Page 68 of Murder Most Haunted

Extract from They Do It With Strings podcast

‘The Tin House’: Episode Five

Noah: Welcome, Gloria. Can you tell me why you wanted to attend the haunted weekend at Atherton Hall?

Gloria: I suppose I wanted a chance to feel my son again.

He . . . died a little while ago. We were always close.

I was a stay-at-home mum when he was little, because I wanted to be with my baby rather than at work, and I was lucky enough to be able to afford to do that.

I told myself I could go back to nursing full-time when Robert was older, but I found I didn’t want to be apart from him more than I had to, he needed me, and by the time he was ready to go out into the world by himself .

. . well, that’s when the crash happened.

I still dream about him. And I enjoy the dreams because I get to touch and hold him again.

It’s the waking up that hurts. Everyone said to me ‘after the funeral, you can begin to move on’ and then it was ‘after the inquest, you can begin to move on’ and then ‘after the court case, you can begin to move on’. But even then, I couldn’t and I didn’t.

Noah: You believe that Robert made contact during the séance on Friday evening. Do you think he needed to tell you something, right a wrong, perhaps?

Gloria: The judge called it ‘an operational delay that led to the suspect’s blood alcohol tests taken at the hospital being rejected as evidence.’

All because of one useless police officer.

Too busy canoodling with one of the nurses to follow procedure and take the blood in time from the drunk driver who’d smashed into Robert’s car. And then, after the case fell apart, do you know what the family liaison woman said to me? She said, ‘You win some, you lose some.’ Just like that.

And now, even after a few years have gone by, it’s not the idiot driver who killed Robert that I think about. It’s the police officer who let him get away with it.

And I hate him.