by Sandra Brown
Chapter Twenty
The shingles left me at a low ebb, and I had never felt so down. Jim told me that he was planning to go in late March to Australia to visit his wife’s relatives and celebrate her fortieth birthday. He would interview my father before he left.
Things were now very strained between me and my family, and my brothers were questioning the allegations made by my cousins.
I had explained to my children what their grandfather had done and that he was now facing prison, but Norman refused to tell his children. I thought this was wrong, because they might find out about it, as I had, from a stranger. I told him it would be dreadful for them to see it on a news-stand and then find out our family was involved: Lauren and Ross had accepted what I had told them without any ill effects, but Norman understandably wanted to shield his children from it until the issue could no longer be avoided.
When Jim and his then superior Detective Chief Inspector Ricky Gray were interviewing my father in Leeds, on 17 and 18 March 1993, I was staying at the Station Hotel in Inverness before speaking at a conference. I tossed and turned all night and wondered if my father was in his own bed or in police cells.
Waiting to find out what had happened in Leeds was dreadful. Somehow I got through the events of that day at Inverness College. I couldn’t stop worrying that Jim would return to tell me I had made a ghastly mistake, and I had wasted everyone’s time. He had promised to phone when he got back, so all I could do was wait, something I am not good at.
Finally, he called me from his home and we agreed to meet up at Airdrie police station on 22 March. Then he’d fill me in, he said.
I braced myself for the meeting, when I now expected him to tell me that they’d got nowhere with my dad, who had probably accused me of being a scheming liar. I’d show Jim that I could take it on the chin.
Jim was remarkably perky. He cleared his throat, then picked up a photograph of Moira. ‘Well, Sandra, I have to tell you that you’re absolutely correct in your view that your dad is responsible for what happened to this young girl. I have come back convinced that we have our man. He holds the key to her disappearance.’
My legs turned to jelly and my heart dropped to the soles of my shoes. There were so many reasons why I hadn’t wanted to be right. I asked, ‘What did he say that convinced you?’
Jim handed me the photograph of Moira. ‘As well as my own gut intuition, your dad’s reaction to this. If I had lived down south for the amount of time he has, no way am I going to recognize after thirty years a school snap of a child to whom I’ve got no connection. When we showed him it, and asked if he knew who it was, he stammered out, “Moira!”, and he started to shake. Then he said a very odd thing. “She looks a lot older there.” ’
I demanded to know what had been my father’s first words to Jim when they arrived at his flat, and Jim’s impression of his mental state.
He grinned. ‘First, let me say you’re right about your dad being on the ball. He told me, quite categorically, that everything you reported of your conversation with him in your gran’s house was true. He didn’t argue with the accuracy of the account you gave us. In fact, he agreed with you.’
I was astonished. I’d expected vehement denial.
‘We took your dad to police headquarters in Leeds and interviewed him there, Sandra. There are quite a few hours of tape, which right now are all being typed into transcript,’ he continued. ‘The other person we thought we’d speak to was his estranged wife, Pat. We decided not to hold your dad at that stage, and took him home, then waited to see what he would do. He made a beeline to her home, where he spent a great deal of time, presumably filling her in on the events of his interview with us. He emerged in the small hours, and we picked her up in the morning. Hers was an interesting statement.’
I looked at him expectantly, reminding myself that although I’d never seen this woman, she was only a little older than me and she was now living with another man.
‘Patricia told us two things I found hard to accept,’ Jim sounded cynical. ‘When we asked if she had ever heard your dad mention the name Moira Anderson, without a flicker, she said we of course were referring to the child who’d gone missing in the fifties in her home town. She said she could clearly recall him discussing Moira when the chum of Christine Keeler’s was thought to be her in London in 1963. Just like that. We had no need to prompt her memory. This answer came out slick as you like. At the end of the session, we asked if she kept in contact with her ex-husband. She said only rarely. It tended to be of an accidental nature, such as running into him at the shopping centre. When I asked when she’d last seen him, she was adamant that it had been “some months” since they’d last met.’
Here was another of my father’s ex-partners willing to protect him from the law.
I asked Jim if I could listen to the tapes. Not at the moment, he replied, perhaps later. He knew that many of the things my father had referred to could be checked out with me. And while he would not normally allow a witness access to them, he felt in this case it might aid the inquiry. ‘Your dad is cunning, Sandra, and all my experience of handling suspects tells me he feels he can play cat and mouse with us. “You could check this out with so and so,” then two minutes later, “but they’re dead, unfortunately.” That’s the type of thing he’s trotting out. He’s damn sure that because I’m in a different age group, and not from the burgh itself, he can talk of routes and buses and crews, and we haven’t got his inside knowledge. We’ve interviewed a number of his ex-colleagues, and I’m hoping the flurry of publicity will reap rewards.’
It didn’t surprise me that my father was toying with the policemen. It had all happened so long ago that he had convinced himself that he had got away with it. I asked how his health appeared.
My father in 1943, aged twenty-one.
My parents with our Patrick Street neighbours on Coronation Day, 1953. Mary, my mother, is seated second from the left, and my granny Katie is standing on the far right. My father is standing centre, back row, his handiwork on the display.
Christmas, 1953, at Ashgrove, the home of my maternal grandparents, Kate and Norman Frew, with just some of their twenty-one grandchildren. Almost four, I am cheekily welcoming my father who has just stuck his head round the door. He was still a heroic figure to me at this point.
Four generations in the family, taken in February, 1956, when my father’s brother Robbie married. I am sitting between my granny Jenny and her mother, in front of my father Alexander, with detested stiff ‘aeroplane’ bow, on edge in all senses.
The Anderson girls taken around Moira’s eleventh birthday in 1956. From left to right: Janet, Marjorie and Moira. This is the last photo of the three sisters taken together. (Mrs. Janet Hart)
Me, aged seven, autumn 1956 at Gartsherrie Academy, Coatbridge.
The last portrait of Moira, taken at Coatdyke Primary, two months before her disappearance. This photo was shown on television in May 1957 and used extensively by the media. (Mrs. Janet Hart)
Some of the Baxter buses’ staff at a social occasion. My dad is the tallest driver on the right. His friend, Jim Gallogley, is fourth from the left in the back row, wearing a collar and tie. Several of the other drivers, like Jim, were often in our home in Dunbeth Road.
Coatbridge Fountain, heart of the town centre, as it was in my childhood. The Regal cinema was Moira’s planned destination on the day she vanished and still exists today as a bingo hall. (From Old Coatbridge by Campbell McCutcheon, Richard Stenlake Publishing, Ochiltree)
Witchwood Pond, in the Townhead area of Coatbridge. The extent of the marshland around the sizeable area of water can be seen from this angle. The tower block had not been built in 1957. (Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser)
‘He’s pleading prostate trouble,’ said Jim. ‘His lawyer’s ensuring that every time your dad feels the need to relieve his bladder, we have to let him go out. It’s significant that when your dad finds the quizzing is making him go hot under the collar,
it grinds to a halt so he can go off to take a leak.’
I asked if my dad would get legal aid, unsure why it mattered to me that he got some support. Jim paused for a moment. Instead of answering my question he said, ‘Sandra, you asked what your dad’s first words to me were. When we arrived, he said, “Someone’s let the cat out of the bag up there. I’m not going to say anything that will commit me until I see my lawyer.” He’s trying to say now that you’re orchestrating some kind of vendetta in your family against him because you’ve not forgiven him for abandoning your family and your mother.’
‘Well, that’s true, I haven’t ever forgiven him for that,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s hardly likely that I’d wait almost thirty years to seek revenge, and in such a manner. He knew he’d said too much to me that night and that was why he left with his son right after the funeral. It’s also why I got that letter. And although what you’ve said today justifies me in talking to you, I didn’t want it to be true. I don’t hate him, just what he’s done.’
Jim understood exactly what I meant. Whatever my father had done, he was still, and always would be, my father.
The news broke in the local papers that detectives had interviewed a man in his seventies in the north of England because of ‘information that been given by someone who used to live in the Coatbridge area’. I saw the story first on our door mat low down on the front page of the Scotsman. But the huge front-page headline of the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser of 26 March 1993 grabbed local attention: ‘DETECTIVES QUIZ MAN IN NORTH OF ENGLAND: Police probe case of Coatbridge girl who disappeared thirty-six years ago . . . following a definite new line of inquiry.’ Two revealing statements caught my eye which the reporter, Eileen McAuley, had ensured were given front-page prominence: ‘The man police spoke to last week is not thought to have been questioned by the detectives who carried out the original investigation’, and
Contrary to official information released at the time, Moira did not vanish without trace from her grandmother’s home in Muiryhall Street. She was apparently spotted AFTER she left on an errand to pick up a packet of butter from a shop just three hundred yards from her own doorstep in Eglinton Street. Four eye witnesses claimed to have seen the youngster after she left her grandmother’s. All four gave statements in 1957, and although three are now dead, their statements are still of great value to the police.
Moira’s picture was also on the front. Inside was a massive two-page spread, headlined, ‘THE LITTLE GIRL WHO DISAPPEARED ON HER WAY TO THE SHOP’, and a feature urging those who thought they could help to telephone Airdrie police station. It went on to say that although senior Monklands detectives felt they were on the verge of a major breakthrough, they were still anxious for fresh information.
Locally the story was on every other person’s lips. Lunchtime reports were shown on television, and in the early and late evening bulletins, with a reporter pacing out part of the short journey Moira had made from her grandmother’s house in Muiryhall Street, curious neighbours all around him. Details given were extremely sparse and neither Jim nor his men were interviewed. Naturally he was playing it low key. There was huge speculation in my home town about the identity of the pensioner being questioned.
Chapter Twenty-One
Meanwhile I was still trying to trace down old friends who my cousins and I felt might have been other victims. Some were impossible to trace. Perhaps they did not wish to be found. Others had moved away from Coatbridge, but I found my ex-next-door neighbour Jan in Airdrie. She remembered my father locking her in his car, only releasing her when my brothers interrupted him, and told me she dreaded her widowed mother sending her to lend my father gardening tools.
Jan agreed reluctantly to be interviewed by the police but clearly would have preferred the past to stay in the past.
Another chum, I’ll call Marie, had lived in Newlands Street, just round the corner from me. We had started high school together, aged twelve, but our friendship had suddenly foundered. I had never been able to work out why. I knew I had never left her alone with my father, and had always tended to visit her house rather than the other way round.
I found her in Glasgow. It had been so many years since we’d met that I barely recognized her at first. We chatted briefly for a few minutes of how our lives had changed and then Marie said, ‘I think I can guess why you’re making contact after all this time. My mum still sends me the local paper and I’ve put two and two together. You’re the one who’s gone to the polis in Coatbridge about why your old boy should be investigated about Moira Anderson, aren’t you? Am I right?’
I told her she was spot on, and asked her if anything had happened to her, saying I always had wondered about why she broke off our friendship. Her eyes watered.
‘Two horrible things happened to me, which I was never able to tell my mammy. Do you remember your dad taking quite a few of us one hot day in the summer over to Bothwell Bridge, you know, by Hamilton, to a place down by the river?’
I did.
‘I only ever went with you the once,’ she said. ‘It was a boiling day. We took those long poles with fishing nets on the end of them, and you brought jelly jars, so we could look for minnows and sticklebacks. I don’t know how he’d the nerve to do it, in a public place like that. He let us play for a while on our own. Then, after rounders, he took us all for a walk down to a bit of the river where kids could wade into wee pools, or lie on the bank to see if we could catch anything. Some went in paddling, and you were dipping in the water with the jars we brought. The next thing I knew your dad was lying right next to me with no space for me to shift away from him, because there was a log or something right there by me on the bank. We were all laughing and shouting, then I don’t know why, but I felt uncomfortable. It was this hand going right up my dress. He wouldn’t stop, and he was sort of pressing me into the ground, his weight almost on top of me, so I thought I’d be crushed to death. I was just frozen there. Can you believe he would do that in broad daylight?’
She was silent for a moment. ‘I just couldn’t believe it had happened. But I knew it had when I saw him smiling at me in his driving mirror on the way home. The worst part was feeling that because I hadn’t shouted or screamed out for him to get off me, somehow I deserved what happened. I could’ve maybe stopped it, but I didn’t, and that gave me the creeps for weeks on end. I hated myself for it. After that, I avoided him. I wouldn’t even go on a Baxter’s bus in case I ran into him.’
Worse was to come.
‘One day after that I went to ask if you could come to the pictures with me and you weren’t in, but your dad said, “Come on in, Marie, she won’t be long,” and I trooped up the stairs on to your landing. You’d a glass door at the top, just at the bend of the stairs, and he was standing right next to it. As soon as he had me through that door, your old boy clicked it shut, and snibbed it. He pushed me into the first bedroom and shoved me over the end of the bed, and I just knew what was coming next. He did what he’d done before, but this time he was moving his whole body into me. Then he shoved this half-crown in my hand, laughing away, and he said maybe I’d like to come back another time nobody else was in, and earn some more pocket money for being nice to him. I felt sick and I ran all the way home. The one sister I told wouldn’t believe me at first, then said I was a little whore ’cos I’d accepted money from your dad, and then she said she’d never speak to me again, which she hasn’t to this day.’
Marie had been in all sorts of trouble since those days. Recently she had had counselling and it was only through that that she had come to understand that my father’s actions had been responsible for her alcohol and drug problems, and the failure of her relationships. Now she was sorting herself out: she had a new partner, she was happy and she didn’t want to be involved again with the police. I understood why she refused to make a formal statement.
Chapter Twenty-Two
During the week when the story broke in the media, I felt exposed and self-conscious. It would have been
easy to sink into further depression but I reminded myself that I had to go and meet Jim’s sidekick, Gus Paterson.
He was a friendly bear of a guy, who chatted away, putting me at ease. Over a coffee, he asked me the question I was now becoming used to: was I sure nothing had happened to me?
I sighed and said I really did not think so, though I could not be a hundred per cent sure. I told him I had thought of having regression hypnosis through a practitioner to whom my GP could refer me. That might put my mind at ease.
Gus told me that the team had had a good response to the publicity Jim had generated, and was following up a number of calls. ‘One of Baxter’s ex-employees actually phoned from down south after someone sent him the local paper with the headline, and the first thing he said was he wanted to travel north, stay with his sister here in Airdrie, and make a statement if he was correct about the identity of the man being questioned. We would not, of course, comment on your dad’s name over the telephone, but the guy actually said he’d suspected a man whose initials were A.G. for many years, and he wanted us to say yes or no to that. We’ve arranged for him to travel north.’
Finally a Baxter’s employee was prepared to spill the beans.
My mother and Aunt Margaret made their statements on Friday 26 March 1993. Both were nearly hysterical, petrified of neighbours spotting police cars at the gate. Finally I quietened Mary by reminding her of the Biblical quotation about how we should confront evil. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘Where there is evil, cast it out.’ Detective Chief Inspector Ricky Gray decided to interview my mother himself, while Aunt Margaret spoke to the WPC, Audrey. Before he began Ricky Gray told me that Jim McEwan, in Australia, had discovered by sheer chance that he was just a few miles from Janet Anderson Hart, Moira’s elder sister. She had contacted Scottish police when a relative had told her of the mounting interest in the media about the reopened investigation. Jim visited her Sydney home on the same day my mother made her statement.