Where IS the brilliant children’s author who vanished into thin air 31 days ago?
As baff led police launch a new appeal today, her loved ones are still asking ...
AT THe height of her grief after her husband’s tragic drowning in Barbados, Helen Bailey sometimes wished she could simply disappear. The pain of losing him was often too much to bear, said the 51-year-old author, made all the worse by her enduring memory of him walking into the glittering, blue water while she lay sunbathing in her bikini and then watching him slipping beneath the surface as he was pulled under by a rip tide.
In a bid to come to terms with the agony of his death in February 2011, Helen began writing a blog, which eventually became a book called When Bad Things Happen In Good Bikinis after the unforgettable horror of John’s death on that picture-perfect beach.
There was a moment, she admits, in one passage, where she thought of simply putting her keys through the letterbox of their London home and running away.
‘My husband had disappeared and so would I,’ she wrote. ‘But where to?’ For the past month that very question has been haunting everyone who knows Helen.
Having left a note saying she ‘ needed some time to herself’ and was heading to her seaside holiday cottage in Broadstairs, Kent, Helen walked out of her large, detached home in Royston, Hertfordshire at 2.45pm on Monday, April 11, with her beloved miniature dachshund Boris at her side.
She has not been heard of since. She was seen by three walkers on the day she vanished and, possibly, the following day by a lorry driver, who says he saw a ‘bedraggled’ woman fitting her description walking along the road around ten miles away.
But aside from these brief sightings, nothing has been seen or heard of her since.
Her phone is switched off. Her bank accounts are inactive. Appeals to get in touch by police, friends and family have gone unanswered. Specialist officers at Hertfordshire Police have combed the fields and heathland around her £1.2 million home as well as drained the cesspit in her garden.
Today, exactly a month to the day since she vanished, Hertfordshire police will hold a press conference in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have new information that will help solve the mystery behind the author’s disappearance.
But, they admit, they are no closer to discovering where Helen has gone, or why, five years after her 65-year-old husband’s death and at a time when she appeared to have moved on with her life, she might want to walk away from it all.
For it seemed that Helen had finally come to terms with her crippling grief. Her memoir was published last autumn to great acclaim, was serialised in this newspaper and featured on Radio 4’s Women’s Hour.
And aside from becoming a vocal voice on bereavement and a comfort to thousands who read her book and ongoing blog, she had found love again with computer software expert Ian Stewart, 55, a man described as her ‘happy ending’ in the dedication to her book.
Having moved in together two years ago, they planned to marry this year.
‘The good news is that however bleak and despairing you feel right now, you won’t always feel this way, I promise you,’ she wrote in February in an article about finding love again.
But there was a hint, too, at the complexity of grief. ‘New love doesn’t erase old loss and cure grief, but brings with it complicated emotions and painful reminders.’
The grieving process, Helen maintained, is not linear, but a web of painful and confused emotions, punctuated with moments of unexpected happiness that give way, without warning, to waves of devastating loss.
EveN so, her friends insist that at the time she went missing, she was happier than she had ever been at any point since her husband’s death. They are utterly baffled and devastated by Helen’s disappearance. ‘She seemed to be very happy with her new partner,’ says David Glasser, 63, a neighbour and friend who comforted Helen in the aftermath of her husband’s death.
‘Obviously, she had a tragedy, she was devastated, but she dealt with it. She came through it, moved on and found someone else.’
According to her bereavement counsellor Shelley White: ‘Helen was well over that loss. She had moved forward with her life and was really loving the life that she lived.’
But at the same time, a re-reading of Helen’s writing — her book and the hundreds of thousands of words she wrote online — reveals how she returned again and again to the undimmed haunting memory ‘of my husband walking away from me into the sea’.
She was just 23 when she met John Sinfield, a former BBC executive who went on to set up his own licensing rights company, handling the merchandising rights of Tv and film characters such as Snoopy, Garfield and eT.
Having studied physiology at Thames Polytechnic, the public health inspector’s daughter, who grew up in the village of Ponteland in Northumberland, had embarked on a PhD but decided to swap her lab coat for life as a secretary.
While temping in 1987 she went to work at her future husband’s company, later recalling how she met father- of-two John, who had been married twice before, by the photocopier. They embarked on a relationship at the height of the ‘Yuppie’ boom, setting up home in North London and driving a Lotus elan.
They married in Barbados in May 1996 and, while they never had children, Helen went on to become a successful children’s author, best known for her teen fiction series featuring the characters electra Brown and Daisy Davenport.
The enduring happiness of their relationship undoubtedly made losing John even harder.
Helen would recall Sunday, February 27, 2011, as the day she was a ‘wife at breakfast’ and a ‘widow by lunch’.
The night before John died, they dined at their favourite restaurant, The Lone Star, drinking champagne cocktails and watching the sun set from the palm-fringed beach. Having married in Barbados, the island was a special place for them both.
THe following morning, they visited the hotel gift shop, where Helen, then aged 46, asked her husband’s advice about whether to buy silver or gold flip-flops, a memorable moment only because it would, given what followed, become so agonisingly trivial.
‘It makes me weep — the thought that I was doing ordinary things while this terrible life-ending and life-changing event was hurtling towards me, to us, to our marriage,’ Helen wrote.
Later that morning, John stepped up from his sun lounger and headed towards the ‘ deceptively calm’ sea. Within minutes he had been swept from the shoreline and Helen, who heard him call for help, saw him waving his arms before he fell forward, face down into the water.
A jet ski rider brought him back to the shore, but despite attempts to revive him, he had drowned.
Pensioner valda Hablion, who was on the beach that day and went to hospital in the ambulance with Helen and John, recalls her distress: ‘ She was a lovely lady, but was going through the worst experience you could imagine,’ she says.
‘I spent a lot of time talking to her, hugging her. I told her she would be strong again one day.’
Back home, Helen did appear to become strong, writing eloquently and poignantly about how grief engulfed her life and the surprising moments that constantly wrong-footed her.
There was her husband’s suitcase, which she never felt able to unpack, the half-used bar of soap she found in the shower he used in their holiday cottage in Broadstairs in Kent, the line of pillow cases she kept in the washing basket, separating her dirty washing from the items of clothing John had left there before they set off on holiday together.
Her words, initially penned in a blog called Planet Grief, struck a chord with many who had suffered a similar loss and who found comfort in the way she gave voice to their own complex, painful emotions.
In finding love again, she offered hope, too, even if some of her online followers were upset that it happened so soon.
‘It was like stepping on the internet equivalent of a landmine,’ she says. She met Ian Stewart online through a Facebook bereavement group in 2011, seven months after John’s death, but it took time for a relationship to develop.
The father-of-two had suffered his own loss when his wife Diane collapsed and died in their garden in 2010. At first he and Helen simply exchanged messages about the despair they faced.
Their first date — a trip to the National Portrait Gallery and an afternoon screening of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in Leicester Square — was, Helen later recalled, a ‘disaster’.
‘It was too much, too soon,’ she wrote. But without Ian, she realised: ‘Life felt even darker than it already was.’ She decided to give their relationship another go.
Two years ago, Helen sold the home
she had shared with John and bought a new house with Ian and his two sons, a stunning detached Arts and Crafts home on the outskirts of Royston with an acre of land and an outdoor swimming pool.
‘It’s not easy living in a household that has only come together because of the death of other people,’ she wrote online in February, ‘but losing those we love has made us cherish what we have now.’
Recently, however, there were signs of the tension she felt transitioning from her old life to her new one.
There are references to her regret at her ‘ big mistake’ at leaving London for Hertfordshire and there were times, she wrote, when she would look up at the sky and think: ‘JS, come back and rescue me! The big experiment is over. You can come home now.’
Writing on her blog in March, she quoted a message sent to her by another widow: ‘The more I do, the more I achieve, the further I feel away from him.’
According to friends, matters were further complicated by Ian’s health problems — he was admitted to hospital around the time of the fifth anniversary of her husband’s death.
According to a friend who spoke to the Mail, Helen told of her fears of being bereaved for a second time.
The friend recalled: ‘She said: “It’s going to happen to me again.” ’
Helen also admitted that she was struggling to cope in her role as carer, sending a text that read: ‘TLC is wearing thin.’
But a week before Helen vanished, Ian was given the all-clear. She took to Facebook to announce her happiness, writing: ‘Let’s start the year again.’
Indeed, her final social media posting came from her Twitter account, two days before her disappearance, praising the gastro pub in Royston where she and Ian had just been for a celebratory meal.
Given such evidence, then, is it really possible that Helen Bailey has chosen to disappear?
Police have found no evidence to suggest she wanted to harm herself — or that she has been harmed. Officers have also told the Mail she may have had access to a four-figure sum of cash when she disappeared, which would have enabled her to lie low for a considerable time.
There are also tantalising clues in her book where she reveals that she was drawn to the idea of disappearing even before John’s death.
On one occasion she recounts how she ‘dramatically announced that I was going to disappear’ standing by the front door with her previous dog, Rufus, on his lead. She explained: ‘I’d seen a programme about people who just vanish to start a new life under a new identity and bolting appealed to me.’
Her husband, she said, laughed off her plan, telling her that it would be easy to spot her and advising that she ‘ditched the dog and dyed my hair blonde’.
They laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, though, intriguingly, she pointed out that the key to disappearing successfully was ‘not to announce you intend to’. But Helen didn’t appear to be a woman who kept secrets. Over the past few years, her innermost thoughts were poured out in the most public manner, making the ongoing mystery around her almost unbearable.
Her final blog post was on February 27th, the fifth anniversary of John’s death, when she wrote: ‘We may feel as if we are going backwards, but we’re not, I promise you.’
She may have been writing for her readers but, with the benefit of hindsight, it is impossible not to question if she was also trying to reassure herself.
But a month after her disappearance, those waiting for news of Helen are determined to remain positive. Some cite her strength in the face of adversity and her resilience as reasons to be optimistic.
Valda Hablion describes her as ‘a strong person’ and ‘a lovely lady’.
‘I just hope she is all right,’ she says. ‘The one thing I do know is that she would not do anything to harm her dog. She was crazy about her dog and spoke a lot about him.’
Friend David Glasser adds: ‘We have to remain positive. There could be a number of reasons. People take breaks from life and relationships all the time.
‘So we are going to try to look at this positively until we hear otherwise and hope she has just gone on some kind of holiday.’