Where There is Evil

by Sandra Brown

  The investigating officers did not choose to reveal publicly that a third local witness had spotted Moira boarding the bus. An old lady who lived over Molly Gardiner’s sweet shop in Alexander Street had been peering at the white-out conditions, and had noticed a little girl playing among the lock-up garages. As the woman reflected wryly that children rarely feel the cold, she noticed the girl fall over with quite a bump, then pick herself up and rub her bottom. Then she spent some time searching among the thick snow as if she had lost something. She checked through her pockets and bag as if, this witness concluded, she had dropped money, perhaps her bus fare, for she seemed to have been looking out for the local bus. Moments later it pulled in at the stop opposite the woman’s home. When the bus departed, the small group of passengers had all got on and the child was no longer there. She was sure the kiddie had got on it with everyone else. I read the statement of a policeman’s wife, Mrs Chalmers, who had exchanged a smile on the bus with Moira.

  I looked up at Jim in amazement. ‘My father floored me with what he told me about driving his bus that day and being the last to speak to her. I was only eight but I don’t recall all this about her getting on a bus at all. Everyone just said she’d disappeared in the blizzard. Why on earth did they not act on this? Surely, if they had a policeman’s wife making such a clear statement . . .’

  ‘That goes for nothing,’ put in Bobby Glenn bleakly.

  ‘Are all these witnesses dead?’ I swept my hand down the page.

  ‘Only the young guy is still alive,’ Jim glanced at me briefly, ‘and he’s a pensioner now. However, we’ve already been to see him. I’ve told him the way we’re treating this investigation is as if it happened yesterday. He stands by every word he said, and the statements of the other witnesses will be treated with respect even if they’re no longer with us.’

  I realized that Jim was saying that my conversation with my father, as related to Billy McCloy, was being treated very seriously. In a strange way, while it petrified me, that knowledge provided a little comfort. It was clear that these two detectives did not regard me as some deluded woman wasting police time. They believed what I was saying.

  ‘Read on,’ said Jim, pointing to the bottom section of the page. This part indicated that whoever had taken the statements from the two bus passengers had gone to the bus station to see the crew. I read with some disbelief the perfunctory words: ‘The driver indicated that neither he nor the conductress were aware of any child answering Moira’s description.’

  As I read out this sentence, we all shook our heads. Not only had the unknown interviewer not bothered speaking to the female companion of the bus driver, he had not checked that he had the correct crew. He had not even asked the man he had questioned for his name.

  But at least one mystery had been solved: my father had never been questioned about Moira. I’d been right to trust my instincts.

  Suddenly Jim asked, ‘Was your dad in the Freemasons, by any chance?’

  Alexander had, indeed, been a member, I told him, but how active I couldn’t say. Though I was aware of rumours of corruption linking the police and freemasonry, I dismissed it as a reason for others protecting him. Much later, I discovered from a reliable source that my dad’s lodge was composed of 90 per cent of policemen.

  ‘Now,’ Jim said, ‘I think, Sandra, you’d better start at the very beginning. Tell me about your earliest memories of your dad.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  The two detectives listened to what I disclosed that day. They absorbed my words, and occasionally asked questions, treating me with great sensitivity. Some of my memories were not sharply defined, while others were vivid in appalling detail. Psychologists have recognized a phenomenon they refer to as forty-year syndrome, found usually in survivors of the Holocaust: the subject denies painful truths for many years in the interests of their own survival and mental well-being. Reality emerges four decades or so later, when the person is secure in their own self-esteem and in the path they have chosen to follow. Something triggers the images that accompany the memories in the form of flashbacks which register on the inner screen of the brain. For me, the trigger had been the conversation with my dad.

  I was relieved that these men were also in their middle years, and that, like me, they could recall the era of Forbidden Subjects.

  Tellingly, each could remember exactly what he had been doing on the weekend that the news had broken about Moira’s disappearance. Jim thought that people of our parents’ generation, colleagues, friends, ex-neighbours, would remember my father well from that time. He was anxious to start gathering a detailed picture of him.

  ‘So does this mean you’re reopening the inquiry?’ I asked, as Jim started to gather his papers together.

  He looked at me. ‘This inquiry’s never been closed, but despite the length of time involved, which convinces me foul play occurred, it has never, for some reason, been upgraded to a murder investigation. It remains a missing-person file.’

  I gave him my father’s address, and arranged to look out photographs of my father in 1957 from old family albums. I asked when Jim intended to see him: I was fearful of the consequences of that, as my dad would know who had spoken to the police and I remembered my eldest step-brother’s scowling face at Granny Jenny’s funeral.

  Jim reassured me that he would not be going to Leeds until he was very sure of all the facts, and that he would warn me before he went. I also asked him not to approach my mother: I had said nothing to her of contacting the police, because of her health and her advancing years. Jim said that if he needed to talk to her he would be in touch with me first.

  Jim contacted me again a few days later, and I arranged to see him at his base, which was the police station in the Wellwynd in Airdrie. As I waited for him in the small reception area, I wondered if the pleasant, open-faced young cop at the counter had any idea why I was there. He had taken my name, said that DI McEwan was caught up on police business, and that I would have to wait a short while.

  When Jim appeared, he swept me through to his office where I stopped dead. The room was sparsely furnished, with a mahogany desk in the centre, and a tall metal cupboard opposite. Pinned up beside a large-scale map of Coatbridge Burgh from the 1950s were two black and white photographs. One was the familiar haunting head-and-shoulders portrait of Moira, eyes crinkling with laughter at the school photographer who had taken it, fair hair swept to one side with a slide, hands folded into the crooks of her arms on her school desk. The other was of a heavily jowled man in his sixties, whose eyes gazed straight ahead with a penetrating stare. My father.

  Jim asked, ‘Can you identify for me, Sandra, that that is your dad?’

  My mouth was dry as I nodded. ‘Is that a mug shot?’ I stammered. ‘When was it taken?’

  ‘Yeah, it is. Taken mid-eighties, I think.’ Jim gazed back at me steadily. ‘Down south.’

  He would not tell me what offences had been committed.

  Then he showed me a copy of the newspaper article from April 1957, in which my father’s rape case had been reported. I noticed that the sexual offences against Betty the babysitter were said to have happened over a two-month period, but I knew that they had gone on for longer than that. My father’s solicitor attempted to cast responsibility for all the incidents on the girl.

  Although the girl is now only 14, she is mature. After the first incident took place, and despite the girl’s youth, Gartshore was in her power for fear that she would betray him to his wife. In my opinion, the girl had simply become a menace to Gartshore, and he should have ordered her out of the house, never to show her face again. Instead of that he allowed the offences to continue.

  All the blandishments of a young woman were used by her when she came to Gartshore’s house. In cases of indecency towards young girls, the accused person often lures them away to lonely and isolated spots. But the accused in this place did nothing like that. The offences were committed in his own home, where he lived happily with his wife a
nd three young children until the appearance of this girl.

  He had argued that my father had a good war record, was a good father, and had been a churchgoer all his life. He had learnt a bitter lesson, but wished to avoid prison. If he was sent there, his wife might leave him, his home might be broken up, his children would suffer and he would emerge ‘an embittered member of society’.

  But Sheriff Young, who had heard the case, sentenced my father to eighteen months’ imprisonment, saying he ‘had heard nothing said that minimizes the serious crime of which you are guilty’.

  Jim told me that he had recently interviewed Betty. She had said that she had not been promiscuous and had been forced into sexual intercourse on the first occasion by my father. It had been rape, and he had given her money to keep quiet about it. She had met him over a six-month period, mainly in Dunbeth Park where Moira and her chums had played, and after the first time, intercourse had taken place by mutual consent, but never, she insisted, in my home.

  I could imagine how the article must have upset both my sets of grandparents. My schoolteacher, purple-rinsed Miss Marshall, must have known that my father was serving a prison sentence for sexual offences against a girl just a few years older than her charges. It seemed unlikely to me, given the relatively small population in our area of thirty thousand or so, that anyone could have missed the newsprint devoted to my father’s trial.

  Jim agreed, and said, ‘Which makes it all the odder that our friend in Stornoway, ex-Inspector John F. MacDonald, seemed to have no recollection that your dad was ever in any kind of bother. He remembered him, including the unusual surname, and was able to give us a description of him. In fact, he was very shocked by what we revealed. He said, “But it couldn’t have been him. He stopped his bus for all the old ladies, and dropped them at their gates . . . and the kiddies all gave him sweets.” He was one hundred per cent clear that your dad never figured as a suspect at the time. He was convinced it was the handicapped guy, Ian Simpson.’

  I could see that Jim could not fathom either why the man in charge at the time could know my father by sight yet not his history, given that he had made local headlines and been sentenced: ‘I know hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but I just can’t think what these guys were doing that they let your dad slip through the net.’

  My father had been arrested and questioned in December 1956, and charged with ‘Having carnal knowledge of a minor and other offences of a sexual nature’ on 23 January 1957. Between Christmas and New Year, my grandfather Gartshore had raised bail money to get his son home and had pressured the Baxter family to allow him to have his job back until the case came to trial in the spring. At the end of January my dad had resumed his seat at the front of the Cliftonville bus, which passed Moira’s door.

  Three weeks later, she disappeared. My father was sentenced to prison in April 1957. That summer, when townsfolk were wondering at the lack of headway in the local investigation, my father had been out of sight in one of Her Majesty’s institutions.

  I asked myself why MacDonald had been reluctant to accept the help of the Glasgow CID. Why had he not wanted to screen Moira’s photograph on television? Why had he not disclosed that the policeman’s wife, Mrs Chalmers, had not been the sole witness to the bus sighting?

  Everything seemed to point to my father having been missed from the round-up of suspects either through sheer ineptitude or because someone in John F. MacDonald’s force had protected him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My next meeting with Jim McEwan took place at Bathgate police station. On 30 April 1992 the reception area was plastered with dramatic posters of a missing fifteen-year-old girl. The face of Vicky Hamilton, who had disappeared on 10 February 1991, stared down at us from the walls. She had vanished from the main square of Bathgate, as mysteriously as Moira had from another small town thirty-five years before, when there was eight inches of snow on the ground. She too, has never been seen again.

  Disposal of a body in such bad weather conditions is difficult: snowstorms and frozen ground make it impossible to dig a makeshift grave. Jim and I had discussed this when I pointed out the route my father’s bus had usually taken, where the terminii had been located. I’d shown him my father’s favourite haunts and other familiar places. We agreed that if he had killed Moira it was unlikely that he had travelled any great distance that night, given the road conditions and fear of being seen. We felt that, if we had had to get rid of a body, we would have chosen old mine workings or water.

  Unfortunately, Coatbridge is riddled with old colliery workings, abandoned pits, lochs and ponds in surrounding marshland, not to mention the Monkland Canal; it had gone right through the town in the fifties. I told Jim of one memory I had from about age four or five, when my dad took me on a long walk one Sunday to a small loch, where some swans were gliding about in the reeds. Now named Clyde Calders nature reserve, and visible today to passing M8 motorists, my dad had told me it was called Dick’s Pond. He had known it from boyhood. ‘Aye, Sandra, I used tae play here,’ he said, showing me how to select a small pebble and skim it across the surface of the water. ‘Come on, you have a go at this!’ I asked him why we couldn’t see the stones come back up, and he explained: ‘Ye see out there? Ah knew a laddie when ah wis wee, who went swimming out in the middle there. He got drownt. He wisnae ever found again. Ye see, underneath there’s a big old mine shaft that goes richt doon. Naebody kens how far doon it goes, but they never goat him. Pit a body oot there, and naebody wid ever find it, it’s sae deep, hen. If ever ah wanted rid o’ somethin’, that’s where I’d pit it.’

  Jim told me that he had spoken with the West Yorkshire police, who had provided further information. The offences that had brought my father to the attention of officers south of the border had related to deception and trying to obtain a mortgage under false pretences. I breathed a huge sigh of relief – then thought, so what if he’s been in jail for other things, and not child molesting, he’s probably still adept at getting away with that. Jim went on, ‘Look, they’re very interested in what we’re telling them, but your dad’s name doesn’t show up on their list of known paedophiles. He’s only known to them for these offences.’

  ‘So what’s new?’ I asked. ‘They just don’t know about him, that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘Leeds has one of the biggest known rings of paedophiles in Britain, but he’s not known to them through complaints of perversion.’

  We stood up to leave, and Jim said he’d be in touch. Over the next few months we spoke regularly on the telephone but could not meet again until July.

  Meanwhile, Jim had told me that he would need to speak to my brothers. Although they were three and six years younger than me, and the period in our lives in which Jim was most interested was 1957, when they had been tiny, he had to interview them. He also said that he was keen to know if my father had had any contact with other young female relatives. I was horrified at the very idea. ‘Well, no. I’ve no sisters, and all my cousins who are female are all much younger than me,’ I said. ‘It was my friends he molested, not any of my relatives – they would be too wee, and besides, I would have known if anything had ever happened. Something would have been said.’

  ‘These things are often hushed up in families. We may even be making assumptions that only female children attract him – many paedophiles don’t discriminate.’ Then he asked the question that was repeated by countless others over the following months.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure, Sandra, that nothing happened to you? I have to ask it. It’s just that when abuse is uncovered like this, it’s rare to find that all the offences take place outside the family circle.’

  Although my instincts told me I had not been one of my father’s victims, I was terrified that perhaps this memory might still be lurking in my subconscious.

  I decided to convene a meeting with my brothers. We got together at Ian’s house, and discussed our different memories of our father, recalling in particular how he had gone
off to Leeds. We seemed like witnesses of an accident, victims who had seen the same build-up and the same event simultaneously, but who all had personal images of it. Ian had been pulled in and out of the car parked at our door by my parents. He had witnessed not only the row between our parents, over the presence of Pat Hanlon in the car, but also our mother hitting back with the frying pan. She had fought like a tigress and won.

  Norman had shared my father’s interest in cars and the two had been close, but he too felt bitter about the way we had been abandoned. He was the only one of us who was upset when he never received a birthday or Christmas card, and the only one to visit my father in Leeds, in an attempt, perhaps, to mend bridges. He went only once and would not discuss what had happened there. Norman remembered how I had tried to keep myself and my friends out of my father’s way, and how I’d insisted on a bedroom door I could lock from an early age. Both my brothers swore that their father had never molested them. Physical beatings, yes, sexual overtures, definitely not.

  But I still needed to talk to my cousins.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Before we set off to the United States for a family holiday with our friends Janet and John McGill and their children, I saw Ashley several times for counselling. She felt the holiday would do me the world of good, as long as I got a balance of rest and sightseeing. She was right and everyone ensured that, for two weeks, the worry took a back seat, and I relaxed.

  Janet and John knew of the chain of events unfolding in my life. Janet told me that she had heard years before from a relative that my father was well known to all of the half-dozen Coatbridge cinema owners as a perpetual nuisance, someone who sat next to children or young women and pestered them. He had been asked to leave a number of times. Most women moved to avoid him, but many children sat frozen with shame and did not know how to react. Janet had never felt it appropriate to tell me until now.