The day that Brian Howe was buried, investigators noticed Mary laughing as they lowered his coffin into the earth. Mary grew up in a very hard environment, where everyone struggled to survive any way they could. We live, after all, in an age when journalism has replaced the confession box. Both women's marriages broke up both moved from their houses as if they could move from the past, and, like Mary Bell , changed their names both staggered through the first months of bereavement in a haze of tranquillisers and, in June Richardson's case, alcohol, then through the next three decades in a more invisible, muted pain. This voice of acute personal sorrow threw petrol on the flames. [CDATA[// >