Read Where There is Evil Online
Authors: Sandra Brown
Where There is Evil
Dedicated to the memories of my mother Mary Milne Frew
and of
Mary McCall Anderson
(Moira)
Men and women make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Karl Marx
Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland
At the start of a bitterly cold February in 1992, my routine as a wife and mother living in the suburbs of Edinburgh and working in nearby West Lothian as a senior lecturer in
childcare in a demanding college post was disrupted. I was sent on a week’s management course, which included assertiveness training. What I learnt triggered off a series of events that have
affected my entire life. Before I returned to West Lothian College, I had an experience that altered the direction of my life irrevocably.
It also affected my husband, my teenage son and my ten-year-old daughter. It almost destroyed relationships within the rest of my large extended family, dividing me from my mother and brothers.
It led to me instigating a major criminal investigation in the Strathclyde region of Scotland, which involved reopening files almost forty years old.
Later, I was in and out of police stations, procurators’ offices and I met leading politicians. Strangers saluted my courage and told me they would not have had the strength to do what I
was doing. Others, including some relatives, called me a bitch hell-bent on revenge. A tiny handful of members of my church supported me with their prayers, while people from my past showed open
hostility. Some said I needed psychiatric help.
All of this resulted from a single conversation I had with my father on 7 February 1992, when we met and spoke for the first time in twenty-seven years.
I was a child in the 1950s, when there was a distinct sense of right and wrong. It was a golden age of innocence when respect for elders was insisted upon, the postman put the
letters in your hand, and my grandmother pulled down the blinds in the house when a neighbour had died or when a funeral was going past. We lived life at a slower pace, and knew no one who suffered
from stress. Indeed, we had never heard of such a thing.
I ran happily to fetch what we called the ‘messages’ from gloomy shops with sawdust floors. Assistants brought you items from the shelf; the butter was patted briskly into shape and
the cheese neatly severed from the block with wire. The money was whisked on a series of pulleys to the girl in her tower-like cash desk and I dreamed of one day having her job, and inscribing
copperplate figures in a huge ledger. We all shopped at the Co-op, although we knew that some people – the toffs – had their shopping delivered by message boys, who wore
three-quarter-length aprons, pedalling their sturdy bikes along tree-lined streets to the big houses where tips were likely. Customers were valued then, and honesty rewarded. It seemed as though
life would go on like this for ever.
Coatbridge was dominated by its blast furnaces and had earned itself the nickname the Iron Burgh. The population was primarily working class, and trips abroad were only for the wealthy, and
although the community had experienced its share of scandalous events the local newspaper headlines tended to run
BUTCHER FINED FOR HAVING TOO MUCH FAT IN MINCE
or
MAN FINED FOR RIDING BICYCLE WITHOUT LIGHTS
.
The community itself appeared to be a safe place to rear a family. We children walked unaccompanied to and from school and the park. We played for hours in streets that had few cars. Indeed,
they were such a rarity that the AA man saluted members as they passed him. The minister called regularly to see us and was offered tea in the best china cup with roses on it, and digestive
biscuits thickspread with butter. Nobody we knew bought chocolate ones, which were too expensive for ordinary folk.
The end of innocence came on 23 February 1957. That date was a watershed in my life and in every other Coatbridge child’s. Overnight, fear seeped into a small community where it had been
thought that everyone knew everyone else. Two families in particular were affected for ever by the tragedy. The repercussions of one little girl’s disappearance caused shock waves and
disbelief that never entirely subsided.
I was just eight years old when Moira Anderson vanished from the streets of Coatbridge in a fierce blizzard on 23 February 1957. She was carrying out an errand for her
grandmother that involved the shortest of journeys to the Co-op for some butter.
Moira was pretty, with straight fair hair framing an impish face. Everyone who remembers her recalls a child with an answer for everything. Not cheeky, but a renowned tomboy who was full of
life, with intelligent blue eyes and a bubbly personality. One of her uncles told the police that Moira ‘was a girl who should’ve been born a boy – she could beat them all at
bools [marbles] and she wasn’t a great one for dolls or skipping’. The middle child of three girls, her parents Andrew and Marjorie (also known as Maisie) had settled in a sandstone
tenement building at 71 Eglinton Street, a stone’s throw from Dunbeth Park, the haunt of all the local children, and close to Coatbridge College in nearby Kildonan Street. The tenements were
near Dunbeth Avenue, a prestigious address, and a main bus route passed them. The whole Cliftonville area, with its tree-lined streets was, and still is, regarded as a desirable part of the burgh
in which to live.
My mother’s sister, my aunt Margaret, lived nearby, and my family and I were just a few streets away. I was a frequent visitor to the park, usually with my aunt’s offspring to give
her a break, or playing with the girls I knew from school. I often saw Marilyn Twycross; she was part of a little group that included Marjorie, the youngest Anderson girl. I only knew Moira by
sight.
Janet, the eldest daughter, was thirteen, and protective of her younger sisters, who bore a striking resemblance to her. People often confused the first two Anderson girls as their appearance
was so similar, but they had distinct personalities and different interests. The sisters were close and Moira confided in Janet. A few days before she disappeared, Moira told her that a young man
with a knife had stopped her near their gran’s home and had asked her to go with him, offering her money. Terrified, she had run away but had told no one except Janet.
The family of Andrew, or ‘Sparks’, Anderson, a boilerman, was well known in the town. They were not well-to-do, but they were respectable. To earn pocket money Moira ran errands for
an elderly neighbour called Mrs Bruce, and did other odd jobs for her and for her mother. The coppers she earned were augmented by her part-time job delivering milk each morning, for Rankin’s
Dairy. Rain or shine, Moira never missed a delivery, although the work involved pushing a heavy handcart of crates full of milk bottles round local streets. She made seven shillings and sixpence
each week and picked up generous tips at Christmas. She put her money straight into the school bank each Monday morning, until funds had grown sufficiently for her to transfer them to the Airdrie
Savings Bank. Her main expenditure was on swimming on Monday evenings, after which she bought threepence worth of chips and two pickled onions from the chippie at Jackson Street, before catching
the Cliftonville bus home with her sister.
The Andersons had neither car nor television. Andrew was a keen Glasgow Rangers supporter, and he took Moira to matches at Ibrox and at Airdrie when he could afford to. He would say to her as
they entered, ‘Now, don’t listen to the foul language, just shut your ears and concentrate on the game.’ The family also had a small holiday cabin in the countryside, where Mrs
Anderson liked to send her daughters to put roses in their cheeks. Seaside visits to relatives who lived on the Scottish East Coast were not unusual, even in winter. Janet had been allowed to go
that particular February weekend.
That Saturday Moira went to her granny’s home in the mid-afternoon, to meet her cousins and their friend. The older girls, Jeannette and Beth Mathewson, were going to take her to the
pictures. Her parents had approved the plan: the girls’ grandfather was dying in Glasgow Royal Infirmary and they planned to visit him. In the end Moira’s mother stayed at home. She had
asked Moira to visit her gran, who had Asian flu, before the outing, to check if she needed anything.
When Moira arrived at her grandmother’s house in Muiryhall Street, her Uncle Jim, a bachelor who lived with his mother, said that he’d bought fish for their tea but that there was no
fat to cook it. He asked Moira to go to the Co-op. She swithered about taking her grandmother’s dog Glen with her as she liked to do, but the snow was falling heavily and her uncle told her
not to dawdle. He thought if she hurried she would get to the store before it closed at 4.15 p.m.
The Co-op in Laird Street was no distance from Muiryhall Street, and when she set off Moira was warmly dressed in her navy blue school coat and a pixie hat with red bands knitted into it. It was
the last time she was ever seen.
That afternoon the streets were deserted, mainly because of the blizzard, but also because, as a contemporary report in the
Scottish Daily Express
read, ‘At that time . . . the
men are at football matches, the women at shops downtown, the kiddies at cinema matinées.’ The staff in the Co-op knew Moira well but had told the newspaper’s journalist:
‘Moira did not come in here on Saturday afternoon.’ They were adamant that they had not closed early.
Moira’s uncle became angry as he waited for the child to return and the afternoon wore on. ‘She said she wouldn’t be long!’ he complained to the Mathewson girls. He
remembered, with some exasperation, how Moira could not resist a challenge to a game of marbles – she was renowned for her skill and had humiliated more than a few male companions, winning
their best ‘bools’ from them with ease. But surely she wouldn’t be playing marbles on a day like this. He became increasingly anxious.
Eventually Moira’s cousins set off for the Regal where they hoped to spot her in the queue. Their luck was out. Moira wasn’t there and the five o’clock show was packed out.
They went on to the Theatre Royal in Jackson Street, where they saw a film starring Peter Finch. By that time, they’d given up on Moira.
Later that evening, when Moira’s cousins were back at home with their parents, they were astonished when Moira’s father appeared at the door looking for her. He was horrified to hear
that his daughter had not been with them. He could not believe that on a journey of five hundred yards, his daughter, who knew the area inside out, could have gone missing. Stunned, he left to tell
his wife.