Authors: Gitta Sereny
However, she must have thought it was safe to go back at dinnertime because, according to both her own and Norma Bell’s story to the police, after her dinner Betty had sent her once more to the shop, this time for dog meat and pease pudding. But then her memories of that month and that day, and about everything involving what she did to Martin Brown, are broken up and confused not, I think, because she was lying, on this or any of the other occasions when she tried to talk to me about what she had done, but because the trauma was unexplored and unresolved.
“I didn’t even remember until you told me that it happened the day before my birthday,” she said in a small voice.
In the intervening years she has presented several versions of Martin Brown’s death. In two of them, at Red Bank and at Styal, aged fourteen and eighteen, she described it as an accident. In one, to Pat Royston, in 1983, she described it as an act committed together with Norma (who was not present). In 1985, in the draft for a book she wrote at the urging of her ex-husband, she said she did it quite simply ‘in anger’.
Eleven years later, with terrible difficulty, she would give me four different versions, the last of which I have decided is probably as close to the truth as her memory could manage. I have quoted from some of these in previous chapters but must now present them in context.
Each of the following accounts was interspersed with other memories of Norma; of seeing the coffin of a baby in Westmoreland Road; of crying her eyes out reading her mother’s book; of Betty’s poem to her father, “In Memoriam” - “Can you believe it,” Mary said again, in the same disgusted tone as before, ‘a poem like that to your father? “
In the first account she admitted immediately that she was on her own.
She had gone to the derelict house in St. Margaret’s Road where she found Martin Brown, whom she knew, playing in the yard. He had followed her inside, where Mary had climbed ‘like a monkey’ along ‘the beams above a room without a floor’, and told him not to follow her.
“It is ironic,” she said.
“I told him to be careful, but he came anyway, so I got hold of his hand and we both fell.”
The second version was a fuller account and by this time she was sobbing.
“Martin was already in the yard, but I thought of, you know, play dead”
A game? I asked.
“No, I didn’t think it was a game. I just thought: ” I’m not really hurting you. I’ll lie down with you. ” And I did. I didn’t drag him.
There was no shouting and screaming, everyone would have heard it. I said, “I’m not going to hurt you, not really.” I said, “We will go to heaven…” I told him to put his hands on my throat and I put my hands on his and . we fell through the beams. I don’t know whether he landed on me or I on him . There was junk on the floor, the sort of thing you find in derelict houses . I had been picked up by my throat lots of times, by my mother, by some of the clients. When my mother used to pull my head back, with the throat stretched, she used to say, “It won’t hurt …” and when I’d lose consciousness and then wake up I’d hear her or them say, “It’ll be all right…”
Have you always associated what happened to you with what you did to Martin on that day?
“Not until much later … a few years … a few months ago,” she said.
So why didn’t you say this, to Pat, for example, or later on to me?
“I didn’t ever want to say it. Not today either … It sounds too much too much like …”
I waited. She couldn’t, wouldn’t say the word.
‘. Nothing can justify what I did,” she finally said.
“Nothing.”
In the third description, which was almost identical to the second, she quoted her partner, Jim, asking her how she had known how to strangle someone, and her reply that she hadn’t really known. Years ago she allegedly told Norma she had seen it in a Bond film.
“But I knew he was unconscious,” she said.
“I recognized that state of not moving, not wanting to move. So I lay down next to him and covered myself with bricks.”
Of all the fantasies or associations I had heard from her, this was one of the strangest. Very early on, first in her descriptions of her mother’s sexual abuse of her, and then of the killings of the two children, I had asked her how much she had read about sexual child abuse, or about the murder of children. And she had assured me she had read almost nothing and ‘never read the papers’. I knew very soon this was not true. In Styal a number of women had talked to her about Myra Hindley, including the former nun, Tricia, who had been an intimate friend of Hindley’s, and all of them will have spoken about the terrible child murders Brady and Hindley committed. I knew, too, that Pat Royston, once she had realized that Betty Bell had sexually abused Mary, had lent her books on child abuse, though Pat was sure that none of them contained descriptions such as those Mary had given both of us. Like me she thought Mary’s memories of her own child abuse were too detailed, too specific and indeed too strange, to allow any doubt.
Nonetheless, here she had not told the truth about two things, and it was something I had to discuss with her.
I had realized from the start that her stories of Martin’s death, those she told to others and the early versions she told to me, had been either wholly or partly invented. This was very clearly not a matter of exaggerating or fantasizing but of an incapacity to face the truth. This description of ‘covering’ herself with bricks not true either appeared to me to be something more. It could have been, despite her statement that she never read the papers, that it had been added to the confused images in her mind by the reports that the two boys who had killed James Bulger in 1993 had covered his body with bricks, but I suspected there were other and possibly significant meanings to this association which I was not equipped to interpret.
When I asked her again, she still said she’d resisted reading anything about the Bulger killing.
“I stayed, it seemed for hours,” she continued.
“So long, I don’t know, I might have fallen asleep, but still no one came … I don’t remember any voices.”
Do you remember coming back to yourself?
“No. No. I only remember being on the outside [sic. It wasn’t long before there was a lot of commotion. I remember thinking, ” If I’d stayed a little longer, they would have found me . and Martin, and I would have come alive . and would have been taken away, and everyone would have understood. “
But you knew you weren’t really dead. Did you know Martin was dead?
“Not dead, not really dead; just unconscious, unconscious like I had been unconscious … I didn’t understand the concept of death or ever I think to me it was, ” You’ll come round in time for tea. “
It is extremely difficult to describe the extent of her distress during the ten to twelve days in the early part of our talks when she spoke first about the abuse she suffered, and then about the killing of the two little boys. For the first week of it, when she was staying with us in London, I was sure almost every evening that she could not possibly go on with it the next morning. During the second week, when she lived at home, and my husband and I stayed nearby, I doubted every day that she would turn up, because I didn’t think she could put herself through any more of it. Although I knew that much of what she said was fantasy and evasion, I had still carefully limited my expressions of doubt, and formulated my questions as un aggressively as I could. However, about five months later, as we were nearing the end of our talks, facing her with the reality of Martin’s killing had become inevitable.
I told her that I thought that there had been some truth in everything she had said to me about it, but that the evidence produced at the trial showed that most of what she said could not have happened. You cannot bear to remember it as it really was, I told her. But you must try. You must make another, final effort,
to tell it honestly. In the final analysis, I told her, only the truth would serve the purpose of this book: which was, on the one hand, to tell her story as completely as it could be told, but also to use what had happened to her, and the reactions of others, as an example and a warning.
“I don’t know how to do it,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can.”
I had known this, of course, for months, and in trying to get Mary to face up to her most difficult memory and tell the truth, had discussed with the few people who knew about the book whether or not I should continue trying, among them two psychiatrist friends, Dr. Virginia Wilking, in America, and Professor Clan Bar-On in Israel. Dr. Wilking, who has worked for many years in Harlem, and with children as severely traumatized as Mary, bluntly advised me to give up on the effort altogether: she was concerned over the unrelenting intensity of these sessions, which would normally, under therapeutic treatment conditions, have probably stretched over a period of years. Professor Bar-On did not agree.
“The main reason [to continue],” he said, ‘is because she urgently needs to say it. “
And so, a few weeks away from Christmas, I told Mary I was going to ask her one more time about the day she killed Martin Brown and that she must concentrate as never before. I had turned off the telephone, the window was closed, and the curtains were half-drawn not to make the atmosphere overly dramatic, but to underline to Mary, who finds concentrating so difficult, the need to search back in her memory about this day, and relate what had happened as far as it was possible in a sequence of events.
She sat with her eyes closed and her hands clasped in her lap, and again, everything came out very slowly, with long pauses between the words, and crying, and once again, as the phrases jerked out, she slipped into the present tense.
As she had said before, she was in the yard of the derelict house.
“Martin is there,” she said.
“I climb in to look around the ground floor, and he follows me.”
She paused. Go on, I said.
“I says, ” Go home. ” He won’t … He won’t … I take his hand and pull him after me up them stairs … broken stairs … He is crying.
“I don’t want to,” he says, “I want to go down … down … down.” He stops on a half-broken step which wiggles. ” Then.
“Stop crying—’ she said, quite sharply, and I interrupted her. Mary, I said, this is not happening now, you are only seeing it in your mind. She stopped for a long moment and I thought perhaps that was all she would say. But then, keeping her eyes closed, she nodded twice, and then spoke again, this time in the past tense.
“He wouldn’t stop crying …” she said. Then stopped again.
“When we got to the top … his crying had become hiccups … He had snot on his nose.
“I want to go down,” he said. I don’t know why I took him up,” she said.
“I said, ” It’s all right, I’ll take you down . But I can’t carry him I knew I couldn’t get him down those broken stairs. There was a hole in what had been the upstairs floor, the ceiling of the room below, a small hole but big enough. I said to him, “See that hole?” He stopped crying then.
“I’ll let you down through that hole; hold on to my hand, I won’t drop you.” And I did. I lay down on my stomach, held one of his hands and let him down through that hole as far as I could stretch my arm and then he dropped to the floor. But it wasn’t far. He fell but he didn’t hurt himself. And I run down the stairs. “
Her concentration broke.
“He could have run from me then,” she said in a much louder voice, for the first time sounding defensive.
“There was an opening where there had been a window, too; he could have shouted called, but he didn’t, he didn’t. He wasn’t frightened of me.”
What happened then? I said. Close your eyes again.
She began again, the strain showing in her face.
“He is in the corner, near the window, standing up with his back against the wall. I don’t know how he got there.”
Is he crying?
“No, no. I’m kneeling in front of him. I think I’m kneeling on a brick. I say…” She began to cry. “Put your hands around my throat,” and he does and . I put my hands around his throat [her hands are lying open in her lap] and I press, I press, I press . “
She had leaned forward until she was bent double, her face down on her knees, her body trembling.
Do you know why you did it, Mary? I asked her. Were you angry? Can you try to tell me what you felt when you pressed Martin’s throat?
“Angry?” Her voice was muffled, talking into her lap.
“I’m not angry.
It isn’t a feeling . it is a void that comes . happens . opens it’s an abyss . it’s beyond rage, beyond pain, it’s black cotton wool. ” She paused; the crying, too, had stopped.
Is it a sort of excitement?
“No, no, it’s not, it’s a draining of feeling.”
Is there an urge?
“It’s like a light being switched off without your knowing it’s been on. It’s like a train behind you and you have to walk, you have to keep walking but there’s no noise, not even your own heartbeat… Sometimes if you are frightened, as I had been before, you feel your heartbeat very strongly, but not even that … muddy waters…” she said, incomprehensibly. She was sitting up again now, leaning back again. Her voice had become monotonous.
“I told you about when I jumped into a pool and almost drowned, but it was different now, because then there was light I remember looking up and I could see light land] because I didn’t know I was drowning I didn’t have apprehension or fear. Though it was different with Martin, it was somewhat the same, but I can only equate it up to a certain point, because there was no light, no physical pull, no sensation …” She paused.
Was there no sense of feeling “I must stop’?
“No,” she said.
“There is a point where that walking ahead of the train gets more suffocating in your head.”
What is it that suffocates?
“I’m trying … trying…” (At times I felt as if she was saying, “I’m trying for you.” ) “But, it’s black cotton wool, one has to get through it … One would die [if one didn’t] … I’m saying that now. Now I’m you know, looking back, I feel an element of panic in me which wasn’t there, but which as an adult I imagine to be there.”