Bible John's Secret Daughter

by David Leslie

  As he sat watching the proceedings from the public gallery, the Irishman chuckled when he heard the codename Operation Lightswitch. He remembered calling to collect money and Hannah wanting to switch on the bedroom lights. Now he realised how fortunate a decision that had been. ‘The first time I saw Hannah’s face was when she stepped into the dock to give her evidence,’ he said. ‘But more important for me was that if someone had asked how many times she had seen me, an honest answer would have been that this was the first. I wouldn’t have recognised her as the woman I’d met a couple of years earlier in the darkened bedroom.

  ‘She had been very well tutored by the police in how to give her evidence. For much of the time she laid on tears and, to hide her real feelings, wore sunglasses, even inside the courtroom. I was praying she would say she couldn’t identify the man who had come to her room at the hotel. And she did.

  ‘But she talked about how her life had been destroyed, how she was devastated by the way in which she had been used, and continually broke down. She set out to destroy Graeme, but because she had heard about Michael Bennett and had often heard Mason mention his name, she decided Benji must be one of his friends. That connection was enough for her to make allegations against him also, even saying Benji used to bring in prostitutes to work as couriers, a claim which was totally untrue.’

  Another of the accused was staggered at the extent of her bitterness. ‘After the arrests, we began getting an insight into the sort of evidence the police would be producing against us. Hannah was to be the prime witness and we learned she had made a very lengthy statement to the police. In it she nailed Del Boy Mason to the floor, hammered him. Hannah hated him because of the way she felt he had tricked her and in court she put the boot in big style, leaving him dead and buried. The trouble was Graeme brought it all on himself. When they’d met and started an affair he had told her a real story to end all stories. And Hannah had been through so much unhappiness in her life she was not the sort of person to forget when someone made an idiot of her.

  ‘He had made the mistake of telling her, “I am the main man here. I set the whole thing up. I’m the brains behind it all, the organiser, the top dog, everyone else takes their orders from me and through me. I direct the whole thing.” Unfortunately, she remembered his words. It was as though he had a gun and had shot himself in the foot, only his recovery from what she did would take much longer.’

  The trial would last 58 days. After 45 days, Wood, McDonnell and Ross were released when it was ruled they had no case to answer. It was a blow for the police but from their point of view there was even worse to come. Benji Bennett, who had been driving the bus when it was stopped near Uddingston and who expressed disbelief when £263,000 worth of hash was discovered hidden under the floor, went home too, as the jury announced the charge that he had smuggled drugs not proven. There were similar verdicts for McPhee and Lawson, both of whom, said the Crown, had acted as couriers, taking money overseas. And as a not proven verdict was announced for Tam McGraw, friends in the packed public gallery hissed ‘Yes’. John Burgon, too, walked free with a clear not guilty ringing in his ears.

  Hannah, sitting at home, listened to the verdicts as they were announced on television. She wasn’t particularly bothered what happened to the majority, it was the fate of two men that interested her. The outcome for one gave her a feeling that justice had won the day; for the other it brought bitter sobs. Of the three men who remained, all were found guilty. Paul Flynn was given six years, Mason eight and Healy ten.

  For Healy, there was worse to come. Under legislation introduced to deprive criminals of their ill-gotten gains, the Crown financial experts had worked out that he had made £766,000 from trafficking in hash and they wanted £450,000 to be paid into state coffers. If it was not, then his sentence would be stretched even further.

  For the Operation Lightswitch team, the outcome was devastatingly disappointing and, as is often the case, individuals looked about to see who could be blamed. Some who were high up pointed to the comments by the trial judge, Lord Bonomy, who criticised the way the case had been presented, making it clear he thought it was so complex the jury would almost certainly have had difficulty following what was going on.

  Hannah would now be hung out to dry. She had served her purpose, helping to convict at least one of the three, possibly two, and had been rewarded for her efforts by not going to prison herself. She was being left to salvage what pieces of her life she could collect. A few days after the trial ended, a detective came to collect the equipment that had been fitted for her protection; evidently, it was felt she no longer deserved looking after.

  ‘Can’t you leave it?’ she begged, trying to demonstrate how vulnerable she felt. ‘Mason has a lot of friends and they know where I am.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she was told. ‘You’ll be OK. If you’re really worried, why don’t you pack up your house and move away? You don’t even need to move out of the district.’

  If it was meant to be helpful it failed abysmally. A few days later, she met an old friend, who asked about Mason. Hannah told her: ‘I fell for his story. He knew he was stringing me along and I couldn’t understand why because I wasn’t impressed by his claims to be the leader of the whole thing. When I found out he’d been making a fool of me, I was so hurt and angry. But I simply sat back and waited for the chance of revenge. Del Boy used to get drunk and began boasting and rambling about what a big shot he was. I didn’t drink, or hardly ever touched the stuff, so I’d sit and listen and take it all in. At the end of the day, he talked himself into jail but took a couple of others with him.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE WRETCHED SOUL

  Hannah, once part of a racket with a turnover approaching £50 million, had returned home penniless, empty and sad. Others had made fortunes, they drove flash cars and wore Rolex watches, while she had no jewellery, no clothes other than what she had bought from her catalogue earnings or made, and no savings.

  Now, with the trial over, she felt abandoned by those she had helped on both sides of the law. The promise of a huge reward from the friends of John Healy had failed to materialise, although she never gave up hoping that one day it would arrive. There was no doubt that she had opened the door to the cell that was now home to Graeme Mason, but while he was locked inside the feeling remained with her that from now on she should move about constantly looking over her shoulder.

  Hannah’s problem was that as Mason had been garrulous, she was reserved, and now she needed to unwind, to uncork the bottle in which she had stored so many emotions for too long. A confession beckoned. She knew one of her closest friends would sit on the other side of the curtain and would understand and not punish. It had been in the days before Mason that the two had last shared a heart to heart and her confidante could never forget what she had been told then.

  ‘Hannah was an amazing storyteller but persuading her that opening up was sometimes the best remedy for sadness could be difficult. After her dad died, she had been at a very low ebb and it was only then that she told me about having Isobel. I had probably been as close to her as anyone, yet I hadn’t had a clue about the baby. That was how closely guarded a family secret it was. We’d sat in a café for two hours and throughout that time it was Hannah who did the talking.

  ‘Then one particular night, some time after that, she had walked down the road with me as though she was heading for home. But it seemed as if she had nowhere to go and so she came to my house and began going over old times, old memories. When midnight came, I wondered how I was going to get up for work the next morning, but to Hannah it was as though time did not exist. She talked on and on through the night, soul searching and crying, and I could tell she wanted to get something into the open.

  ‘When eventually Hannah decided to talk about her baby, she was distressed and distraught. It was the story of Isobel from the night in the back of the car up to her birth. It simply poured from her, as if a dam holding back the words had burst. It was, I sup
pose, like a relief to her, but she went over who she had spoken to about the baby, who hadn’t to know and who was told, who helped, who was in favour of her keeping the child and who against it. She cried her way through from half an hour after midnight to half past five in the morning and came back the next night and did the same.

  ‘Now, a few years on, I had the sense she needed more of these long sessions, and it was only after she and Mason split up that she really, really opened up. Maybe she had thought that in Mason there was an escape from the past and perhaps finding he was not the answer made the experiences she had with him appear all the worse. “He’s a wee weasel,” she said. She rarely referred to him by name, usually as “that wee weasel”.

  ‘For a long time after they parted, she kept herself to herself because she could not face going out. She went to her job, selling catalogues, and then came straight home and went to her bed. That’s how she lived for months. Part of living like a hermit was down to her always having that fear after giving evidence of somebody putting a contract out on her, even though she had no alternative. In reality, it was probably Mason who had more to be scared of than her because but for him she would have known nothing and the others would not have been in jail.

  ‘I thought the drugs thing was an ingenious plan and I told Hannah, “Maybe more of a punishment for the weasel is the thought he might get done in for opening his mouth too often rather than simply being locked up in prison.”

  ‘During another meeting, I asked what she was doing with herself, but she simply sighed and said, “Absolutely nothing, I haven’t been anywhere lately. We’ll have to have a night out.”

  ‘One night, I again asked her into my house. She came in and that was the resumption of the long unburdening sessions we’d had before she lived with Mason. Hannah started coming to my house on a regular basis, before she started work, after she finished work, often right into the early hours unless I was going somewhere else and even then she would wait until I returned and ring up, although it might be midnight, and ask if she could come to see me.

  ‘Some nights she told stories about her mother, crying from one end of the night to the other, about the things her mother had done. Then she’d look up as if she was a wee girl and ask, “How could she do that?” I’d felt part of Hannah’s family but, in my naivety, because her mother was nice to me and in many ways kind to me, had I really overlooked the fact that she just wasn’t the same with Hannah?

  ‘There had been times when she was living in Clova Street when we’d met one another as she came over to check her own house and we’d chat. Then she had talked about Mason and Healy, especially Healy. She didn’t mention any of the others or the involvement she had with them at that time, but after it was over and the trial was finished and she had laid low for months, she really opened up.

  ‘She’d had all her pain, living through the unhappiness of her childhood and then suffering the tragedies of her sister dying, her mother dying, her father, granny and granddad too. And there had been the disappointment and heartbreak of everybody else who was supposed to care about her at some point or another slapping her in the bloody face and turning their backs on her when she needed help. She got everything out. That’s why I knew of all her bitterness, all her hatred, all her love even.

  ‘Was she a sad, hurt person? People say “You bring it all on yourself” and I did say that to her about her fears over the Mason situation. But there’s always a lot more to it than that. You actually don’t just “bring it on yourself” because it’s like there is fate, as if it’s bloody meant to happen to you, the karma experience again. I said to Hannah, “I’m shocked by what was going on, all the drugs and the kids in buses, and yet I’m not shocked at your involvement. Maybe you were destined to be there and to do something about it, as you did in the end.”

  ‘She believed she had been part of something very, very big and yet she hated drugs and drug users. “I know it’s hypocritical,” she would say, “because I took part in bringing them in, but it was only ever cannabis.”

  ‘Hannah had felt this was one way, maybe the only way, in which she might make some money in life. Yet despite all the bad things that happened to her, she could remain a dreamer. Sometimes when we’d sit talking at night, she would say, “See, when I get that money from John’s friends, because John will make sure I get that money, I’m going to buy my house and then I’ll not have rent to pay. I’ll struggle on for the next couple of years until I can claim the pension I built up when I worked at Hoover. Then things will be so much better.”

  ‘She so looked forward to getting the tax-free lump sum that would come with her Hoover pension and had even thought about how receipt of the pension itself would adversely affect her right to housing and other benefits. Owning her own house would be the best way around the problem and that’s why the money she expected for helping out John Healy was so important to her. She was sure that if he knew it had not been paid he would send word from prison to his friends who had made the arrangement to honour it.

  ‘Hannah was such a changed person after the split from Mason and the long build up to the trial. The whole experience had a devastating effect and for a year or two afterwards she laid low, not having relationships and not seeking them. He had slowly demoralised her, and if she had been in love with him the thought that someone to whom she had given her heart could put her down in the cruel way he did would have been so much worse. But she had never loved him, although maybe at the beginning she wondered if love might come with time. Now she had to begin all over again.

  ‘When she’d been happy and everything was going along fine, she would shine. But there were two faces to Hannah; she had a split personality after the years with Mason. That affair destroyed her mentally and materially.

  ‘Once she sat in the dark at her home for a week because she had no money with which to buy a card for her electricity meter. Each day bills and final demands dropped through her letterbox. Anyone else might have sought help from their friends, but not Hannah. She was suffering from depression but could not see it and like many depressives was too proud to seek help.

  ‘I wondered why, when she was staying with Mason, she had continued to slog around the streets, looking for catalogue customers. Why, I asked her, had she not packed it in and looked for something more profitable? She would shrug as though she didn’t know the answer, but it was clear she was hiding the truth, which was that she felt insecure when she was with him, unsure as to how it would all end. For all his bragging about money, she still paid bills and bought food. When they broke up, she returned to Bellshill with so much baggage she was never fully able to sort her head out. She tried doing that by dressing up to become a different person, applying make-up in a way that actually made her feel differently about herself. “I’m putting on my personality,” she would say, dressing in very stylish outfits by the likes of Frank Usher, even though they might be second-hand, telling us when she was ready to go out, “Now the act begins.”

  ‘She was probably more comfortable playing these smart, bright characters that she pretended to be than her actual self. Getting dolled up gave her such confidence. Others might need a couple of drinks to get enough courage to take to the dance floor but not Hannah. If she liked the music, she would walk straight on and begin, even if she had no partner. She loved making an entrance, being noticed, and yet while others thought she was too full of herself she was the first to put herself down.

  ‘And the reason was that the hidden Hannah was a wretched, depressed soul who must have shocked even herself when she opened up into the other jovial, laughing woman she could become. It was like watching a chameleon. She used to say, “I know I’m not pretty and men don’t find me attractive, but when I put my face on and go out I can become a different person.” And people who knew her would say, “Hannah gives you her heart and soul.”

  ‘She always gave the impression she couldn’t do enough for you. If she had it, she would give you it, but all th
e brightness went out of her after Mason. What was especially sad was that in the later years she didn’t have anything to give; she had to be a taker.

  ‘She was paranoid knowing that someone blaming her for the demise of the gang would come after her bent on revenge, and friends tried persuading her to shake off the distress this caused her by going out socially. We’d take her to different clubs but, although she appeared to be having a good time, it was never enough for her. If we suggested somewhere different, she would say, “I’ve never been in there in my life, why should I go now?”

  ‘Despite the trauma caused by the affair with Mason, she still hoped to find someone with whom she could settle down. On nights out, Hannah would say, “If I get into a relationship that works, I won’t dump my friends but I’ll stop going out with them. Instead I’ll be going out with whoever I meet. He’ll come first.”

  ‘One night, when we were with her at a club, she met a guy – big, bloody dumb and you could tell from the little conversation he had how dull he was. But he bragged about having money, and when you have none that’s an attraction. That was the bait that caught Hannah. He asked her for a date and when she agreed he took her for a meal and even gave her a red rose. They arranged to meet again and he telephoned to say he was taking her out, but didn’t. Instead he turned up and suggested he stayed the night. The reason was that her home was along the route he would be taking to get to work and he thought he could have his fun with her, use her, then clear off. Hannah saw through that right away, blasted him and told him to bugger off. She told me, “It took me an hour and a half to tell him everything that was wrong with him.”

  ‘She met a local man who had been living in England and had returned to Scotland. They went out for meals and he’d turn up at her door with fish suppers and ice cream so they could stay in and have a cosy night. At weekends, though, he would disappear and then telephone her to make excuses, such as “My dad is ill” and “I’m in casualty, come and get me.” We told her he had a drink problem, that he was phoning from a pub, but at first she didn’t want to believe this because she felt comfortable in his company. Then she realised he drank and told him it was over. He called her a bitch and lots of other unpleasant names. She was deeply upset because she’d had high hopes of things working out.