Free Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived by Hailey Giblin Page A

climb a tree, you say?’ Huntley quizzed me. ‘It’s not the kind of thing that you would do?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Or not allowed to do, rather?’
    â€˜No, because my mum always said, “You climb trees, you fall and break your neck.”’
    â€˜Yes, you’ve had a really boring life, haven’t you?’ he said, pressing his earlier point.
    â€˜Well, it’s a bit unfair that I’m not allowed out of the street without an adult. All my friends are allowed out of the street. Even to go to the corner shop, I’d have to have an adult with me.’
    It was true. I was only allowed out on my own in our street, where my mum could walk out of her front door, look left – ‘She’s not down there’ – look right – ‘Oh, she’s down that end’ – and then she could call me in.
    So that was when Huntley beguilingly said, ‘Well,
I’m
an adult. Why don’t you go out of the street with
me
and we’ll go and climb some trees. Your mum knows me and so does your dad.’
    When I look back on it now, it was in a really charming – how can I put it? – a smooth-talking, befriending sort of way that he then said, ‘We’ll go out of the street, we’ll go and climb some trees and, you know, it’s all right because I’m an adult and you’ll be fine.’
    â€˜Oh, yeah,’ I gushed, ‘Mum and Dad know you and my auntie Sue lives next door and my cousin Katie lives next door and Mum knows Jackie, Katie Webber’s mum, and, oh yeah, OK then. OK.’
    Using that as his cue, Huntley folding his magazine once and then again, before stuffing it down the side of his seat. Then, beaming a smile at me, he repeated reassuringly, ‘Your mum and dad know me.
I’m
an adult, it’ll be fine.’
    The trap was set for me when I thought for a lingering moment that what he was saying was right. And that’s when the rebel in me accepted his offer with gusto. ‘All right then,’ I answered.
    Off we went, step by step, the safe confines of mystreet disappearing into the distance. Huntley led the way in what, to him, was a walk of lustful abandonment . He must have been preoccupied with the wicked thoughts of what he wanted to do to me running around inside his head. Knowing what I now know about Huntley, this is probably what he had done to the Soham girls, Holly and Jessica, before murdering them.
    I recall that, as we walked past the window of Katie’s house, her mum Jackie wasn’t there. She wasn’t by the window, as she had been when I arrived. We walked out of the sanctuary of the street, ambled through this alleyway that I used to walk through every morning on the way to school and then we went across a road before trekking through the grounds of my school – Huntley always leading the way, with me keenly following close behind.
    We were generally talking about school and where Katie had got to, and he was reassuring, saying, ‘I wonder where she could have got to? Don’t worry, I’ll tell her you were looking for her.’
    Picturing trees in my mind, I replied cheerfully, ‘Oh, don’t worry.’
    We were as talkative as each other. You couldn’t shut me up; I could have talked the head off a brush. This was going to be much better than a day in town. Climbing trees would make this a great Saturday. It was like going from felt to velvet.
    We walked for over 30 minutes, at about three to four miles an hour, which means it must have been a mile and half to two miles from the caravan. I didn’t know where we were going, and he never said where he was taking me. I just assumed we were going to climb trees.
    Huntley had done a good job in not arousing any suspicion in me about what he had planned in his brooding mind. It was as if he was an old hand at this.
    I blindly followed where Huntley led. We made our way through the school