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  New lines of inquiry gradually dried up, and what had been front-page news was relegated to inside columns, then odd paragraphs tucked in corners. ‘Moira – Still No News’, ‘Coatbridge Girl Still Untraced’, ‘Girl Still Missing’.

  On 18 May the Herald reported that a photo of Moira would appear on television, some three months after she had vanished. The police had been urged to have it broadcast before, but had felt that the BBC would not transmit it as ‘It would serve no useful purpose’.

  Two days later, when the picture had been shown, it was reported that the television appeal had brought no response.

  Chapter Two

  As time dragged by with no news, faith in Coatbridge Burgh Police plummeted. Just days after Moira’s disappearance, a dinner was held in honour of the retiring Chief Constable Daniel McLauchlan OBE. The new Chief, Charles McIntosh, was left with a hot potato. In his statement to the Scotsman of 26 February, he said that he was in command of the investigation and appealed for witnesses who might have seen Moira on the Saturday to come forward. From their statements, he said, perhaps a complete picture of her movements on the day of her disappearance might emerge. To co-ordinate the inquiry, he promoted Detective Sergeant John F. MacDonald to Uniformed Inspector in charge of the Coatbridge CID.

  The Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser carried a photograph of the new man, and I can remember my father discussing these promotions: we lived opposite the police station and he was on nodding terms with all the officers, who in those days jumped on and off the buses and who had an arrangement with drivers where they expected to travel free. In return, they were prepared to look the other way when problems arose regarding the staff of Baxter’s Bus Service.

  Whether it was because of the turmoil of McLauchlan’s departure, McIntosh’s arrival, or MacDonald’s promotion, or whether the announcement in the middle of the search for Moira that the Chief Constable for Lanarkshire was coming to visit the local force, there is no doubt that the search for the missing child became unco-ordinated. In 1993, a former police officer, now living in Canada, telephoned the Scottish Sunday Mail to say he recalled how disillusioned he had been by his time spent with the Coatbridge Burgh Police. Contrary to what was being said in the newspapers at the time about areas being searched two and three times, he had felt uneasy then and for years afterwards about the attitude of some of those in charge. Superiors, he said, were more concerned about getting offices spick and span and ensuring filing cabinets were up to date because of the impending visit of the highest-ranking officer in the county. A distinct lack of urgency had been shown about Moira, and he had overheard several men shrug off her disappearance with the words, ‘Och, the lassie’s likely had a row wi’ her mammy and went off. She’ll turn up soon enough.’ The group of officers he had been with were told not to search anywhere beyond the town boundary.

  Furthermore, egos were bruised, when because of lack of headway and the Andersons’ view that the local police were not experienced in dealing with missing persons, the Glasgow CID joined the case. They were not overwhelmed by help. They briefly linked Peter Manuel, who went down in criminal history as Scotland’s most infamous serial killer, to Moira, and her name was mentioned when he conducted his own defence at his trial in May 1958. Manuel indicated that two detectives had said to him after an identification parade that they were going to pin eight murders on him, including ‘the little girl who disappeared in Coatbridge last year’. But they had to rule out Manuel: he had been in prison at the time of Moira’s disappearance, completing a stretch for breaking into Hamilton colliery. He might have been in the clear about Moira, but he went on to gain further notoriety as the last person hanged in Scotland.

  Other members of the public share the view that the search was fragmented and lacked foresight. A local man commented in 1993 that he never understood why the Monkland Canal, which went right through the town, had not been dragged. At the time the official line was that it was too choked and overgrown with weeds, and because of Suez the petrol crisis was uppermost in the minds of the authorities.

  Also in 1993, William McDonald of Glenboig made a statement to those who reopened Moira’s file, saying how astounded he had been to see land infilled at Coltswood, only a mile from Moira’s home, that spring. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes to see quarrying and infill work going on when a local child had just gone missing.’

  Others have commented that they were amazed that no door-to-door interviewing took place, not even around Muiryhall Street, where Moira’s grandmother lived. A relative of mine, who has stayed in neighbouring Albion Street all his life, said, ‘We always expected police to call because our household had three single men, all of them in different age groups, but it just never happened.’

  The local police had made the naïve assumption that people would come forward automatically with any relevant information, but they were mistaken. Members of the public thought progress was being made when it was not. They felt sure that any local deviants would be undergoing thorough checking.

  The only ‘local’ suspect whose movements were thoroughly checked was Ian Simpson, who was mentally handicapped, from Mitchell Street, near Kirkwood. His sister, by sheer coincidence, lived almost next door to the Co-op to which Moira had been sent.

  In the 1990s Inspector John F. MacDonald revealed that Simpson was always his number one suspect, but he had a cast-iron alibi. He had been away with the Territorial Army that weekend, and his sister insisted he had been nowhere near her home in Laird Street. He was allowed to go free. However, he was eventually taken to Carstairs, the state psychiatric hospital, after hitching a lift from a Leeds man whom he murdered and buried in a lay-by in the Scottish mountains. Taking the victim’s car, he picked up a foreign student and murdered him, too, dumping the body in a forest near Dumfries. He was in Carstairs from 1962 till February 1976, when he was hacked to death with a staff member and a police officer during a break-out by fellow inmates.

  The Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser, published weekly on Saturdays in 1957, summarized the events of the first week, stressing the concern being shown throughout the district: ‘Moira’s name is mentioned in shops, buses, public houses, in fact everywhere that people gather . . . all wish to help, yet all feel helpless in their ability to do so.’ Seldom, they reported, in the history of the Monklands had there been such a poignant human drama, and Mrs Anderson had the sympathy of countless mothers. All of Scotland was in shock. The paper described the ‘sightings’ in Greenock and Doncaster, but it went on to say:

  Coatbridge Police revealed that they had been contacted by a woman who had seen Moira board a Baxter’s bus in Alexander Street at 5.15 p.m. on Saturday. It was bound for Kirkwood [a modern housing area on the town’s outskirts], and the woman, who knows Moira by sight, distinctly remembers smiling at the little girl as she smiled back. The police managed to trace the conductress of this bus, but she has been unable to aid the investigation . . . The bus went from Coatdyke Cross via Muiryhall St, Kildonan St, Alexander St, along Sunnyside Road towards the main town centre landmark known to every local as The Fountain, and then along the Main St, down towards Whifflet; its final leg would be via School St to the Kirkwood area of Old Monkland.

  The mention of the bus’s destination made the police concentrate on Ian Simpson’s alibi. The Anderson parents queried why Moira would ever wish to go there. They explained that they knew no one who lived in that part of town.

  After an appeal only one of six passengers had come forward. James Inglis had been waiting for the bus and knew Moira: she had been playing in the snow at the bus stop when the bus arrived, he said, but he was less sure that she had boarded it.

  One other person reported seeing a child loitering at a bus stop in Whifflet around teatime. She seemed to be waiting for someone, they said, scuffing the icy pavement with her feet to keep warm. Their description of her shoes was accurate, but they had not noticed who had picked her up. The buses had stopped because of the weather, but the chi
ld appeared to have had an arrangement with someone. She had simply melted away into the night.

  Instead of reconstructing the five-minute bus journey to the Whitelaw Fountain in the town centre and then on through Whifflet to the town centre, though, police concentrated their efforts on issuing descriptions of Moira’s clothing to all policemen in Greenock, where a search was organized. All ships’ crews anchored in port were interviewed to see if they recollected a girl answering Moira’s description. None did. Back at Coatbridge, police discounted the bus sightings, and visited schools to question pupils. This met with little success.

  When detectives came to my primary school their talk was directed at older children in Primary 4–7. Gartsherrie Academy had a large central hall, and, a Primary 3 child on an errand, my curiosity got the better of me. Clasping the jug I’d been given to fetch water from the cloakroom for painting, I listened. I watched as older pupils shook their heads. Many knew her or, like myself, knew of her, although Moira had been at Coatdyke Primary in Muiryhall Street. I felt a flash of sympathy go through me when I thought of Marjorie, who was my own age. How awful never to see your big sister again.

  Inexplicably the 1957 investigation team failed to interview Moira’s best friend, who had spent part of that final day with her. That morning, Moira had visited the Limb Centre in Motherwell with her father. They had returned after 11 a.m. and Moira had popped round to see Elizabeth Taylor with whom she spent most Saturdays at the Regal or Odeon matinées. Elizabeth Taylor Nimmo, now a grandmother, can recall the events of that day vividly. Moira had come round to her house in Dunbeth Avenue, and asked her to come out to play despite the dark sky, which promised bad weather, and an icy wind. Unusually for them, they elected to skip to keep warm and tied one end of a clothes rope to a lamp post, taking turns to twirl it while the other skipped.

  Elizabeth Nimmo said, ‘The snow started to come on not long after we started the skipping. Funnily enough the morning had been fine, very crisp and bright with no hint of the blizzard coming. It turned into a really terrible day, in fact I’d never seen snow like it. Moira said as soon as she turned up that she would have to go for some messages . . . Then my mother noticed the weather and shouted to me from the window to come in, it was too cold to play. Moira asked if I wanted to go with her, but I wasn’t allowed, and that was that. I went into the house and watched some swimming which was on television, which we had then. The last I saw of Moira, she was turning the corner towards her home, obviously popping into her mum before she left for her gran’s house.’ Elizabeth added, with obvious sorrow, ‘Who knows what might have happened if I’d gone with her? Could I have saved her or would the two of us have vanished? It’s a question that can never be answered.’

  She can still remember how the news was broken to her, and her shock, on the morning after Moira vanished without trace. Usually on Sunday mornings she and Moira went to Band of Hope meetings but that day her father, deeply perturbed, woke her and said, ‘Moira didn’t come home last night.’

  More than thirty years later Elizabeth had her first opportunity to make a formal statement to the police about her friend’s disappearance and provided information not previously known.

  In April 1993, she gave an interview to the local paper, in which she spoke of the enormity of the tragedy with which the Andersons had had to come to terms. Maisie Anderson, Elizabeth Nimmo said, had died in 1977, never having fully accepted the loss of her child, and Sparks, ironically, died in 1992, a few months after the police were approached to reopen the case. He never knew that there had been a sudden and dramatic development.

  ‘It’s very sad,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Her parents must have gone through hell wondering if she would or wouldn’t walk through the door again. And for her sisters, Janet and Marjorie, it must have been hell living with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Moira was alive or dead. I know that her mum believed for years that she was still alive and used to go out looking for her. She even set a place for her daughter at the tea table every night and bought Moira a birthday present each 31st March. I don’t believe Moira ran away. She wouldn’t have gone willingly with a strange man. Although in those days you could go out and leave your door open, our parents always warned us about speaking to strange men and being offered sweets. For a time I thought she might have been abducted and could still be alive, but not any more.’

  Until 1977 many others shared Elizabeth’s view. If Moira had still been alive then, she would surely have come to her mother’s funeral.

  It would be a little longer before the key to the puzzle of Moira’s disappearance was unearthed.

  Chapter Three

  My mother Mary once told me that in the days following my birth, on 7 January 1949, when she stared into my face, she had a sense of being scrutinized by one of the ancients. A pair of eyes surveyed her that seemed to possess an inner knowledge. ‘Everyone told me you’d been here before, Sandra.’ She laughed. ‘They said you’d probably read all the books and would keep me right. Such a serious wee face!’

  My earliest memory is of being held on her lap, and having my little clenched fists prised open by her and her mother, Granny Katie. They were commenting on the length of my fingers.

  ‘I wonder what she’ll be when she grows up?’ my mother mused.

  ‘Perhaps with these fingers she’ll be an artist or play the piano,’ said Granny Katie.

  To their amusement, I piped up, ‘Me gonna read!’ and tried to remove my gran’s spectacles.

  Perhaps this indicated the way in which my relationship with my mother would progress. She discovered that I was a headstrong, independent child who thrived on responsibility. I was often entrusted to keep an eye on my two little brothers while she ran to the Co-op near our first home in Partick Street. Even before their arrival, and before my third birthday, she had found that I was resourceful. One day, the wind slammed the door shut as she hung washing outside. I amazed her by getting up from my nap, toddling down the stairs and stuffing the key, which I pulled from the lock, through the letterbox.

  My relationship with my father, though, was fraught with problems. My first memory is of him holding me on the parapet of a bridge overlooking the river Clyde in Glasgow. I was about three. I remember with startling clarity the stark terror I felt when I gazed down at the swirling black water. Despite the knowledge that the arms encircling me were strong ones, I nevertheless felt real mistrust and panicked. Howling with terror, mainly because my father suddenly pretended that he was going to drop me, I was put down. Ever since, I have been frightened of deep running water and heights.

  Otherwise my father adored me. I was the first child my mother had borne him who survived and I was named Alexandra after him, although I was always known to everyone as Sandra. He and my mother, Mary Frew, had married, like many others, at the tail end of the war in October 1945. He called himself Sandy, to distinguish himself from his own dad, who was also Alexander Gartshore. My mother, though, always called him Alex.

  She had been deeply in love with a young man named Davey Thomson, who was drowned during the war. My father had been a friend of Davey and wrote to her to console her. Later, he suggested that they meet up, since he lived in Bellshill and she in Whifflet, only a couple of miles away.

  My mother was from a large family, which was respectable but not wealthy. The eldest child of eight, she was always acutely aware that no matter how bright she was, a wage was needed from her as early as possible. And she was bright, but there was no question of her education continuing: she was found a job in Marshall’s shoe shop, earning a few welcome shillings a week. Her parents had married at the close of the First World War. Katie Smith hailed from Denny, and went into service at thirteen in the big houses of Glasgow and Paisley. There she met my grandfather, Norman Frew, who worked all his days in the huge iron forges at Beardmore’s in Parkhead, Glasgow. He brought her to set up home in Coatbridge, where his father had a profitable grocer’s shop. But with eight in the family, they never
knew a life in which they could have a holiday.

  My father came from a quite different background. He was one of only three children and there was more to go round. By all accounts, though, he did not care about possessions and was a loner, keen to skip tedious hours in the classroom for the bluebell woods of the estate on which he spent his early years. He was a constant source of anxiety to his father, who could never be quite sure where he was. His maternal grandmother was heard to comment that young Alex reminded her of her philandering late husband – out at all hours, fond of females and feckless. To anyone who would listen she said that her worries had ended when she was widowed, ‘because then I knew where he was’. My father, she claimed, was a chip off the same block.

  Born in 1921, my father’s humble beginnings in a cottage on a rambling estate obscure the grand origins of the family from which he sprang. The Gartshores of Gartshore have been traced back to the twelfth century by one of my relatives, Graham. Given lands and their own charter by a Scottish monarch, for generations they lived quietly on their estate by Kirkintilloch, a small town near Glasgow. A brief skirmish with fame came in 1745 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops marched through the town and someone took a potshot at him. Angry at such audacity, Charles had my father’s ancestor, the Laird of Gartshore, imprisoned to force the guilty party to give themselves up. According to records in Kirkintilloch Library, it was only on the intervention of a beautiful lady in the entourage of the Young Pretender that the Laird was not hanged.

  All went well with the family estate until 1813, when it passed to Marjorie Gartshore, known as May, who never married. She left everything to a child named John Murray, fourth son of the Lord Lieutenant of Scotland, who came from Edinburgh. No one is quite sure why she did this and also insisted that he took the name – she had ignored her Gartshore relatives in the surrounding areas – but John Murray Gartshore was a disaster. He drank heavily, gambled away large sums of money, and finally lost Gartshore House and all its land, including pits and brickworks, on the turn of dice, to a powerful family of iron and steel magnates, the Bairds of Gartsherrie. They in turn passed it to a daughter who married Lord Whitelaw, now a peer in the House of Lords.