Evil Relations (26 page)

I’m being led towards my usual interview room, the one I’ve spent so many hours in that I actually think of it as mine. But as I walk by the first office, for some reason I pause and look in.

The suitcases are on a table, the blue one and the brown. Both are open, their heaving contents spilling out like something wicked across the Formica surface. I’m rooted to the spot by what I see: a black wig, books with lurid covers – some of which I recognise – papers, photographs and several reels of tape. I remember the look that passed between Benfield and Talbot in the house when I mentioned Ian recording stuff on his eight-track and I feel a sudden chill without knowing why.

Someone ushers me along the corridor, towards my little room. I’m left there for ten minutes or more by myself and sit stiffly, cracking my knuckles and listening to the muted sounds in the rest of the building. There is a constant murmur of grim conversation, doors opening and closing, chairs being scraped back.

A copper I’ve never seen before enters my room and looks at me for a moment before saying, ‘Well, lad, we’ve found plenty of stuff all right.’

I sit up straight in my chair and wait for the questions to begin, but instead he tells me I can go home. I’m dumbfounded but don’t need telling twice. It’s only as I leave the station that I realise the suitcases probably haven’t been examined thoroughly yet and, until the coppers have got their heads around it all, they won’t know what line to take with me. I get an easy ride that day, in the sense of being allowed to go early, but my stomach is in knots, wondering about the black wig, what those photographs show and what the hell might be on the spools of brown tape . . .

I spend my free afternoon in town with Dad. We do our best to avoid the newspaper stands, where every black-and-white placard reads: ‘Moors Search Continues’. I try not to think of that dark landscape and the reservoir lying at the bottom, still and silent under a full moon.

My efforts to forget don’t work, as the hours tick by: I can’t get the moor out of my head. I’ve been there again recently with Joe Mounsey, who explained as we drove out through the old mill villages that they’d managed to identify the place in the photographs as Hollin Brown Knoll. The name meant nothing to me, but as we rounded a sharp, high bend and the boulders came into view on the horizon – great black ugly rocks, like rotten teeth – I felt a sudden jolt of recognition. We parked below the boulders and crossed the road together, just me and Mr Mounsey at first, then with an army of coppers following us, clipboards at the ready. We stopped at the place I thought must have been where I’d stood with Ian the night before Angela died. It looked different in the watery daylight – the reservoir seemed wider, less of a silver streak bordered by high banks of land. I tried to answer Mr Mounsey’s questions, concentrating hard.
Was the reservoir far away when you stopped, David? Was it this far or a bit further? Did it seem bigger or smaller than this? Would it be this angle or slightly to the side? Was the ground spongy beneath your feet like this, sinking in, or was it firmer, more rocky?
I felt painfully inadequate, as I stumbled out the truth:
it was dark when I was up there with Brady, and I hadn’t even realised it was a reservoir until he told me so – I thought it was a river
.
I was wearing cowboy boots that night and the heels sink into anything that isn’t concrete . . .
Mr Mounsey, to his eternal credit, didn’t mock or become impatient: he nodded thoughtfully and paced about, occasionally waving me across to him and asking if
this
was actually the place I’d stood with Brady that night, or this . . . I wanted to help more than ever, to be able to point at the exact spot, but I couldn’t. As we walked back to his car, I felt as if the whole thing had been a waste of time, because without knowing for certain which was the precise area, nothing could come of it. Their search methods were medieval: push in a bamboo stick, sniff it for any hints of decomposition and then repeat. One pace in the wrong direction meant they could so easily miss something – or someone.

*

It’s getting dark in the city. Dad and I wander aimlessly; it’s as if the news-stands are being put out ahead of us because everywhere we look there they are, updated to announce that this is the last day of the search. Apparently the big brass have decided it’s too expensive to carry on doing the needle-in-a-haystack thing. I turn my head away from the paper shop on Market Street and tell Dad we ought to think about getting back for Maureen. He nods but doesn’t speak; he’s got about as much conversation in him as I have, and together we turn up our coat collars against the damp, bitter mist and shuffle through the babbling crowds towards our bus stop.

We’ve spent too long in town. In the alleys and down side streets it’s particularly dark – that deep, early dark peculiar to cities. The lights from the shops and offices turn the pavement rain into luminous patterns and when I step into a small pool of water, the light scatters at my feet.

We’re heading past the wide square of Piccadilly Gardens, the smell of exhaust fumes, fish and chips and beer stinging the wet air, when Dad squeezes my arm, forcing me to stop.

There is a placard to our left, outside a small shop with a yellow
Manchester Evening News
hoarding. Four words in black and white loom out from behind the criss-cross wire: ‘BODY FOUND ON MOOR’.

I close my eyes tightly shut. Ian’s voice fills my brain: ‘Maggots, they’re all fucking maggots . . . you’ve sat on one of the
graves
. . .’

Dad’s grip on my arm increases. I open my eyes and look at him. We stand there silently, letting the crowds surge round us, two small pebbles in a stream of people looking forward to tea and telly and Saturday night down the boozer. Dad moves first, hauling me on towards our bus stop further up, past the bright, busy shop fronts. The Hattersley bus is already there, and Dad pays our fare while I stagger upstairs like a man twice his age and slump into the front seat on the right. I lean forward and put my head in my hands.

This is real now. Everything is real. Ian wasn’t bluffing. He’s killed. Three or four, he said, you’ve sat on one of the graves. It wasn’t the drink talking. BODY FOUND ON MOOR.

Dad drops heavily down into the seat, his leg and elbow against mine. I don’t look at him and he doesn’t speak to me. What is there to say?

The engine starts up and the bus pulls out, a rumble of normality in a world I’m not part of, on the long road to Hattersley.

The small body recovered from the moor was swiftly identified as ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. She was found by Police Constable Robert Spiers, who had moved away from the search party on Hollin Brown Knoll after feeling drawn to the higher ground behind the jutting rocks. He saw what he thought was a white, withered stick, but upon investigation it turned out to be part of the little girl’s forearm poking out of the water-logged peat. In a statement later read to court, Dr Dave Gee described the state in which she was found: ‘The body lay on its right side; the skeletal remains of the left arm were extended above the head, and the hand was missing. The right arm was beneath the body, the hand being near the right knee. Both legs were doubled up towards the abdomen, flexed at hips and knees. The head was in normal position. The body was naked.’ Lesley’s clothes and shoes lay piled at her feet, together with the string of white beads her elder brother had won for her at the fair the day before Lesley disappeared from there on Boxing Day 1964.

On Monday, following the discovery on the moor, David and Maureen were taken up to Hollin Brown Knoll again by Joe Mounsey. A green tent concealed Lesley’s grave and a long line of police fanned out in a circle from that spot, probing the ground with the now ubiquitous bamboo sticks. Mounsey had several maps with him, but although David and Maureen walked around the area with him at length, neither could be of further assistance. David was taken back to Hyde, where the police station was in organised uproar, having been transformed into the headquarters of a momentous murder inquiry; the canteen was serving as the press room and a vast press conference – the first in Britain to be filmed – had been planned for that week.

David was ushered into ‘his’ interview room for the toughest day of questioning yet. He was asked about the books found inside the suitcases (among them
Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
,
Cradle of Erotica
,
Sexus
,
The Kiss of the Whip
,
Tropic of Cancer
,
The Life and Ideals of the Marquis de Sade
wrapped in the
Daily Mirror
and
Mein Kampf
wrapped in the
News of the World
), the pornographic magazines, two library tickets belonging to his father, a bandolier and ammunition, a cutlery box containing a cosh and a black mask, and another cosh with ‘EUREKA’ on it.

‘The police didn’t show me everything,’ he recalls, ‘but they asked me what I’d taken round to Ian’s the night before Edward Evans was killed and I told them: a notepad, books, a cosh, my starter pistol and the blank shells that went with it. That was it. Then they brought everything I’d listed as mine into the room and asked me if I could positively identify it all. I did – though I have no idea how those library tickets belonging to my dad came to be in there. That’s a complete mystery to me. I didn’t like admitting that the home-made cosh marked Eureka was mine, but I wasn’t going to lie about anything.’

He pauses. ‘The notepad proved to be the biggest sticking point. It contained my interpretation of the books Ian had given me to read and the police pounced on it straight away. It was a major interrogation issue.’ Inside the notepad David had compiled a list of the novels recommended to him by Ian Brady, with some extracts from the texts and his own understanding of the authors’ intentions added alongside.

‘I thought it was clear enough that the notepad was a sort of diary of what I’d read,’ he reflects, ‘but it became a real battle to try and prove that these were not necessarily my views, as such. I understood why the police needed to get to the bottom of what I’d written, but I really struggled to convince them that the notebook wasn’t what it seemed. And I ended up becoming very defensive, which was the last thing I wanted. I’d never asked for a solicitor, not once, because I didn’t want the obstruction and constant interjections of some legal bloke telling me I didn’t have to answer this and that. Being upfront about the things that belonged to me in the suitcases might not have been the path a solicitor would have advised me to take, for example – he might have said that it wasn’t in my best interests. But as far as I was concerned it was the only option. I knew which way I wanted to go and I knew it was something I had to do on my own.’

Detectives moved away from the issue of the notepad and turned instead to other items found within the suitcases. These included a set of photographs, which were brought into the interview room and placed face down on the table. After waiting for a moment, one of the detectives flipped over the first photograph.

It showed a small, dark-haired child naked but for her shoes and socks and a gag pulled tight around the lower half of her face. The detective turned over another photograph, and another, and another – nine in all, each of the same little girl, standing, lying down, kneeling and bending, as she had been told.

‘The photographs were . . .’ David lifts his hands, helplessly. ‘I couldn’t take in what I was seeing. The detectives presented them in a certain way, and rightly so, to get an honest reaction from me. I freaked out and couldn’t stand to look at them. The detectives started barking at me, as they turned the photographs over: “What do you think of that? How does it make you feel? You know who that is, don’t you? It’s Lesley Ann Downey, isn’t it? That little girl is Lesley Ann Downey and her body was found where you used to go for picnics with your sister-in-law and her boyfriend. What do you think happened to her after this was taken? Come on, let’s have it –
what the fucking hell happened to her
?” That was their attitude.’

He shakes his head repeatedly. ‘I realised then what Brady had meant when he’d told me that he had “photographic proof”. That burned itself into my mind. His words meant nothing until then. And it was obvious to anyone who saw those pictures that Lesley Ann Downey would never have been able to go home after they’d been taken.’

Leaving aside the matter of the photographs, detectives brought an eight-track tape recorder into the room and loaded it with a reel found in one of the suitcases. ‘I was in a state at that point,’ David remembers, ‘but there was no gentle “Prepare yourself” or “We’d like you to listen to something.” One of the suits said to me, “You’re going to listen to this and you’re not getting up or going anywhere until it’s finished.”’

The tape, recorded in Myra Hindley’s bedroom at Wardle Brook Avenue, opened with Ian Brady announcing, ‘This is track four.’ He spoke angrily to the dogs, then the sound of footsteps could be heard, muffled voices, and a door banged before the silence was shattered by a child’s scream. For several minutes, the tape went on revolving, relaying the last moments of Lesley Ann Downey’s life, as she pleaded in desperation with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to let her go home. The recording ended with the saccharine voices of the Ray Conniff singers – added to the track afterwards – singing ‘Jolly Old St Nicholas’ and ‘The Little Drummer Boy’, then footsteps fading into silence.

‘The police acted fairly in how they played that tape,’ David insists. ‘They needed an honest reaction from me. And that was, in this case, to cry. I cried, I got very upset, but they played the whole thing from beginning to end, and by the time the music came on I had my head in my hands, sobbing uncontrollably. It was completely horrific, that tape. Afterwards, I couldn’t find my voice. But they had their questions: “You know that was Lesley, don’t you? What happened to her after the tape ran out? When it went quiet, what was going on then? Get it off your chest, lad. Admit to it – she wasn’t going to bloody walk home, was she?”’