Where There is Evil (14 page)

I agreed. A few days later, Billy’s colleague rang me and made arrangements to visit my home. I organized the children to go on a holiday treat that day to the newly opened leisure centre
in Coatbridge. They had just gone off, full of excitement, when two plain-clothes policeman arrived. One was thick set, dour and gruff-looking, older than his buddy, while the other was handsome
and noticeably fit, probably around my own age, with a lively, intelligent face. The voice on the phone had been friendly, but my heart sank slightly as they stood on the step, grim-faced. Their
handshakes, though, were firm and positive. Both men settled in our family room at the back of the house and I made us a cup of tea before the interview began. Jim McEwan introduced himself as
Detective Inspector, and indicated that his companion was Bobby Glenn.

Jim outlined a little of what he had gleaned from Billy McCloy, then leaned forward and tapped a large box file which he had carried in with him. My heart gave an enormous leap, as I saw a
slightly dusty but still legible label marked ‘Moira Anderson Enquiry, 1957’.

‘What I can tell you categorically before we take a formal statement, Sandra, is that we have combed through the original investigation files which you see here, and there is absolutely no
trace of an Alexander Gartshore ever being interviewed at that time or later.
No trace
. What I can do is show you that, indeed, contrary to what a large number of people seem to recall
about this girl’s disappearance, there is a confirmed sighting of her, in fact, several of her being on a local-service bus after the time given out by the officers then carrying out the
inquiry, who did not choose to make this public at the time. It hardly featured in the press. I think you may be interested to read this page.’

He passed me the bulky file with its yellowing entries. Nearly forty years on, I read James Inglis’ statement that she was the child to whom he spoke – he knew all three sisters and
was unlikely to have confused Moira with Janet, despite their resemblance. Janet, in any case, was away from her home. The incident had stuck in his mind because while he had been sheltering in a
doorway opposite the bus stop she, a typical child, had played in the snow.

For reasons best known to themselves, MacDonald and McIntosh dismissed Inglis, and made no attempt to interview the bus driver; they also put aside the statement of the woman although she was
clear that Moira had not only boarded the bus, but might have sat at the front near the driver to speak to him. She herself had walked much further up the middle aisle of the bus and had sat near a
side door at the back, by which she later left. She said she could not be sure where the little girl got off, but had the impression that she was still there when she disembarked. Her statement was
not fully investigated, although she was a policeman’s wife, from Irvine Crescent, near Moira’s granny.

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.’

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.

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.