Let This Be Our Secret Read online

  Hazel had a sheltered upbringing in the country. Her parents were God-fearing Baptist folks – just like Howell’s. She was an excellent mother and a seemingly dutiful wife. She had little personality but was clearly seduced by his charm and intellect. She and Colin Howell had already made each other’s acquaintance through church circles, and they would chat when he dropped off little Lauren to the Mulberry Bush Nursery School at Mountsandel, Coleraine, where his young daughter would spend most weekday mornings. At one time Hazel had also been a patient at the dentist’s clinic. Gradually, the relationship began to develop.

  It was in the water at the swimming pool of the Riada Leisure Centre in Ballymoney that the affair proper took hold. It was early summer 1990. Lesley, who was pregnant with Jonathan and resting at home, had arranged for the children to have swimming lessons, and Hazel took her two along as well. She was one of a number of mothers in attendance, but Howell was the only father there. Most of the other women sat and had coffee as they watched their children in the pool, but Hazel was keen to learn how to get her breathing right while doing the front crawl. She was impressed by Howell’s swimming technique and she soon found the confident and charming father to be a willing instructor, holding her waist high with both hands as she practised her strokes.

  As the weeks passed the two began to flirt. One afternoon as he held her up in the water he noticed her skin was more slippery than usual: she had been using a particularly rich body moisturizer and before he could stop himself he ran his hand over her upper legs, and then across her pubic area towards her stomach and back again. Half expecting a slap on the face, he excused himself at once: ‘If I’m having wrong thoughts about you, you’ll have to forgive me.’ But he was relieved, as well as heartened, when the young mother responded: ‘I’m not so innocent myself,’ before she gently pushed him to one side, leaving him standing, as she swam away.

  That day in the deep end of the pool an invisible line had been crossed and it was not long afterwards when they kissed and embraced for the first time. It happened after they had taken their children out for a walk on the beach at Castlerock on an outing with other families organized by the church’s Children Special Services Mission. Afterwards in the bathroom at his home as they were washing the sand out of their children’s hair and toes Hazel rubbed her hand on his arm. Before they knew it they had stepped into one of the bedrooms, out of sight of the children, and were kissing and touching each other.

  They quickly found an excuse for Howell to call over to the Buchanans’ house at certain times. He played in a church music group and was handy with the guitar. Hazel said she wanted him to teach her some new chords. He would come to the house with sheets of music and strum away while she sat at the opposite end of the sofa with her own guitar resting on her knee and tried to follow what he was doing. Trevor once arrived home unexpectedly and was not impressed. Even though the pair had always anticipated how he, and they, would react if he suddenly appeared unannounced Trevor realized almost at once the guitar lesson was not as innocent as it looked. ‘Hello, Colin,’ the young policeman said, as he summoned his wife to the kitchen. Hazel tried to explain that it was all very harmless and said she wondered why her husband could get into such an agitated state. Suspecting that Howell’s motive for being there was not restricted to music, Trevor left the house and drove off in a fury.

  The first time they had sex together was early summer 1990, probably in June. It was in the Buchanans’ home. Trevor was out, but Howell brought his guitar with him just in case. Hazel was dressed in a denim miniskirt and a low-cut, sleeveless blouse. The heavy scent of her perfume was an irresistible invitation. Years later, he would identify this as the moment when he got caught up in a fatal tangle that was just as much her making as it was his: ‘I was walking into the spider’s web …’ Then and there they made love and both enjoyed it. But once it was over Hazel went into immediate denial, feigning surprise that it had actually taken place at all: ‘Did that really happen? Did that really happen?’ she questioned her lover who had just made his debut in the marital bed. Howell would recount to police after his arrest : ‘I remember saying to her: “We’ve just had sex. Do you want me to explain it to you?” ’

  The affair continued with the couple stealing moments together whenever possible. Typically Howell was not averse to taking chances and sailing very close to the wind when it came to seeing his lover. On three occasions he actually would insist on coming to the house when Trevor was there, asleep in bed, having come back from night duty. Once Hazel had pleaded on the telephone with the headstrong dentist not to come, but he just could not resist taking the risk anyway. He arrived in the utility room to take his nervous lover into his arms. Years later he explained to police: ‘I knew Trevor had a gun. It was just to see her. When you don’t see much of each other and it’s full of passion … You plan to see each other, then realize you can’t. It was just to see her.’

  Sometimes Hazel would tell her husband she was going shopping and then rendezvous with her lover in nearby towns such as Ballymena. They would also arrange to meet while out running and cycling on the roads as part of their keep-fit routines. Sex was usually once a week – sometimes at Howell’s clinic at night when all the staff had gone home, and sometimes at Hazel’s house when Trevor was out. The Buchanans’ garden backed on to Mountsandel Wood, a forest area on steep slopes beside the River Bann. Wearing his running gear, Howell would disappear from the road into the trees, before emerging again to climb the perimeter fence of the forest and sneak quietly through the back door. Sometimes he even climbed through the bedroom window.

  The couple’s movements in public were always well choreographed and nobody suspected a liaison, even when they appeared together. Friends remember meeting Colin, Lesley, Hazel and the children in the centre of Coleraine, when Lesley was on crutches after falling and breaking a bone in her foot. They thought the other woman was there to assist Lesley but later realized this was not the only reason.

  Trevor’s brother Gordon Buchanan remembers how he and his wife Donna called at the house at Charnwood Park one afternoon. The two brothers took their children for a walk to a nearby rugby pitch, leaving the wives on their own. There had been no hint of any marital discord but by the time the men returned Hazel had taken off on her bicycle, leaving Donna on her own. Trevor was not pleased, as Gordon recalls: ‘I can only speculate now where she was going. Trevor seemed overly anxious and agitated as it was getting dark and, looking back, I think he had an inkling that Hazel was having an affair … For most people, it would be unthinkable to leave a visitor in the house on their own and head off on a bicycle. It was downright rude. There had to be some other reason for doing that. It left us uncertain about the relationship generally – we thought it was so bizarre.’

  The Buchanans’ neighbours often noticed Howell driving past the house in his Renault Savanna estate car and parking outside. It happened several times a week, mostly when Trevor was away. The couple managed to spend time together on church away days as well. On one occasion a group of church friends and their children went on an outing to Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast. Trevor was on duty and no doubt preoccupied with baby Daniel. Lesley stayed at home and had a sign up on the kitchen wall which read: ‘Boring wife – Tidy house’. But Howell and Hazel spent most of the afternoon on their own away from the main party. There were other trips as well, one to a stately house in Donegal, just across the Irish border. Hazel’s church duties involved helping to organize the days out and if the proposed dates did not suit Howell because of his dental commitments, she would see to it that the dates were changed so that he would be able to come along too.

  The lovers quickly devised their own secret method of maintaining lines of communication. He would tap in her phone number and then hang up just before her push-button telephone rang out. When she heard the faint click from the phone, she would know it was Howell wanting to talk and would ring him back as soon as she could. If the conversation las
ted more than ten minutes, the call would automatically be registered on their itemized telephone bills. This meant that after every nine minutes they put the receivers down and took turns to call each other back. The discussions often lasted for over an hour and were usually late at night or in the early hours when their children and Lesley were asleep and Trevor was out on duty.

  Hazel was asked by the police in 1991 after her husband’s death why she had the affair. She said that when she, Trevor and the two children had moved to live in Coleraine in March 1986, she had found it difficult living away from her wider family circle back in Omagh. It took at least two years, she claimed, before she and Trevor felt more settled in the area. She explained that she was by nature very quiet and did not find it easy to mix socially: for a long time she didn’t go out much, and if she did she was always accompanied by Trevor. Then in January 1989 she had found the part-time job as an assistant at the nursery school, five mornings a week. It was here, she claimed, that she began to develop a more independent outlook, working with the children, meeting other young mothers and making friends – one of them Howell, whom she recognized from the church.

  Recalling the impact Howell quickly made on her life, she told police: ‘Really from this time onwards, I began to … [realize] there was more to life than merely being in the home. I found myself … not depending on Trevor as much. Trevor saw a change in my attitude for which, for the most part, he was not in favour of – he preferred me as I was before. This initially led to arguments between us and, at times, a lack of communication set in. We did not huff, as it were, but felt no real closeness. I could see that Colin was a different type of person from Trevor in that he was friendly, more outgoing and easy to talk [to], with plenty of chat …’

  In the summer of 1990 Hazel became sick, and a pregnancy test confirmed that she was carrying a baby. But who was the child’s father? She was sleeping with both her husband and her lover at this stage. Howell, as usual, hadn’t cared too much about taking precautions when they made love. Around that time when she was having sex with Trevor a condom had burst – so in theory it was possible that he was the father. But Trevor had brown eyes and dark hair. What if the baby had blond hair and blue eyes, just like Howell’s children? More telling still, what if the child emerged with an unusual genetic feature which ran in Howell’s family: syndactyly, a fairly rare hereditary condition whereby some of the toes or fingers are ‘webbed’, i.e. still fused together by ‘webs’ of skin. What would Trevor make of it if the baby was born with a rare foot defect?

  Hazel told her lover she could not cope with nine months of uncertainty and the subsequent fallout if the baby was obviously his. Even though Howell had initially insisted that he would claim full parental rights if it was proved he was the father, he ultimately relented and agreed that they should arrange an abortion. In many ways he would have been happy to keep the child but he feared that the pregnancy might end the relationship with Hazel which was so vital to him now as to be bordering on obsession.

  Early one morning in late summer 1990 Hazel slipped out of bed as her husband slept beside her. She dressed without making a sound, gently closed the back door, opened the garden gate and hurried through Mountsandel Forest to the end of a road where Howell was parked.

  The lovers were facing an unexpected crisis and Howell quickly and quietly put in place arrangements to deal with the emergency. After all he had found himself in this situation before and he knew who to call, and where to go. They would have to go away for a day or two. Later that morning, Trevor would find a note from his wife stuck on the bathroom mirror, which read: ‘Going through a really hard time. Don’t worry about me. Don’t try and find me. I’ll be back in a few days. I love you. Hazel.’ Howell didn’t have to leave a note. Instead he told his wife he was going to a conference in London and the night before, he left two of his children with one of his sisters in another part of Northern Ireland before returning to Coleraine in the early hours to pick up Hazel.

  Soon afterwards, the lovers were speeding down the M2 motorway towards Belfast International Airport. They were due to catch an early morning British Airways shuttle flight to London Heathrow. Hazel hoped that none of the other departing passengers would recognize either of them as she and Howell slipped into their seats in different parts of the cabin. The tickets for the flights had been bought at a travel agent’s outside Coleraine, where Howell was confident nobody knew him.

  Disembarking from the aircraft, making their way through arrivals and boarding the Tube for the city centre, they were still careful to keep their distance. They got off at Ealing and she followed him, looking over her shoulder to make sure there were no familiar faces or Northern Irish accents in the immediate vicinity. As they walked into the reception of the clinic, a young lady in a white tunic behind the desk greeted Howell with a smile: ‘Good morning, sir.’ Running her pen down the list in the appointments book, she ticked off the name and accepted an envelope stuffed with banknotes. ‘Would your friend like to come this way?’

  That night the couple stayed at a B&B close to the clinic where Hazel had the procedure the following morning. The staff did not want her to leave that day because of the after-effects of the anaesthetic, but the confirmed tickets for the return journey meant that they had no choice but to go. Howell literally had to hoist Hazel upright as she staggered to a waiting taxi. On the flight back to Belfast, she felt weak and tearful, but everything had gone to plan, as they had hoped. By the time they reached Coleraine, Hazel was virtually out on her feet with exhaustion, feeling guilty but still hugely relieved that an unsuspecting Trevor would never know anything about the abortion. She passed off the fairly substantial bleeding she suffered in the days which followed as a particularly heavy period.

  4.

  Buchanan–Elkin: ‘She’s the right one …’

  Hazel Elkin was born in March 1963 and brought up in the townland of Gillygooley on the Drumquin Road outside Omagh, where her parents, Jack and Peggy Elkin, had a dairy farm. The Elkins had a big family, and Hazel had five sisters: Winnie, Pauline, Jacqueline, Lorna and Carmen, and four brothers: Raymond, Mervyn, Clarke and David. The family were well known and well respected in the area for their devout Baptist beliefs. Jack Elkin was a church elder and, along with his wife, devoted much of his free time to the development of the church in Omagh, where Hazel was baptized. The Elkins went to church each Sunday morning and evening without fail, with the children also attending Sunday School in the afternoon.

  Unlike most of her five sisters, Hazel was never one for the land. She had a fear of mice and preferred to be with her mother in the kitchen, and otherwise helping with the housework. Life on the farm was tough, and Jack was a strict disciplinarian with a quick temper; he expected each of his children to pull their weight by helping out with the various chores whenever they had any free time. Hazel’s early years were fairly uneventful, apart from one or two fairly typical childhood misadventures, such as the time she was left with a large scar after a trailer ran over her foot. Some years later when she was at Gillygooley Primary School she was struck by a bread van after running out from behind a school bus.

  She went to Omagh High School on the Crevenagh Road, opposite Campsie playing fields. She wasn’t academically gifted. Even at this stage, she was far more interested in style and her appearance than in maths and English. Former staff remembered her as being a bit distant and vague. She was an average pupil in the classroom but her performance was much better in the gymnasium and sports hall, and she once captained one of the school’s netball teams. She rarely fell foul of the teachers, although on a fourth-year school trip to France and Holland she and a friend had to be admonished. While in Noordwijk aan Zee, a small Dutch fishing village, the two girls had invited the attentions of a couple of local boys who were afterwards warned to keep well clear of the hotel in which the pupils were staying.

  Hazel’s first serious boyfriend was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1979. Twenty-one-year-ol
d Mervyn McLaughlin from Newtownstewart, ten miles away, was on his way to Gillygooley when he crashed. She was just sixteen and was shattered by his death; she even kept part of his damaged motorbike in his memory. After leaving school in the same year she got a job as a stitcher in Desmond’s shirt factory in Omagh. She also worked part time for a short while in Elliott’s busy grocery and confectionery shop in the town’s Campsie area. It was there that she met her future husband, Trevor Buchanan, whose family came from the townland of Strawduff, outside the village of Dromore, also near Omagh. Twenty-year-old Trevor, a young reservist in the RUC at the time, would call into the shop where local police officers would often buy their provisions. Some would even get their pay cheques cashed there.

  Trevor met Hazel not long after his closest friend, John Wray, got married. John – also a policeman – and Trevor had been inseparable. Trevor was his friend’s groomsman at his wedding in December 1979 and the following May John and his new wife Sheila took their seats at the same restaurant table with Hazel for Trevor’s twenty-first birthday. Hazel had bought him a watch.

  Hazel was Trevor’s first serious girlfriend. He was keen to know what his family thought of the new girl in his life, and shortly after introducing her he asked his sister Melva for an opinion. Even though she was nine years Trevor’s junior, Melva was impressed by Hazel’s appearance and friendliness. ‘Yeah,’ she said to her brother. ‘She’s the right one.’ She would be one of the bridesmaids at their wedding, along with Hazel’s sisters Pauline and Carmen.

  Hazel and Trevor got married on 11 July 1981 at Omagh Baptist Church. It was a happy family occasion. All of the one hundred guests who were invited turned up on the day. The in-laws got on well, although Trevor’s brother Gordon missed the ceremony as he had accidentally locked his keys inside his car. One of the guests would say that they had never seen Trevor happier: ‘He had this funny wee laugh and he just giggled all day long.’ There was no music or dancing. Once the photographs were out of the way and the meal had ended, everybody went home. Melva still clearly remembers watching the Eleventh Night bonfires light up the sky – in advance of the traditional Orange Order marches of the following day – as she headed back to her brother Gordon’s home in Glengormley, outside Belfast, where he then lived. The young couple honeymooned in Stafford in England, at the home of Trevor’s Aunt Sadie.