by Sandra Brown
I showed Alistair the documents I had prepared for the two politicians. He gave me a copy of one of the covering letters he had written to accompany my request for meetings with them both: I wanted them to press my case in Westminster. I read it when I got home, and his words made me feel much better after the rebuffs I had received.
Without going into all the details, having met her father again, Sandra became convinced he was responsible for the likely abduction and murder of a child called Moira Anderson in Coatbridge. This may all sound a trifle improbable, but I can say that, having heard the details, I am pretty sure that she is right and that the original police enquiry was a terrible botch . . .
As you have probably guessed, this document is very much a potted version of the whole saga, but what I can assure you of is that Sandra is not a crank. For what it is worth, I am firmly of the view that her suspicions are well-founded and that a major injustice will be done if this man is not brought to book for his wrongs. I hope you can help her, and would be quite happy to talk with you about it all in greater detail.
Alistair J. M. Duff.
John McFall chose not to become involved, but Lord Macauley wrote to say that he would make some discreet inquiries first, before we met with Alistair at Parliament House. His initial reaction was of great disquiet. He requested copies of all the correspondence up to date, and a complete summary of events.
‘What’s the problem?’ Sheena, the chief clerical officer, who was also working late one night, had spotted my haunted look over the paperwork I’d to do. I felt I could confide in her, given her connections to Coatbridge from childhood, and the discreet comments she had made as events in the media had unfolded. ‘How can I help?’ I was stunned when she took away the letters which all had to be copied, and a covering letter I’d drafted to type. Later, I discovered that Moira Anderson’s was one of two child abductions in Coatbridge this century. The other, in the 1920s, turned out to have been of the brother of Sheena’s grandfather. The murder of a child does not affect only one generation.
More unexpected help came in other forms. Alistair and I left Lord Macauley after a supportive meeting, with a book on the infamous ‘Carol X’ Glasgow rape case, in which Donald Macauley had been involved as a young man. He lent it to me to let me see what was involved in pursuing a private prosecution, and he waved away my thanks while indicating to us that as Shadow Lord Advocate he would continue to press the Crown Office on my behalf in an attempt to glean further information. So far, between them, he and Alistair had ascertained that no written notification had ever been sent by the Lord Advocate’s office to Leeds to let my father or his English solicitors know of their decision in relation to possible future proceedings. They had been able to check that the Procurator Fiscal at Airdrie had never intimated to Mr Gartshore any word about their decisions. As far as my two advisers were concerned, this seemed to indicate that if and when we could pressure the Crown Office to re-examine its findings, the door was not firmly closed on a possible case against my dad.
Financially, however, I told Alistair, my cousins and I had ruled out the idea of a private prosecution. It was too much of a risk, with too many folk and their families worried about maintaining a roof over their heads. Despite Lord Macauley’s view that my cousins could be eligible for criminal compensation, we had dismissed it. None of us, I told him, were interested in gaining financially from a tragic situation. We just wanted justice, for Moira and ourselves.
‘I suppose the only way forward is if you happen to know a millionaire, Sandra.’
Alistair’s remark had been a joke, but after he dropped me off at home, I pondered over what he had said, and realized I did know of one multi-millionaire in the Monklands, who might help us.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Through Eileen, I arranged a meeting in the Georgian Hotel in Coatbridge with a local philanthropist, Vera Weisfeld, who had made a fortune with her second husband, Gerald, in the rag trade. I introduced myself to her and her son Michael, of Celtic football club. Close up, the girl from Coatbridge who had worked so hard to gain unbelievable wealth and status, and who was easily included in the top ten of Scotland’s rich and famous, was unassuming and genuine. She chatted away to break the ice, but a sharp business brain was at work. Her smile was warm, her interest in my story genuine, as she asked her son to fetch us both a sherry. ‘Of course I recall the whole saga of Moira Anderson’s disappearance vividly.’ She proceeded to do what every contemporary who remembered the event did – she recalled her exact movements on Saturday 23 February 1957. Then she and her son listened to my story.
‘Michael, how can we help?’ Vera was decisive. She wanted to consult with lawyers, see how feasible financing a private prosecution would be and get back to me. Meanwhile, I had to give her a copy of the correspondence that had passed between all the parties concerned, and she would think it through. Her decision would not be made overnight, she said, but she’d be in touch. We left the hotel to the sound of electioneering, and discussed the forthcoming by-election caused by John Smith’s death. We both felt sure Helen Liddell would succeed him, and I mentioned that Janet in Australia had gone out with Alastair Liddell years before. His family had been friendly with Moira’s, and still lived in Cliftonville.
‘Scotland is really a very small country.’ Vera Weisfeld smiled.
Meanwhile, I received a call out of the blue from Elizabeth Taylor Nimmo, up north visiting her daughter. I was surprised to hear from her: she sounded upset. It transpired that her family had had a new baby, and her daughter had asked her to bring all the old family albums to have a look through before they inserted the new ones.
‘I couldn’t believe it, Sandra. I hadn’t seen them for years. Pictures that my parents took at St Andrews when I was a kiddie – it was such a shock when I saw myself on the beach in this pink sloppy joe T-shirt and the grey divided skirts. It was just as you described, and I’d forgotten that in the summer of 1956, my mum had got my hair permed. It does look different, and darker in those snaps. My daughter said something when I was just gazing at it, and it must have triggered something. It was horrible.’
‘You’ve remembered,’ I said softly. ‘It was you. You’re Beth.’
She sobbed for a few moments, then I heard her agree quietly.
‘I’ve told my daughter, though it was so painful. The photo brought it all back, because we’re there, all of us on the beach, the family, my big sister and her boyfriend, who’d been allowed to come with us. They were the ones who got married the same week as Moira disappeared the next February, and their anniversary always coincides. Well, when he was changing, the towel slipped and, of course, there was a lot of hilarity, mainly at my expense because they thought I’d never seen a man undressed at my age. My parents were very fair people, but strict, and they would’ve died rather than discuss sex with my sister and me. They thought I was pure as the driven snow. I was mortified. But I couldn’t tell my folks that I had actually seen a man’s sexual organ that summer.’
I felt a sweeping sense of relief. Here was the final piece in my own personal jigsaw of memory slipping into its appointed place, from the heat wave of 1956.
‘I’ve been so upset discussing it with my own daughter, but she insisted I phone you to let you know you were right about the flashback you had all these years ago. It was Moira and your dad and me that you saw, though why I should’ve repressed it all this time, I don’t know. I genuinely had no recollection of the man Moira knew who called us over to his car that day at Dunbeth Park, till I saw that picture of me on the sands at St Andrews and realized it was the same outfit you’d described. Suddenly, there I was, back with her, and laughing like a couple of drains at what he was doing in his little black car.’
‘What was he doing, Elizabeth?’ I asked, already knowing.
‘He was exposing himself, wanting us to come and touch him and get sweets.’
‘You’re sure she knew him?’
‘Yes, I’m sure she c
alled him by name. She definitely knew him, but when he spoke to her, that’s when you appeared, and we ran off in fits.’
I told Elizabeth how grateful I was that she’d shared this recollection with me.
She contacted me later to tell me she had called at the police station, where she had hoped to see Gus Patterson, whom she knew, but it had turned out there was only desultory interest in the additional statement she gave. It seemed to her, she said, that the case, as Janet, my cousins and myself had feared, was being quietly put to rest once more in the recesses of Coatbridge police station.
Now, I told my cousins, our only hope seemed to lie with Vera Weisfeld.
But it was clear when I met her again that she has decided reluctantly that a private prosecution was not the way forward. On advice from her lawyers, she felt she did not want to take on the Lord Advocate. Then she said, ‘Have you considered writing down what has happened to you at all?’ She asked if I’d heard of Eddie Bell, a local guy of my own age, who, like herself, had surpassed the aspirations of many. He had risen to great heights at Collins, the publishers in Glasgow. I remembered him as a bouncer on the door of the youth fellowship at Gibson’s church from my teenage years, when they ran discos, a fair-haired square-set chap, who had sold greeting cards for a living.
‘Sure, I know who he is.’ I smiled at her. ‘Local boy done good, as they say! Now a real star in the publishing world, I understand.’
‘More than a star. He’s executive chairman these days of HarperCollins, and his reputation’s formidable, but like myself, he’s never forgotten his roots, and I imagine the events of 1957 would be included in his memories of this town.’
Vera described how she was working on a book for him, and said she would be happy to arrange a meeting on my behalf. On the way home, however, I reflected on what she had suggested and I realized that, for all sorts of reasons, I should consider her idea. I left it for some weeks, to mull things over, then contacted her again. ‘Right. I think I could do it. Tell Eddie I’ll see him when he’s next north of the border.’
And so, through the millionairess, I met Eddie Bell, whose face seemed the same but whose shape had expanded since our teenage years. After a long lunch at Glasgow’s Devonshire Gardens, when he’d heard of the ordeal we had all been through, he said simply, ‘This story has to be told. No question.’
I informed Alistair and Lord Macauley that the last resort, it seemed, would be a book. They were in broad agreement that it was perhaps the only real avenue remaining to me, though the latter continued to fire off letters to the Crown Office. In November, he also accompanied me to meet Helen Liddell, now settling in as MP in John Smith’s constituency. As I had expected, she showed great sensitivity and promised to do all she could, and met A and B to assure them of her support.
I took a short break after my second lot of autumn exams and started to write down all the events of the past few years, which seemed far too outlandish to be true but every one of which had happened to me.
Only one thing worried me, and that was my mother’s reaction to what I was doing, but as 1995 dawned, and she wished me a happy birthday, I spoke to her of my intentions to see it through. I waited fearfully but there was no outburst from her, just a deep, heartfelt sigh and a nod.
‘I know there’s no point asking you not to do it. You’re driven, I can see that,’ she said slowly. ‘And I know why it’s important for you that the truth comes out, but I just hope it isn’t in my lifetime, Sandra. I hope I’m not around to see it.’
I noticed with a wry smile that the sepia photograph of the long-lost fiancé who had drowned had emerged from her box into pride of place on her sideboard. It was her way of letting me know that she no longer held any allegiance to my father. ‘He saw me as an opportunity, I think,’ she said. ‘His life was in a mess when I came along. He’d got a girl into trouble, and her baby had to be adopted, but I didn’t know that at the time. The baby was the reason he’d met our minister, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I found out about her later on – you could tell when you saw them that there had been an affair. But they couldn’t marry.’
‘Why not?’ I asked curiously.
‘She was his aunt – his own mother’s sister. They hushed it all up at the time.’
My mother got her fervent wish. She lived only six weeks or so after having said that she would not wish to witness a book by her own flesh and blood based on the tragic events that had happened in her life and then in mine.
Many ministers will tell you that it is a common phenomenon for those on the point of death to believe they can see someone dear to them who has already passed on. When my mother died unexpectedly in March 1995, only a few hours after collapsing without warning, she regained consciousness for long enough to tell my brothers, their wives, and my uncle who stayed with her what she had been doing that day, what she had eaten for her lunch at her club for the blind in Coatbridge, and she heard that one sister-in-law was doing her best to contact me in Edinburgh. The staff at the Monklands Hospital were just making arrangements to transfer my mother from the casualty department to a ward, when she had a cardiac arrest. Despite all efforts, the staff could not resuscitate her, and when I arrived, she had been dead an hour.
While I was upset that I had not been there, the family told me that seconds before the chest pains took hold of her, my mother looked towards the end of the bed and said very clearly, ‘Daddy. There’s my daddy.’
She repeated it, so that they were in no doubt that she was seeing her own father. Knowing how deep their relationship was, those words have given me comfort. It seems entirely appropriate to me that the one man in her life in whom my mother had implicit trust was there for her at the very end.
Epilogue
Many people will question why I felt it necessary to take up my pen after all other avenues of attempting to obtain justice for Moira and my cousins had failed. It is a duty, as far as I can see, that I should alert others to look into the darkness that surrounds the world of the abuser, to probe and question how he gets away with such behaviour, and to demand answers even when it may be easier to shy away from what may be sickening to hear.
It is important to realize that the inquiry I sparked off in the 1990s ran parallel with an even more depraved situation that was investigated in a small English city. Sadly, it will now be for ever associated with the horror of sex abuse, sudden disappearances, and the murders of young women. In Gloucester, it quickly became obvious to those who followed the trial of Rosemary West, which followed the suicide of her partner, that over the preceding decades there had not been nearly enough co-operation between all the relevant agencies with whom the family had contact. Warning bells, we are told, would be heard immediately today. But would they?
Their plausibility and adept deceit helped Fred and Rosemary West evade detection for years, but the couple were aided and abetted by official records being lost, destroyed, never kept or never passed on, with no one agency being blameless. Not only were children not observed independently or listened to, but the rape and torture of an early victim, Caroline Owens, then seventeen, in 1972, turned into a meaningless farce, where the Wests found rape charges dropped and each was fined £50. Information from surviving victims did not lead to investigations, and women who were attacked by the two at the roadside in enticement attempts gave descriptions that went nowhere.
There is no such thing as a typical paedophile, but from childhood, both my father and Fred West showed a precocious interest in sex and a love of pornography that grew as they matured. Their lives followed separate paths, but both became sexual psychopaths. This is a lifelong problem, which in my view only ceases with infirmity or death. My father will be a threat to young women and children until he is overcome by one or the other.
Both men’s first offences were recorded on police files as sexual assaults on thirteen-year-old girls who lived in their local area. Both were involved in incest within their own family. Fred West’s si
ster was taken into care as a pregnant youngster, and there is little doubt that he was the father of her child. My father made his aunt, a woman older than himself, pregnant with a child who was then adopted.
Both men had a sadistic streak, and were able to hide a complete disregard for the feelings of others and a need to gratify their own sexual demands behind a façade of amiability. A deep-seated need in both meant presenting an air of hardworking respectability, and they sought token approval from others, whether through working long hours on building projects as West did, or as my father did, by stopping his bus for old ladies. When they were interviewed by police, neither man showed any desire to clear his conscience or give information that would help the families of victims.
How differently things might have turned out for my father, had he married a Rosemary, rather than my mother. Fred West used his wife as an ally: her presence in his car lulled young women into a false sense of security. Behind my mother’s back I, too, was used unknowingly as bait by my father. I have had to confront the fact that I was an unwitting ally on a number of occasions for my father’s depravity. It never crossed the minds of my friends that anything would happen to them if they played with me. Sexual assailants don’t come with their daughters, do they?
Finally, both men evaded formal interviews when girls went missing at bus stops. Fred West’s attack on Caroline Owens seems to have been overlooked when it bore similarities to the assaults other women reported, and there had been disappearances of several women in the area; in 1957 the police chose not to round up all the local suspects in Moira Anderson’s case.
In the final analysis, it is significant that neither man was arrested through painstaking paperwork or strokes of insight by dedicated men. Fred West’s undoing was that one of his children’s statements about the disappearance of their sister, Heather, was finally taken seriously by a social worker, then followed up by a policewoman who checked out that her national insurance number and other personal identification details had never been used in the United Kingdom. In my father’s case, it was his own startling statements to me after a twenty-seven-year absence that sowed the seeds of doubt. Detectives only then reopened forgotten files. In the end, the finger was pointed by the flesh and blood of both men.