Where There is Evil

by Sandra Brown

  Sexual Offences (Scotland) Section V:

  Lewd (i.e. lustful), indecent or libidinous (lustful desire for sexual indulgence) practices or behaviour towards a girl less than twelve years of age.

  I had read the footnotes concerning Presentation of Abuse, and recognized the hallmark of my dad clearly defined over a paragraph or two.

  The sexual encounter between the child and the adult may be of a single episode which may be very violent and traumatic, particularly if the abuser is a chance acquaintance, or a stranger. It may be the motive for the murder of a child. Much more often the sexual contacts and encounters are multiple with the initial advances made towards the child being relatively minor, but as days, months, and years pass by, the advances become more involved often coming to a stage where sexual intercourse or sodomy is occurring with the child. A crescendo type history is typical of such complaints.

  If the sexual encounter has been violent, the child will often present with severe injuries to the body or genitals as an emergency; on occasions this encounter may also result in death of the child. The victim has been restrained, strangled or throttled in the process, or sharp or blunt force trauma has been perpetrated against the child to ensure that the child succumbs to the sexual demands being made of it, or as part of the sadistic nature of the assault. The very act of penetration of a child by an adult can ‘per se’ result in death of the child as a result of vagal reflex cardiac inhibition. The body of a young child on occasions may show no other evidence of violence other than features of sexual penetration.

  Very often, presentation is non-acute, and may even be delayed, and frequently is, until adult life when the presentation is to psychologists, psychiatrists, and marriage counsellors – indeed, under-reporting is a feature of childhood abuse.

  I had photocopied this information, and read it several times in a grim attempt to try to understand what had occurred on that February night so long ago. I came up with several theories and succeeded in reawakening my wish to be regressed back to my troubled childhood, to eliminate any shred of suspicion about my dad’s relationship with me. I decided to go to an expert in hypnosis regression, recommended by my GP, Brian Venters and with the knowledge of Ashley, who was still counselling me.

  Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool, which, in the correct hands, can provide the key to deeply rooted emotional problems; it taps into the subconscious, where the experiences we meet early, and how we deal with them, lay down our behaviour for a lifetime. I had never been hypnotized, had never witnessed any kind of stage show, and had only read articles on the subject. Everything learned or seen is stored in the brain, and using hypnotherapy to reach what is present in the deeper recesses means you can re-evaluate with adult eyes what took place in the past and cut through the child’s confusion. Often the subconscious reveals events repressed by the conscious mind because they were too distressing for the child to cope with at the time.

  It is important that the hypnotherapist is able to deal professionally not only with helping the client access the subconscious, but also with any revealed trauma. I had every faith in the woman with whom Brian Venters put me in contact, a Glasgow GP named Hetty McKinnon, and visited her home one Friday evening.

  Hetty showed me into a charming study, lined with antiques, and soon had me installed in a comfortable winged armchair with a little footstool in front of me. She set up the tape recorder I had remembered to bring, and tested its volume. Recordings could be passed on to Jim if they proved useful.

  ‘Now, you’ve absolutely nothing to worry about.’ She beamed at me. ‘When we start to regress you, just let me show you what to do should there be anything that worries you, so that I know you’re concerned about it.’ She demonstrated how I should move my finger to alert her.

  Reassured, I felt tension slip out of my body. I concentrated on her framed watercolours, then closed my eyes and let myself drift as she suggested, while her gentle voice washed over me. She made it clear that I could stop what was happening at any time simply by opening my eyes. It was just like entering the lightest of afternoon naps.

  Hetty described my arm, which I had to extend straight in front of me; it would be as heavy as one of the huge iron bars which were manufactured in the foundries of Coatbridge many years ago. Within a second, I could not budge it when asked to move it, neither could I curl my fingers. It was the strangest of sensations.

  ‘I want to take you back, Sandra, maybe to think of happy occasions first from your past, then others. Go back to when you were a little girl. Imagine you’ve got a book in front of you and each year will be on a page so we’ll have to turn back a few, and more and more, till we can reach 1962, when you’d be thirteen. Then 1961, when you’d be twelve. If there’s anything on the page to worry you, just show me by giving the signal which I have shown you.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Slowly we drifted backwards from 1993. Images were flashing through my brain, some happy, some disturbing, but nothing to make me feel I wanted to pause and talk of the memory. Fragments passed me as if I were in a long tunnel like a kaleidoscope of visions.

  I frowned. One vivid picture came from Ashgrove, not long after we had moved there. I was twelve. I was wearing my best dress, a bright sunshine yellow one with some fancy embroidery and a little matching bolero, originally bought for my uncle Bobby’s wedding.

  I examined the memory more closely.

  I’m terribly proud of my outfit, but now it hurts under my arms, and there’s a faint line you can see where the hem has been let down, so it’s no longer just for Sundays any more, and I’m playing out in the street. Then I go reluctantly to Allison’s van that has stopped at my granny’s gate. My mother’s shouted at me to get items from the butcher for her and Katie, but I always look warily into the sawdust interior at the back. Dead carcasses swing about, still swaying from the vehicle’s momentum, as do dark brown sticky fly papers; and the white trays are clogged with bits of minced meat, attracting large bluebottles which make me feel sick. Clutching my wares in their hastily wrapped brown paper, I run up the path to Katie’s door, then stop dead as I feel the blood soak through the cotton material of my dress. I scream as a gory ox tongue rolls out of the package and right down the front of my frock, marking it so that I can never wear it again. The crimson splashes are everywhere, the rivulet down my leg and in my sock a dreadful reminder from the past. I end up yelling like a banshee and now all the linked sausages are scattered about on Katie’s red Cardinal-waxed steps. My father, running from his garage to see what has occurred, curses me for the needless fuss I am making over some bloodstains, and wallops me for stupidity at dropping what will be his tea all over the path. My granny Katie also clatters me across the head to silence the shrieking, which I cannot stop for a good minute, particularly when I see her pick up the huge dripping tongue. ‘What a stushie to make about a frock!’ she declares as she shoves me in the door. ‘God bless us, stop drawing attention to yerself!’

  I let the memory drift away. I had been terribly ashamed at the time: to draw all eyes to you was the worst of offences and against my granny’s code. Then, I had not been able to cope with it. As an adult, it makes perfect sense to me why the sight of all the spilt blood had had such an effect: it had brought the sexual attack I’d suffered from my unknown assailant in Dunbeth Road three years previously straight into my mind with no warning.

  I did not make any signal to Hetty, and let her turn another page back, then another.

  The early 1960s . . . Davy Crockett hats . . . crocodiles of children bouncing jauntily to the baths with wee string bags stuffed with ancient family towels and our elasticated, horribly ruched swimsuits.

  1960, 1959 . . . wonderful memories here, of splashing in and out of tubs in back yards, skipping about through sprays of water hosed into groups of kids by adults enjoying amazing summer weather. Lurid-coloured plastic hula hoops.

  1958, 1957 . . . I am absolutely fine till 1957.

  ‘Is there someth
ing on that page worrying you?’

  Hetty has spotted my finger trembling. I have still not spoken so far on the tape.

  When I do, it is a childish little voice that speaks, and it astonishes me. I find myself listening to what this wee girl is saying. I’m quite detached from her, yet she is me.

  ‘It’s very hot. I’ve got flu. Lots of people have it – my two little brothers, they’re usually in my bed here, but I’m on my own. They might get it, in the bed in the wall, where I am, with flu . . . but it’s OK, Mum’s here . . .’

  Hetty tried to establish when this had taken place, and asked some questions about winter, and took me back a little to Christmas in the same period.

  ‘My dad’s not here. He’s not, and we have to go on Christmas Day to my aunt Bessie’s. I’ve asked for the Girl’s Crystal annual – but he’s not going to be there. We’re not allowed to visit him.’

  Hetty asked me about missing my father, and how I had enjoyed Christmas.

  ‘I think the tangerines in my stockin’ – he put them there, with the gold coins. He must have remembered about me, he knows the gold chocolate coins are my favourites. Children aren’t allowed in the big hospital where he is . . . The gold coins, I know they’re from him. The other children at school, they said: “Your dad’s been sent away to a bad place,” and I said, “No, he hasn’t! He’s in hospital, he’s hurt his back,” an’ they said “He’s forgotten all about you,” but he’s not forgotten about us . . . I wish there was a real Santa.’

  How strange, I think to myself. This child is devastated to be without him.

  We went further back, and I gave an involuntary signal to Hetty.

  ‘Is there anything else on this page which worries you, little Sandra, aged seven?’

  Loud sobbing can be heard on the tape.

  ‘He wants me to get my friends . . . There’s Joy, the Elizabeths an’ the others and he keeps wanting to play our games. It’s horrible.’

  ‘What’s horrible about it?’

  ‘Because we jus’ want to play our own games, but he – he keeps doing these things . . .’

  ‘Is he touching you when he plays these games?’

  ‘He’s touching my friends an’ he won’t stop.’

  ‘What is he doing to them?’

  ‘He’s puttin’ his hands under their clothes and he’s ticklin’ them, and makin’ them laugh – but I don’t think it’s very funny.’

  ‘You don’t laugh. Does he do it to you?’

  ‘No, but he doesn’t want me to tell.’

  ‘Does he speak about this?’

  ‘He gives me money and ice cream, he can be so nice. He says there are some things you shouldn’t say . . .’

  ‘Some things should be secret?’

  ‘Uh-huh. But I went to play with Elizabeth an’ she came to the door and said: “I can’t play with you any more, your dad does funny things,” an’ she’s going to tell people at school.’

  ‘And you start crying?’

  ‘Yes, he gives me sweeties, and he gives them to my friends, and money as well. I tried to tell my mummy about it – I saw him. I saw him trying to take girls into his car at the park. My mum wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘You did try to say to her, but she doesn’t believe you?’

  ‘She says he went into Molly Gardiner’s shop for cigarettes for his clippie because he was going to work, an’ she says how could he be talking to people at the park if he was on his way to work? He wouldn’t have had time. I told her an’ said why was he there? He was talkin’ to them and I think he was wantin’ them to go with him. I wasn’t there, this time. I wasn’t meant to see him, it was jist an accident that I saw him with them.’

  ‘And did he say anything to you, Sandra?’

  ‘ “Keep yer mouth shut, in future.” And he burnt me with the spoon. After I’d been trying to tell my mum, he put the teaspoon in his tea, no milk in it, an’ then he put the teaspoon in my face.’

  ‘And it’s sore.’

  ‘Yes. It’s sore.’

  The furthest back we went that day was 1953, when I was just four years old. I had had no recollection of this memory in my normal day-to-day living; I described the panic of my brother Norman having a fit, and the terror of going along what seemed miles and miles of great long corridors at Yorkhill, the hospital for sick children in Glasgow, which I revealed in some detail. Then:

  ‘My mummy’s giving me such a row! It’s because I’m so . . . she keeps saying, “You’re so crabbit. Why are you so crabbit?” An’ then the doctor comes, an’ the doctor says – the doctor’s black – an’ he says: “Can you not see that this child has chicken pox coming out? No wonder she’s upset,” an’ there is red itchies comin’ up, m’m. I’m kept in hospital too.’

  Hetty explained afterwards that a number of things from this memory had caught her attention. My description of the hospital was very much as she remembered it when she had worked there years before, and my child’s reaction to an ethnic face had not surprised her: immigrant doctors were rare in the early fifties. (I discovered later from my mother that the incident had indeed taken place, although she, too, had forgotten all about it. She confirmed that Norman had had a fit aged eighteen months, which had involved a short spell in hospital. And yes, I had ended up covered in a rash there.)

  Hetty remembered flu sweeping Scotland the weekend Moira vanished. Then she said I would need one more session with her. We set a date for an October evening before my Open University examinations.

  After my session with Hetty, I received a message at work, asking me to meet Lord James Douglas-Hamilton at his local surgery in Davidson’s Mains, another suburb of Edinburgh, on Friday 24 September, at 5 p.m. All he could do, he said, was add his voice to John Smith’s and ask the Lord Advocate why no one would meet my family or myself to enlighten us. The whole business seemed to strike him as distasteful.

  My cousins asked about the hypnotherapy. Had I been a victim too?

  ‘We haven’t finished, but I don’t think so,’ I said slowly. ‘Much of what has come up are the same memories I’ve given the police in my witness statements, but the details are just that bit sharper. We went pretty far back, but not as far as the memory with Doctor Vicky. It must have been even earlier, so I’ve not dealt with that nightmare.’

  Not yet.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I had a meeting over tea at the Sheraton Hotel with Irene, my oldest friend, and her cousin, Sheila, who’d known me for years too. Sheila’s husband, Bill, had grown up beside A and B and knew of my father. He’d told me that he did not doubt for one minute what my cousins were saying: my father’s predilection for young girls was ‘well known’. Bill had a colleague, Richard Kinsey, who Sheila felt could give me the best advice and recommend a top lawyer who might help our cause.

  I telephoned Richard. He was a well-known expert in criminology at a Scottish university. He was generous not only with his advice, but also with his time: our chat lasted some two hours.

  He told me to think carefully before launching a private prosecution, and cautioned me on its inherent difficulties. He was keen to know what my motives were. Did I realize I would be placed under the spotlight? He warned me of the personal scrutiny I would receive from the media. A private prosecution would hit the headlines, the journalists would have a field day with the daughter who wanted to see her father in court, and my husband and I could court financial ruin, if none of my cousins or myself qualified for legal aid. ‘You and your family run the risk of losing your home,’ he pointed out, ‘and even if it doesn’t come to that, how will you feel if your kids are perhaps pointed out at school – others would certainly gossip about their mum and what’s in all the papers – or what if you have reporters hanging round your gate? Have you thought all this through? Because some will view your desire to see your father behind bars as a revenge trip. A moment ago you called him an evil bastard. How would that sort of vilification come across in a high court setting? You wou
ld find it incredibly hard to separate off your emotional relationship with this man when sitting in a witness box.’ He reckoned that the only person who could help me, if I was determined to bring my father to court, was the top Scottish lawyer Alistair Duff.

  I had also contacted Robert Reap, from Falkirk, who had spearheaded the formation of an abuse survivors’ group. C had shown me a Daily Record article on his work, and thought he might have advice on how to lauch a private prosecution. He advised me to talk to Maggie Barry, who had written the article on him. I had never heard of her, but filed her name for reference. If she was anything like Eileen McAuley, there would be no problem, I thought.

  Over the next few days, events occurred that undermined my self-confidence. I had rung Jim to have a word with him about the second of my meetings with Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, but he was out and could not be contacted. I gave Eileen a quick call instead, and was put through to her. She asked if I had heard anything more from John Smith. I had had a note from him, I told her, and then mentioned in passing that I hadn’t been able to get hold of Jim. There was a short silence. ‘Has he mentioned to you he’s about to be moved from Airdrie CID? It’s a sideways shift to Clydebank on the other side of Glasgow. It’s come out of the blue.’