THE man who looks like George Bernard Shaw is queueing for Court One where two schoolboys stand accused of killing James Bulger. He has wild long hair, a streaming beard, carries three plastic bags and later, in the public gallery, he wears odd socks on his hands and eats a Cornish pastie. After him, another man tries to gain entry to the court with a bus ticket instead of a public gallery pass. He mumbles incomprehensibly as the police officers turn him away.

Next day, Matt Jones, a 26-year-old aspiring novelist, comes by train from London for his first visit to a court. He arrives in Preston at 3am. Outside the court, photographers camp to snap the two police vans with blocked-out windows which hide the two defendants. I go through security, body search and past uniformed police with radio earplugs into the imposing wood-panelled Edwardian courtroom. Inside, there are 19th century oil paintings of High Sheriffs and Clerks of the Peace – among them Judge Batty Addison, ‘the terror of the criminal’ – and white plaster cherubs holding up the ceiling corners with swags of fruit and flowers.

>From the public gallery, one sees only the backs and neat haircuts of Child A and B, in charcoal jackets. They are seated on grey chairs on a specially raised dock and next to a burly social worker.

The call comes for the court to rise – and the children barely reach the social workers’ shoulders.

Ralph Bulger, father of James, sits on the seat in front of me. On the first day he listened impassively as the court was told by Richard Henriques QC for the prosecution, the defendants had subjected James to a beating with bricks, stones and metal, before his body was placed on a railway line. The second day, Mr Henriques puts the prosecution case that the children denied all knowledge of the two-year-old and then blamed the murder on each other. As more horrifying details are disclosed to the hushed court, Mr Bulger – with slicked back hair and a gold heart on his lapel – swallows hard. His brother sits nearby, tearing at the skin on his fingers. Behind them in the public gallery, women press their hands to their faces in gestures of self-comfort.

As Mr Henriques recounts Child A’s police interviews – ‘he picked up a big metal thing that had holes in it and hit him on the head,’ – Mr Bulger’s eyelashes flutter frantically in an attempt to stop himself crying. As the QC quotes – ‘I was trying to see if the baby was still alive and he would not move. I got my ear against his belly and he wasn’t breathing’ – the muscles in Mr Bulger’s face twitch uncontrollably. As we hear of Child B’s account that ‘A’ (had) thrown paint in (James’s) face. ‘A threw a brick into his face . . . I picked up little stones because I would not throw bricks at him’ – Mr Bulger bends his head. It’s hard not to cry in this courtroom. There are frequent breaks for the children, legal language is simplified as for a classroom and the court finishes at schooltime.

Mr Henriques invites the jury to steel itself for photographs of the two-and-a-half-mile route along which the boys are alleged to have led James.

Mrs Z, a young housewife, gives evidence of the boys’ alleged attempt to abduct her two-year-old son on the day of James’s death. At the end of the proceedings, Mr Bulger stands watching Boy B’s parents as they leave. On the third morning of the hearing, written evidence from Denise Bulger, mother of the dead child, is submitted to the court. It is heard how she looked desperately for her little boy as she shopped at the Strand centre in Bootle, Merseyside. That is where I am this morning – following James’s march to death.

Outside the shop, T J Hughes, in which Mrs Z was shopping when the boys allegedly attempted to abduct her son, grannies in woollen hats gossip on a wooden bench. Nearby a board displays photographs of the bruised faces of two children. ‘The faces change, the bruises don’t,’ it reads. These are NSPCC posters depicting a child in 1884 and one in 1984. Past them, anoraked children trail after their shopping parents.

A three-year-old girl is being led around by a 14-year-old boy – whose mother is in H Samuels. This is a school morning and, in five minutes, I see half a dozen schoolchildren with skinhead cuts sagging off school. Nearby, the canal – to which it is claimed the boys took James – looks bleak, like a floating rubbish tip. In neighbouring Bootle Library a man is reading a story to a group of schoolchildren dressed neatly in grey: a tale of a child who leaves his home without telling his parents and is presumed lost. ‘What should you do if you go out to play?’ the man asks them. ‘Tell yer mum, cos she’d be worried,’ they chorus.

Then on to Breeze Hill and up to the grass-covered reservoir where James was allegedly dragged. Today, at 11.50am a lone child in school uniform stands kicking his feet. Then past grey high-rises under a grey sky and under a grey subway beneath a grey flyover. I am tired of walking. But on to the alleyway opposite the Walton Lane police station, past desolate houses with the rubbish stacked outside and trails of dog excrement, to the two tracks of the railway where James is said to have met his end. Today, a magpie sits on the line.

In court in the afternoon, I sit in the row in front of the jury. The defendants are wearing stripy school ties. Boy A has forsaken his jacket. Next to Boy B sits his father, a slight man in a turtle-neck sweater and jacket. His face looks wan. He hunches his shoulders and his forehead is constantly furrowed. Then the children settle to watch the television – these are the videos showing two boys allegedly abducting James in the shopping precinct. Child B points to the screen and speaks to his social worker.

As the figures come onto the screen, with arrows from the prosecution to highlight them, both boys sit peering through the rail of the dock. Child B’s father stares at the monitor intently, then he gives up and just looks down. Like some early silent cinema, the court is quiet for 18 minutes but for the sound of people shifting on their seats. Mr Henriques puts his hand up, as if to ask the teacher a question. In reality, he wants to freeze a frame. Next to Boy B, junior counsel Richard Isaacson, props his slipping head on his hand and closes his eyes for a moment.

The jury asks to see the last part of the video again. Boy B’s shirt is hanging out. Nearby, eight men in wigs and gowns, a multitude of uniformed policemen, a jury of nine men and three women and the world’s Press concentrate on the screens.

Down the road is the media annexe, in an office block with panoramic views of Preston. In court it is sometimes hard to hear witnesses. ‘Do speak up please,’ Mr Justice Morland implores frequently but in the annexe on the audio system, the sound is better. And the world’s Press eat McDonald’s, smoke and drink coffee.

IN PASSAU, a picturesque Bavarian city at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers, the Second World War is still being fought.

On one side are the respectable citizens of Passau and on the other, 33 year-old Anna Rosmus. Since she was a teenager she’s been obsessively trying to expose what she sees as the truth about her home town, an outwardly affluent and charming Catholic community.

Frau Rosmus has worked single-mindedly to expose Passau’s Nazi past since she wrote a schoolgirl essay on My Home Town During The Third Reich. She is known locally as ‘the nasty girl’ after the title of an Oscar-nominated movie based on her story. She has since exploded single-handedly the post-war conspiracy of silence that allowed prominent Passau Nazis to disguise themselves as former resistance men by publishing material that might not otherwise have appeared.

In return she has been spat on, called a Jewish Whore, threatened with death and had stones thrown at her. Frau Anna Rosmus still receives threatening phone calls and is told her house will be burned down. Today sees the publication of her book Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, which records the mass murder and mistreatment of the Russians in 1945 and includes more than 300 names, including surviving local perpetrators and further documentation about the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz, a local obstetrician.

Earlier this month, the family of the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz of Passau took Rosmus to court over her allegations that the surgeon had carried out brutal late abortions on women from eastern Europe used as forced labour. The family won an order banning Frau Rosmus from repeating allegations that all the abortions were brutal and made at a late stage of pregnancy.

She faces a £200,000 fine or six months imprisonment if she refers to the alleged atrocities again.

The publisher expects the book to be stopped. Frau Rosmus thinks several ‘honourable citizens,’ perhaps ‘even the government’, may take her to court. And Bavaria’s criminal prosecutors will consider whether there are grounds for trials of any of those mentioned.

‘She makes untrue accusations,’ lawyer Klaus Zehner shouts, punching the air with his fist. ‘She selects her documents to fit her case.’ He doesn’t yet know what’s in her book.

The allegations are chilling. ‘Rosmus said that Clarenz performed abortions on mothers sometimes in the eighth month of pregnancy,’ says Zehner who fought the case. ‘Rosmus said the babies were wrenched out of the womb, limb by limb, and that the mothers, slave labourers, received no anaesthetic. That many of the babies forced into the world were left without food to die.

‘But this is not true. He performed over 200 abortions legally on eastern prisoners, under order of Hitler’s government,’ says Zehner. ‘There were no late abortions.’ He says they were natural births forced prematurely with medicine. ‘The mothers consented willingly and many babies survived and are still alive today.’

So why would a mother in an era before incubators want to induce birth at eight months? ‘They were women who had been frightened to have abortions and now wanted to be rid of their children because they knew the Russians were coming,’ he replies. ‘If the Russians found their women pregnant by Germans, they knew they would have an awful time.’

Frau Rosmus has painted the town brown. Behind the facade of caring Catholics and friendly bakers is a town which played host to three forced labour camps. Hitler lived here briefly, so too Heinrich Himmler. Anti-semitism is still rife. Passau is 80 per cent Catholic and officially there are no Jews registered, although Rosmus knows 19. ‘They are afraid to declare themselves,’ she said. The town’s Nazi constructed concrete Nibelung Hall is the annual meeting place for the far-Right Deutsche Volks Union. A local baker, she claims, makes swastika shaped bread for the occasion and the flea market sells SS memorabilia.

But Herr Riederer, a baker who recalls the Russian soldiers looting the shops and being executed afterwards, has never heard of the swastika bread. He is uneasy about Frau Rosmus’s other claims.

‘’Thomas Heller, an antiques dealer, who otherwise supports Frau Rosmus’s research, says it is strictly verboten to sell SS regalia. ‘She’s mad to say this.’

The town of 50,000 inhabitants is riven. Everyone has an opinion on ‘the nasty girl’ and, according to the letters to the local newspaper, the majority have had enough of her. Most think her motives pure, but there is a feeling that she should now be quiet.

She is seen as a woman obsessed. ‘There is a very bad taste and feeling in the town,’ says Gisa Schaffer-Huber. ‘We feel she’s doing it mostly for her own publicity.’

In the Fifties Passau’s town council removed all crosses marking Russian graves. In one cemetery, the desecration failed to wipe out the wintergreen, a hardy flower. The bones were exhumed in the Fifties and placed in a mass grave. Even the wintergreen has gone.

The nearby Innstadtfriedhof graveyard, set in the lush Bavarian forest, has stone crosses and metal plaques to commemorate the dead. Some were SS soldiers, some high-level perpetrators.

Back with Klaus Zehner in his gloomy office I ask whether he can help put me in touch with the family of the accused? ‘I am the accused,’ he says. ‘I’m the son-in-law of the deceased doctor.’

‘’‘’He feels outrage that Frau Rosmus has opened the wounds nearly 50 years after Clarenz was cleared of war crimes.

Frau Zehner says her father was patient, artistic and musical. ‘He only joined the Nazis to get a job.’ And what of anti-semitism? ‘I don’t have any Jewish friends. But my grandfather did.’

When I meet Frau Rosmus it is unexpectedly when she was broadcasting outside her home.

Inside there are two huge yellow cardboard Stars of David fringed with pencilled barbed wire and a massive collage depicting Moses. She is an unpredictable and volatile woman. Her eyes dart around fearfully. She wears a Star of David ‘out of sympathy’.

‘If I’m alone they say whatever they like. If I’m broadcasting they’re terrified.’ Now Rosmus, who has an open face, is natural and compelling. But her story contradicts the lawyer’s tale.

Back in town there is graffiti on a wall behind the cathedral with a Star of David daubed in red paint and the legend ‘Nazi raus.’ It means ‘Nazis piss off.’ On another wall, there is a poster advertising an anti-fascism disco, depicting a fist smashing a swastika.

THE HERCULES in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground. I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane, known to the crew as Fat Albert, is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly. The humour of the crew is macabre, like that in an operating theatre, a doctor comments later. The lashing tape is marked in red pen, ‘same shit, different day’. And they have sayings like: ‘You can kick ass or save Sarajevo – but you can’t do both.’ On the ground in Sarajevo, Foreign Legionnaires run around among white UN armoured vehicles. We deliver 26,000 lbs of tinned tuna and flour, with the plane engines still running. They like to get out in three minutes flat. But we’re picking up 30 Canadian soldiers going on rest and recreation leave, so we don’t manage to turn around for a full eight minutes.

The Canadians have been there for three months. What’s it like? Squaddie Guy, 20, smiles and looks puzzled. ‘I hope it’ll never be like that again.’ Tim Gunter is horrified. ‘There are little kids stepping on mines and people skinny and with fear in their eyes.’

Sergeant Renaud Marc asks: ‘Any news on that little girl? Nice of your PM to do that.’

In the body of the aircraft, eight racks for stretchers are pinned at the back, ready for the following day.

Azure lakes, ravines and hills blue in the morning mist of former Yugoslavia stretch beneath us. ‘They should be lying on the beaches bathing,’ says Flight Sergeant Steve Askey, with a bewildered expression. A UN Tornado buzzes underneath us in the opposite direction. ‘Why are the Press all here now?’ asks another crew member ingenuously. ‘Where have you been for the last 15 months?’

Back in Ancona, the doctors and those they teasingly call ‘just nurses’ are preparing themselves. They’re learning useful phrases like ‘are you thirsty or in pain?’ from the Red Cross phrasebook. ‘What’s Serbo-Croat for ‘I want to see a proper doctor?” jests one.

‘How about ‘are you private?’ or ‘I want a second opinion?” ‘Or ‘wait’. After all, they are going to the NHS.’

They are working intensely, lightening their load with humour. You couldn’t meet a nicer, better-meaning bunch. One doctor talks sensitively about the effects on his psyche of dealing with emergency cases. ‘It’s OK while I’m doing the job, because I’m plugged in. But afterwards I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

They mind about the added load their absence forces on their colleagues at home. And they care deeply about the well-being of those to be evacuated. To many of them, the ages of the evacuees are immaterial: Their health is more important.

They express fear at inadvertently saying to journalists something construed as politically inflammatory. Their leader, Tony Redmond, has worked so hard to achieve these mercy missions and is paranoid about the Press.

By Saturday afternoon, the medical team has been forbidden to speak to journalists. The instruction came from ‘very high up’, they say. Information is scant, but Operation Irma, they think, is becoming very political.

The question of whether Bosnian soldiers are to be evacuated is denied by officials. And the international slanging match about who to evacuate is hotting up between UN officials and cynical politicians keen to score political advantage.

You sense the doctors’ acute awareness of being used as pawns by politicians. They seem to want to mutiny against their enforced silence. You point out that they are only there because of the media and you note grateful recognition and a wish to help on their faces.

They are here simply because they want this to be the start of many humanitarian operations to rescue the sick and injured from a war zone. But they know they are simply putting a plaster on the gaping wound that is the medical problem of Sarajevo.

You find yourself thinking, simplistically, that children deserve priority in evacuations in this increasingly shambolicly organised public relations exercise with a media circus, photo opportunities and allegations of soldiers being rescued.

Now the medical team, which has divided into teams with specific duties, is preparing the field hospital on the civilian and military airbase of Ancona. It is set up in a cargo hangar next to three army tents – one with a Union Jack, one with a French flag and one with a Sky satellite dish. ‘’‘’‘’

There are canteen and toilet facilities and another area for walking wounded. And stretchers, toys, blankets, boiled sweets and fizzy drinks. Huge plastic bags filled with drugs hang on the walls. And hand-coloured nursery pictures of animals – a mouse carrying a breakfast tray on his head reads, ‘a little love makes a lot of difference’.

Information on the number and ages of evacuees and time of airlift changes frequently. As does the appallingly coordinated Ministry of Defence list of journalists allowed to accompany the flight.

I beg a place on a German plane going to Sarajevo, in an effort to see the casualties being loaded. ‘Welkom to zer Germunn airforce,’ they say, beaming. But a little MoD hiccup puts paid to that. So I secure a place on a Canadian flight and maybe it is the Overseas Development Administration which sees an end to that.

At 1.40 local time on Sunday, the tail of the Hercules carrying out Operation Irma opens. Three ambulances, assorted military and a Red Cross representative in fluorescent green jacket stand by. There are 21 people including seven children, plus 16 relatives. Some of the children the RAF team saw as priorities stayed behind.

A doctor stands by the hangar door, keeping telephone contact. The first through the tailgate is chronic meningitis sufferer Belma Salaka, three, with a breathing tube taped to her mouth. Seven people, mostly soldiers, carry her stretcher, careful not to jog her. It was her plight that prompted John Major to demand the number of children on the flight be increased. They bring out nine-month-old Eldar Kalamujic, a nurse shielding his face from the sun. He has liver disease. The TV crews and photographers fight for space, pushing through the restraining rope. The media throng becomes more unmanageable as time goes on and the police offer to make arrests. Now there are some relatives and walking wounded with bandaged eyes – clean but thin. They look tired but relieved. Then a third emaciated boy is carried out. There is 11-year-old Edhen Dedovic, denim-clad, with his right cheekbone eaten away by a mortar wound and his left eye gouged out by shrapnel, walking off, waving delightedly to the crowd.

There are nine on stretchers and walking wounded of military age. One man on a stretcher sticks up his fingers in a Bosnian army victory salute. Curiously there is only one woman, 44-year-old Branka Franic. Then they start to load them on the chartered Russian Tupulev 154 jet, a blue striped plane beneath a blue sky. It made the Red Cross ODA trip to Banja Luka last year.

It is five years old with torn carpets and seats folded down to accommodate stretchers. The doctors dub it a flying intensive care ward, saying its equipment is comparable to a ground hospital.

Professor David Southall, the only consultant paediatrician in the team, said: ‘The mission is orientated to moving children from the war zone. That’s what we’re hoping for if the Bosnian doctors and parents agree. Otherwise they have no hope. They are in a war zone which is getting worse.’

DOUBLE-killer Norman Parker, 48, was freed last week after spending more than half his life in jail. In 1963, aged 18, Parker, who is Jewish, shot dead his Nazi girlfriend who was two-timing him. He might have hanged, but pleaded self-defence and was jailed for manslaughter. In 1971, he was convicted of a gangland killing – the sensational Body in a Trunk murder – in which his victim was hammered, shot six times and disposed of in the New Forest.

During 28 years in more than 20 jails, Parker rubbed shoulders with notorious criminals like the Great Train Robbers and the Krays. He was also befriended by tycoon Gerald Ronson in Ford open prison, where Ronson was serving his sentence for his part in the Guinness scandal.

While inside, Parker gained an Open University degree and wrote Parkhurst Tales, a harrowing book about prison life. When Ronson left prison, he got Parker an agent to help him sell the book for television. ‘I’ve seen Gerald three times since he’s been out,’ Parker says in his Cockney accent. ‘I met him in schule (synagogue). We treated each other as equals. We’re both proud men.’

Parker is short with strong features and a prison gym physique. He is tough, lucid, looks you in the eye and never laughs. He wears jeans, and a chain around his neck.

He shot 18-year-old Susan Fitzgerald one afternoon in Notting Hill. She admired Adolf Hitler and kept guns and books on concentration camps. ‘It was strange for a Jewish boy to pick up with a Nazi. Both her brothers were guards to Sir Oswald Mosley and her family was deeply involved in armed robberies. She was a violent and unbalanced girl who slept with a gun under her pillow. It was a tempestuous relationship.

‘One day we had a hideous argument. She pulled out a gun. I thought she was going to shoot me, so I pulled out my gun and fired one shot,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘It hit her in the head.’

Parker then talks about his second killing, clenching his wrist with his hand. He was in his office with his co-defendant, David Woods, and Edward Coleman, a violent robber from Glasgow. ‘We had an argument about the way we wanted to hijack a lorry. Edward pulled a gun on me. I struggled for it, David hit him with a hammer, he fell to the ground and I killed him with his own gun. I killed a man who seconds before was trying to kill me. ‘At worst it was manslaughter. (This is the subject of a current judicial review.) That’s what I’ve done 23 years for. I don’t think the public lose much sleep when violent criminals kill one another. I covered up the murder. But we bumped into a policeman when we were trying to dispose of the body, and I assaulted him.’

How does he feel about having terminated two lives? ‘That’s something you can’t put into words. When you’re young and unfeeling, you can’t empathise. Now I’ve had quarter of a century of suffering. I feel diabolical about Susan. I loved her deeply. I visit her grave and pray for forgiveness.’ What drove him to murder? ‘I used to experience intense rages and a deep sense of frustration. I was emotionally unstable. I don’t think the roots were in my childhood, though. I just wasn’t happy with my lot in life.’ (His father was a bookkeeper, his mother a post office worker. He went to grammar school, did well academically and left aged 17.) Was he a psychopath? ‘That’s a catch-all term. I lacked empathy for people, so it was true in that sense.’ His last psychiatric report said he had high self-esteem and a sense of responsibility.

He’s changed in prison. ‘My first prison sentence definitely made my rage worse. But it is a corrosive emotion and I’ve learned to chill out. Things no longer touch me. I’ve become almost totally self-sufficient. I didn’t have any emotional relationships in prison. I pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into the castle.’

His Judaism also grew. ‘It’s rare to have a Jewish murderer. Anything related to crime is frowned on by rabbis more than ministers of any other denomination. I’ve been in jails where the rabbi has refused to talk to me or even shake hands.’

Does he believe in divine retribution and punishment when he dies? ‘I believe in God. So almost certainly.’

He doesn’t know whether he might re-offend. ‘Nobody can know. Emotional violent crimes are unpredictable. I could show you priests and bank managers who have committed or attempted murder. I’m not going to get involved in crime again.’

The world Parker has re-entered is different and shocking. He’s astonished at the dirtiness of London, powerful cars and the number of foreigners. ‘I can’t believe the homeless people on the streets. People actually sleep in cardboard boxes.

‘I’m also shocked by sex and promiscuity. Take these phone lines where people talk dirty to you. If someone had come out with that 23 years ago, he’d have been dragged into a psychiatric hospital.’ (He says when he went into prison he read The Daily Telegraph. ‘Now I’d describe myself as a radical socialist.’) He has returned to his 82-year-old mother. ‘Waiting for me kept her alive. She’s the only person in the world that I’m close to. I’ve had to get to know her again. She’d become a stranger.’

His father has gone into a rest home and his sister, an ex-bunny girl and model, disappeared. ‘She attempted suicide and turned to drink. Nobody’s seen her for 15 years.’

Parker thinks he’ll ‘adapt easily’ to life outside. ‘I’m ready to work for two or three years. I hope I’ll be able to get enough money to buy myself a nice place in Portugal and sit in the sun for a few years. I hope I’ll do something with my writing.’

His book, Parkhurst Tales, bears his pen name ‘Fred Barabbas’. ‘Barabbas was crucified on the cross next to Christ, not just any old criminal. In case that was grandiose, I added Fred …

THAT fateful Saturday night Heidi read an Agatha Christie thriller before falling asleep. She had always dreamed of living on her own in London and had moved into her rented Shepherd’s Bush flat just the day before. It was on the ground floor but had good security. Yet she awoke at 2am with a strange man standing by her bed. It was the start of a three-hour ordeal.

Heidi is good-looking, her face expressive. She speaks seamlessly and with remarkable self-possession, her constant smoking being the only indication of her nervousness. Yet this composed young professional woman now lives in fear because her assailants, who terrorised her in her own home, have not yet been caught.

That night, on Saturday 3 July, the apartment upstairs was empty and her neighbours were having a noisy party.

Suddenly she awoke. In the darkness she made out a man standing in her bedroom. ‘I screamed like an animal,’ says Heidi, a 25-year-old fashion publicist.

Her intruder was startled. ‘Stop screaming or I’ll kill you,’ he shouted. ‘Put a blanket over your head.

‘I’m going to knock you unconscious. But I won’t rape you,’ he went on. ‘I’ve come to teach you a lesson not to leave the windows open.’ She had left the tiny top bathroom window ajar.

At first Heidi thought she was dreaming. She pulled the blanket over her head (she was wearing a short nightdress) and wondered whether he had a gun. ‘I kept telling myself not to panic and do as he said, so he wouldn’t kill me.’

Her assailant asked why she wasn’t at the party, blindfolded her with a T-shirt and the blanket, and pushed her through the flat to the bathroom, where he wiped off his fingerprints.

‘You have a wonderful body. If I saw you on the street I’d chat you up,’ he said. She could feel him kissing her through the T-shirt. ‘But I’m not here to rape you.’

He pushed her back to the bed. She breathed heavily, trying to stop herself breaking down. He told her to ‘shut up’. Then he took her purse. ‘There’s only £25,’ he said, ‘I should have gone to Knightsbridge.’ Heidi was shaking, terrified. ‘He kept threatening to kill me. But I kept making conversation to make things easier. I felt I had to be truthful with him.’

Her head covered, she led him to her hidden antique ring and bank cash card. She was relieved when he asked for the PIN number, thinking that meant he was going, and gave him the wrong number.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, chillingly. ‘My mate outside will check it.’ Heidi was horrified. Suddenly both men were standing in her bedroom. With astonishing presence of mind, she played for time; she told the second criminal to go to the (distant) Kings Street cash machine.

‘Take a cab back,’ her first assailant ordered his accomplice, handing him Heidi’s money. Then he left.

Heidi sensed the man drop his guard. She grabbed her can of CS tear gas, hidden by her bedside. ‘I knew if he saw me, he’d kill me.’ Suddenly she smelt him standing near her, and sprayed the gas where she guessed he stood. He swore madly.

But the gas was five years old and didn’t work properly. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He should have been lying on the floor.’

The man screamed at her. ‘You fucking bitch. I trusted you and what did you do? Now you deserve to be raped and I am going to kill you.’ Heidi punched and kicked. The man was holding her by the wrists and in the struggle bit a chunk out of her arm.

Then he took a kitchen knife, held it to her neck and, to Heidi’s horror, started to molest her. ‘I thought, ‘Don’t think about it. Block it completely. Don’t feel anything. There’s nothing you can do.’ ‘I kept thinking, ‘This is how people feel when they’re being raped’.’ The knife blade was still sticking into her while he assaulted her. ‘‘Wibble’ your hips,’ he repeated, curiously.

Suddenly the accomplice returned, furious that he’d been given the wrong PIN number. ‘I don’t think he wanted his mate to know what he was doing to me. I gave him another wrong number and he left again.’ (She had £500 in her account, but he never withdrew any money.) Heidi was once again alone with her abuser. He now threatened to tie her up and lock her in a cupboard. (He said he’d then call the police.) ‘I didn’t have any rope. I told him to lock me in my cellar. I was afraid of cellars when I was a kid.’

He pushed her to the cellar, with the shirt over her head. ‘He kept marking places on my back with the knife, saying ‘This is your heart and here’s your liver’,’ she says, in astonishingly measured manner. ‘My legs turned to stone.’

Her body was exposed. ‘It didn’t really matter any more what I looked like. I thought, ‘Just kill me. Let my mind have peace. Free me from this.’ He sprayed tear gas on her gaping wound. ‘Thank God it was empty.’ Then he imprisoned her in the cellar, alone and petrified. She listened for sounds from upstairs. Then in a box in the cellar she found two kitchen knives. She didn’t know whether the villains had gone. ‘I thought now I’ll kill them.’

She threw her body against the door, but it didn’t yield. Then she found a garden spade and smashed at it. Finally she crawled through. ‘I don’t know how. The hole was tiny, just 12 inches across.’

Intrepidly, Heidi went through the flat, brandishing her knives. When she found it was empty, this extraordinarily self-possessed woman sat down and smoked a cigarette.

Heidi is German, has only lived in England for 18 months and couldn’t remember the number for the emergency services. ‘I rang 192 and broke down.’ When the police arrived she cried uncontrollably.

They took her to the Brentford Rape Suite – ‘They apologised that it was a male doctor, but I didn’t mind’ – where she underwent forensic tests and gave her 18-page statement.

‘It’s very strange but I didn’t feel dirty. It didn’t occur to me until 12 hours later to take a shower.’

Today Heidi wears jeans, chic green jacket and bohemian jewellery. University educated and smart, Heidi is lively, open and optimistic. The police say she becomes daily more lighthearted and friendly. She had never before been the victim of even petty crime and her experience has had a profound effect on her. (She had the CS gas, which is legal on the Continent, simply because she felt ‘more secure’ with it.) Her assailants had seen photographs of her on the walls of her flat. ‘I feel really frightened in the street if a black man approaches me. Scared he’ll recognise me.’ She has altered her appearance, but not radically. ‘I refuse to change my life completely.’

She has also changed her behaviour. ‘I used to ride my bike in the middle of the night in Brixton, going from one party to another. Now I always take taxis.’

And she has moved. ‘I’ll never dare live alone again. I’ll have a panic button fixed wherever I live. I don’t care what it costs.’ But she doesn’t feel compelled to return to her homeland. ‘This could have happened anywhere.’

She hasn’t ‘yet’ had counselling. ‘I hope it won’t affect my attitude to men. I don’t think it will.’ Her mother is a teacher and her father died when she was an infant. But her sister, an actress, flew to England and helped her to relive the experience while doing cathartic breathing exercises. ‘She made me imagine he was there again.’

Now she says: ‘I feel like skinning those men alive. ‘The worst part wasn’t the sexual side. It was the feeling that this guy could decide whether I should live or die.

‘How easily someone can snip your life.’

Can you help trap the attackers who dropped a key and stole a ruby ring? THE CRIME took place at 8 Leysfield Road, Shepherds Bush, between 2am and 5am on Sunday 4 July. Police are also interested in anyone using the Midland bank cash machine in Kings Street W6 at that time.

Of the two male attackers, one is definitely black. One is 5ft 10in tall, of medium build with broad shoulders and had short afro hair. He was wearing a white T-shirt, with numbers or writing and black vertical stripes, with blue jeans and a belt with large buckle.

DIANE OSBORNE’S husband died in her arms. ‘After I’d called the ambulance, I begged Bob not to leave me,’ she says.

‘I kept saying, ‘Baby, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me now. Please don’t leave me.’ But he went purple, stopped breathing and died.’

Afterwards she went into deep shock. ‘I had terrible shakes and couldn’t even hold a cup without the liquid pouring out. I’ve been crying a lot and haven’t felt like going from day to day.

‘Each morning I wake up and remember that Bob is dead and I feel sick. I used to eat a lot, now I hardly touch a thing unless somebody forces me. I’ve had terrible nightmares, always the same dream in which Bob is dying and going blue.

‘At first when people spoke to me, the words didn’t even go through my ears to my brain. I couldn’t remember a thing for six weeks – I had to write everything down.

‘Even now I can’t recall things properly. But I can remember everything that happened that night most vividly.’

Robert Osborne, a husband and father of three, was fatally stabbed just before Christmas last year. He was 40 years old.

He was killed by Joseph Elliott, a drugged teenager whom Robert had followed with a hammer when he caught him slashing neighbours’ car tyres for fun. Yesterday an Old Bailey jury allowed the 19-year-old killer to walk free. Diane, 38, is sitting in the kitchen of their rented family home in Streatham being comforted by her sister-in-law Patricia, who lives next door. Diane wears jeans, looks wan, smokes roll-ups and drinks Liebfraumilch. ‘I’m devastated. Justice stinks,’ she says furiously. ‘Elliott admitted taking drugs, slashing tyres and stabbing my husband. But they still said he wasn’t guilty. My husband is now dead and his killer is free.’

She appears alternately distraught and numb. Nothing prepared her for the jury’s verdict. ‘I expected murder or at least manslaughter for that boy,’ she says, looking dazed. (She rarely refers to Elliott by name, generally calling him ‘that boy’.) ‘I don’t have feelings of revenge. But I want a retrial. I’m told I can’t get one because I don’t have any more evidence.’

Elliott’s miserable childhood was used as an excuse in court. ‘But my dad died of cancer when I was 15,’ says Diane. ‘I almost died when I was 12, my mother suffered from mental illness and I was brought up in three foster homes.’

She looks sadly at her two labrador-cross dogs and cat playing nearby. ‘It’s unreal to say that someone doesn’t turn out right because of their childhood.’

She recalls the events of 10 December last year when she was in her garden watching an eclipse of the moon. Robert, a musician and music tutor, was inside decorating.

‘I heard a hissing noise and went out and saw these two guys slashing tyres then trying to break into a pensioner’s house.’

She followed them but fled when they faced her and went back to ring the police. Robert said she shouldn’t bother. ‘We’d called them out before and they hadn’t come. They’re too busy. My car had been done twice before and so had Bob’s. His handbuilt car was his pride and joy.’

Robert grabbed a hammer. ‘He’d had enough of this sort of vandalism. He just wanted to demand an explanation and get their names. He would never ever have used the hammer. He picked the hammer up by its head and just took it for protection.’

He followed the unemployed youth (who was high on LSD, drink and cannabis) to a local council estate, cornered him on a balcony – and was stabbed through the heart.

Diane had followed her husband: ‘Bob ran downstairs to protect me. He collapsed. I tried to stop him kicking Bob while he was dying,’ she says heavily. (In court, Elliott denied kicking his victim as he lay dying.) ‘He punched me around the head and rib cage.’

She holds back tears as she remembers her husband. They’d been together 16 years but she’s shocked and says she cannot remember when they married.’

‘Everybody says they’ve never seen a closer couple. Now it’s been taken away.

‘He was a good father and husband and a just, quiet man. He’s the most gentle man in the world. He used to take spiders out of the bath and put them in the garden to avoid hurting them.

‘He lived for his music and family. He was very clever –and used to teach 13 to 17-year-olds. He also played guitar in pubs with a band or on his own.

‘Our house was derelict when we moved in four years ago – and he did everything from the plumbing to building a pond in the garden. He was so happy that wildlife was thriving in it.’

Diane has coped with life by ‘living for the trial, thinking it would bring justice’.

‘She kept saying her life was over when he was killed,’ explains Patricia. ‘But she kept going so she could see his killer brought to justice.’

How did Diane feel when she saw Elliott? ‘It was very hard. I kept remembering him as I saw him on the night – mad, out of his head, vicious and dangerous.’ After the verdict, Elliott whooped with delight and Diane broke down in tears.

She returned to her ‘broken family’. She has three children – Tarina, 19, Justin, 18, and Lisa, 14. (Yesterday Tarina was on holiday in Spain.) The effect on the children has been devastating. ‘Lisa has done nothing but cry her eyes out. When I told her her father was dead, she went mad.’ They also face the prospect of meeting Elliott because his council flat is 300 yards from Diane’s home. He lives in squalor on an estate littered with cars with missing wheels, syringes on the ground and graffiti. ‘If I bump into him, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she says, quietly. ‘I suppose I’ll have to do what I did in court and walk by, bite my tongue and hide my tears.

‘I will not move from here,’ she adds, forcefully. ‘It’s my house and Bob did the decorating. If I move somewhere else where there’s no decorating by Bob, my life will be as empty as my heart is now.’

She is also terrified that Lisa will bump into Elliott on her way to school. (Lisa had, in fact, met Elliott before the tragedy. ‘He spoke to me,’ she says. ‘He’s dirty and he always looks like a tramp. I saw inside his home and it’s disgusting.’) The Osborne family is united in their horror at Elliott’s acquittal. ‘When the jury foreman stood up and read out the verdict, I thought another juror was going to stand up and say it was a joke,’ says Justin, a former store security guard.

‘It was bad enough having to go through his death and the funeral, but this really might just finish us off.’

Later, next door, Robert’s brother Mark, a builder, said: ‘How can a peaceful bloke like Robert go out of his house to protect my car, get beaten to death and his killer go free? Those 12 people who let that bastard out should be examining their consciences today.’

Previously Diane had faith in the system of justice. ‘But if I walked into the Queen’s house or didn’t pay my poll tax I’d be locked up tomorrow,’ she says now.

‘We live in a society where people are allowed to slash old ladies’ throats while they’re in bed and rape little girls and get away with it. Now you can’t even go out and protect your car without ending up dead. If that boy had robbed a bank he would have got time.’

Diane’s future is bleak. ‘I’m now trying to survive on income support. I’ve lost his teacher’s salary and have to get by on £70 a week. I’ll scrape through financially. But emotionally I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m knackered. I haven’t got any strength left and nobody can help me.’ She looks down. ‘My husband paid with his life for having a hammer. He died for nothing.’

Self-defence or not? How the judge guided the jury FOR LEGAL reasons, the judge, the prosecutor and the jury in the Robert Osborne murder trial are unable to defend themselves against the mounting tide of public concern.

But, by examining transcripts of the case, it is possible today to throw more light on the way it was handled.

This is an edited version of Mr Justice Kay’s direction to the jury: ‘The only lawful justification for this killing that arises is the question of self-defence.

‘Self-defence is lawful when it is necessary to use force to resist or defend yourself against an attack or threatened attack, and when the amount of force used is reasonable.

‘I emphasise two words: necessary and reasonable.

‘There are, thus, three matters that you have to consider. First and foremost, was the defendant acting in self-defence at all.

‘The defendant tells you he wanted no part in any fighting and if he is or may be right, then clearly his actions were entirely to defend himself. ‘If, however, you accept the evidence of Mr Osborne’s widow, for example, that the defendant shouted down a challenge to Mr Osborne, the prosecution say there is no question of him simply acting in self-defence. ‘Secondly, there is the question whether it was necessary to resort to the use of the knife at all. The defendant says that he was not intending to stab, merely to wave the knife in front of him and that it was Mr Osborne whose momentum carried him on to the knife. Thus he asserts that he was doing no more than was necessary.

‘Thirdly, was the defendant using no more force than was reasonably necessary? What is reasonable depends on all the facts, for example, the nature of the attack or anticipated attack, whether or not a weapon is used and whether or not the attacker was on his own.

SHE was snatched off the street, sexually assaulted and mutilated by a convicted killer who left her for dead in a blazing squat.

But only 48 hours after the attacker was jailed for 20 years, she is able to say: ‘I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

The courage that helped the 28-year-old career girl relive her ordeal at the Old Bailey is more evident than ever as she gives her first interview. Her face is expressive and lovely. She is beautifully turned out and talks in a calm, self-assured way.

Of her assailant, Anthony Ferrira, she says: ‘He could have cancelled my life. I don’t believe he deserves to live. I won’t ever forgive him.’ But what she really wants to stress is how lucky she is. The world is mostly full of good, kind and thoughtful people, she says, smiling. She loves her friends and family. She is intensely grateful to those who have helped her overcome the trauma. Every day feels like a bonus. ‘I love my life,’ she says. ‘That’s why I fought so hard for it.’ It was 7.15 on a February morning and the buyer with a top London store was walking through Brixton, South London, to a business meeting when Ferrira lured her into the squat by pretending his pregnant girlfriend needed help. When she resisted, he produced a knife.

‘I can’t describe the fear when I realised there was nobody else in the room and I thought he was going to kill me,’ she says.

He tried to strangle her then attacked her with a knife, cheesewire and a broken bottle. ‘The sexual acts were repulsive, humiliating and degrading, but I thought I’d do anything to stay alive,’ she recalls. `Then this crazed violence started. I fought to stop him killing me.’

The wounds Ferrira inflicted needed 100 stitches and she lost half her blood. `I wanted to lose consciousness,’ she says. `I wanted it to stop, just to stop the pain, even if it meant dying.

`I felt this deep whirling as if I was being spun round faster and faster. Then there was this profound agony, which I presume was unconsciousness. I didn’t even know whether I was dead. I tried not to breathe so he’d think I was dead, but the fire he’d started began burning my leg so I had to move. He began pounding my neck again.’

Eventually he left. `I hoped I’d die before the flames got to me,’ she says. But she was rescued by a neighbour.

In hospital, fear overwhelmed her. `Ferrira had the contents of my bag and my name,’ she says. `I was scared to go to the lavatory alone. My sister and best friend slept with me every night.’

She needed plastic surgery and still has scars, but doesn’t hide them. She has only just regained the use of one hand.

After hospital, she went to stay with relatives in Spain. `I couldn’t live in this country until he was behind bars.’

At present she is staying with her sister. `I loved living alone before,’ she says. `Now I have to live out of a suitcase.’

She had no partner at the time of the attack, but there have been boyfriends since. `I didn’t know if I could have a normal relationship,’ she admits, `but I’m lucky, I don’t think of Ferrira as a man. A partner in a loving relationship is very different.’

Her greatest difficulty is in being alone. `I won’t go anywhere without a mobile phone. If nobody’s at home, I ring someone from the car before I get out and they talk me through going indoors.’

After three months off work, she went back part-time. Her mother died when she was seven and her father three years ago. `To be honest, his death was far worse than any of this,’ she says. `There’s no way I can fill that gap. But I can rebuild my life and do things he’d be proud of.’

The former convent girl still believes in God. `Things happen for a reason,’ she says, `though I’m not quite sure why this happened. Maybe it was to make me stronger.

`I don’t have nightmares. I don’t feel any guilt or shame about what happened. I didn’t ask for this. Now I just have to get on and deal with it.

`The firemen who rescued me are receiving counselling. I went to see them. I don’t want anyone else to be scarred.’

She admits she found the trial terrifying, particularly the discussion before it was decided she could be screened from Ferrira. `In the end I saw him briefly and was surprised I felt nothing. He looked a pathetic character – not big, as I’d built him up to be in my mind.’

Although he is behind bars at last, she knows her troubles are not over. But she is strong enough to say: `I’m so lucky, I should have died. Now I feel today is the first day of the rest of my life.’

IT’S OVER. The harsh streaks of an uneasy dawn brings the news that they have found the last of them. He is dead. We are told he is Peter Alcock. More we do not know.

Faces sunk from lack of sleep take in the information and turn away. There is no emotion left. The price of coal!

I look around what is for me an unfamiliar landscape. The head-gears over the shafts look like giant, grey steel Meccano constructions. Their halogen lights are always on for shift workers, making the whole place look somewhat like the Nottingham Forest football ground under floodlights. A yellow bulldozer goes back and forth up a black mountain, stockpiling coal. There are 400,000 tonnes in these mountain stocks – enough to fuel 100,000 homes for a year. You’d need climbing gear to tackle one of these man-made mountains.

They should be selling it – but they are over-producing. The killer around here, says one policeman without irony, is the dash for gas. They have 14 million tonnes of coal on the ground in Bilsthorpe. We are in Robin Hood country, the region near Sherwood Forest. But this is the land not of merrie men but dejected ones.

There is frost on the road and there are patches of fog. You can make out industrial estates, quarries and flesh-coloured buildings – miners’ houses on the fringe of the pit.

It is a busy and bustling community during the day but it is no place to be standing and stamping one’s feet during the night; especially this night.

Around 4am it really hits me. Two orange-suited miners with lamps on their heads and in their hands walk past. The air is chilly and it may be only that which set off the shivers.

We are waiting for two men still 2,000 feet beneath the ground on which I stand.

Now we know they were dead already. Then, we still had hope. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking of the wife of David Shelton, 31, from Bingham, who was visited by a personnel manager earlier in the evening. She is eight months pregnant and has an 18-month old child – and he had to tell her that her husband had been found dead.

Despite all the technological advances in recent years the fear that their man might not return from their shift lurks in the subconscious of every miner’s wife from the day they marry to the day he retires. It is that which makes miners wives special people and miners’ communities special: The price of coal.

In St Margaret’s Church they lit five candles for the missing. Forty people turned up for the service of mourning for the dead and exaltation for the living.

It started at 11am yesterday when the collapse occurred. The flying squad emergency team from Mansfield Hospital and the pit’s emergency team were immediately in operation.

They brought out Paul Smith with facial injuries, in deep shock but conscious, with a sore back.

Then they found Bill McCulloch, a 26-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents. Bill was dead.

It is different at pitheads these days in times of disaster. Mourning is done in private. Technology detracts somehow from the great drama of the rescue. Yet it is human still. Throughout the night colliery workers brought us tea and coffee.

‘There were one or two doomwatchers at Toppa Pit Lane,’ said a security man, ‘but now it’s quiet.’

Earlier he was given flowers – white and yellow roses and pink hydrangeas picked by an ex-miner from Clipstone pit and a former miner from Bilsthorpe.

‘They wanted them put inside pit shafts,’ he said. ‘If he’s taken t’trouble to pick them, I must get them down there when I’m allowed.’ The flowers lay on a plastic chair in his office dying – while the teams of tired men, working ‘20-minute snaps’ pursued a rescue operation in which hope was fading.

And then, suddenly, it was over and the miners and their families returned to get on with the rest of their lives, while we who came to report upon this night got into our cars and drove away weary past a gamut of safety instructions: ‘Wear gloves’ dictated one sign on the road; ‘Think before you act’ said another; ‘Remove dangers yourself’; ‘Wear eye protection’; ‘Know your support rules’.

For us the morning brought another story in another part of the country.

CHERRY ROOMES is 43. To date she has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

THE nursery stands ready and the crib has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise. It is the crib Cherry Roomes slept in as a child. Now it awaits the arrival of a miracle.

To date Cherry has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

Two children from a previous marriage have survived, but all the other babies died in the womb and with four of them Cherry had to go through labour knowing the child was already dead. Yet next week she hopes to give birth to baby number 16 by Caesarean section. He already has a name, Benjamin.

By safely delivering him, the medical team at King’s College Hospital will be making medical history, and put an end to one woman’s extraordinary saga of love, despair and monumental determination.

Benjamin is already a miracle of human science. For the baby has already undergone the world’s first bone marrow transplant in the womb and he has been kept alive by regular blood transfusions – some of them directly into his heart.

His mother has rare rhesus negative blood. Her husband Geoff, a primary school headteacher, is rhesus positive. Every time Cherry Roomes becomes pregnant, the unborn baby is also rhesus positive, and her body simply attacks and kills it as a foreign invader.

The nursery stands ready and the crib Cherry herself slept in as a baby has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise.

‘I recovered the crib inside and out in 1981, but I’ve never had a baby to put in it,’ she says.

Although she has never heard Benjamin’s cries, she feels she already knows him. She has journeyed from their Kempston home near Bedford to King’s College for one day every week of her pregnancy. At the hospital, she watches the baby on a scanner as he undergoes a complex series of tests. Two albums full of blurry scanner pictures chart Benjamin’s development from seven weeks after conception. Cherry can locate every limb and facial movement from them.

‘To me, it’s like looking at normal photographs. He’s a very strong, fit, healthy baby.’

Cherry Roomes, who says she is talking to us because she wants to help other childless couples, is clearly remarkable, but so then is Dr Kypros Nicolaides, a consultant in foetal medicine and head of the Harris Birthright foetal research centre at King’s. It is he who has refused to be beaten by Cherry Roomes’s problems and, as a result, his relationship with the couple has become intensely close.

She finds it difficult explaining the almost primal instincts that urge her to keep trying and for putting the crushing pain of bereavement behind her, the instinct that has driven her on in the constant, dogged struggle to bear a child that comes from herself and Geoff.

In 1986, convinced they would never conceive, she and Geoff adopted baby Charlotte, then aged 15 months, and a cerebral palsy sufferer. ‘I had two sons already and we had adopted Charlotte, but I felt it would complete the family to have one child that we shared, one of Geoff’s. ‘To be honest, you blank out the pain. You just put it at the back of your mind. If you dwelled on it, you couldn’t cope. If you thought about it, you wouldn’t ever try for another one.

‘I haven’t carried all the babies to the end. A lot of my miscarriages came early. It is a lot more upsetting to carry a child 20 to 35 weeks and then lose it. Your immediate reaction is ‘I’ll never do it again’. But eventually you get over it, because time heals. But it doesn’t get any easier each time one dies.’

She found the death of Eleanor (who was severely handicapped) her worst experience. ‘She may not have been the sort of child that most people want, but we loved her. Her death was desperately painful for us. Nothing could be worse than that. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that completely. I’ll never forget her. We talk about her daily. Her photos are still around.’ With the exception of the death of her first baby, she has seen all of her offspring. ‘I’ve always asked to see them, to hold them, to look at them. They’re not people if you don’t look at them. They have to have identities. If they don’t have identities, there wouldn’t be any point. ‘I have photos of the little ones who have died. You’d be surprised how early a foetus has features, you’re not looking at some horrendous red blob. The photos help you to grieve for the baby.

‘At no time when we have lost a baby have we screamed and yelled and cried in front of Charlotte. You keep your grieving behind closed doors. My husband goes to church every week. I don’t go at the moment, because I’m not the right shape. But we do have very strong religious beliefs. We believe in life after death. Hopefully somewhere our children are all together.’ Dr Nicolaides say: ‘People may think she is mad and I am mad, but I am only trying to do what my patients want. And if that is to help them have children, then that’s what I do.’

There have been five haemorrhages during the pregnancy. During one of them, the Roomes phoned Dr Nicolaides at home in the middle of the night. ‘I just told them to get down to the hospital as fast as they could and I met them there,’ he says. ‘She was all right. She is a very brave woman.’ It was Dr Nicolaides who developed the bone marrow transplant technique which had to be carried out before the baby developed its own immune system, just 12 weeks into the pregnancy when it was less than three inches long. Marrow from Mrs Roomes’s hip was removed under local anaesthetic. It was purified and injected directly into the wriggling baby’s thimble-sized stomach using a hollow needle. The idea was to make him start producing his own rhesus negative blood.

Cherry explained: ‘Benjamin hasn’t got the same blood group as me, which was the idea of the bone marrow transplant.’

It didn’t work. It reduced the rejection process, but Cherry’s blood is still attacking the baby’s red cells. Now, the blood transfusions from Cherry not only top up his blood supply but also confuse his mother’s immune system so that it does not try to attack the growing baby.

‘Now it seems my body doesn’t recognise the baby as totally foreign, so it’s not having an all-out, vicious attempt at killing it, which has happened with my other babies. It’s only a half-hearted one,’ she says calmly, showing little of the emotional stress that must mark each minute of her day.

The transfusions carry their own deadly risks.

‘You never know with each transfusion if it’s going to kill him,’ she said.

‘The last one two weeks ago obviously created a strain on his heart. He was very quiet for several days afterwards, but I could feel him wriggling so I knew he was alive.

‘There is still one more transfusion to go before the birth. I just have not to think about anything going wrong. I have total trust in the team at King’s and I have to think they’re going to get it right.’

Her two sons Grant, 22, and William, 17, from her first marriage survived because the rhesus incompatibility was less severe.

Last year, Dr Nicolaides, who has been their mentor since 1985, offered them new hope with the experimental marrow transplant.

‘I have to believe him,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t take anything away from Charlotte and the boys that we want to have one last try.

‘At the moment, I’m the only one who’s agreed to have this treatment done. But if they don’t have people who are prepared to try, then they are never going to progress.

‘If we can get help and help others at the same time, I think that’s good.’

There’s a police car outside the hospital tonight. In front of it, an alcoholic sits on a plastic chair, can of Special Brew in hand. His friend – a man with a savaged face – goes into the hospital, pushing through the transparent plastic swing doors.

This is the scene in casualty at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell one recent weekend night. It is one of the busiest accident and emergency departments in London.

It’s a deprived hospital in a deprived area, but is known for its excellent nursing and medical care. And it was here that they just had the Walworth Bell pub shootings – six shootings – six acute emergencies in one hour, and with new doctors who had been in the job for only three days. It’s 9.30 pm and already there is a queue of walking wounded that will take at least a couple of hours to deal with. A sign on the cream walls says: ‘There is a . . . hour wait to see the doctor. Emergencies seen first.’ The empty space has been covered with blank card.

The recent record time for someone waiting in casualty for a bed was 26 hours – with a fractured leg. But at the moment, things aren’t too bad. And people seem resigned to long waits.

The casualty patients – anyone who is not acute – queue on benches in front of a partition. A blurred and soundless TV is set up high and on the floor are cigarette stubs, drink cans and litter. A baby is crying: staff say they try to see children in half the waiting time. Alongside the infant, a cardiac case, with deathly face, is wheeled down the corridor. Just inches behind the casualty queue, the other side of the screen, are six patients lined up on stretcher trollies. One woman writhes in agony with renal stones. She has an ochre-yellow face.

Next to the trollies, in this smaller than small casualty area, people are examined in one of three curtained cubicles – discussing their problems with the corridor – or one of the three cubicles. Nearby is the emergency room, where they take the unconscious, diabetic, cardiac, asthmatic and ‘trauma’ victims – for example stabbings and shootings – who need to go to theatre.

There’s room for five here, but in the last few months they’ve been accommodating eight – more than 100 beds were closed last year due to financial restraint. If someone dies in casualty, it is here (with perhaps an asthmatic child to the left and a chap with stab wounds to the right) that the relatives come to view the body behind curtains.

The nurses take calls on the emergency red phone – one RTA (road traffic accident) and a young man who has been critically beaten up. Yet tonight they say it’s really quiet.

Behind the reception area, out of the view of patients’ eyes, there is a blacklist on the wall of regular hospital abusers. And on the door there is a memo concerning a bogus female doctor who is operating in the area. An Asian man with a public school voice and what looks to have been a bottle smashed over his head comes to reception. His ear hangs off. ‘Human bite,’ the receptionist writes on his form. His boyfriend bit him. They refused even to be admitted to the same accident and emergency, so his lover has gone to Guy’s.

It’s 10.30 and the tramps have started to arrive for the night. Two dossers are fast asleep on the cushioned bench in the hallway. The nurses sometimes let them sleep off their drink on the trollies behind the screen: rather that than the men go out and injure themselves.

Wiflred is a regular and this is his second home (whether his first home is a fixed address is unclear.) He doesn’t come to be seen by a doctor, and brings his dog and squirrel and bottle of meths. If a fight is going on, he protects the staff.

Now they’re bleeping security. A man with a shaved head and a tracksuit, late forties, is punching fisticuffs in the air. He’s drunk and with a face full of aggro. His friend got beaten up, so he wants to bash up the nurses. Someone calms him down. Then he proceeds to stand in front of every trolley that they try to wheel through. He tells the nurse that he’s come to the hospital because he wants to become a Christian. Then he lies on the floor, head down on the red tiles, in front of reception.

‘Come on, go and sit in the corridor,’ says one of the ambulancemen. The aggressive man paces, threatens to beat up the staff, lolls his tongue out at the nurse, red eyes rolling, and hits his head. (It later turns out he has a psychiatric history – as do many of the patients who make their way across the road from the Maudsley.) At 2.30am, a staff nurse attempts to discharge him, medically fit. Her voice is rising – and he is jerking himself off through his tracksuit while she talks to him.

The nurses rush around and despite the stressed working conditions, there’s an amazing feeling of dedication and supportiveness. Morale may waver according to the bed situation, but the nurses are in reasonable spirits. To alleviate the problems, the hospital opened an emergency admissions ward with 20 beds in August, which cuts down emergency queuing. They are also planning a rehabilitation centre, which will free up even more beds.

At 11.35 three undertakers, grim faced and charcoal suited, come in to pick up a body. A boy pushes up against the reception glass. ‘I’ve got bad sunburn,’ he says. A woman arrives: ‘I think I’ve sprained my wrist.’ In emergency casualty, a policewoman emerges from a cubicle. She’s wearing a plastic apron. The staff are pressurised and she used to work in A and E – an unusual occurence, this – so she’s helping clean up the body of a young boy battered to death. The sister says she sees about one serious assault a week. Back in the reception office, a policeman is on the phone. ‘We’ve managed to identify the body, it’s Mark . . .’

Outside, a teenager keeps getting up from a trolley. He has overdosed on heroin. ‘I want to go ‘ome.’ The security guard keeps bringing him back. They’ve admitted one overdose each night this week. ‘Fackin’ ‘ell,’ he says. ‘You take too long to see me around ‘ere.’ Later on he walks out, on his fifth attempt. ‘Oh let him go,’ says the nurse. ‘We can’t keep on watching him.’

An ambulance has just knocked down a pedestrian. They bemoan the fact that the vehicle is now going to be off the road for three hours. The 999 calls are stacking up. They’re legally allowed only one patient in an ambulance – but a nurse says she saw seven getting out of one vehicle after a fight on New Year’s Eve.

Sid is one of the community of regulars. He has duly medicated himself before arriving. ‘Me and me mate was taking all sorts of pills.’ He has a cross tatooed on his forehead and a look of permanent mourning. He perks up to tell about the time he came to have his spleen taken out. That was when someone ‘who used to be a friend’ beat him up. Sid tells his war story with relish. He appears really to enjoy life – and its attendant attention – only when he’s ill. Tonight he’s in because he rode his pedal bike into a stationary vehicle when cycling around a corner .

His apparent enthusiasm is matched by that of Mr and Mrs Blidi, an Algerian couple, with their 22-month-old daughter Hannia. She wears Moslem head dress. ‘We all been here regularly,’ says Mr Blidi. ‘We go here, Guy’s or Westminster.’ Hannia fell down when she was in an aeroplane. She sleeps through her parents’ concern. One family bought their child in because she was having nightmares. The trouble is, GPs won’t go out in this area at night.

Nearby, a dear old lady – 90-plus with hennaed hair – lies wrapped in a red blanket. She looks spirited and her feet – bare and gnarled – protrude. She’s fallen over. The air smells deeply dank, of feet and the strong and acrid smell of anxiety sweat. There is no air conditioning. ‘Damn fool thing to do,’ her daughter, who lives with her, bellows. ‘What were you doing? Playing football?’ The daughter, wearing brick-coloured shorts and a vindictive expression, paces up and down. ‘People will think you’re loopy. They won’t be far wrong.’

It’s 3.45am. A lady who was mugged and has no money sits waiting for some coins from petty cash before she can go home. Inside, the nurses who work a nine-hour 23 minute shift remain. Outside, the police car has gone and three empty wheelchairs stand discarded.

ONE day senior ad man Alistair Treves was earning more than £100,000 – and the next he was on the dole. ‘I get paid £50 a week from social security because I have a wife and children.’ He had worked for leading London advertising agency Young and Rubicon for 21 years.

He used to have a chauffeur-driven car, his own fancy motor and holidays in Florida. Now he’s recognised on the number three bus where he sits on the top deck and practises Chinese breathing techniques and relaxation exercises.

He’s a rare breed: a senior professional who has been made redundant and will talk about it. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. These things occur in modern life.’

We’re sitting in the garden of his four-bedroom Victorian house in Dulwich – a better class of sun streaming onto our faces, mugs of Lapsang Souchong in our hands.

Alistair, 44, has a boyish haircut atop a long oval face with expansive pink cheeks and facial expressions that look as if he is mimicking himself. And he’s wearing Saturday-lunch-in-Bibendum kind of garb: pink polo shirt, grey cords and navy blazer.

Until he left his job on 10 January, he wore three hats: assistant managing director; director of client services, running a department of 80 people; and group director, handling £35 million worth of business. In the Eighties the agency had been making money, money, money. But then the recession hit and by 1989 it was biting with rottweiler teeth. Costs and overheads were out of control, they had too many senior people, and the budget for 1991 was looking dire.

‘I was called back from a day’s leave at 5.30 one Friday (30 November). I didn’t realise I was the third senior person to go in there. I was like a marked man.’

A white collar redundancy! The Gaultier fabric of his life threatened! Would he not lose his status and everything he had worked for? Would he have to reschedule his mortgage? Lose the respect of his wife? Tell the kids they couldn’t have mountain bikes?

He looks at his light and spacious residence: freshly painted, immaculately tidy, with a guinea pig in a pen in the kitchen, a wife planting in the garden and the sort of vehicles that a three and six-year-old leave strewn around the place. Owing to management upheavals, he no longer felt he fitted in at Y and R; and he’d long wanted to get the hell out but couldn’t think of a way.

His pay-off after 21 years was hardly guinea-pig feed. (He won’t reveal the sum. ‘There’s loyalty among thieves,’ he says. But it would be enough to keep the show on the road for about a year if he didn’t earn a penny. He can’t or won’t imagine the show coming to an end.) He had neither savings nor credit card debts. He has a pension. Y and R is still paying for his private health care. And homes like his £300,000ish one weren’t selling. So he worried, briefly, whether he might end up on a caravan site in North Wales or have to move to New Zealand.

Instead he went to Peckham Social Security and queued for three hours. Then he was told he had been misdirected and should really be at the Department of Employment. So he queued there – and was then told he was meant to be in Peckham. ‘It was a real eye-opener. I realised for the first time how lucky I am.’

Now he’s not exactly sitting around at home. He still gets up at 6.45. ‘No reason to stay in bed, there’s too much going on,’ says the man who has decided he wants to do ‘anything and everything’ in the communications business. He’s approached 90 headhunters and spends his time ‘meeting terribly interesting people’. He’s been doing a little consultancy work too.

But what of his ‘over £100,000’ mortgage? He howls with defensive laughter on being asked whether he will manage to pay it. It’s a forced laugh and his fists tense up noticeably. But he hasn’t reduced it. And will he keep his children at private school? ‘I’d clean the bloody streets to make sure they stayed.’ A lot of streets, I say; ha, ha, he says.

They’ve slashed their outgoings by a third. ‘We went into siege mentality.’ They’ve stopped buying spirits, reduced their wine intake and cut out new clothes and eating out. ‘It was strange coming from an industry of largesse – where I was eating out breakfast three days a week, lunch four days and dinner a couple of times. Now if anybody kindly buys me lunch, for a change I appreciate it.’

He’s become less arrogant. And he’s realised the fragility of life. ‘When you’re made redundant, it’s a bit like a death. You wake up to life and think if there are things you want to do, just get on and do them.’ But what of the chance that he might never be in full-term employment again? Pause. ‘Good question. I don’t know. I’ve got another 30 years of working (he’s 44). If I’m not in full-time employment again, it’ll be out of choice.’

So what of his loss of status? ‘I’ve never been hung up on that. I didn’t make advertising my life. I have a supportive wife, a young family, other interests.

‘My wife told the children that Daddy hasn’t got a job at the moment. Andrew occasionally worries about Daddy getting a job.’ And are his kid’s worries justified? Daddy hoots with laughter. ‘I’m laid-back. I know we’ll make it.’