Where There is Evil (20 page)

‘He was
definitely
interviewed at the time,’ my mother said emphatically, although I had told her there was no written record of this. She looked at us all in bewilderment.
‘Why would he say he was if he wasn’t?’

There was a silence. I already knew from Jim that not only had no interview taken place, but the voters’ roll for 1957 showed that while there were families named Liddell in the
Cliftonville area, none had had a female child in the correct age group named Moira or anything similar. The child that Mrs Chalmers, the policeman’s wife, had spotted talking to the bus
driver that day
had
been Moira Anderson.

Jim had told me that Betty the babysitter, whose views had not figured at the time, had said that, despite numerous warnings from her parents, she had been drawn to my
father’s bus like a magnet. She had even been a passenger on his vehicle at some point during the afternoon of 23 February 1957 and had had a conversation with him about his plans for that
evening. He had implied that he was off duty, but wouldn’t require anyone to babysit: they wouldn’t be going out on such a bad night. So, he had intended going out for the evening, but
not with my mother, or herself. He had had other plans.

My father’s version of how he had heard of Moira’s disappearance and the events of that Saturday evening varies considerably from what is contained in my mother’s statement,
and that of Betty. He had insisted, when he was seen in Leeds, that he had heard the news on the night Moira had gone missing. There were, he stated, ‘plenty of people mentioning it on the
bus during the evening’. This must have been untrue because the child’s father did not report it until at least midnight. My dad had finished work slightly late, he claimed, bought fish
and chips on the way home, and had told my mother about the wee girl’s disappearance at 11.45 that night. Moira’s name had been mentioned by passengers, he claimed, but he didn’t
know who she was.

My father’s view of how well he had known the Andersons changed subtly over the months he was interviewed. Originally, in March 1993, he stuck to the line that he recalled Moira as just
one more child who got on and off his bus regularly, even though he was visibly shaken when confronted with her photograph.

He insisted during his taped conversations that there had been no friendship between them: ‘Ah never had much dealings with her . . . Ah never had any dealings except for on the
bus.’ He could not have chatted to her or anyone else, he maintained, as his cab was separate from the passengers.

Of her parents and sisters he pleaded ignorance, too, although my mother told me later that she recalled a conversation with my father
after
his release from prison when he returned to
Coatbridge and to his old bus route. He had mentioned to her how sorry he was for ‘that nice Mrs Anderson, whose kid had run off’. He had seen her from his bus sweeping the pavement
outside her home and she had glanced up and waved to him. When my mother told me this, she had been trying to convince both of us that there was a caring side to my father’s nature. ‘I
can assure you he was shaken to see that poor woman, still not knowing what had happened to her daughter,’ she quavered. ‘I hadn’t realized he knew her. And how could he have come
back here, if what you’re saying is right? Nobody could do something like that, and go back.’

I reminded her that by the time the police had realized that Moira had not run away, my dad had been in prison. Because he was away, he’d been forgotten in the inquiry so when he came out
he could slip quietly back into his family and his job.

But the truth was too much for my mother, who sobbed for hours after the visit by the CID, hoping still it was a nightmare from which she would awake.

The second time Jim and his team grilled my father, his story changed.

The detectives told him they had interviewed two people still living in the area, who not only were able to say which bus he had been driving that day, but also who had a photograph of the very
one, calling it EVA 26. The two bus spotters recalled it easily, for it had some features that distinguished it from the rest of Baxter’s fleet, including a bull nose. They had kept a note
over the years of every bus bought by the firm, and knew that it had been used between 1951 and 1958 in the Monklands, mainly on the Cliftonville to Kirkwood route, a journey of some twenty-five
minutes, where crews maintained a half-hour service, with five-minute breaks and a longer lunch-hour. Built in 1939, they knew its model number, T58, and registration, CWY 219, and the fact that it
was a hybrid, a Maudsley, which had been adapted with a Massey body. The driver was not completely isolated from his thirty-five passengers, and the vehicle had a capacious boot, the key for which
was hung up in a special pouch in the cabin. Unusually, the boot could also be utilized from
inside
the vehicle, by lifting the rear passenger seats above, and operating a concealed
lever.

My father recognized it instantly when Jim produced the photograph.

‘It’s a Maudsley. It has a Massey body.’

‘Was that the one you were driving?’

‘Similar. Don’t know if it was the exact one.’

‘That was the exact one, I assure you, Alex,’ Jim replied. ‘I can assure you that this
is
the bus that was on that route on that day.’

‘You couldnae get intae them without the T-key,’ my father said, when Jim asked him about access into the boot. ‘We never got supplied wi’ them.’

‘I am assured by reliable sources that a driver would not take a bus out without taking what they called the budgie key with them, because it was part of the bus’s
equipment.’

‘I worked in Baxter’s for years, and never had one – only in the luxury coaches.’

‘You were not aware,’ said Jim in ironic tones, ‘there was a passengers’ luggage compartment under the rear seat of this bus?’

‘Naw.’

He tried to insist there could be little contact with anyone, because of a partition between cab and vehicle, with only room in the compartment for one. When told that a witness had stated that
Betty, the babysitter, had been observed sitting on his knee in the cab, he had protested: ‘Naw, never. That was against the rules.’

‘But we have drivers and conductresses telling us this.’

‘Ah never took any lass intae the cab.’

‘You were noted for having young girls on your bus at the terminus.’

‘Me?’

‘You.’

‘Naw, Ah never had time. Naw, ye’ve got it all wrong.’

The detectives did not tell him then that a former conductress had recalled that horseplay had gone on among bus crews when they were taking breaks at a terminus, and she had a vivid memory of
being bundled by Alex Gartshore into the boot of his bus.

When they told him that many of his former workmates had been seen by the police, my father demanded to know who had been interviewed. They included Cliff Harper, a man of similar height to my
father, with a tiny moustache; George McArdle, an old buddy who had joined him on the buses from Allison’s the butcher’s – he had said that Alex Gartshore was very mannerly and
plausible, and renowned ‘for picking up girls who’d just left school’ and that he had been invited by my dad to go into Glasgow to rendezvous with two fifteen-year-olds; Willie
Brown, known as Tashie because of his large RAF-style moustache; and Pat O’Rourke the one I disliked intensely. My father was full of self-righteous indignation and denied their allegations
that he had given young girls money to visit his cab, and George McArdle’s claim that Betty had been one of many. Jeannette Mitchell Speirs, one of my father’s regular conductresses,
however, had agreed that it happened frequently.

My father also denied all knowledge of what three of his male colleagues and a conductress called Nan Laird claimed was common practice – for drivers to ‘cover’ for a friend.
Being relieved on a Saturday to go off without your spouse having any inkling of your whereabouts had been apparently nothing out of the ordinary. George McArdle pointed out that a great deal of
fiddling went on with ticket money, never mind subtle rearrangements of shifts, and wholesale deception of spouses. He said that he had always been suspicious of Alexander, about whom rumours were
rife at the time of the child’s disappearance. It seemed that as long as buses ran on schedule the inspectors were happy.

Two drivers who knew my father well in the fifties and sixties made particularly revealing remarks about his behaviour. Cliff Harper said, ‘I knew he was a bit of a ladies’ man.
However, he was also the type of man who encouraged young girls to frequent the bus at the terminus.’

Tashie Brown agreed. ‘Alex was attracted to wee lassies, schoolgirls, not older ones. They were always on his bus, and he was known to be interfering with them sexually.’ He was also
clear that, at the time of Moira’s disappearance, speculation had spread throughout the bus company that Alex Gartshore had killed Moira.

Pat O’Rourke said, ‘He would interfere with boys and girls. He wasn’t too fussy.’

On his affair with Betty, the babysitter, my father refuted her statement, which described many meetings between them in Dunbeth Park, intercourse taking place by mutual consent after the first
occasion some twenty to thirty times. She’d indicated the affair had lasted some six months, and that he had given her pocket money. This, she imagined, he had fiddled from the fares so that
his wife would not suspect.

‘I was with her once,’ he declared, and denied ever having been near the park.

But Jim told him that the police had a statement from a woman who had walked into our house and caught him naked with Betty on the couch having full sexual intercourse.

In fact,
two
of my relatives, an aunt and a cousin, had described stumbling, as I had, into sexual encounters at 51 Dunbeth Road, over the winter of 1956 and 1957, and being unsure at
the time of how to cope with their discovery.

One witness, an aunt who was pregnant over the winter of 1956/57, called to see my mother unexpectedly after a visit to the ante-natal clinic at the foot of our street. She was disappointed to
find my mother out and had been about to leave when the back door opened suddenly. My father made an excuse, and seemed agitated when she pushed past him. She spotted a fair-haired girl rushing
about in an attempt to dress. My aunt shouted, ‘What the hell is going on here?’

She did not believe the tale he spun her, and she threatened to tell my mother if she ever came across him and this girl again. She was still upset when she reached her own home, but she and her
husband agreed that my mother should never know anything of the matter. She also told Jim’s team that she’d spotted my father in the back seat of his car, again with a fair-haired girl
of twelve or thirteen when she was taking a short-cut over some wasteground. She knew he had seen her: their eyes had met before she had looked away hurriedly. She could not be sure if the child
was the same one she had seen in our living room.

The cousin had often called to see my mother during the school lunch hour. On one particular day, there was no answer at our back door, and she found it was locked. Surprised, as she thought
she’d heard voices, my cousin walked through our close and, on impulse, jumped up to look through the windows of my parents’ bedroom near the front door.

She saw my father and a blonde girl of around her own age, thirteen, whom she thought she recognized as Betty, a fellow school pupil, naked in bed.

She also thought there had even been talk of an anonymous letter sent to my mother linking my father to Moira. A former neighbour might be able to confirm it, she said. Ella Brown Copeland
agreed that this had happened just after Moira’s disappearance. She told detectives that, even after all this time, she was not surprised that my father was being investigated.

When I asked my mother about the letter, she admitted it readily. She
had
received a cruel note, pasted with assembled letters cut from newspapers, immediately after my father was
sentenced. ‘It said I should take myself and my weans away to Australia with my aunt, and disappear from town,’ she sighed slowly, ‘and it said that the lassie Betty wasn’t
the only one – there were a dozen others he didn’t get caught with. At the bottom they put: “Why don’t you go, if you know what’s good for you – you think you
know what he’s done, but you don’t know the half of it. He won’t stop with the lassie Anderson.” ’ Your grandfather insisted I took it round to the police station, and
I did.’

‘The police
saw
the anonymous letter?’

‘Yes,’ my mother answered dully. ‘I handed it in to them at the desk, and told nobody else that I’d got it, except for my own mother. She told me I should ignore
it.’

‘And no police officer came to see you to discuss it?’

‘No, I was terrified for days, waiting for them to come and ask questions, but I heard no more about it. After a while, I took the advice to put it out of my mind.’

I was stunned by what appeared another example from 1957 of staggeringly inept police work. My mother had given someone in John F. MacDonald’s team a résumé of what was on
many people’s lips at the time and, like everything else to do with my father, the details of the note had not even been regarded as suspicious.

I decided my father had had a charmed life. But everyone’s luck dries up at some point.

On Wednesday 17 March 1993, Alexander Gartshore was asked directly by Jim McEwan about his involvement in the missing girl’s movements that day.

‘Ah never had much dealings wi’ her . . . Ah never had any dealings except for on the bus.’

‘Are you responsible for the disappearance of Moira Anderson?’

‘No, Ah’m not, Ah promise you that. Ah’m no used to sayin’ Ah swear tae God . . . my right hand’s up tae God. Ah swear on ma kids lives down here and up there as
well . . . Ah had nothin’ at all to do with it, nothing. If Ah could help ye, Ah would help ye.’

But eventually, he shifted his position on this issue too. He admitted to Jim that he had known the family; he knew them from coming on and off his vehicle. In particular, he had known Mrs
Anderson and her middle daughter. When he was reminded that his cab had had open access and that the policeman’s wife, Mrs Chalmers, had made a statement about Moira and herself exchanging
smiles and then the child sitting at the front and speaking to the driver, he backtracked. He also denied all knowledge of ‘Moira Liddell’.