Where There is Evil Read online

  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

  Contents

  Prologue

  Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  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.

  Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland

  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.

  Chapter One

  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 errand
s 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.

  It took time for the news of Moira’s disappearance to spread: communications in the fifties were a poor shadow of what we now take for granted. A local search took place, the next day, on the traditional Scottish Sabbath but Monday’s Daily Record made no mention that the child had vanished. On Tuesday, though, it devoted the centre-spread to the story, and illustrated the route she had followed. There is one sentence in which the reporter who wrote the story unwittingly touched on the key to the mystery: ‘Something made Moira change her mind about shopping.’ But as the days slipped past the question ‘What?’ was left unanswered.

  A few days later, on 2 March, the family’s sick grandfather, James Anderson, died, which doubled their pain. After the funeral, hopes for Moira’s safety faded fast, but Mrs Anderson insisted on buying the Monopoly set Moira had said she’d love for her twelfth birthday on 31 March, saying, ‘I won’t give up hope yet.’ But the date, which was also Mothering Sunday that year, came and went and Moira had not appeared for either her present or her birthday tea.

  There had been no reconstruction of Moira’s journey to the Co-op and no door-to-door inquiry took place. Had the police spoken to the Andersons’ neighbours, they would have found that one had been a vital witness. Mrs Twycross was the mother of my playmate Marilyn. She had been trying to clear her path of the heavy snow, and had seen Moira on her way to the Co-op. She had called a greeting. She felt sure the child had shouted back, ‘Is the bus away yet?’ before she carried on, and Mrs Twycross had scurried back into the warmth of her home. Like others, she expected the police to visit Moira’s neighbours but none came round and she dismissed what she had seen.

  The Daily Record’s report ended with Maisie Anderson’s words: ‘I know Moira has been taken away against her will – she would never speak to strangers. Everybody knew her. She was such a tomboy, so full of fun and life. She wouldn’t go willingly with her birthday so close.’

  It had been just after midnight on that Saturday might that Andrew Anderson had contacted the local police station, which was almost opposite my home in Dunbeth Road. He told the officer on duty of his daughter’s plans for that afternoon. The managers of half a dozen cinemas were called from their homes in case Moira had been locked in somewhere. Even the Carnegie Library was opened and searched because she was an avid reader who spent lots of time there. The houses of all relatives and friends were checked and double-checked.

  As the week progressed with no news, a huge search was mounted. The bin men abandoned their strike to join police on the hunt, scouring back yards, sheds, garages and derelict buildings. The big event of Saturday, an Ayr United v. Airdrie football match at Broomfield, had attracted large crowds, then had been cancelled with the awful weather. Could a football supporter have stopped Moira for directions and abducted her? Andrew was firm that his daughter would never have gone off with a stranger, but as the hunt dragged on he said, ‘I fear she has been picked up in a car and taken away somewhere. But Moira never liked leaving the town, even to go into Glasgow. She spent almost all her spare time playing around the house.’ But Maisie Anderson insisted again that Moira would not have gone anywhere with a strange man.

  Terror built up in the local children. Our mothers promised dire punishments if we played out late without permission. My friends and I walked in pairs to school, and had to bear the ignominy of being collected from the clubs we attended. I gave up Brownies on my mother’s insistence but was allowed to carry on with Red Cross classes, which were held much closer to home. We muttered darkly about the injustice of this, but we looked over our shoulders constantly as we avoided former favourite play areas such as the old graveyard in Church Lane, by the school.

  Overnight, the freedom of an entire generation of children had been wiped out by a single event.

  As the days lengthened, townsfolk continued to surmise what might have happened. Some limelight-seeking individuals invented possibly useful information. One woman near Eglinton Street where the Andersons lived insisted she had heard screeching brakes and had seen a car
speed off that afternoon. Police dismissed her theory that Moira had been knocked down and that a panicking motorist had bundled her body into his car when they checked the view from her window. She couldn’t have seen or heard what she had described. They explained to her that with the amount of snow that had fallen on the roads it was highly unlikely that any vehicle could have been heard. All the side streets had been treacherous, and very few main roads had remained open on that Saturday.

  Other leads took the police nowhere. A family described seeing the missing girl at a Queen’s Park funfair on Glasgow’s South Side, but the show folk could not corroborate this. A navy blue raincoat belt was found by a railwayman in a marshy area of bog near Coatbridge known as the Moss, but proved not to be Moira’s. Most dramatic of all, a girl seen being dragged forcibly into a van at Baillieston, by Coatbridge, that night, turned out to have been a willing hitchhiker.

  Suspicion fell on the Anderson family themselves: as police understand it, the majority of victims know their killer. Moira’s sister Janet recalls that her uncle Jim was grilled endlessly as he had been the last known person to have spoken to the child. Whispers followed him for many years and Janet feels that the episode blighted his life.

  Even Moira’s parents found themselves the object of speculation. Fathers of missing children are automatic suspects, and Andrew was conscious of people looking at him askance. Maisie, it was falsely said, had often had to punish Moira. She was lively, more trouble than the other two girls, a handful. Perhaps a family argument had gone too far.

  Rumours of a family dispute persisted for several days, and on 5 March, eleven days after Moira had vanished, Coatbridge CID officers were reported by the Glasgow Herald to have searched the Andersons’ holiday home, but found nothing.

  The same officers travelled to Greenock, where an elderly woman insisted she had spotted a girl bearing a resemblance to Moira, and south to Doncaster to interview a lorry driver who thought he had spotted her with two men. Both leads came to nothing.