Alma Cogan (24 page)

But many were from women (all seemingly in the WAAFs), lying on plastic-headboarded beds in limp-curtained rooms, doing themselves with rolled magazines, the handles of hairbrushes, the heels of shoes, moaning and gasping my name.

You could spot a heavy-breather in the opening seconds from the ambient noise of doors being closed, footsteps crossing floors and the incidental fric-frac of the microphone being set up.

I recognise it now as I clamp the headphones on and substitute the night-time sounds of this room (the whisper of the tape hubs, the noise of my own breathing, the packed silence bearing down from outside) for the sounds of another room committed to tape twenty-odd years ago.

(Sound of door banging.) (Crackling noise.) (Footsteps across room and then recording noise followed by blowing sound into microphone.) (Voice, quiet, unreadable.) (Coughing.) (Throat-clearing.) (A man’s voice.) ‘Alma you know what I’d like I’d like you to wank me off all over your fat beautiful tits. Then I’d like to put my swollen cock in your mouth, pull the …’

Fast-forward. Play. A different man’s voice. ‘… twirl your tits around my mouth, bite off both your nipples at the same time. Lick your pubes. Suck …’

The liquid crystal figures flicker as if caught in a sharp draught. Overhead, Francis McLaren moves in bed.

I replace the tapes in the Kelloggs packet and put them back where I found them.

Among the books lining the upper shelf are a set of textbooks or encyclopedias with plain brown wrappers and small windows in the spines giving their titles tooled onto burgundy leather. The books are closely packed except for ‘Biology’ and ‘Mathematics’, which have something inserted between them that prevents the covers from touching.

Exploring with my fingers. I discover a strip of cheap varnished wood of the kind you find on sale in souvenir shops at the seaside: on one side are four spots of Blu-tack, as smooth and flat as the surface they recently adhered to; on the other, the transfer of a figure in a blue crinoline dress and, in painted letters to the right of it, the words: Alma’s Room.

The house where they discovered the mutilated remains of Mrs Crippen (stage name: ‘Belle Elmore’) was a stone’s throw from the Finsbury Park Empire; it was turned into a theatrical digs by Sandy McNab, the Scottish comedian, after Crippen was apprehended and hanged.

When they searched 10 Rillington Place after arresting the necrophiliac murderer Christie, they found, in addition to a number of women’s bodies, a tobacco tin containing four lots of pubic hair.

In those instances where the tapes aren’t sufficient to fill a shoe-box completely, McLaren has made up the extra volume with tissue paper. The box containing the tapes relating to the year 1964 and, I suspect, the object of my visit, is roughly half and half. I pick out a cassette dated December 26th, 1964, and load it into the machine.

It’s a fragment of a Christmas show which went out that evening on Radio Luxembourg. According to the information given on the box, I sing three numbers: ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, in the slow-tempo Streisand version; a pretty, schmaltzy song, ‘This Time of Year’, and ‘Little Drummer Boy’.

The tape in fact begins towards the end of ‘Happy Days …’ and proceeds uneventfully until a few lines into the second track. Then the headset communicates a sensation which is like falling through several hundred feet in an air-pocket, with the accompanying drop in air pressure.

It stabilises – ‘Evergreens are snowy white/Sleighbells ring through the night/This time of year’; then the same thing again in a less stomach-rolling version.

It continues in this way for the remaining seven minutes – lurching from almost perfect clarity and balance in one passage,
to what could be a third-or fourth-generation, or even older, copy in the next.

It’s as though dropouts caused by physical damage to the tape, or sections of tape corruption or decay, have been laboriously reconstituted, layer on layer, and the original magnetic impulses boosted back to nearly full strength. There is evidence of dub-editing, splicing, and sophisticated electronic enhancement of the final product.

Yet, for all that, a fluctuating, almost subliminal undercurrent of discords and weird microtones persists; the tracks are punctuated with indistinct muffled cracks and swoops.

There is none of the hyper-reality that characterises even the oldest of the other tapes. The density of information is low and resonates with the acoustics of a particular room at a particular but, as it has proved, infinitely reclaimable moment in time.

It is only since they reopened the search for bodies on the Moors that it has emerged that Ian Brady bought Myra Hindley a pop record every time he decided to do another killing.

On the day of Pauline Reade’s death it was the theme music from
The
Hill
, a film they had seen together at a cinema in Old-ham. On the day they murdered a twelve-year-old called John Kilbride it was Gene Pitney singing ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’. For Keith Bennett it was Roy Orbison’s It’s Over’; and for Edward Evans, whom Brady murdered with a hatchet on their living-room carpet, it was Joan Baez’s version of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.

‘Girl Don’t Come’ by Sandie Shaw was Brady’s present to commemorate the murder of Lesley Ann Downey. But ‘Little Red Rooster’ by the Rolling Stones is the record that Hindley would associate with this killing. That’s what was playing at the funfair in Miles Platting in Manchester when they approached the ten-year-old girl and asked her to help them carry some shopping back to the car and then to their house.

Like all their child victims, according to Myra Hindley, she went ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’. It was between five and six
in the evening on Boxing Day, December 26th, 1964.

McLaren is sleeping half-propped up in bed with his head tilted towards the door. He has grown a pale stubble beard in the last two hours. He’s wearing pyjamas and a tweedy dressing gown under the blankets and when he opens his eyes seems unsurprised to see me standing by the bed.

A plastic strip shading the light in the headboard has buckled from the heat. My picture smiles down from a poster for a bill at the Ardwick Empire, with Eddie Arnold, Mr Everybody, Alf Carlson, Continental Contortionist, Devine and King, Professors of Music, Raf and Julian, Two Wrongs Make A Riot, and the Lyn Bahrys, Fast and Furious, in support.

They drove Lesley Ann Downey to where they were living at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in the Hattersley district of Manchester, where Hindley knew Brady had already set up his camera, tripod and lighting equipment in the upstairs back room. The tape recorder was under the bed, hidden by a sheet.

Brady made the little girl take off her clothes and pose for pornographic pictures on the bed, before raping her and strangling her with a piece of string. Hindley, standing by the window while all – some – of this was going on (the black wig she had worn to the funfair removed or still in place?), tuned the radio to Radio Luxembourg, allowing my voice to bring the message (which is really radio’s only message now) that the rest of the world was still there and all right.

She interrupted her reverie to help Brady pack a gag into Lesley Ann’s mouth, and to run a bath to get rid of any dog hairs or fibres on her body.

Francis McLaren puts the cassette back in its
Ray
Conniff:
For
Sen
timental
Reasons
box and returns it to the anonymity of the rack. (So many secrets!)

The cord of his dressing-gown ends in tassels with heavy silken domes. The backs of his slippers have been broken under his heels.

‘I don’t see what the fuss is about,’ he says, although this is contradicted by a vein in his temple. ‘A few years ago anybody could buy a copy in Manchester. If you went to the right pub. You could buy
pictures
of the girl if you knew the right channels. The people into this area. Distributors. Dealers. Collectors. One of the police from the case was done for selling pictures, for Godsake.

‘My only interest was you. The unavailability of those tracks anywhere else. The rarity value. It was a big job getting it up to even the quality it is now.’

What am I going to say?

I read somewhere that no musical vibrations are ever lost: that even though they are dispersed, they will go on vibrating through the cosmos for eternity.

I imagine I hear screams coming from cars when I am standing waiting to cross at the kerb sometimes, but it’s only
Orfeo
ed 
Euridice
, Madonna, Β. Β. King and Lucille or some other electric ghost trapped in the tape shell, the transport mechanism, the spatial dynamics in which two solitudes promiscuously approach one another.

Laura Ashley in the bedroom. Crabtree and Evelyn in the bathroom (horn-chestnut and hop bath gel; calendula and evening primrose soap; vetiver talcum powder).

And no sign – or just one sign: a used tray of Nurofen caplets at the bottom of the wastebin – of the bodies who have tumbled in the bed, streaked the towels, called down for the special ‘Eye-Opener breakfast’ of bacon and egg muffin and chilled orange juice, steadied themselves to face the world with a ten-pound spend at the mini-bar.

The paper seal across the toilet reminded me of the tape markers the police wind between lamp-posts and parking meters in bomb-scare areas. The corners of the first sheet of toilet paper had been turned in, the top tissue in the Kleenex dispenser fluffed up. The extractor roars like a DC-10 when the light goes on, with the result that everything is done in the half-dark.

There’s blow-drier, mini-safe, electric trouser-press, electric kettle, sachets of hot chocolate, Maxwell House, Sweetex, a caramel wafer, ‘everything’, according to the wallet of room-service menus and brochures, ‘to enable the renaissance businessman or woman to temper effort with relaxation’.

The television has Teletext, a picture-in-picture digital effects system, subscriber porno-channel. At the minute a Welsh collie bitch called Josie is snuffling up and down a row of handkerchiefs trying to find the right one to bring to her owner in a rerun of the obedience trials at this year’s Crufts. There’s a number ‘3’ in a fluttering green box in the top right-hand corner of the picture whose significance I don’t understand.

‘This is a non-smoking bedroom in support of the British Lung Foundation’ it says beside the symbol of a small red balloon on a string on the door. And yet it smelled of stale smoke when I
arrived, which suggests somebody trying to kid themselves that they’ve kicked the habit, or a heavy smoker in the next room.

There’s an adjoining door. The television was on late, and again first thing this morning. When I got up to let some air in around two, there was a line of light running across the carpet and a news report about a Cambridge woman becoming the world’s first triple heart, lungs and liver transplant patient.

There was steady traffic on the ring-roads and service roads around the six-lane flyover that curves past the hotel. Turning a map of the local area around in my hands until it becomes aligned with it, I can now identify it as the A627M.

‘15 mins Manchester City Centre’ it says next to an arrow pointing in one direction. Other arrows point towards Ashton-under-Lyne, Macclesfield, Leeds and the Acorn, West Point and Star industrial estates. Numbered blobs on the map, prepared by the hotel, indicate all-night petrol stations, chemists, cash machines and other essential back-up services for pistol-packing eighties lives lived on the run.

Number twelve is Butterflys Nightclub; thirteen, Mario’s Trattoria. Fourteen is the Light of Bengal Indian Restaurant in Waterloo Street, which had disappeared when I tried to find it last night. Waterloo Street was still there, but the Light of Bengal was a water-filled hole in the ground.

I ended up eating the three-nuggets-and-fries special from a box in a Tennessee Chicken where I was the only customer, but it wasn’t as desolate as that makes it sound. It was wet outside, which is always a good feeling; and there was a row of shops opposite with interesting sodium-washed displays and fronts, and I could see the boy who had served me reflected in the window reading what looked like a worthwhile book.

Although it’s midday there’s a queue snaking from the ballroom entrance right across the car park in front of the hotel. The names of the surrounding streets – Union, Foundry, Corporation, Albion – and their still-to-be-developed façades, suggest dole queues, soup kitchens, bread lines.

But the people queueing don’t look poor. They have padded shoulders, big hair, stacked heels, tight bright patent surfaces of viscose, polycotton, elastane-enriched nylon, glazed rubber compounds.

‘Car radio. Compact disc hi-fi. Deep freeze,’ the taxi driver says. ‘Walkman. Video recorder. Portable telephone. Answer machine. Household goods. They buy.’ He passes me back a flyer. ‘Auction sale. Comprehensive stock and assorted merchandise of manufacturers, distributors and others. All items to clear!!’

He’s wearing a turban, which makes him a Sikh. A tight strap of grey beard.

Sikhs. Fighting men. Sabres. The Golden Temple at Amritsar. A taboo on cutting hair. I know nothing about their history or what they believe. If I did would I find anything, some ritual or rite or piece of arcana, to rationalise what I’m doing, or at least help throw some light on what it exactly is that has brought me here?

We pass the open market, combining drabness with cheerful displays on vivid plastic grass; then the football ground. Then the close black streets quickly give way to moorland and oppressive black hills.

We are climbing into what I have learned is known locally as ‘moor grime’ – fog that rolls off the moors and along the terraces of cottage houses, casting a smutty grey-turning light.

The village of Greenfield has a newsagent, a chapel, a baker, a shop specialising in model railways, a hairdresser called ‘P’Zazz’, and a pub, the Clarence, where Myra Hindley waited in her scarf and black wig on the night Brady killed John Kilbride on the Moor.

A left turn at the Clarence begins the ascent on to Saddleworth Moor. There are terraced gardens on the left for a while, with people pottering; and then fog-coloured sheep with their coats hanging off them in ice-ball clumps; and then – nothing.

The Moor rises like a wall on the left and falls away steeply to the right for several hundred yards, and then this is reversed; it
breaks up into ravines and chines and blood-blisters in the middle-distance and is marbled all over with brooks and streams like stewing meat.

It suggests the overview of a city – earthworks and mounds muffling the monumental architecture of a Glasgow or a Leeds. Victorian town halls, public libraries, banks, swimming baths, corn exchanges, railway stations and squares cladded in hoar grass, heather, bracken, gorse and rich dark peaty earth.

Occasional police vehicles pass us travelling in the opposite direction, but that is the only clue that people are out there, excavating, digging, covering the ground.

I get the driver to pull in to a lay-by close to what I estimate is Hollin Brow Knoll, where they found the body of Lesley Ann Downey in 1965. Brady had practised carrying bodies with Hindley at this spot, telling her to make herself as limp as possible and then putting her over his shoulder and walking with her on the Moor.

Lesley Ann Downey’s is the only body he had to carry: the others all walked to their deaths, lured there by Myra Hindley, who asked them to help her find a glove she had lost.

The earth looks scorched, not loamy and wet. Pauline Reade stepped on it wearing the white shoes she had bought a few hours earlier for the dance she was on her way to when she was waylaid. Brady cut her throat with a knife then buried her in her pink dress, her blue coat and her new shoes with the chafing heels and the manufacturer’s gold writing still on the curve of the sole.

Half a mile further on we come across a tea wagon with an old man in a white coat at the window and a single customer in the nothingness leaning in. ‘Snoopys’, a big sign on pink card says. ‘As seen on TV. LWT. TVAM. NewsNorthWest. World In Action. BBC Breakfast Time.’

I pay off the driver and arrange for him to collect me near the pub in the village in two hours.

‘Reporter?’ the old man calls. ‘You a reporter? You could be a reporter. What paper?’

It’s only the living you have to be scared of, not the dead. Somebody said that to me once. Who, I can’t remember. But it’s as good a thought as any to hang on to now as I start back on the road to Greenfield through the skirts of rubbing mist and grime.

It’s no longer possible to step off the road directly on to the Moor: irrigation ditches have been dug, barbed wire fences have gone up fringed with scraps of wool which give the direction of the wind.

But a gap will open up soon, an opportunity will present itself. And when it does I will slip through it and, with the knife which has grown warm under my hand – a satisfyingly heavy piece of flatware with the name of the hotel stamped in the blade – will cut a small grave for the door plaque with the words ‘Alma’s Room’ and the crinoline lady that I am carrying in my pocket.

I will pack the peat around it with my fingers and close the lid of turf and make certain before I leave it that the Moor has been put back to its original state.