by David Smith
He pauses again and then explains slowly, ‘It was through the idea of the robbery that he was able to raise the subject of murder . . . would I be prepared to kill, if necessary? It went like this: a few nights prior to my hanging about outside the bank, he outlined a scenario: “Imagine you’ve gone into the bank with the gun, Dave. What if you’re confronted by a security guard? What if he comes at you – we’re talking big money, remember. High stakes.” My reply was to use blanks, because the noise alone should do it – I had that starter pistol and if you put a blank cartridge in it, the thing made a hell of a racket. Brady used to fire it in Wiles Street when he was drunk. It was harmless enough, but the deafening crack it made was horrible. Your ears would ring for a long time afterwards. But Brady waved away my suggestion, insisting, “No way. We’re talking live ammunition. The guard is there in front of you. You’ve got to drop him, you’ve got to be ready to kill. Are you up for that – we’re talking murder. Myra will be in the car, waiting to get us out of there afterwards . . .”’
David lets the words tail off and hunches forward in his chair. ‘He had no intention of robbing a bank. The “stakeout” was a ruse of his, to give the idea a whiff of authenticity, but after I handed in my notebook he never mentioned it again. It was a test. Brady had his guns, the Webley .45 and Smith & Wesson .38, which we’d used for target practice on the moor, shooting at an oil drum on an old railway sleeper down in the valley. That was just larking about, as far as I knew, but he tied it in with the imaginary bank job to find out how far I would go – if I could kill someone. Then one night he turned the gun on me . . .’
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
Ian’s lost it. Why didn’t I see this coming?
We’re in the middle of our heaviest drinking session yet at Wardle Brook Avenue. Reason has flown out of the window and ego fills the room like brutal helium. The girls are asleep in Myra’s room upstairs, leaving us to our madness.
Ian wears his customary white shirt, tie, waistcoat and fancy cufflinks. At first glance he looks exactly what he is, a minor company stock-clerk . . . apart from a single detail: the Webley sitting snug in the heavy leather gun-holster under his left arm. That little accessory transforms him from an office worker to a city gangster, a 1920s throwback.
He’s got it into his wine-and-whisky-pickled head that I never believed his talk about robbing banks and shooting the moronic hero who’s prepared to die for the business. He doesn’t realise that I couldn’t give a fuck about anything any more. Life is running in slow motion or on pause, depending on my mood when I wake up. This dreary little house at the end of a dreary little terrace is just somewhere else to go, a place to get stoned on booze and talk about nothing. If I have to listen to shit to get pissed for free, then I will, and if I agree with what he’s saying, it’s just because I can’t be arsed to argue, but tonight Ian’s taken it personally and is spoiling for a verbal brawl.
The Formica coffee table displays the usual still life: empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays and an abandoned chessboard. There’s just one difference: the bullets Ian’s emptied from his gun. I half-close my right eye to focus, stumbling through the numbers . . . one short.
I hear a sudden whir across the table and jerk my head up as Ian spins the gun chamber. His narrow mouth is drawn back in a grin and his eyes are unusually bright.
‘This is how easy it is to kill,’ he murmurs. ‘Look at me and then look at the gun. Look at the fucking gun . . .’
I stare past his outstretched arm and straight into his face. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. I’m thinking: he means it, he’s gonna do it.
Ian raises his voice: ‘Into the gun, look into the hole of the gun, you’re not going to see it coming, blink and you won’t even know I’ve shot you, look at the fucking gun . . . You’re about to die . . .’
He squeezes the trigger and I close my eyes tightly, a tremor passing from my skull to my feet.
Then silence.
I open my eyes slowly. He disengages the chamber and I watch one bullet fall to the floor. I sit with my head still on my shoulders, no screaming agony and no warm blood oozing from the centre of my forehead – just a cold finger of fear scraping down my spine.
‘That’s how easy it is, Dave.’ His voice is back to its normal low level. ‘You just have to press the fucking trigger . . .’
I feel numb. The tremor is a memory; I am still and quiet, as cool as Ian himself.
He watches me and I smile at him, the numbness growing stronger with each passing second. ‘You fucker,’ I say, and realise he’s no longer drunk but completely sober.
When I was a child, my mother would pull out my teeth herself when they were loose. I trusted her and hid my panic, but inside I was scared stiff. Now, looking at Ian’s pitiless face, I feel the cold, clean rush of absolute fear but somehow I am still able to subdue it and smile . . .
Writing this more than 40 years after that night, I wonder why I couldn’t see things more clearly then. But reflecting back on life is difficult. All the pieces that once seemed murky and blunt as glass washed up by the sea are suddenly transparent and sharp again. But at the time it’s very different – the intensity and speed carry you forward on a wave, thunder in your ears and salt in your eyes. Or maybe that’s just crap and life itself is meaningless in the end.
That night I felt death approaching, accelerating with unstoppable velocity.
I thought it was my own.
* * *
During another drinking session at Wardle Brook Avenue, Ian posed a question: Was there anyone David hated enough to not want around any more? Eventually, David told him about the rows with Sammy Jepson and Tony Latham. Ian asked for a few details and homed in on Tony rather than Sammy, for no other reason than that Sammy lived in Gorton. He told David that he would need a photograph of Tony; David replied that he could easily get a snap of him on his new Polaroid camera and the best place to do it was in Tony’s favourite pub.
A couple of nights later, Myra and Ian drove into Manchester and dropped David at the back of a cinema known by locals as the Flea Pit. Clutching the Polaroid, David climbed out of the car and walked down Hyde Road to the Dolphin pub, where Tony was chatting with a group of mates. David joined in their conversation, using the camera itself as a ruse and passed it round the gathering to give them all a closer look. When they handed it back, he pressed the shutter quickly in Tony’s direction, then nipped into the toilets before the photograph popped out. Examining the camera, he discovered he’d forgotten to load it with film. Mortified, he returned to Hattersley on the bus, convinced that Ian would be furious. Yet when he called round the following evening to explain, Ian merely shrugged. The subject was ditched as swiftly as the idea of the bank robbery.
‘Did we seriously intend to kill Tony Latham?’ David shakes his head slowly. ‘It was all part of the same nonsense, said in drink and about as real as anything else we discussed together . . . so no, it was just more crap. An element of intention was there, but what kind of assassin sets out to snap his victim without putting film in the camera? It was never followed up because, at the end of the day, it was just “big talk” again. I thought that’s all everything was . . . but I was wrong.’
David’s suspicion that his own life hung in the balance wasn’t without foundation: in September 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley discussed whether or not they should kill him. Over a bottle of wine on the hills above Buxton, the couple debated his murder. Ian declared himself profoundly irritated with David’s ‘domestic’ problems; Maureen had recently discovered she was pregnant again and David, still reeling from the loss of Angela Dawn, reacted angrily. The couple had a serious row, and Maureen left to stay at her mother’s house in Gorton. But she was only there for one night; David turned up full of apologies and they began looking forward to the birth of their child, due the following May. Ian was scathing about their relationship and uneasy about what he termed ‘a flaw’ in David’s character, whi
ch made him a potential liability to their future plans.
More than 20 years later, Ian Brady told journalist Fred Harrison how he had intended to get rid of David, but Myra convinced him otherwise: ‘Head out of Manchester. Take the .38 Smith & Wesson. Blow his head off. Mo [Maureen] some days or weeks later would have enquired if we had heard anything from him. Nothing. [But] it was always Mo this, and Mo that. [Myra] didn’t want to hurt Mo. Mo baby – you know, she was the younger sister.’
At the end of the month, David found out that his much-loved dog, Peggy, whom he had been forced to leave behind in Wiles Street, had been put to sleep. Jack Smith was then working several days away from home in London and had taken the decision to have Peggy destroyed without consulting his son. David responded by downing copious amounts of alcohol, and when Ian and Myra arrived at Underwood Court from a short holiday in Scotland they found him in bed, distraught and inebriated.
‘Ian walked into the bedroom and asked me if I was all right,’ David recalled for the benefit of the courtroom in Chester several months later. ‘Then he turned round and he said: “It’s that bleeder who should have got the needle and not the dog.” . . . I wasn’t angry with [Dad]. I was upset about the dog . . . He had had it humanely destroyed . . . Myra went out of her way to try and save the dog. She drove all the way down to the dog’s home . . . she was just too late.’ Despite the ban on dogs at Underwood Court, within days he and Maureen had acquired a handsome collie whom they named Bob. Taking Bob for walks was problematic; David had to sneak him down the stairwell, directly past the door of caretaker Mr Page, who was rapidly getting to the end of his tether with the young couple in Flat 18.
Earlier that month, Ian had considered killing David. For reasons known only to himself and Myra, he now set aside his unease completely about the ‘flaw’ in his younger friend. Having bided his time while he weighed up whether David could be trusted or not, he took the final plunge one night after the girls had gone to bed. Following vast quantities of wine and whisky, Ian Brady at last split open the secret he and Myra Hindley had so carefully concealed for the past two years.
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
2 October 1965, Wardle Brook Avenue, long after midnight.
Away from Myra, Ian is changing. He’s becoming intense, and conversations are always long and involved. Something is eating away inside him, compelling him to talk. Gone are the half-baked plans for robbery; now, he’s opening up his world to me: a world where people are worthless, maggots and morons, where human life is less important than swatting a fly. He’s obsessed with the idea that I doubt him and it makes him excited, overwrought.
Away from Myra, he’s heading for an experience unlike any other, searching for the ultimate kick, and is keyed up by the need to take us all with him, to the floor of his abyss.
He thinks he has me. In his mind, when I agreed to stake out the bank and talked about wanting an old acquaintance wiped out, that was a commitment to him. He might have had his reservations about me, but they’re gone now. He trusts me.
In a voice whisky-thick and wired with energy, he talks about religion as lobotomy, and the genius of de Sade. Then he asks, banging his fist down on his knee, ‘What’s wrong with killing somebody if you’re prepared to accept responsibility for your actions?’
The whisky makes his accent stronger, the r’s rolling, like the mist across the moor, and he emphasises certain words, clenching and unclenching that fist. ‘The victim’s family has the right to kill you. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Let the murderer face the family of the one that he’s killed. That’s de Sade’s philosophy for you in a nutshell. He was right . . .’
I don’t answer, but I nod, almost involuntarily, aware of the stink from the ashtray, where red wine has been spilled into the pile of spent cigarettes.
After a pause, he starts again, leaning forward across the table, his eyes unnaturally bright as always during a tirade.
‘Think about it. No, no, think about God. Where was he when Angela died? If there is a God, he had no right to let that happen, did he? Bastard. What life did she have? Six months is fuck all. God murdered your child. But there is no God, God is nothing. God killed your fucking daughter, who the fuck is God?’
I don’t say a word. I keep the whisky in my mouth and listen, head bowed, stoned out of my brain on booze.
His fist is on the coffee table as he rages at me: ‘Your dad had no right to kill Peggy. It should have been your fucking dad who got the jab. You get fuck all from people, dogs are better, they give you devotion, they give their lives for you. You see them two dogs there, Lassie and Puppet, stretched out by the telly? They mean and give more to you than any two-legged arsehole. Fuck parents, lovers and kids. They all do what they want in the end . . .’
The whisky shoots through my skull, filling every corner of my brain with its blistering fog. My forehead is almost resting against the edge of the coffee table. I feel something building in the room, a moment that’s been a long time in coming.
His voice is calm when he says it. One short, sharp breath and out it comes: ‘Listen to me. I’ve killed. I’ve done it. I know what it’s like.’
I don’t believe him.
‘You think I’m lying, don’t you? You think I’m a lying cunt, but it’s been done, I’ve killed, more than once. Ach, but you don’t believe me. Maggots, they’re all fucking maggots . . .’
I don’t believe him. Through the fever in my head, I’m thinking: like fuck, you haven’t killed anyone. I raise an eyebrow sceptically and it ignites something in him, bringing his words down on my head: ‘I’ve got photographic proof, and you’ve sat on one of the graves. Get the bastards over 16, that’s the easiest way, they’re nothing to the police then, just some sad missing kid, runaways who’ve fucked off to London and the bright lights, file and forget. Jews, winos, queers – who gives a shit about them? They’re fucking germs and worth fuck all, even the police see them as numbers and know the world’s well rid. Who’s gonna give a fuck about some dirty little shirt-lifter? Hitler had the right idea, that’s just my point, he had the right fucking idea . . .’
Shut up, I’m thinking. Let me lie down and sleep. Talking a load of drunken shite again. Bank job, here we come. Tony Latham, here we come. I am a murderer, here we fucking come. Shut your fucking mouth and let me rest.
But the momentum spins; Ian’s pale eyes start out of his head: ‘Listen, there are two ways to do it, I’m fucking telling you, two ways, not just one. First method: get the car and yourself ready, prepare the lot, clean the car, cover the inside with polythene, count all the buttons on what you’re wearing and note everything, mustn’t leave anything behind – do you fucking understand, are you listening? Right, so you get out of the car, find the maggots – Central Station, Union Hotel, Rembrandt bar, queers – just get them, splatter them away. But that’s not the best way to do it, there’s too many risks, you have to clean your clothes and everything else afterwards. Not enough control in the situation. Second method, this one is better: get them and do them in a place where you have full control, even over the fucking body, you can’t get caught then, ’cause the police are thick fuckers, give them fuck all and they do fuck all. Plan ahead, and if you’re questioned, give them the old spiel about not remembering anything more than ten days ago, that’s normal . . .’
He sits back suddenly, spent, breathless.
I look at him and his eyes narrow.
‘It will be done again.’ He nods slowly. ‘But this one won’t count. I’m not due another yet, but it will be done.’ His lips curl in a sly smile and I feel unnaturally tired.
He’s speaking again, but my brain scarcely registers his soft, insistent voice: ‘You know what I get from it? Control. You’re in control and that’s the biggest fucking high you’ll ever have, you’re in control. You can even control death, do you fucking understand me, it’s all a matter of control . . .’
* * *
‘He’
d been building up to that moment for some time,’ David explains, running his thumbnail along a deeply scored groove in the kitchen table. ‘It went back to the day of Angela’s funeral, when he’d sat in the car without acknowledging my grief. His attitude that day had a purpose – he was already thinking ahead to how he would use it, twisting it into his philosophy about there being no God and life worth so little. He waited until he felt he had me in his grasp. The books, the note-taking, the soft porn and the stronger stuff, the bank robbery and Tony Latham – all of that was “grooming”. Then he sprang the trap: “I’ve killed.”’
After a long silence, David clarifies Myra’s perception of how things stood between them: ‘She definitely wasn’t pleased about his desire to bring me into their little secret. She would have been aware of what he was after long before it ever occurred to me, because she was able to recognise the pattern and what it had led to between the two of them. When we were discussing the bank job, she knew about it and wasn’t tidy with it at all. She didn’t want me on board – that came from him. I’m sure they would have talked about what was happening with me and agreed on a strategy – kill me if anything went wrong. She could tell that he was overstretching their boundaries and there was no need for it. And I’m positive – because I could see it in her whole attitude – that she wasn’t happy with any of it, especially given that he was on this insane, downward spiral where he was losing control.’