ward, then, at last, the chance to fulfil her dreams and start on the Children’s Ward.

  Dorothy knew how much Beverley loved the job, treasured every moment, revelled in the contact with infants and their parents. It had been more than a job to Beverley, it had been a way of life.

  Her grandmother sighed as she glanced at a photograph of Beverley, taken when she was a baby, which still hangs proudly on her front-room wall. ‘You see, Beverley always had this way with children. She used to come with her mum and dad every Sunday afternoon without fail. She would bring children with her, they were neighbours’ and friends’ children from Corby Glen. Some were only babies, two or three months old. Sometimes she would bring two along, she’d take them for a walk, play with them, feed them at tea-time and even bath them sometimes. One little boy she used to get ready for bed before they went home. She always had this wonderful way with them.’

  She went on: ‘People in Corby Glen trusted Beverley with their children and some of the youngsters still go to Richard and Lillian’s even now. If she’d got a bad name, then nobody would have let her have their kids. But they knew they could rely on her. I’ve heard people say she was the nicest girl in Corby Glen.’

  Rachel Smith was Beverley’s closest childhood friend. They grew up in the same street. Rachel lived with her mother and father at 16 Barleycroft, a smart terraced house just round the corner from the Fighting Cocks. Beverley lived across the cul-de-sac with her family at number 24. The two girls started on the same day at the village primary school.

  Rachel noticed how Beverley took to mothering the local children even when she was only little herself. Rachel’s first memory is of Beverley pushing her baby brother, Darren, in his pram when her friend was no older than six or seven. Rachel got used to seeing Beverley playing with younger children from around the village.

  ‘She used to mother the little kids. You got used to seeing Beverley playing with the toddlers, pushing their prams or walking them up and down the road. We were in the same class at the primary school. Even then Beverley was on the chubby side, but she was always one of the brightest kids. She had plenty of ability so it was a bit of a surprise when she failed the test to go to the Girls’ High School in Grantham. Mrs Thatcher was a pupil there once and, like me, I suppose Beverley was disappointed at missing out. She only failed by four points.’

  The two girls found themselves drawn together from the day they started at Charles Read, the secondary-modern school on the hill above the village. ‘I remember the night we went up to school with our parents. Beverley’s mum and dad are smashing people. They put the girls from the primary school in one form, and the boys in another, so the two of us stayed together. From the beginning we got on fine.’

  Rachel always knew that Beverley was going to be a nurse. When their class did a project on child care, and was told to monitor the progress of a toddler week by week, Beverley was in her element.

  ‘She used to love home economics and child care was a part of that. I chose to spend time with the people at the Fighting Cocks who’d got a little baby. Bev picked the Warburtons who’d got a two-year-old son. It involved going to see the kids a couple of times every week, playing with them, taking them out for walks, babysitting for them, everything on a one-to-one basis. Bev was fourteen then; I think it was the first time I heard her talk seriously about being a nurse. It wasn’t a surprise. I mean, it was obvious then that it would suit her although she never liked the sight of blood and I used to tease her about that.’

  Beverley joined the Girl Guides and, in the summer, she would pack a picnic and walk for miles through the fields and woods with fellow guides Rachel and Dawn Greetham. Once the three girls spent the whole day trekking from one village to another, visiting seven neighbouring parish churches in all.

  There wasn’t much night life for young girls in Corby Glen but, once a month on a Friday night, the village came alive with a disco in the village hall near the church. The three pals would save up their pocket money, spend 50p on a ticket, buy cans of coke and a few bags of crisps, and let their hair down dancing to Bananarama and Duran Duran.

  ‘We were fourteen or fifteen at the time and it was the highlight of our s
ocial calendar,’ recalls Dawn. ‘It would go on until midnight, but the three of us would normally leave around 11pm. We didn’t have boyfriends, but we’d dance, and the boys would just stand around and watch. Eventually, after the vicar complained about the noise, they stopped having the discos altogether.’

  Beverley and her friends weren’t the kind to get into trouble. The nearest she, Rachel and Dawn ever got to breaking the law was pinching the odd apple when the orchards were full in mid summer. Dawn remembers clambering over garden walls and scaling apple trees in search of fresh fruit. ‘We’d do a bit of scrumping, the three of us, borrowing the odd apple here and there. On mischievous nights we used to have a bit of fun tapping on windows in the village, then running off, but we were all just ordinary kids. We never misbehaved much. If we went out in the village we’d always be home on time.’

  At school, Beverley hated sports lessons and managed to escape the cross-country runs and the hockey in the winter. Rachel said: ‘She used to get out of it as much as she could. Bev was OK doing indoor sport but, if she had to do the cross-country running with the rest of us, she was always one of the last to finish. They had us going round the school field ten times, it was awful, and with Bev being a bit on the heavy side she hated it more than most of us.’

  She became conscious of her weight. All her friends were slim and she was the biggest of the bunch, a good two stones too heavy, but she never bothered to cut down on her eating. She wore baggy clothes, jeans and jumpers away from school, and nobody ever saw her wearing a short skirt.

  Rachel recalls how her friend lived a ‘charmed life’ at school. If she was messing about then it was always someone else the teacher caught. She would be the one with the idea for a prank or a bit of fun, but it was always someone else who did it.

  Beverley never had a boyfriend while she was at school though she and Rachel did take on the job of scoring for the boys’ basketball team.