Evil Relations (14 page)

Because for one man, this isn’t ‘people-watching’. This is a hunting ground.

* * *

Immediately after leaving school, David was taken on by Albert Sudlow & Sons as an apprentice electrician. His father secured him the job. ‘A cousin of mine – another Frank – was doing “very well” as a trainee in the same line of work,’ David explains. ‘The family went on about how he was earning “bloody good money for a lad his age”. But I didn’t want to be a Frank-type worker. I didn’t want to be a Frank-type anything – I’d had more than my fill of that with Mum. So my career earning bloody good money lasted no more than six or seven months. Afterwards, I worked as a labourer for a fella called Jim Miller who lived on Gorton’s Railway Street. He was a one-man-band property repair business. But I was bored, restless. I didn’t last long there either.’

Years later, Myra Hindley claimed in her unpublished writings that she had intervened to win David his job back following his dismissal by Miller for poor time-keeping. He snorts derisively, ‘Rubbish. Can you see Myra doing that for me? Not true. I was unemployed for quite a while after working for him.’

In March 1964, David was idling away an afternoon in Sivori’s when Maureen appeared, less animated than usual. ‘She sat down next to me,’ he recalls, ‘and she was very quiet. I didn’t think much of it at first, just another “bad hair day” probably. Then all at once she blurted out that she was pregnant. For a moment, the wind was taken out of my sails, but neither of us was upset. After Mum died, there was no attempt at stopping nature’s course from my side or hers. There was a mutual, unspoken
allowing
it to happen. I was 15, and wanted something to replace what I’d just lost. Getting Maureen pregnant seemed to be the answer.’

He sips at a fresh mug of tea. ‘I was delighted, absolutely over the moon. Maureen had never mentioned missing her monthlies – she just came out with it, there and then. I felt on top of the world. She wasn’t quite as thrilled because of having to tell her family. She didn’t cry or get upset, but she was concerned. I held her hand tightly and told her that she had
nothing
to be scared of because I was with her every step of the way. Besides, she’d stood her ground against Myra over seeing me and that showed that she could be tough if she needed to be, not the meek younger daughter or timid little sister. We talked, and after a while she was as excited as me over the baby. We couldn’t have been happier. We both believed we would make it as a couple, and as a family.’

Jack Smith reacted better to the news than they expected; he acknowledged that they wanted to plan a future together. Bob Hindley had nothing to say about the impending birth of his first grandchild, but Nellie was furious when David and Maureen broke the news, and made David leave the house. To the young couple’s surprise, Myra appeared to accept her sister’s pregnancy, only expressing mild concern for Maureen’s well-being.

Jack, Bert and the Duchess urged David to make his relationship with Maureen ‘respectable’. ‘I wasn’t bothered about a band of gold on my finger,’ David recalls. ‘The getting married bit didn’t come from me or Maureen. All we cared about was becoming parents. Nothing else mattered from then on – not our mates, hanging around the streets or in Sivori’s, nothing. But illegitimacy was still a big stigma back then and “the adults” didn’t want Maureen or the baby to suffer that. The wedding was sorted out within a couple of months and we were happy to go along with it. Maureen moved in with me and Dad while arrangements were made for us to get married.’

But before Maureen Hindley became Mrs Smith, another child in Manchester vanished. Keith Bennett was the same age as John Kilbride when he went missing; he’d turned twelve just four days before. On 16 June 1964, he set off from home with his mother to spend the night at his gran’s house, where his brothers Alan and Ian and sister Maggie were waiting for him. Earlier that week, after swimming a length of the old Victorian baths near home for the first time, he’d broken a lens in his glasses. His mother saw him across bustling Stockport Road safely, but Keith never arrived at his gran’s; his path there in the evening sunlight took him past Westmoreland Street, where Ian Brady lived.

Again the police mounted an all-out search and local newspapers highlighted the case, but there were no leads: Keith had vanished without trace.

On Saturday, 15 August 1964, 16-year-old David and 18-year-old Maureen married at All Saints Registry Office in Manchester. The only surviving photograph from that day shows the two of them grinning artlessly, Maureen’s hair dyed jet-black for the occasion. ‘She was as blonde as her sister when I first got to know her,’ David recalls, ‘but from that day on she kept her hair dark. It went well with the turquoise maternity suit she’d bought for the wedding. I wore a light-coloured jacket with a black velvet collar and new tie. It was a good day and neither of us was particularly nervous. Our guests were Dad, Uncle Bert, the Duchess and my cousin John. No Hindleys. Were they invited? Nobody was
invited
as such – it was more a case of me and Maureen just being taken to get wed. Afterwards, we went into a greasy spoon Greek cafe for a proper fry-up and Dad and Uncle Bert insisted we celebrate at the Hyde Road Hotel. We stayed there for a few hours, and then Maureen and me slipped away on the 109 bus back to Wiles Street, leaving Dad, Uncle Bert and the Duchess in the pub. John beetled off on his little motorbike. And that was that: we couldn’t afford a proper reception or a honeymoon – most people couldn’t in those days. I wasn’t working and Maureen had given up her job at Millwards because she was seven months pregnant. But tradition wasn’t really our thing anyway – Maureen didn’t stay away from me the night before the wedding, for instance. Our home life was very happy then, and Dad was fine with the two of us – he bought our wedding rings. We even had a couple of dogs, Peggy and Rusty, to make the house cosy. Life was good.’

Later that evening there was a knock at the door. Maureen opened it to find her smartly dressed and perfectly coiffed sister standing there. ‘Ian would like a drink with you,’ Myra told the newly-weds, who immediately spruced themselves up and went round to Bannock Street, where Granny Maybury was already in bed. The Dansette was playing in the background and a bottle of red wine stood by the fire; Ian had a habit of putting bottles there to watch the heat pop the corks out. There were plenty of other bottles – white wine, whisky and a further jug of red wine – on the table. Myra was slightly giddy with drink as she chatted away to Maureen, and Ian seemed very different from the mutinous, unfriendly bore David had always judged him to be.

‘That was the first time I’d socialised with them as a couple,’ he remembers. ‘When we arrived, Ian was nothing like the person I’d seen on the street, all gangling limbs in his long coat with a snooty expression. He chilled out that night. The waistcoat and trousers with a stiff crease down the centre of each leg were still there, but his shirt collar was undone and he was welcoming. He looked like a cross between a nerd and a gangster, if you can imagine that. A lot of drink flowed. Ian had a taste for Liebfraumilch, which I’ve never liked, and he’d brought whisky and jugged red wine from the offy near Westmoreland Street. We downed the whisky and warm red wine and the girls sipped the Liebfraumilch. Beer wasn’t really Ian’s thing – I think he thought it was a bit common. The only time I ever saw him nursing a beer was when we popped into the Wagon and Horses on Hyde Road for a pint. It was a very handsome old pub, all oak beams and gleaming brass, where the beer is served in those “bobbly” pint glasses. He held his with both hands, as if he couldn’t manage to lift it otherwise. I’ve never seen anyone do that – it was awful wimpish.’

Much to his surprise, David was able to relax at Bannock Street. Granny Maybury’s collie, Lassie, and the eight-month-old puppy from her litter that Myra had kept and named Puppet stretched out at his feet. He felt himself grow warm with the fire and the wine. ‘It was the girls who really created the atmosphere,’ he remembers. ‘My friendship with Ian developed because of them. Myra stood near the record player, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, bopping about and choosing the vinyl for us. She liked Alma Cogan and any sort of pop. The girls danced and sang together, and I got up and had a jive as well. It felt like a small party, just the four of us, celebrating the wedding – a regular happy occasion. They made a fuss of us that night – Ian was
Mein Host
, hovering with his bottle so that no one’s glass was ever empty. He’d squeeze past Myra with a fag hanging from the corner of his lip and give her an affectionate hug. Just an ordinary bloke having a good time, in full flight. He’d never have got up to jive with the rest of us, but he was thoroughly enjoying himself and there was nothing sinister to it, as far as I could tell. We went home in the early hours. I was three sheets to the wind and singing, and Maureen was laughing like a drain as we stumbled back to Wiles Street in the dark.’

The following morning, as the sun clambered high above the foundry and the sooty streets surrounding it, David and Maureen were woken by Myra’s unmistakeable rap on the front door. David fumbled into his jeans and lurched downstairs to answer it. His sister-in-law glanced him up and down, arching a thickly pencilled eyebrow before instructing, ‘Get ready and we’ll pick you up in an hour. We’ve got a surprise for you.’

Despite his hangover, David was soon washed and dressed, and was waiting with Maureen in the sitting room when Myra’s white Morris Mini-Traveller purred up. Maureen slid into the front seat next to her sister; Ian folded the rear bench seat flat so that he and David could sprawl out with the obligatory red wine and cigarettes.

They headed north out of the city to the Lake District. The plan was to visit Lake Windermere, but it was heaving with day-trippers. Myra turned the car towards Bowness, where they found somewhere to park eventually. Ian was generous in his spending, paying for a boat trip on the glittering lake, lunch in a cosy restaurant and more supplies of alcohol for the journey home that evening. ‘The day in the Lakes was their wedding present to us,’ David explains. ‘We didn’t have the money for such things. I climbed into the back with Ian again and stretched out to carry on drinking, while the girls nattered in the front. Ian began philosophising but nothing too heavy – no more than any opinionated drunk. He talked about the distribution of wealth but never mentioned robbery then, as some journalists claim. He waffled on a bit about class and society in general, but again nothing ominous.’ They arrived back in Gorton around midnight and, as David later told an attentive courtroom: ‘We had a meal and most of it was drink.’ At 4 a.m., the Smiths left Bannock Street and headed home.

The two couples met up every fortnight, either at Bannock Street or Wiles Street, following the trip to the Lakes. ‘We’d get fish and chips, play cards, drink and listen to music,’ David recalls. ‘Ian had terrible, old-fashioned tastes – Cole Porter and Glenn Miller. It was a very ordinary time, no heavy conversation or hints of what was to come. The relationship between Ian and Myra was normal, as far as I could see, too. There was no question of one dominating the other. She could give as good as she got, anyway. They rowed occasionally, but only over daft stuff. He loved his Heinz macaroni cheese straight from the tin and could have lived on it. She hated it and would shout at him that it was worse than dog food. And if he got very drunk and started rambling or raising his voice about something, she’d give him a withering look like women do and he’d belt up.’

David’s own relationship with his sister-in-law had thawed considerably. ‘We were OK with each other then,’ he states with a shrug. ‘If I saw her in the street, she’d stop for a chat, arms crossed as always, asking what I was up to and how was Maureen. She’d accepted that I was married to her sister – what else could she do, with a baby on the way as well? But she was fine with it. She’d had her moment, reading me the ground rules, telling me not to lay a finger on Maureen or mess her about, but after that everything was OK. I felt very comfortable around her then. Again, the relationship between the two of us was nothing like it’s been portrayed in books and dramas – reduced to filthy looks and constant sniping. We were all right.’

While he and his new wife prepared for the birth of their first child, the landscape around them was in the process of an epic transformation. Seventy thousand homes in Manchester had been declared unfit for human habitation and a vast slum-clearance programme was under way. Suburbs were earmarked for demolition, including Gorton, where once-thriving industries had fallen into eerie disuse and businesses were collapsing. Satellite towns were proposed, where communities would be self-contained with every conceivable necessity to hand. Gone were the endless, crumbling brick terraces with their outside lavatories; residents moved family by family into larger council houses with plumbed-in baths and toilets, and high-rise flats with lifts and laundry chutes. An improvement, in theory; the reality was somewhat different, with many homes built before the essential facilities, and as extended families found themselves living in distant neighbourhoods, crime levels burgeoned to equal the dissatisfaction many felt with ‘modern living’ in Manchester’s emergent metropolis.

One morning in September, Myra arrived at Wiles Street with the news that she and Granny Maybury had been allocated a home in Hattersley, the largest new town, with 14,000 inhabitants. Her delight at leaving Gorton was plain, but the elder Hindleys struggled with the prospect of relocating. Bob had suffered a stroke and Nellie was having an affair with a man named Bill Moulton; she was reluctant to move as far as Hattersley with her invalided husband and held out for another offer from the council.

One month after Myra and Granny Maybury left Gorton, Maureen gave birth to a daughter, Angela Dawn. She and David were ecstatic at becoming parents and life quickly settled into a new, fulfilling routine. ‘I was working alongside Dad at Moseley Brothers, just behind Ardwick Green and close to Gary’s Hotel, earning a regular wage,’ David remembers. ‘We were a very happy little unit. There was no longer any friction between Dad and Maureen, and straight after work, I’d play with Angela before sitting down at the table with Dad to eat the dinner Maureen had cooked. At weekends and in the evenings, we’d take Angela out in her pram and walk the dogs. I still looked like a rebel, but now the older people on the street smiled, chatted to Maureen and made baby-talk at Angela. I felt content, and didn’t even make a fuss over visiting the in-laws on a Sunday afternoon. Maureen laughed a lot and Dad was a changed man – he would babysit while the two of us had a night out at Three Arrows on the corner of Hyde Road and Church Lane, near Belle Vue. We’d sort of graduated from Sivori’s to there. Nellie had mellowed as well, and was just as you’d expect a grandma to be. When we used to call round with Angela in the pram, she’d pick her up straightaway for a cuddle. Bob was too wrapped up in his own misery to care.’