One of Your Own (13 page)

Having found one celebrated writer whose works he could interpret to make his own desires more palatable, he sought out others and soon encountered the novels of the Marquis de Sade, whose books brim with sexual cruelty and urge the reader to view murder not as a criminal offence but as a pleasure to be indulged. From de Sade he moved on to the philosophies of Nietzsche, telling himself that a killer was ‘attracted and stimulated by the excitement of challenging the norm, of stepping into forbidden territory like a solitary explorer, consciously thirsting to experience that which the majority have not and dare not’.
⁴⁴
A post-trial psychiatric report on Ian concludes: ‘He found an affinity for literature of a sadistic nature and had sympathy with fascist ideology and Nazi practices. He says he was exhilarated by their loss of feeling, as it appeared a liberation or freedom, but at the same time he was distressed.’
⁴⁵

In February 1959, one month after his 21st birthday, Ian replied to an advertisement for a stock clerk. Wearing the new suit his mother and stepfather had bought him, he caught the bus on Hyde Road to Millwards. He was offered the position following an interview with Tom Craig, who had his reservations over the young Scotsman with the borstal record but decided to give him a chance. Ian began work at Millwards on 16 February 1959, earning £9 a week. Staff found him neat, punctual and usually polite, apart from a dire lack of gamesmanship; lunchtime bridge sessions were dropped because he was so foul-tempered with his partner when they lost, and would sit glowering for the rest of the day if he had a bad hand at pontoon. Otherwise he was quiet, eating his egg-and-cheese sandwiches alone, reading
Teach Yourself German
or
Mein Kampf
.

Tom Craig regretted having employed him: ‘He was so bad-tempered about anything that upset him. If you ticked him off about something, he would fly into a rage. He had a shocking temper and his language was dreadful, but I used to pass it over just to keep the peace. He was reasonable at his job, but he would have been sacked long before if it hadn’t been that difficult to get staff . . . I can’t say I ever got to know him at all. In an office, the lads usually chat a bit about football or something like that, but Brady wasn’t interested in anything like that. Sometimes in the morning he might join in a conversation about what was on TV the night before, but I noticed he only talked about the crime films or the
Hitchcock Hour
, things with a bit of horror or brutality in them. He often had a book with him – I don’t remember any of them, but they were always those paperbacks with a bit of filth in them. I think it was his first clerical job and he was just adequate and no more. He wasn’t the sort of fellow I liked to have around.’
⁴⁶

Although he was a keen reader, privately Ian returned again and again to
Crime and Punishment
, sharpening his beliefs and ambitions through the character of Raskolnikov. He failed to recognise the sorrow behind the would-be assassin’s lament: ‘What filthy things my heart is capable of . . .’
⁴⁷
Instead, he interpreted it as a switch to flick on the ‘black light’ of his darkest secret: a sexual attraction to children.
⁴⁸
But he couldn’t satisfy it alone.

Ostensibly at least, Myra and Ian appeared to be a normal if unsociable couple. The staff at Millwards weren’t deceived by protestations that they were merely friends; Myra confided in one girl that they were having a relationship, and everyone else knew without being told. The two of them spent their lunch hour at their desks, talking quietly and eating sandwiches, or went out together for fish and chips. Although Ian was undemonstrative towards Myra in public – he never held her hand or put his arm around her – the impression they gave was of an unassailably intimate couple. Even years afterwards, when Myra was diligently constructing an image of herself as a gullible handmaiden to a master, she admitted that he was often loving and affectionate in private. Capable of genuine kindness towards her and habitually generous with money, he treated her to meals at Oriental restaurants and brought home impulsive gifts. He cooked more often than she did at Bannock Street, when they were alone after Gran had retired to bed, and if they had a disagreement he would apologise with another gift, which they referred to as ‘anniversary presents’.
¹
He called her Kiddo or the Germanic-sounding Hess, while she named him Neddie in homage to the
Goon Show
character played by Harry Secombe, which she learned to love as ardently as Ian.
²

They were keen cinema-goers. Ian always tried to reserve seats that had an uninterrupted view of the screen but recalls when, if there was a full house and they had to wait, ‘the doorman would come walking along the queue declaring that two of the best seats (also the most expensive) were available [and] I hated having to walk past the queue in order to accept them; I felt that I was deliberately snubbing or insulting them by my action. “I can afford the most expensive; you can’t.”’
³
He vividly remembers sitting with Myra in the front circle at the spectacular Gaumont cinema on Oxford Road to watch
West Side Story
. They were spellbound by the riotous colour and energy of the film; it flashed by ‘in what seemed like half an hour’, Ian recalls.
⁴
They shared the national interest in the spy dramas that reflected the political climate of the times and, having read Ian Fleming’s novels, were both eager to see the first Bond film,
Dr. No
, when it premiered in October 1962.
New Statesman
cursorily dismissed the spy as ‘an invincibly stupid-looking secret service agent’, but the British public embraced the film, relieved to have an alternative to the gritty new-wave realism of the working-class North.
⁵
Ian and Myra loved it, and saw the follow-up,
From Russia with Love
, when it was released the following year.

After the cinema, they would head back to Bannock Street and share a bottle of Liebfraumilch, which Ian placed next to the fire until the heat forced the cork from the bottle. On other evenings, when Gran was in bed, they indulged in the new British obsession: television. Replacing the radio as a daily staple in people’s lives, by 1962 the television had gone from being a luxury to a social necessity.
Coronation Street
was an immediate ratings winner upon its launch in 1960, as was the long-running, gentle police drama
Dixon of Dock Green
, superseded in 1962 by the more hard-hitting
Z Cars
.
The Wednesday Play
outraged the moral majority with its pragmatic depictions of sex, poverty and crime. But the programme Ian and Myra never liked to miss was
That Was The Week That Was
(
TW3
), a satirical news show that began in November 1962 and reached the peak of its popularity in April 1963. David Frost was the chief presenter, but it also starred Bernard Levin, an opinionated journalist with whom Ian later corresponded, and Malcolm Bradbury, Jack Rosenthal, John Braine and Dennis Potter contributed sketches.

Each evening, Ian would pretend to return home, sharing a curious streak of public prudery with Myra, not wanting the neighbours to know that they spent the night together. Mrs Margaret Withnall, who lived nearby, wasn’t fooled: ‘When Ian started visiting Myra, he used to leave the house and say goodnight at the front door, but several times we heard him sneaking in later.’
⁶

The couple’s public prudery was at odds with their private lives and values. Literature featured heavily in their love-making; they borrowed books on philosophy and torture from local libraries. Barbara Hughes, a trainee librarian in the district, grew used to seeing them: ‘[Myra] wore quite short skirts, even before the miniskirt was in fashion, so the first impression was that she was tarty, a bit common. That’s why I thought they were not suited. When he returned his books at the Longsight branch, he never said please or thank you. He always walked straight to the True Crime shelves, crash hat under his arm. They frequently came into Levenshulme Library, chatting together, but they never spoke to the staff.’
⁷
They went elsewhere in search of more explicit books. Myra told her solicitor, Jim Nichol: ‘When we went to the Central Library in Manchester and upstairs into the reference library, [Ian would] give me a list of books to pick out, such as
The Cradle of Erotica
, which was pornographic, Havelock Ellis, Kinsey, etc. and show my library card to get them and casually leave all but one on the desk he’d chosen to sit at, some distance away from mine. There was one book,
Sexual Murders
, which could only be taken out on a special ticket. I had to go to the main desk and ask for it, and get it stamped out on my card and give my name and address.’
⁸

Together they read Henry Miller, Harold Robbins and de Sade, incorporating scenarios into their own sex lives. ‘[Ian] took the lead most times,’ Myra divulged to her prison therapist. ‘He enjoyed rough sex and light spankings became whippings . . . He excited me in a way that no other man had done before.’
⁹
Although she used alcohol to lower her inhibitions, she never drank to excess, not wanting to dull her senses: ‘I needed to drink to perform for him or to do the things Ian wanted to do. He liked me to dress up like a tart, for us both to wear hoods. He enjoyed anal sex the most . . . He also enjoyed having a candle inserted up his backside. It gave us both pleasure, especially me, because then I was in the dominant role.’
¹⁰
The pornography they used wasn’t always of interest to her, but she ‘went along with it for Ian’s sake. I didn’t reach orgasm, but I was very excited by seeing him satisfied.’
¹¹
De Sade – whose writings by then had largely fallen into obscurity – remained a mutual favourite. They read aloud to each other from his books, which feature rape, bestiality, incest and necrophilia, and deliberated on the lines: ‘If you enjoy wickedness, it shows that nature intended you to be wicked and it would be wicked not to be’ and ‘If crime is seasoned by enjoyment, crime can become a pleasure . . .’
¹²
Myra admitted to journalist Duncan Staff that Ian’s sadistic desires, inspired by de Sade’s writings, aroused her. They took a substantial risk by never using a reliable form of birth control, although a family planning leaflet was found among their belongings after their arrest, and Myra recalled, ‘On one occasion . . . I thought I might be pregnant. I was very happy at the thought, but in the end I wasn’t. Perhaps it might have been disastrous if I had been.’
¹³

Ian had never seen the appeal of conventional relationships and scorned those around him whose aims in life were ‘to marry, breed, further burden themselves by mortgage . . . own a family car, and live in excruciating moderation and boredom till death do they depart’.
¹⁴
Myra briefly entertained the idea that their affair might lead to marriage but was glad to have found someone who echoed her own loathing of ‘dreary domestic bliss and the norm’.
¹⁵
She and Ian had ‘a very good understanding with one another’ which she felt was far superior to her married friends’ lives.
¹⁶
Finally, she had met a man ‘on a similar intellectual level’ to herself.
¹⁷
In her eyes, Ian was ‘cultured, he listened to classical music, he read classical literature. They were things that interested me too, but I’d had no one to share them with.’
¹⁸

Ian encouraged her to use her mind, to realise that politics weren’t something that happened in London but had a personal and daily effect on her life. His belief that the working classes were deliberately kept in a state of subjugation by the government and that ‘the very wealthy and powerful are the lawmakers [but] no one accumulates such a high degree of wealth and power by honest and legal means’ made sense to her.
¹⁹
Myra recalled: ‘One thing which we shared was a dissatisfaction with belonging to the working class and being trapped in it.’
²⁰
He was fanatical about Nazism and despised Churchill for his part in the Third Reich’s downfall. He bought German records from mail-order companies, ending his letters with the flourish, ‘Thank you, Meine Herren.’ Both he and Myra were gripped by
Hitler’s Inferno
, a compilation of war songs, speeches from the Nuremberg rallies and beer hall music. Fuelled by Nazi-inspired hatred, he and Myra detested the waves of immigrants who arrived in Britain between 1955 and 1962 from the West Indies, East Africa and South Asia in search of work and better lives for their families. Ian and Myra regarded the newcomers as ‘filth’ and ‘spongers’, while the rest of humanity were ‘morons’ and ‘maggots’.
²¹
Animals were preferable to people; the two of them lavished attention on Ian’s dog, Bruce, and Gran’s dog, Lassie, whom they dubbed ‘Ches’. They read the
Manchester Evening News
for names of those convicted of animal cruelty, then secretly damaged their property or subjected them to physical attack.