One of Your Own (25 page)

Margaret Mounsey recalls: ‘One of Joe’s strengths was knowing the value of having a good team around him. He enjoyed getting stuck into things with people he could trust. They don’t work a murder inquiry like they used to; Joe was a dedicated, old-fashioned detective.’
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Among his loyal, skilled and enthusiastic squad was Mike Massheder: ‘Johnny Down, who led the investigation into John Kilbride’s disappearance originally, retired. Frank Taylor filled in for a while and then Joe Mounsey took over. One of the first things he did was to take all the detectives out to the pub. He always used to come up to the darkroom and say, “Mike, can you do so-and-so?” and I’d say, “Well, I’m a little bit pushed . . .” and he’d say, “It’s all right, I’ll go. If you can, you can, if you can’t, you can’t, no problem.” Then he’d come back a few minutes later: “Mike, do you think you could just . . .” and I’d find myself saying, “Aye, go on then, what is it?” It’d be two o’clock in the morning, I’d be in the darkroom, and thinking, “Bloody hell, he’s got me
again
.” His team would do anything for him. One of his sayings was, “Never complain, never explain.” He was a grand boss, the very best.’
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Mounsey quickly picked up on the stagnant Kilbride case. Margaret recalls: ‘When Joe moved into the area as the new head of CID, he looked through the back cases for anything outstanding, and that’s when he read the case notes on John Kilbride. He called on Mrs Kilbride, just generally taking an interest and seeing exactly what was involved. He had the posters reprinted and got the whole campaign into the little boy’s disappearance up and running again.’
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Mounsey shared Mrs Kilbride’s unspoken conviction that something terrible had happened to John and shared her certainty that her husband had no part in John’s disappearance. His tenacity in the Kilbride case led to John becoming known at Ashton police station as ‘Mounsey’s Lad’.

Danny Kilbride recalls, ‘None of us had any hope then that John would come back, but what Mounsey did was to get things moving towards finding out who was responsible. He decided to reconstruct John’s last known movements at Ashton market to try and jog people’s memories. He needed someone to take John’s part and I said straight away, “I’ll do it.” I was 12 at the time and I looked a lot like him. We did the reconstruction around the time of the first anniversary of John going missing.’
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Despite Mounsey’s efforts, no one came forward with fresh information about John’s whereabouts.

As Christmas approached, the shops were flooded with Dalek merchandise; having made their first appearance on
Doctor Who
the previous Christmas, Dalek-themed toys were all the rage, and only Beatles and James Bond products came close to beating them in popularity. In Hattersley, Myra told Elsie that she loved the glowing, light-laden Christmas tree that stood in the front window of number 12; however, just a few days before Christmas, there was a fracas at the Masterton house when a neighbour ‘went berserk’ and attacked Elsie’s eldest son, Jim.
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Anita, Jim’s girlfriend, rushed to Myra’s house for help and Myra reported the incident to Hyde police while Ian cleaned the blood from Jim’s face. When the situation had calmed down, Elsie told Myra that Patty and the other kids had been invited to a Christmas party at the Braithwaites’ house. She recalled: ‘Myra hated the Jamaican next door. She said to me, “Dirt is better than him . . . You’re not letting them go are you? I wouldn’t let my children go nowhere near a black’s party. Tell them I’m taking them to see Santa Claus.” But my little girls went and Mr Braithwaite was very kind. He kept playing records and jiving about like a teenager.’
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Shortly before Christmas, Myra and Ian visited a Tesco store near Ancoats one lunchtime to take advantage of the special offers on wine and spirits. On their way there, they saw posters advertising Silcock’s Wonder Fair, to be held on the recreation ground off Hulme Hall Lane.

During Christmas Eve afternoon, Patty took Puppet for a patter about the estate – Gran insisted he wore his little coat to keep him warm – while Edwina and Myra were across the road at the New Inn; Ian was at his mum’s house until the evening. Patty spent the rest of the day at number 16, and that night Ian and Myra told her to fetch Elsie in for a drink. They exchanged presents: Patty gave Ian a box of chocolates and she had made Myra a jelly in the shape of a rabbit. Myra’s gifts for Patty and her siblings were ‘done up lovely’, as Elsie phrased it.
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They discussed Elsa, then nine, who was going to have her ears pierced by Ian. Myra was against it, and offered Elsie the money to have her daughter’s ears professionally pierced instead. She refilled their glasses with gin; Patty was given some too, together with a small amount of whisky and the sweet apricot wine she and Myra loved. Elsie noticed that Myra seemed unable to tear her eyes from Ian and kept his whisky glass topped up. She recalled: ‘Ian talked and talked and I couldn’t understand half of what he said.’
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He smoked cigars and let Myra finish the tabby ends. Elsie asked Ian what made a man go berserk. Ian thought for a while, then answered, ‘It’s nothing to do with his brain, it’s just how much provocation he can stand.’
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Later, when Ian and Patty were watching telly and the dogs were sleeping in front of the fire, Elsie followed Myra into the kitchen, where she was putting a pork joint in the oven for Christmas lunch. During their conversation, Elsie confided that she was pregnant again and Myra closed the serving hatch ‘so that Ian won’t hear’.
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She asked Elsie if she was going to do ‘something to shift it’, to which Elsie replied with a shocked, ‘No fear.’ Myra told her, ‘Ian and I have a very good understanding . . . I’d rather have puppies than babies.’
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She also told Elsie that everything was taken care of for the house to be put into her name if Gran died. The elderly lady was already in bed, but Myra took her up a cup of tea when she called down for one.

It was after eleven o’clock when Elsie decided to go home. As she got to her feet, Myra asked whether she’d mind if Patty went with them to the moor, to see in Christmas Day. Elsie agreed on the understanding that they wouldn’t stay too long; it was bitterly cold. Patty already had her coat on, and went out with Ian and Myra to the car. They drove to their usual spot, by Hollin Brown Knoll. It was a crisp, clear night, starlit above the reservoir. ‘We sat in the van when we got there,’ Patty recalled. ‘Myra took some sandwiches. I might have had a little bit of wine. We stayed there until about 12.30 a.m. Myra said, “Shall we go home and get some blankets and come back for the night?” and Ian said, “All right.” Myra then drove me back home. It was about 1.30 a.m. when I got in. Shortly after I got in the house, I heard the van drive off.’
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While Patty drifted to sleep in her warm bed in Hattersley, and Elsie dressed in a Santa costume to sneak into the kids’ rooms to fill their Christmas stockings, Myra and Ian sat cocooned on the moor, discussing the murder they intended to commit on Boxing Day. Ian referred to the posters they’d seen for the fair in Ancoats. But this time they wouldn’t take the victim straight to the moor to be raped and murdered; they would take the child to the house instead, where, Myra recalled, they planned to take ‘blue photographs’.
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When the sun came up over the moor on Christmas morning, the couple headed back down the winding road to Hattersley, where Ian unwrapped the most expensive of the presents Myra had bought him: a tape recorder.

Lesley Ann Downey was ten years old in 1964. She was the only girl in a family of three boys: Terry, fourteen, Thomas, eight, and Brett, four. The children lived with their mother Ann, and her partner, Alan West, in a new council flat at 25 Charnley Walk, Ancoats. Ann had largely been brought up by her grandfather following her mother’s death; her father was a sergeant-major. Her disjointed childhood made her determined to give her own children a stable home, but her marriage to Terence Downey had broken up in early 1964. Although Terence had remarried, he remained in touch with his children. Ann was working in the city as a waitress when she met Alan West, a lorry driver from London who provided the stability she wanted for her family. Their new home on Charnley Walk was in the shadow of Bradford Road gasworks in the redeveloped quarter of Ancoats, a once thriving industrial region of cotton mills and foundries.

Lesley, a porcelain-faced little girl with bobbed, wavy dark hair, was an extremely shy child who – like Pauline Reade – only came out of her shell when singing and dancing. Her favourite song was ‘Bobby’s Girl’ and she had a poster of Chris Montez, the ‘Let’s Dance’ vocalist, on her bedroom wall. She had gone with her brother Terry, an apprentice butcher, to her first dance a few months before at the church hall, where a skiffle group were playing. Lesley bashfully admitted to finding one of the boys in the group lovely, and Terry asked for a lock of the lad’s hair, which Lesley kept in a box on her dressing table. Although quiet by nature, she had several close friends at school and at the Trinity Methodist Church’s Girls’ Guildry, where she was a member. When she went away with her Sunday School group to north Wales, she was terribly homesick and spent her money on a small bottle of freesia perfume for her mother. The only lingering sadness in Lesley’s life concerned the family dog, Rebel; he was given to her uncle for safekeeping following the move to Charnley Walk. Lesley missed Rebel every day and visited him whenever she could.

A fortnight before Christmas, Alan treated Lesley, Tommy and Brett to an outing to Henry’s Store on Manchester’s Market Street, where they met Santa Claus. Lesley, undergoing one of the swift growth spurts that occur between childhood and adolescence, had her photograph taken there, among the tinsel and twinkling lights, looking very much the proud ‘big sister’ next to her younger brothers. Within a month, that same photograph – cropped to show only Lesley – had been distributed to thousands of city shops and cafes in the search for her.

On Christmas morning, Lesley unwrapped her presents with delight: a small electric sewing machine, a nurse’s outfit, a doll, an annual and various board games. After breakfast, she carried her little sewing machine to Trinity Methodist Church, where the local children were encouraged to bring their favourite presents to have them blessed. As the skies darkened that afternoon, a few flakes of snow floated down with the faint music from Silcock’s Wonder Fair, pitched on the recreation ground half a mile away on Hulme Hall Lane. Lesley was due to visit the fair with friends on Boxing Day, while her older brother Terry had already been with his friends, winning a string of white beads and a matching bracelet on the shooting gallery. He’d left the plastic jewellery on Lesley’s dressing table while she was sleeping; they were the first things she saw when she opened her eyes the following morning. She clipped the necklace on immediately and rolled the bracelet onto her wrist.

In Hattersley on Boxing Day morning, Ian handed Myra a record in a paper sleeve: ‘Girl Don’t Come’ by Sandie Shaw, who had scored a huge hit earlier in the year with ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’. Upstairs, the wardrobe in Myra’s room had been emptied of incriminating materials; Ian had already deposited a suitcase at the left luggage department of a railway station as part of the preparations. There was no need to invent an excuse to get rid of Gran because it was Jim’s birthday, and Myra was taking her to his home in Dukinfield after breakfast. While they were gone, Ian set up his camera and photographic lights in Myra’s room and checked that all the equipment was in working order. He slid his reel-to-reel tape recorder under the divan bed.

In the maisonette on Charnley Walk, Lesley played with her new toys and looked forward to her visit to the fair that afternoon. Whenever her mother, Ann, opened the kitchen window, the tinny music and stallholders’ booming, magnified shouts wafted up from the recreation ground. Lesley elicited a promise from her mother that she would show her how to make clothes for her two favourite dolls, Patsy and Lynn, on the new sewing machine later that day. Shortly before four o’clock, she pulled on her coat and left the flat with Tommy to knock on the Clarks’ door downstairs. Mrs Clark and her children – Lesley’s friend Linda, and her younger brother and sister, Roy and Ann – had planned to spend an hour at the fair, but Mrs Clark declared herself too tired to venture out. Undeterred, the children left Charnley Walk without her, agreeing to return at five o’clock. At ten years old, Lesley was the eldest of the small group walking along the frosty, twilit streets.

Myra returned from Dukinfield after lunch, having arranged to pick up Gran at nine-thirty that night as usual. By late afternoon, she and Ian were driving out to the Tesco store they had visited a few days before Christmas; the posters for Silcock’s Wonder Fair, emblazoned with a big wheel, were everywhere. They did their shopping, packing it with deliberate carelessness in a few cardboard boxes. With the groceries in the back of the car, Myra pulled on the black wig and headscarf, careful that no one should see her. She started the ignition and they drove on to Hulme Hall Lane, parking the car in a quiet side street, away from the whooping crowds milling about the recreation ground. She and Ian overloaded a couple of boxes, locked the car and began walking towards the dazzling, flashing lights of the fair.

By five o’clock, Lesley’s small group had run out of money and knew they should be heading home. Lesley was still breathless from a ride on the cyclone as they threaded their way past the soft toy prizes dangling from the stalls. Away from the main booths and whirling waltzers, they trod on dank grass and entered the dimly lit streets where a pale, thin flurry of sleet fell. As they trooped towards home in the shadow of the gasworks, Lesley suddenly said, ‘I’m going back’, and turned and ran up Iron Street before anyone could stop her, past the red-brick wall and in through the dark opening, met by a surge of deafening music and glaring lights.