The menacing of Margaret Anne

ON MONDAY night, a muggy evening, Margaret Anne Bell, a 19- year-old student, was walking back to her fifth-floor council flat in west Glasgow with her sister. They were chatting happily about her young niece. Lightheartedness had been, for almost two years, unusual, but for the past few weeks Margaret Anne had been beginning to relax. Soon, perhaps, she might even feel secure enough to enter her home alone. And then she glanced up at her flat and froze. The windows on the floor just below were lit, and in them, looking out, she could see an all too familiar form.

'My stomach turned,' she says. 'I was terrified. I stopped talking. I couldn't talk. I started to cry.' She ran to the nearest phone to ask her friend if she could spend the night at her house instead of going home. 'When I came back past the flats,' she said, 'I could see the lights were off, but he was still at the window. I felt numb. I couldn't believe that he was out so soon, and no one had warned me.'

The still form at the window above belonged to a man who had harassed her for almost two years, until she was physically sick with terror. At one point, she says, he was making silent phone calls at the rate of up to 40 a night.

A month ago her harasser pleaded guilty to two offences under the Telecommunications Act 1984, which makes malicious or frightening calls criminal, and was placed in a secure unit for mental treatment by court order. 'I was told by the police that they thought he might be inside for a year,' she says. 'How could he be let out into a flat so close? It was all for nothing, ringing the police, taking him to court.'

Like Diane Osborne of south London, whose husband's killer was cleared of manslaughter this week, she feels that the system of justice has entirely failed. 'It's not justice,' she says, 'It's so unfair.'

At first, when unsigned Christmas cards started arriving in October 1991, Miss Bell had thought it was a joke. Then anonymous phone calls began. The voice calling seemed to know everything about her. 'He told me he had been watching me,' she says. She called the police. They knew at once who it was likely to be: they warned him to stop. Three or four months later, silent telephone calls began. Sometimes they came all night. One night, at 4.15am, an application for a marriage licence was pushed through the door, in the names of Bell and King. Her harasser apparently harboured the delusion that he was Elvis 'the King' Presley.

Fear began to grip her. When she realised that her silent watcher lived just beneath her, it increased. 'I wouldn't go out or come in without someone with me. One day he followed me on the bus to college. So I started to stay in. If I wanted to go out I had to phone someone to come and pick me up. I was terrified in the house and

out of it.' Mostly, he simply stared.

She was never hurt physically: if she had been her case would have been taken more seriously. But the calls, the notes, the looks, and the fear of what might happen, robbed her of sleep and all peace of mind. She found it impossible to continue with her college course in accounts. Getting someone to escort her out all the time was hard and she found it impossible to concentrate. 'Once he stopped annoying me for a week. I was even more frightened then. Was he planning something?' Her health deteriorated. She had bouts of vomiting, and picked up a kidney infection her doctor thought might be related to stress. I just felt like crying all the time,' she says. 'The doctor and I talked about my going on tranquillisers.' On one day she would receive a letter advising her to think of this middle-aged man as a member of her fan club. Then he came and kicked at her door. When British Telecom put a trace on her calls, and he was taken to court, she felt that she had finally been delivered from a nightmare. And now the nightmare is back. 'I feel worse than before,' she says. 'Now I know there's nothing I can do.'

In the delusion that she was finally free, she had spent the past few weeks redecorating her home, banishing its ghosts. In the middle of this week she made a sad visit to the housing department. Were they going to move him? They said not, although he has been given a final warning.

The council is unwilling to turn a mentally ill man on to the street, and there are all too few places in suitable supported accommodation. The result is that while her harasser remains, for his own good, in the familiar surroundings of his home, Margaret Anne, his frightened victim, must leave the comfort of hers. She has no faith in assurances that her harasser will have changed. 'It seems so unfair,' she says. 'I'm not the problem. Why should I have to move? But I can't spend more nights lying there, listening for sounds in the corridor, or watching behind me when I come in, not daring to get in the lift.'

It seemed to her when she asked for a move that the housing officers thought she was trying it on to get a superior flat. 'I was told if they moved me I musn't seem to be bettering myself,' she says. She burst into tears and left. When the Independent rang, a spokesman for Glasgow City Council said that it was possible that Miss Bell was so upset by events that she had misunderstood what was being said to her. 'We will certainly move her, and to equivalent accommodation in the same area. We want her to come in again and discuss it,' he said.

Council officers did not know that the man had been about to be released. It is not their job to warn Miss Bell. Nor is it the probation service's job, or the police's. The Royal Commission on Criminal Justice piously suggests that victims should be kept better informed, but its recommendations would not have helped Miss Bell. Victim Support believes that statutory rights to information are needed if victims who fear for their safety are to be helped.

The truth is that it was no one's job to consider Margaret Anne Bell's interests. In the criminal justice system the offender is under a spotlight, but the victim is not even in focus. Her story is one more small illustration of that sad fact.

(Photograph omitted)