by David Leslie
The parting of the ways of Isobel’s natural mother and Arthur created little interest and so, as Hannah entered her 30s, she had more or less abandoned hope of starting a second family.
Then she met a man who we will call ‘Peter’. Despite her resolve, she would become heavily attracted to him, but he would take a course that would leave her in turmoil. Early on in their friendship, Peter confessed he had a wife but said the couple only stayed together for the sake of their children. His version of the set-up was that it was an open marriage, where each partner could go his/her own way, unafraid to start up relationships and not embarrassed to be discovered in compromising situations by acquaintances.
Her grandparents by now dead, Hannah would be free to go out with Peter most nights of the week and sometimes to a caravan in the vicinity of Dunoon, or even on holidays to east-coast resorts. Just as she had been determined to use Arthur for her own needs, so she began falling in love with Peter with the same intensity, although the depth of that love would never match the devotion she had felt, and always would, for Joseph.
‘She and Peter had a great relationship,’ said a good friend. ‘She was like a kid again. They were in their 30s but would literally play together, having a very adult candlelit and romantic dinner and then walking hand in hand to some children’s play park, where they would jump on swings or roundabouts, pushing one another, giggling and laughing as though they had not a care in the world.
‘Hannah thoroughly enjoyed her times with Peter but some of those closest to her wondered about him. For as a married man, even one with the very open arrangement he said his wife allowed him, he appeared to have an incredible amount of freedom. Although he had said the marriage was held together only for the children, he never seemed to give them any time, whereas it would have been expected that he and his wife would have shared their care. No one wanted to say anything to Hannah because she was so fond of him, but some of us wondered if his talk of being bound by a wedding ring was an excuse to avoid having to explain to Hannah why they could never marry.
‘She, on the other hand, evidently held nothing back and told Peter about Isobel. He clearly asked if she knew where the child was and when she said she did not but often wondered about her daughter, he took matters into his own hands and did a very stupid thing. He announced to her that he would find Isobel. Hannah pleaded with him not to do so, telling him no good could come of it even if he was successful and trying to get through to him that she had lived long enough without knowing the truth and had in time come to accept she never would. But he saw it differently.
‘Maybe he was trying to help, maybe he was trying to show off, maybe he just wanted to learn the truth of the matter, but he came back one night and told her he had traced Isobel. Hannah could not make up her mind whether she wanted to know what he had learned but in the end asked to be told. Peter said he had traced her to Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and that she lived in the town and had reddish hair.
‘Hannah said later she let out a gasp when she was told about Isobel’s hair. She believed the man who was the child’s father was Bible John and the police descriptions of that man gave him as having light auburn-reddish hair. One of the witnesses who had seen Jemima with the man presumed to be her killer said he had short red hair.
‘Now, the whole episode came back, making her go over and over again in her mind what had happened in that car. But she could never picture the face of the man who made her pregnant. Peter said he would carry on making enquiries until he found out where Isobel lived, but Hannah begged him to do nothing further. She thought too many ghosts had been dug up.
‘But he had sown the seeds of curiosity. What mother could have simply left it at that? Hairmyres Hospital was only 12 miles from the house in Bellshill where she lived with her dad, a 20-minute car journey. She started making excuses to travel to East Kilbride and would hang about the hospital hoping to glimpse the girl with red hair Peter said was her daughter. It was a crazy thing to do, scanning every head that went into or came out of Hairmyres. Each time she saw red hair, she wondered if it could be Isobel. And, of course, she never saw her. When she asked Peter where his information had come from, he refused to tell her. Their relationship would never be the same after that.’
Maybe Peter had acted in good faith and without malice, hoping to impress Hannah by telling her he knew of her daughter without first checking out the information for himself and then approaching the girl to discover her feelings. It was stupid and cruel. Worse was allowing Hannah to go off to search in vain, knowing it could only end in heartache because long-lost Isobel did not live in East Kilbride, did not work at the hospital and did not have red hair. But his words would act as a strange and near tragic augury.
However, among those who knew Isobel there were those who would in the years to come notice a similarity, if slight, between her pretty face and that of the man painted by Lennox Paterson.
SEVENTEEN
SUGAR DADDY
After the disappointment of the fruitless search for Isobel, Hannah’s affair with Peter began to lose its impetus. The spark that had once fuelled such happy times began to dim; that it would burn out altogether was inevitable. However, her sadness about the failed relationship was tempered by the fact that her father’s health had begun to deteriorate.
By 1988, Malcolm was still only 62 – a comparatively young man in modern terms – but like so many other men in areas such as Lanarkshire, where he had spent his life, his health and chances of reaching old age had been destroyed by working in coal mining and steel making, industries where workers inhaled dust, filth and fumes for half of the day. She had given up her work at the Hoover plant to take care of him, and did so with love and diligence as his life drew to a close. Considering that he had deprived her of that which should have been a great comfort as the years passed, it was an extraordinary sacrifice on her part yet never once was she heard to complain. Others might have asked that he be taken into hospital, because the onset of cancer had left him with a dreadful neck injury that required daily dressing. Cripplingly short of money, she applied for a disability living allowance and was, as is customarily the case at the first try, rejected. Encouraged by friends to appeal the decision, she did.
In November 1988, Malcolm finally surrendered in hospital to lung cancer, the third most common cause of death in the UK after heart disease and pneumonia. On the day he died, Hannah walked up to his hospital bed to see the eyes she loved so much open with a startling brightness.
‘Oh, Jessie, I knew you’d come,’ he said. Hannah did not disillusion him or destroy his happiness. She had gone there to tell her father that she had received a letter informing her that the appeal for disability living allowance had been successful. But she decided the news could wait. Hours later, he died.
Like his wife and older daughter before him, his final journey was to the Daldowie crematorium. Now Hannah found herself alone and, as a result of giving up work, in dire financial straits. Something had to be done.
She began scouring the newspapers in an ever-more-frantic search for something that would provide an income. In the early days after the death of her father, she had made tentative enquiries about returning to Hoover, but in her heart of hearts she knew the prospects there were grim. From 1979, when the factory employed around 4,000 people, the ever-worsening economic recession, combined with increasing competition, had caused a series of lay-offs and pay-offs. By 1992, just 360 workers remained there to hear the news that the factory was to be shut down. There was little demand for a woman with few skills and her situation became ever more desperate.
Hannah and Malcolm had lived happily in a maisonette in Bellshill, which they had decorated and furnished assiduously, but perhaps because it held too many sad memories she decided to move out to Simpson Way in Bellshill. Admittedly, her new home had a front and a back door, but the house was in a poor state of repair and needed a considerable amount of work done to it. To make the move even more co
stly, none of the carpets, curtains and fittings were suitable, which added to the bills and meant her having to dip into meagre savings that would, in time, disappear altogether.
‘Moving to another house had not been a good idea,’ said her close friend. ‘They had everything at Rockburn Crescent and the place in Simpson Way was frankly too much for her to take on by herself, especially without money. She had a hard job putting it all together and because there was never enough money, she never really ever got there and made it into the home she wanted. Hannah was only just managing to keep her head above water.’
It was then she spotted a tiny advertisement that would change the course of her life in so many ways. Kays, the mail order company, was looking for representatives in the area to find potential clients. The job involved knocking on doors in designated streets and persuading the householders to agree to have the catalogues sent twice a year.
It sounded interesting work and Hannah made a telephone call in response to the advertisement. Within weeks, she was on the payroll, with a basic wage of £88 a week. She needed to supply ten names per day of willing participants, and each customer above that number would qualify her for a bonus, as would the successful placing of the first order by the new customer. There was the added perk of a little car to get her around, which she could use for her own purposes. Hannah set herself a daily target of 15 signatures and in the early days found meeting that number relatively easy. She also discovered that there was an additional bonus from the work, one the manager at Kays had not mentioned and probably not considered. She got to meet men, lots of them.
At most of the houses on which she called where couples lived, even if the wife did not answer the door it would be the woman who decided whether to become a Kays customer. But where there was no woman involved, she put on a pleasant smile for the gentleman, who invariably would be living alone. If he invited her indoors, all the better. But she was sufficiently wary, remembering what had happened on those dark nights near the Barrowland Ballroom, not to allow her defences – or anything else – to drop too far.
‘She was a very, very good saleswoman,’ said the close friend. ‘Hannah had a knack of knowing the right things to say, when to smile, when to sympathise, when to listen and when she was wasting her time. She railroaded an old school friend into helping her out and the friend said later she found it one of the most soul-destroying, miserable jobs anybody could possibly do. But in order to retain the car, she had to keep the job and that meant filling her quota of customers.
‘She would be sent areas, streets and lists of people living there who weren’t financially blacklisted. During the days and nights – usually the nights because that’s when most people were at home – the pair of them would arrive at one end of a street, park the car and Hannah would tell her, “You do this side and I’ll take the other.” Sometimes her helper would protest, saying, “I’m not a flipping salesperson,” but Hannah would just tell her, “Anybody can do it. Here’s what to do. Knock on the door or ring the bell and when they answer it give them everything, all the patter, straight away. If you can’t get their attention in the first ten seconds, you’ve lost the sale, so get right in there immediately.”
‘There were times when Hannah felt like a beggar, knocking on doors. She was good when her mood was up, but it was hard to persuade her to make a move and get door-knocking when her mood was down. From time to time, she would miss a day and then work double the next day, trying to sign up at least 30 customers. That was even more soul destroying. And if the weather was against you, if it was pelting with rain or snow, or if it was damp with clinging fog or howling with wind, people didn’t want to open their doors, and when they did they wanted rid of you as soon as possible. But she must have liked doing it because she stuck with selling catalogues for more than ten years.’
In the early days, Hannah found the work relatively easy, talking her way to her quota with no difficulty. But being bright and successful would be her downfall. She was asked to move into areas of Glasgow where the streets were littered with abandoned furniture and broken glass. Doors were covered with graffiti and signs of repairs, few windows retained all their glass panes and dogs howled their annoyance at intruders. Selling there was tough, too tough at times, and pals convinced her she needed to change her job to one where her wages were not dependent on the whims of a housewife who was in a good mood if the children were behaving or her husband’s horses or football team had been successful.
‘You’ll need to try to get something else,’ they urged.
‘I’m not going back to a factory,’ said Hannah. ‘I don’t want to get in somewhere one day to find it closing down the next. I want something that gets me out and about with some freedom.’
The answer, it appeared, came in an advertisement that sought people who would call at pubs, clubs and hotels, emptying cash and tokens from fruit machines. She knew it was exactly what she had been looking for and was obviously disappointed when she was told the post had been taken. ‘That was made for me,’ she sighed. ‘Something like it won’t come along again.’
So she carried on with her catalogue selling. Now and again, she would encounter a quiet road that offered driveways, well-kept gardens, trim lawns and shining motors. It was as she went up and down one such street that a small, portly man opened his door, heard what she had to say and invited her inside. He became her customer that night, her lover soon after and her long-time sugar daddy. Hannah would come to use him as others in the past had used her. She had only to flash her green eyes in his direction and he was hers for the taking.
‘I can use my eyes to do anything, make anybody look at me, and he’s so easily hooked,’ she would tell friends. ‘I can make my eyes sparkle at him and he thinks he’s the most important person in the world.’ Certainly, the effect she had on him initially was devastating and he begged Hannah to give up work and become his full-time mistress, living in a luxury flat he owned. She knew it would not work out in the long run; he, on the other hand, believed they were in a loving relationship, with genuine feelings for one another.
‘She knew she was in it for what she could get from him and for a time it must have seemed ever so easy to her,’ remembers a friend. ‘She could telephone him and say, “I’ve got no cigarettes,” or “I’ve seen such and such and it costs £200,” and in the early days he would turn up and put that sum of money through her door.
‘Hannah would stand in her bedroom, peering through the side of the curtains watching him as he drove up, walked to the door, knocked, got no answer and left. She didn’t even bother acknowledging him. There would come a time when she became dependent, in order to pay her bills, on what he would give her. She certainly got a lot out of it at first. He thought they were having a relationship, but Hannah’s view of it was different. He was there to help her out. It meant having sex from time to time, but she didn’t enjoy it. She would say, “I can get him finished before I need to do anything.” He could be so gullible.
‘She took him for a lot over time and would actually get a laugh telling her friends how easily she could con him. He had bought her a beautiful leather coat and one night while they were at a Chinese restaurant together Hannah told him how she was so disappointed to find, after he had bought it, that there was a matching leather hat. When he asked how much it was, she told him it was £100 and so he handed that sum over to her. The hat, said Hannah, as she told the story, had actually been £50.
‘She’d go through a Kays catalogue with him, pointing to items and asking, “Do you like that?” or “Isn’t that lovely? I’d love that,” which was a hint for him that he was just unable to refuse because he was so besotted by her.
‘After a time, though, he began to cool and that’s when she had to work for it. Instead of her promising to meet him somewhere and not turning up, as she had done, it was he who let her down. Hannah was anxious at the thought of all that money and all those presents disappearing. She would then spend days trying to ge
t through to him on the telephone, he not taking her calls or responding to messages for him to get in contact. She would resort to going to the home of a pal and using their telephone so he wouldn’t recognise the number, or even getting the pal to make the call for her, though that almost backfired because on one occasion, having taken a call from the friend, it was she whom he asked for a date. The friend, thinking of all the goodies he had heaped on Hannah, was tempted to take him up on it.’
Eventually, this lover would drift into oblivion. But, as Hannah was to discover, someone else was waiting and together they would decide the fate of many others; others who were at this time (around 1990) creating a venture that would mushroom into one that would have a major effect on thousands of Scots.
This woman, who had most probably come face to face with Bible John, who would unwittingly and unknowingly play a role in the horror of a host of unsolved murders, was on a door-knocking, catalogue-selling route that would lead her into the most successful drug-smuggling racket the country had ever known. As yet, Hannah had never heard of Gordon Ross or Billy McPhee, Trevor Lawson or Manny McDonnell, Tam McGraw or John Healy. But around the time she was slogging about the streets of Lanarkshire and Glasgow, a copy of the catalogue under her arm, dreaming of a lost daughter and better times, others were also buying and selling, only the returns were more lucrative and the risks higher than her sore feet and influenza.
In 1989, Gordon Ross and Charles ‘Chick’ Glackin, inspired by talk of get-rich-quick schemes in their native Glasgow, had pooled their savings, bought a third- or fourth-hand Volkswagen Golf and driven it to Dover, where they boarded a cross-Channel ferry to Calais. Disembarking and clutching a cheap map of Europe, they motored across France, through tiny Andorra and into Spain, where they headed for the coastal resort of Malaga on the Costa del Sol, so popular with package holidaymakers.