by David Smith
At five o’clock, the jury filed silently back into court.
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
I’m in the flat with Dad and Maureen. Dad has got the telly on, turned down low, all afternoon. I sit on my chair next to the electric fire, huddled and shivering over the glowing bars even though it isn’t really cold. Maureen is in the kitchen, clattering about, pretending to do something practical but I know that she’s just moving stuff about on the work surfaces. Dad is rubbing his stubbly chin, frowning, standing at the balcony doors and staring at the mist coming slowly down from the moors.
Teatime.
None of us are hungry, we’re all waiting . . . The flat is more quiet than I can remember it. Why is it so quiet? I sit jigging my feet and smoking fags like they’re going out of fashion. Although I’ve always believed that Myra and Ian will go down, in the last couple of hours my faith has begun to waver like a bad radio signal. Suddenly I’m scared. Proper, old-fashioned, shitting-the-seat of my pants frightened. I still believe that Ian is facing a long stint inside, but her . . . what if she’s able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes? What if the fact that she’s a woman blinds them to what she’s done? I picture her walking out of court, free to go home, and although I know her life will be hell if that happens, it puts the wind up me so much you could stick a ribbon on my backside and pretend I’m a fucking kite. She might get a nominal sentence and be out in a couple of years . . .
Then the news comes on.
Dad dives across the small sitting room and I leap forward, switching up the volume dial as far as it will go on the television set. In my head, I’m certain that I’ve sat down again, but later I realise I’ve only bent my knees and am crouched halfway between telly and chair.
The waiting is almost over. I will the grating music to stop and clench my fists, staring at the newsreader, a slab-faced idiot who probably hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about half the time. But here it is, and Maureen comes in from the kitchen, standing stock-still in the doorway, eyes rooted to the screen, just like Dad and me.
‘Moors killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley have been sentenced to jail for life . . .’
Relief hurtles through my veins, making me woozy, drunk with liberation from my darkest fears yet. I stare silently at grainy monochrome shots of the moor, then at the smiling faces of Edward Evans, John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and the unfound victims, Keith Bennett and my friend Pauline Reade.
Two more faces fill the screen. Bang: Brady and Hindley’s mugshots have never been seen until now and their impact is like a gunshot echoing across the city. Two hard, frozen faces, two sets of black, dead eyes without any breadth of human feeling. The room blisters and I feel as if I’m hallucinating. My heart seems to be slowing down, down, down.
I turn my face to the wall. I’ve walked away from the trial battered, shattered, and bitter. I feel crucified and abandoned, the outsider, the bastard, all over again. I remember the policemen who interviewed me and realise that not one has put an arm around my shoulder, or offered a reassuring, ‘Well done, lad.’ After months of talking and more talking, exploding anger and shared tears, every last one of them has disappeared into silence.
I turn back and glance at Maureen, wondering if she is about to break down. But I see relief on her face too, as if she feels that the child she carries will be born into a safer world.
A small kernel of hope begins to grow inside me.
The next morning, those mugshots are everywhere, but at least the headlines read: ‘Jailed for Life’. I squeeze Maureen’s hand as we walk quickly past the newspaper shop and back to the flat. We think the nightmare is over.
But it’s just beginning.
IV
Coming Down Fast
1966–71
Chapter 17
‘The people of the neighbourhood could not forget . . .’
– The Times, 18 July 1969
From David Smith’s memoir:
Maureen goes into labour three days after the end of the trial. Paul Anthony Smith is born on 9 May 1966, a healthy and beautiful 9 lb boy, but even as I take him into my arms I feel the darkness gathering around us. I bend over this tiny new soul, wanting to hold back the void like a wall against a howling wind. I am filled with fierce love and the desperation that comes of knowing my world is no place for such innocence.
It’s little more than a year since I buried my daughter. When Angela Dawn was laid to rest beside Mum and Frank the brown-eyed soldier boy, she took with her the best six months of my life. Back then I knew who I was – I had an identity that was grounded in parenthood and marriage. Even Wiles Street had changed from something grim and grubby into a cheery little spot. Where did the good times go? I remember it all with a sorrow so deep it feels like a weight pulling me to the ground: the factory hooter, the smoke, the coke-and-iron smell of the railway, the hot reek of vinegar and newspaper from the chip shop, posing in front of the brilliantly lit jukebox at Sivori’s, and being accepted at last by the neighbourhood elders. But not much more than a year after Angela came into our lives she was gone, and the dream with it, buried even further than the little white coffin in the damp earth.
I crave my old life and secretly lose myself in memories. Wiles Street had no hot water or home comforts and its outside loo stank like a ferret’s arse, but I’d give anything to go back. Hattersley is a shit hole, nothing but row upon row of paper-thin council houses, skyscrapers and sizzling electricity pylons. Everyone hates us here; the flat is the only place we’re safe, even though the reality is that we’re trapped in a stinking tower block in the aftermath of a murder case. But Paul makes it seem much brighter than that.
Our problems start at the front door. The council turn up regularly to erase the graffiti – ‘Child Killers Live Here’ and ‘Murdering Bastards’ – sprayed across the walls. The press still pester us, so to get them off our backs I tell them we’ve nothing more to say and are moving abroad. I get my £1,000 off the News of the World, but there’s no money after that, not like they promised. No one will give me a job and we’ve got no friends any more. Our world is becoming smaller every day, and in the end, when you only have a few walls to keep you sane, it begins to drive you crazy.
The atmosphere inside the flat is stifling us all. I sit alone more and more often, staring out at the balcony and seeing them: Myra and Ian, leaning out over the barrier together, as they used to do so often, admiring the view, Ian with his long arm and bony finger, pointing out to Myra the areas of Mottram and Glossop and beyond that . . . the moor.
I think alone and I walk alone. At night, when it’s dark and there is no one about apart from the stray cats and dogs that roam the estate, I leave the tower block and pound the empty streets until my feet burn. I try to talk ‘it’ out of myself, whatever ‘it’ is. I cry and even shout in the darkness, growing frustrated and furious at not being able to figure out the ‘why’ of it all. The cold air clears my smoke-filled lungs but does nothing to empty my head of the thoughts that are sending me gradually insane. My mind tricks me into feeling a warm, heavy breath at my elbow and the pad and thump of huge paws behind me. In the privacy of the suburban night, I am joined by a polar bear and tigon; we’re together, trapped and demented within the same cage. Deep inside myself I’m screwed up like an old chip paper, wrapped in a black aftermath of murder. My head bursts with the filth of it all: I feel it pouring out of my ears and nose, the green-tasting waste that makes me want to vomit. This is supposed to be over, life is supposed to have gone on. My life. But it’s getting worse, by the week, by the day, by the hour.
Witness.
The word echoes far into the green gloom of my mind: witness, witness, witness, witness . . . It has its own beat, that word, and with the polar bear and tigon at my side, I walk in time to its rhythm. I was and will forever be a witness, and yet those learned men in wigs and robes, the dignitaries who relied upon my evidence, condemned me as a devil’s disciple, accusing
me of every horror the human spirit can contain. If I am a witness, why do I feel so much pain and confusion? Why am I so hated? I’ve never claimed to walk with Jesus, but the devil isn’t my master and never was or shall be. For all that I am, I am far from that.
I walk on, leaving Hattersley’s mean lights to fade, indistinguishable from the pale glow of the city. Roads become country lanes that I’ll never see again. I ask myself questions no one can answer; I smoke a cigarette down to the filter until it burns my fingers, and I look up at the starless sky realising that what I need most is someone to listen to me. A tear scalds my cheek as I lean back against an ancient dry-stone wall. Someone to listen: if I could just find that person, it might help take away the filth and the pain.
My world is beginning to buckle in on itself. I can feel it crashing around me, burying me alive under the rubble. I wipe away the tear angrily, telling myself I don’t need that shit. I get up, and walk away from yet another dark lane. I head home, finding the main road at last, and turn up past the New Inn, keeping my eyes averted from the defaced street sign on Wardle Brook Avenue.
I get into the lift at Underwood Court and realise I am alone; the polar bear and tigon are already on their long journey back to the concrete enclosures and crippling cages of Belle Vue. I step out of the lift and listen for the sound of their claws on the pavements into the city. But the silence and the night are as one: dark, endless, deafening.
The unemployment office has finally given up on me. Scores of job interviews have ended the same way: I’m always rejected as ‘unsuitable’, but how can I be unsuitable for sweeping floors or stacking shelves? The precise nature of my affliction always manifests after the question: ‘Don’t mind me asking, but are you the David Smith? The one connected to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley?’
Connected. I hate that word. People think I’m attached to those two by some kind of monstrous umbilical cord. If only they knew.
The final straw comes when I apply for work at the African print factory. I answer the same question asked by a friendly personnel manager and, to my amazement, she thanks me for my honesty and offers me the job. I’m ecstatic, and proudly march into the dole office with my interview card signed and rubber-stamped with an official start time at the factory. The grin on my face is so wide it hurts my jaw, but I swear it lights up the miserable little dole office. I ask for my insurance cards, and then catch the 125 to Hattersley, signed off and legal.
Maureen and Dad are delighted with my news – Maureen especially, because she’s pregnant again. Dad is on the dole himself and hates being out of work. He tells me that once I’ve got my feet under the table at the factory I should let him know straight away if I hear of anything going – ‘no matter what’ – and put in a good word for him.
It feels like the old days when I get up the next morning: I spend ten minutes playing with Paul on the sofa while Maureen does my pack-up. Then I’m off to catch the bus with the sort of cheerful goodbye I can’t remember giving or receiving for far too long. The only regret I have is that Dad isn’t coming with me.
My stop is a few hundred yards past the factory. As the bus draws level with the entrance, I look outside: a huge number of men are gathered before the iron gates and to the right, at the window of the personnel office, is the kind lady who interviewed me, gazing down at the crowd. I imagine that the workforce waiting at the gates is routine and jump down from the bus determined to do my best in the hours ahead of me. But as I approach the mob, I hear a collective rumble of anger and someone shouts: ‘That’s him, that’s the bastard. Murderer!’
I freeze. Something more threatening than straightforward antagonism comes away from the men, and a voice within tells me to keep my mouth shut no matter what. This isn’t the time for bravado.
Three men come towards me. I grip my pack-up box tight enough to turn my knuckles white.
‘You Smith?’ one asks.
I nod.
‘Turn around and fuck off, this is no place for you.’
I mumble something about the office knowing about everything, but he shuts me up with a jab in the chest and snarls: ‘I couldn’t give a fuck. I’m the Union in this place and the Union is telling you to fuck off for your own good.’
I don’t need further explanations. As I walk away, their fury rings in my ears: ‘Murdering bastards, they should’ve hanged the fucking lot of you!’ One man attempts to calm the situation, but his words aren’t any consolation to me: ‘Easy now, steady, lads, just let the cunt go.’
Their jeers follow me along the street.
By the time I’ve reached the dole office, I’m trembling with fear and resentment, aware that this was probably my last shot at getting a job. When a concerned supervisor beckons me over to listen to the story of my morning, I finish by throwing my pack-up box and insurance cards across the counter, yelling, ‘I’ve had enough of this fucking shit – you can shove my cards up your arses!’
Two days later, a brown envelope with the Social Security office logo arrives at Underwood Court. The letter within informs me that: ‘Due to exceptional circumstances you are no longer required to seek employment.’ Graciously, the civil servant dogsbody who drafted the letter assures me: ‘This decision will not affect your entitlement to unemployment benefit at the awarded rate.’
I screw the letter up into a tight ball and bin it.
Geoffrey Potter – I always address him as ‘Mr Potter’ – is a gentleman in both senses of the word, kindly, thoughtful and calm. He’s a new breed of probation officer, nothing like the retired coppers of old. Mr P has ‘supervised’ me for a sizeable chunk of my life and I respect him totally, but there’s just one problem: he’s too nice.
Ironically, he’s a born listener, but I find it impossible to offload on him. He doesn’t have the distance and authority that I need in order to function with someone in his position; instead he worries over me as if we’re real friends, willingly dipping into his small ‘probation fund’ if he suspects I’m a few bob short. Years ago, he’d walk across from his office in Gorton Town Hall to seek me out in Sivori’s, after I’d typically forgotten our appointment from days before. Each time, he’d give me an old-fashioned look and ask if I was hungry, then without waiting for my answer he’d order a hot Holland’s meat-and-potato pie with gravy, a frothy espresso and a packet of fags. We’d chat easily while I ate my free dinner, with one ear cocked to the sounds of the jukebox.
But those days are long gone and on this particular morning I’m standing at the door of the flat, waiting for the shuddering lift to bring Mr P to me. He emerges, looking lost, eyes drawn straight to the insults and threats sprayed on the door and walls. He greets me warmly; I’m glad to see him, even if only to pass another hour and the rare chance to do so with a friendly face from a hostile world. I’m at least ten degrees below my normal ‘morose’ reading, physically drained and weary.
Maureen is quick to provide us with cups of tea before gathering Paul up from the floor and disappearing into the kitchen. Alone with Mr P, I’m suddenly unable to speak. The same rotten filth that plagues me around the clock refuses to give me this time with someone who genuinely wants to help. Lately, whenever I close my eyes I see nothing but blood, oozing from the edges of my subconscious. I’ve reached a point where I’m not only forcing myself to stay awake at night but am too frightened to blink. When my eyelids shut for more than a second, I see congealing blood and small, glistening pieces of brain, while the smell that fills my nostrils is beyond description. I wish I could slice off the top of my head and empty out its memories into some other vessel, even into someone else’s head – especially one of the thousands who hate me, just to find out how they might handle what I’ve seen.
Mr P coughs politely, hoping to jolt me into speech. We sip our tea and I notice his gaze on the overflowing ashtray and my trembling hands. He takes a deep breath and in a gentle octave begins talking about Maureen and her condition, then about Paul, Dad, and the future. He measures out his word
s as carefully as a doctor dispensing medicine, while I hang onto each one, trying to absorb their meaning instead of just watching his lips move.
Part of his speech penetrates the red fog in my head: he has a suggestion for me, which he’d like me to discuss with Maureen and Dad later. He explains that he knows things aren’t good for us and that’s unlikely to change, but there is a way out. He’s made several phone calls to colleagues and services around the country and he’s in no doubt that we could be re-housed, away from Manchester and even the north itself. Changing my name wouldn’t be a problem (‘though, of course, Smith is most people’s first choice when they want to become anonymous’) and would give us a better chance of ‘disappearing’ as a family, putting us in a prime position for a fresh start.
I say nothing. Finally, realising that my silence is deliberate, he gets to his feet, reminding me to think it through. We say goodbye and as the lift doors close, I do the polite thing and promise to do as he’s asked. Then I return to the flat with no intention of ever mentioning it.
His solution is not the answer to our troubles. I can call myself by another name and live wherever I like, but I’ll still take the nightmare with me. Where’s the sense in lying in a different bed while having the same screaming flashbacks? To follow Mr P’s suggestion would be the equivalent of a rat going underground. I think of Mum and the Duchess, and how they brought me up. I did the right thing, as I was taught to do, blowing the whistle on a pair of murderers whom the police could never catch, so why should I run?
My name is David Smith and that’s how I’ll be known until my last breath. Even with the whole world hating my guts, I won’t be made to hide in the sewers, not for anyone.
