Where There is Evil (19 page)

‘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

Moira’s picture was also on the front. Inside was a massive two-page spread, headlined, ‘T
HE
L
ITTLE
G
IRL
W
HO
D
ISAPPEARED
O
N
H
ER
W
AY
T
O
T
HE
S
HOP
’, 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.

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.

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.

‘So you’re not the only one we are speaking to, Mrs Gartshore, about painful past events,’ Ricky Gray said gently. ‘I know you’re divorced from him now, but you
need to tell us all about Alex – how you met, what you learned about him, and what he was like as a husband, how he was at his job—’

‘He was teetotal, wouldn’t touch a drop all the years he was on the buses,’ my mother declared. The DCI commented wryly that drinking was certainly one vice that caused his
team headaches but there were worse offences.

If I had thought that my memories emerged like an old tank being sluiced out, in sudden rushes then slow trickles, my mother’s resembled a torrent that had been dammed for years. The flow,
however, spelt out a clear message to everyone in the room. She described the decent hardworking people my father was from, his excellent war record, how he had, it was said, rescued civilians from
a burning building in Holland – she had even had a Delft plate from the couple on her wall for years – and how she was sure that Alexander had witnessed scenes in the war which had
psychologically damaged him.

As she rattled on about his timekeeping and good attendance at work, and his bread-winning abilities, I began to see that she was attempting to justify her choice of him as a life partner. My
mother had made a decision she had lived to regret, but felt unable to expose the man who had given her the three children she adored.

She explained the circumstances in which they had met, and how she felt assured that he was of the same Christian background as herself when Alex mentioned that he knew her minister.
‘I’ve been in the manse and had tea and sandwiches with him,’ he’d said, which had pleased her.

‘I felt he was a kindred spirit – it wasn’t till much later I discovered he’d been in the manse for reasons all of his own. By that time his family had welcomed me, I had
got to know and like his mother, and the war was coming to an end, so it seemed logical to marry in October 1945. But after that came all the problems . . . all these other women. I blame the
buses.’

‘Ah,’ said Ricky Gray, finally managing to get a word in edgeways. ‘Womanizers. They’re hard to live with. Baxter’s Buses, too, we’re finding, seems to have
been a hotbed of affairs in the fifties, I agree. We need to talk to you, however, of what you can recall of the actual day of Saturday 23 February 1957, when Moira Anderson went missing. Can you
remember what you and Alex were doing that day at all?’

Still as scrupulously fair to my father as it was possible to be, my mother recalled what she could of that winter weekend when her aunt from Australia was arriving, and she had been annoyed
with her husband for failing to swap with a colleague for the evening. She talked about his late arrival home and his shift the following day for which she had prepared his sandwiches. Asked how
she remembered hearing of Moira’s disappearance, she was as clear as I was that this news had been given to us by my aunt Betty, her sister-in-law, on the Sunday afternoon. She could recall
the circumstances of that weekend just as I could – it stood out from others because of its surprising events. Questioned closely, she was positive the news had not been broken by my father.
She also described how after a week had passed with no sign of the child, my father had come in and said that he ‘had been asked to go round to the station to be interviewed’. She gave
the policemen in her living room the same version of events that I had given Jim McEwan, the tale of mistaken identity with the child called Moira Liddell, also from Cliftonville, who was well
known for giving sweets to all the drivers.