Where There is Evil

by Sandra Brown

  For me, it explained why the original inquiry had stalled, why Moira’s photograph only appeared on television three months after she had vanished and why Detective Inspector Jim McEwan, the industrious police officer in charge of the second investigation, met with silence from some former colleagues. Masonic loyalties ran through my mind once more.

  Gallogley’s account of Moira’s disappearance confirmed the evidence of a lady interviewed on a Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary, called Missing, Presumed Murdered, which had been shown in spring 2000. Agnes Smith, then a young mum, was trying to get home in the storm with two toddlers when the Cliftonville bus appeared.

  ‘It was virtually the last vehicle on the road,’ she said. ‘Hardly anyone got on – most had set off walking home.’

  Agnes claimed that she was the last passenger to exit the single decker, but a girl still remained on my dad’s bus. Agnes had got off in Old Monkland Road before it made its last stop before the terminus, near the cemetery.

  The 1957 police had treated her, Agnes said, as a liar, dismissing her claim. She insisted, however, that a child had been there, chatting to the driver. Perturbed that the girl was unaccompanied, Agnes had remembered her, although she had only seen the back of her head with her distinctive pixie hood. She could recollect no conductress at all. Whoever the clippie was that day, she had got off in the town centre before Agnes got on, trusting him to ‘clock in’ on her behalf at the depot, perhaps because she had a hot date lined up, or was anxious to get home.

  Gallogley said my dad had abducted Moira and abused her, Alex claiming she had ‘been with him once before’. As paedophiles fantasize and boast to each other, I reserved judgement on that one. I also recalled that turning circle, on the town’s edge, where my aunt lived and street lighting was minimal. I’d seen evidence there with my own eyes of affairs going on between adults who worked the various shifts.

  Jim said Alexander had then driven Moira to Baxter’s huge garage depot in Airdrie, which held umpteen buses. Those outside parked in rows on wasteground, extinguishing lights as soon as they did so, to conserve energy. Today there is no trace of the garage or grounds where, according to Gallogley, he and another man joined abductor and victim on that vehicle.

  EVA 26 plied the Cliftonville route from one end of Coatbridge to the other. It was my dad’s, he drove it so much. I had taken him his ‘piece’ so often as a child that I knew the driver was not isolated from passengers. My father never knew how much I’d observed – like the bus’s back seat, used on breaks, with its concealed lever, from which unsuspecting folk could plunge into the boot. My father thought it a great joke to play on new clippies.

  The horseplay Moira was subjected to, on this same seat, had gone much too far. Jim revealed my dad had pulled off her panties and soaked them with chloroform. They were popped on her head, pressed against her lips. The little girl passed out immediately. Afterwards, they had slapped her to bring her round. Gallogley spoke of frantically rubbing her wrists and shaking her, but there was no response. Panic-stricken, the depraved adults released the lever to drop her out of sight. When they returned in the early hours, before others appeared, there was no pulse; Moira had been left unconscious on the most bitter of nights, when temperatures had plummeted.

  Jim claimed he was unsure if the cold had killed her, or the sedation.

  ‘I felt so ashamed, as there was no need at all,’ he confessed. ‘There was no reason for that child to die that night.’

  The terrible weather conditions, which cloaked their activities, meant that by the time they returned to the bus body fluids were leaking; they did not dare leave her there any longer. I was shocked as Steve Smith related that Jim had said she was hidden at the Tarry Burn.

  The name of that location will rarely be found on any map of Coatbridge. A local name known only to children who play near Witchwood, it is a small burn that flows near the water Jim McEwan had searched. Police divers, it seemed, had actually been in the right area, but had concentrated on the pond only. If Gallogley’s deathbed account was to be believed, William the psychic had been correct, and Moira’s remains were nearby.

  Moira, I believe, had had no intention of spending time in Alex Gartshore’s company. That Saturday was an unusual one, for several reasons, for her.

  Going to a football game was off; ‘Sparks’, her dad, was visiting his dying father in Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary. Older cousins went, but Moira was considered too young. Janet was on a visit to the east coast. Skipping with her chum Elizabeth was abandoned when she was called inside as the blizzard worsened, so there were no playmates around. Instead Moira was excited about two things that day, other than the snowstorm.

  Her cousins, the Mathewson girls, were taking her for a treat, to see Guys and Dolls. Though due to leave their grandmother’s house together, Moira knew that she could join them in the Regal queue later. Everyone recalls her as independent – a ‘streetwise’ child. Her other exciting agenda was to purchase a special card and present for her mother’s birthday, the ‘secret’ task Janet had given her.

  Three great misfortunes befell Moira Anderson that freezing late afternoon. First, the Co-operative store – despite what staff said at the time – had closed early. She decided to risk her uncle’s anger. A bus to town was due, and it was her only means to get to Woolworths, where she could easily make her purchases. We did not have specialist birthday shops then. ‘Woolies’ was ideal. Perhaps she figured that the Mathewson girls, fed up waiting, would already be on the bus. When she had shouted above howling wind to Mrs Twycross, ‘Is the bus away yet?’ Moira’s intention was clear, but with no later door-to-door inquiry, it went unnoticed.

  The second disaster was that when she larked about in the snow as she waited, Moira lost all her money. The elderly resident above Molly Gardiner’s small shop, who had spotted a child opposite, believed that her frantic scrabbling was to do with losing something.

  The third chilling coincidence in a ghastly chain of events was that when the bus came, it was my father’s smiling face that she saw – a familiar figure in his reassuring uniform.

  I believe my dad distracted Moira from her mission. She was in a pickle. Maybe he let her on for free, and the clippie, about to get off two stops later herself, did not question his decision. EVA 26 was not scheduled to stop at Woolworth’s. Perhaps Alexander promised help, saying: ‘I’m finishing. I’ll give you a lift back to Woolies in my car or I’ll pay you into the pictures, and we can look for your pals.’ The one other place where you could buy chocolates at that time was the cinema.

  It was all about an opportunity that had presented itself. Whatever he said as she pushed back her blonde hair, caught by a pretty clasp of the type she usually wore, and smiled at my dad, Moira had no inkling he was a man already charged with sexual offences against a girl just a few months older than herself. I, his own daughter, aged eight, knew nothing of this, so why would she? Just as my mother had been bowled over by the tall six-footer in his smart uniform, Moira, too, trusted him. She knew him, or thought she did.

  I think of the small friends who, one by one, told me that they could not play with me any more. ‘Your dad does funny things.’ So confusing, so hurtful. It had made no sense to me at six, or seven. Gradually I realized: My father is not safe to be around.

  When he returned from a ‘long-stay hospital’ that kids did not visit, I was two years older, and wiser. To keep friends – not always successfully – I ensured they avoided him. It was the best strategy I could think of, but the responsibility was heavy.

  It explains, perhaps, what has driven me over the years, and shows where my determination to find Moira, and my quest for the truth, comes from. As adults we know that we cannot constantly ‘rescue’ others; we end up exhausted and they forever expect assistance. With hindsight, however, the obstacle to me gaining closure is an unspoken childhood vow.

  I only knew Moira by sight. I have that one fragile memory from a summer’s day in Dunbeth Park,
when she and Elizabeth ran from my dad’s small black car, while I approached full of misgivings. My anger about sweets he offered, to buy me off, masked other feelings. Fear. Anxiety. Most of all, sheer relief. They were ‘big girls’, not my friends, and there were two of them. They knew how to look after themselves, didn’t they? But . . . they had not experienced what I had.

  At home, I voiced concerns. My mother denied point-blank that my father had been there. Normally a rational and loving parent who rarely raised a hand, Mary grabbed me, panting, ‘Stop telling these lies! Sandra, if I catch you doing it again, God help you . . .’

  Though used to my father’s sudden lunges with his leather belt with its thick brass buckle that he could pull off in one movement, she took me by surprise. She propelled me like a battering ram, banging my skull against our home’s front door then the back door, in an attempt to knock these disloyal, terrifying statements out of my head. She was exhausted by the effort.

  I have found, in my search for truth, the darkest, worst, and last legacy Alexander left me.

  A sense of guilt drives me to make amends to Moira. The hiding I got silenced me. I failed to rescue her that Saturday nearly fifty years ago. It is no use rationalizing that there is no way I could have; I was tiny, and ill with the same flu that had struck down Moira’s grandmother, and could not have predicted fate’s malevolent sequence of events.

  I close my eyes, and see Uncle Jim and frail Granny Anderson, too ill to visit her dying husband. The Westminster clock chimes . . . her bewilderment builds about what’s keeping Moira; his grumbles grow about the meal he hoped would tempt his mother; their mutual fearfulness gathers as the blizzard gains in ferocity.

  I reflect on the puzzled cousins who set off without Moira, only to search fruitlessly in the cinema queue for her distinctive red pixie hood.

  I feel the escalating pain that ensued for Janet, for her young sister Marjorie, her parents and her grandmother as, along with shocked townsfolk, they absorbed the fact that she would not come home. It was a nightmare that would haunt people differently.

  Her grandmother never recovered from the second blow of her husband’s death a week after Moira’s disappearance. The Anderson sisters could go nowhere alone afterwards; ‘Sparks’ had lost all faith in the Coatbridge police. Maisie, though, took it hardest of all. She always set a place at the table, never giving up hope. Every 31 March, she bought a small birthday gift. For twenty years she went looking, believing there was a local connection, insisting her lass would not have gone with a stranger. Nurses attending her when she died were deeply affected by her constant heartrending cries for Moira. Uncle Jim never married, knowing, as the last family member to see Moira, that some blamed him. He had loved his niece, and would never have harmed a hair of her head.

  And I was one of many children who, overnight, found their freedom curtailed. No dire threats were now required to call kids in on winter afternoons, or long summer evenings. A generation heard: ‘Don’t wander off. Remember what happened to Moira Anderson.’

  Moira was someone I failed to protect from my dad.

  Janet, Elizabeth, her friend, and I all dwell on ‘What if?’ memories. If I had not visited relatives . . . if I had gone with her on the errand . . . if she had only taken Glen the collie . . . if she hadn’t met my dad . . . she would be here still.

  The consequences of my father’s actions and those of his fellow abusers, for two families, are incalculable.

  Janet was with her family watching the opening of the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Sydney when another phone call shattered her life again.

  She was aghast at the idea of three men abusing her sister, but the possibility that Moira had been heavily sedated perhaps gave a crumb of comfort.

  ‘Chloroform?’ She was bemused. ‘Where would your dad get that?’

  ‘From a dentist, or a vet? Maybe members of the ring had access to drugs,’ I said. ‘They used chloroform at a PDSA van beside the Regal for sick animals. We didn’t go to vets, then – it was too dear. My granny sent me there with her cat, Darkie.’

  ‘Is this the final piece of the jigsaw?’ Janet cried. ‘I pray to God this will bring it all to an end. We wondered if any more victims would ever come forward. Imagine, a breakthrough from another convicted offender! Can we trust this Keil?’

  ‘Well, he’s served most of his nine-year sentence. I tracked him down – there’s no chequebook journalism involved. And he’s a Highlander, totally unfamiliar with the Monklands, so local references in this confession must come from Gallogley.’

  ‘But Gallogley died in 1999! Why on earth are we finding out now?’

  ‘Are you sitting down?’

  I had already told her son to have a stiff drink nearby.

  ‘Gallogley wrote: “People are going to ask why I now want to come clean . . . it is not meant as a dossier for forgiveness, but to try to make amends for what other people and I did to these children. I have recently received letters, as I have before, asking me about missing kids, and I think that is as good a reason as any to go public. I suppose I am one son of a bitch and the people of Coatbridge have said that. But what they don’t know is there are worse living there than me, and who have done worse than anything I have.” ’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Janet, Keil wrote to the Scottish Crown Office from Peterhead. He was not specific, but let them know he had a full confession. They refused to see him.’

  ‘Whaat?’

  ‘Incredibly, they rejected Keil’s five requests for interview. We’ve had to wait till now, till Keil got out, and went public.’

  ‘This stinks to high heaven! A cover-up all over again, has to be. Whose names are being protected? I’ve always said, “Who does your dad know?” Is it the Masonics?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I can’t imagine Crown Office have felons revealing deathbed confessions every week, though,’ I said wearily. ‘And they could’ve easily got Strathclyde Police to check it out. Jim McEwan just retired recently—’

  ‘He would’ve gone like a shot. Is the investigation being reopened?’ Her tone was a mixture of grief and optimism.

  ‘Yes. Maybe others, too. The police told me Gallogley mentions six other murders. Moira’s the only child who ever went missing from the Monklands. Maybe they’re runaways from elsewhere in the UK. He refers to Fred West, from the sixties, when he was in Coatbridge, and married Rena Costello . . . remember I knew her from childhood? Rena was a clippie familiar with all the drivers; her daughter Charmaine was the child of an Asian driver. She and Fred set up home in Glasgow, then he murdered them both after they went to his home territory in Gloucester.’

  ‘The links are horrific. Your dad, Gallogley, Fred West all living close, and part of the same ring – so organized!’ Janet cried. ‘Moira’s remains must be found. My parents are buried with a space for her. I don’t want this resurfacing, though, if it’s going nowhere.’

  ‘At the very least, Moira’s inquiry must be upgraded to a murder investigation.’

  ‘Your dad must be re-interviewed; this is fresh evidence! How different the television documentary would’ve been if we had known this! Your dad’s own father accused him, and looked for Moira’s body; you went to the police, then wrote a book; two of his nieces accused him of abuse on Cutting Edge, which he admitted. Now his friend’s given an eyewitness account of what happened! What more is needed?’ She said she’d call Steve Smith. I said I thought he’d a major exposé on his hands.

  ‘Horrific Secrets of Moira Murder’ was indeed front-page headlines, turning out to be my holiday reading. There was a photo of my dad as a young soldier. Then, disconcertingly, he was shown in his seventies, glowering outside his Leeds tower block. There was a shot of Witchwood Pond, trees reflecting broodingly. Mail on Sunday readers would absorb the sombre atmosphere in that place, just from its image. There was the familiar laughing portrait of Moira taken at Coatdyke Primary, one her family could never have envisaged being used in the media for five decades. There was a
mug shot of Jim Gallogley, with a quiff of silver hair that mirrored the Tony Curtis hairstyle he had sported as a young man. A snippet of memory surfaced, and his voice floated back to me, humming an old hit on Two Way Family Favourites in our kitchen: ‘Pickin’ a Chicken’. He was dismembering a rabbit as a favour for Mary.

  Finally, there was my picture, with my response underneath.

  ‘I always hoped for a deathbed confession. This is like someone walking over my grave.’

  Even in the hot Greek sun, I shivered violently. Yes, I had got what I wanted, but not from the source I’d hoped for. Had justice at long last, though, knocked at my dad’s door?

  It all revolved on one very simple issue, Janet agreed. It would be up to the Scottish legal system to decide once again whether to re-interview him, or mark the case for all eternity: No Further Proceedings.

  In spring 2004, in Belgium, the trial of Marc Dutroux commenced. Two victims won respect, confronting the paedophile in court. After years of dithering, he went to prison for sickening crimes that were also the work of a ring, not one man.

  I met the Procurator Fiscal in Airdrie, who promised to have the location mentioned by Gallogley in his confession checked out.

  Eight months later, however, police told Janet no grounds had been found to pursue the prime suspect and they had not permission to question Alexander further. No one was likely to be charged. Moira would remain a ‘missing person’. She asked about the site. A feasibility study had been done, she was told, by experts who said it would be ‘impossible’ to find anything because of changes to the land.

  ‘So, no excavation will go ahead, either.’ Janet was devastated: ‘To them it’s clearly a waste of time, using too many resources. When do we get a breakthrough?’