Where There is Evil (21 page)

‘For thirty-seven years, the world was under the impression Moira vanished at four-ten p.m.,’ Jim said,

‘when she left her gran’s and was never seen again. It’s only since last year that
you
have come into the picture by saying to your daughter at the funeral what you
said to her. You have made admissions that she
was
on your bus over an hour
after
the last official sighting.’

Still my dad maintained he had said all this in an interview at the time, which Jim knew to be untrue. Grilling him, however, paid dividends, as holes began to appear in his story.

‘Where did Moira Anderson get on your bus?’

‘At the stop just outside her door.’

Jim established that this was where Moira had been spotted by the old lady noticing the increasing severity of the storm.

‘Ah seen her comin’ in,’ my father agreed. ‘Front door bus.’

‘Who else got on at that stop?’

‘Don’t know. Ah think her sister, I’m not sure, there was another lass with her . . . Ah can’t mind if there was anybody, any adults or that.’

‘Did you say anything to her?’

‘Ah couldn’t because the window was shut.’

‘But your wife told us you said, “Hello, Moira,” and the police wanted to speak to you about it.’

‘Nut.’

‘You left to go, allegedly, to tell the police about that a few days later.’

‘Ah never said such a thing.’

‘You told your wife you had to go and speak to the police.’

‘Ah can’t mind if Ah went because they interviewed me at the garage – Ah think it wis the next day.’

‘Well, why did you tell your wife, “Hold my supper – the police want to speak to me and I’m going round to speak to them.” ’

‘Ah said that?’

‘Uh-huh. That is what your wife is saying.’

‘Naw.’

Then came the breakthrough they needed. Having tried to insist that he and Moira had not chatted, my father finally crumbled on this part of his story too. From him, after so many years, the
police learned why Moira, having found the Co-op closed, decided to take a bus into town alone, ignoring the arrangement to go to the cinema with her cousins. She had had a secret plan, which she
revealed to no one except my father.

He had been the last person in Moira’s company. In their conversation, she had told him that she was going to Woolworths near the Fountain, to buy a special surprise birthday card for her
mother. No one else knew of her important task, not even her sisters or cousins.

Jim McEwan’s men were stunned by this piece of information and checked. Jim discovered that Maisie Anderson’s headstone proved that she had spent Sunday 24 February 1957, her
fortieth birthday, searching for her daughter. This was proof not only that my father was the last person to have spoken to the little girl and hear what her intentions were, but that he had known
her well. She would have been unlikely to share her secret during a casual encounter with a stranger.

My father did his utmost to distance himself from the inside knowledge of the card. He said that he had heard it later on the same shift.

‘Ah learned that frae other people on the bus at the same time.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A young woman and a lass.’

‘Names?’

‘Naw, Ah don’t know their names, but they said it was terrible . . . this Moira Anderson business.’

‘When?’

‘The following Monday.’

‘But you said you told the police about this card on the Sunday when spoken to at the bus depot.’

‘People came on the bus,’ my father said eventually, ‘on the Saturday night. A woman came on wi’ a kiddie, and she told us about seven-thirty that night . . .
“Isn’t it just terrible, and she was going for a birthday card.” ’

‘Nobody in the original enquiry knew that that was where Moira Anderson was going. There’s no record of it at all,’ replied Jim. ‘She was never reported missing till well
after eleven-thirty p.m. It’s not until we dug really deeply that we found it was Moira’s mum’s birthday the next day.’ He said nothing to my father of John F.
MacDonald’s admission that he had been unaware of the mother’s birthday.

Ignoring this, my father would not budge from his tale of telling my mother the news of the child’s disappearance between eleven and midnight on 23 February: ‘There were plenty of
people mentioning it on my bus, about nine o’clock, then ten o’clock, plenty of them.’

He had plainly forgotten the fact that all the buses had gone off the road with the bad weather.

Jim and his men were sure of the exact time at which Andrew Anderson had arrived, distraught, at the station in Dunbeth Road to report his child missing. Both Moira’s parents were now dead
but Janice Anderson Mathewson, mother of Moira’s cousins, remembered that she had gone on the hospital visit to the family’s grandfather with others, returning to Coatbridge after 5
p.m. Andrew had appeared at her home, 37c Laird Street, where they lived over the Co-op, at 10.30 p.m. She said that they had searched locally until it was felt that Andrew had to inform the police
just prior to midnight. The news did not leak out to the general public until the next day. Only the immediate family and a handful of neighbours had known that something had befallen Moira late on
the Saturday night. A tiny number of people and her killer.

My father said that Moira disembarked from his bus at Woolworths in Main Street, although that would have been an unofficial stop, and had waved goodbye. He had worked on, despite the bad road
conditions, till 11.45 p.m. He had bought fish and chips on his way home, arrived before midnight, and he had told my mother the shocking news of a child being missing.

My father’s black car would either have been sitting at Baxter’s bus garage in Gartlea, Airdrie, that night, or it would have been parked outside our back door in the yard. One
former bus driver, George McNeil, had handed over his bus that day to my dad. He said the crews had changed over at 2 p.m. at Jackson Street. From his statement, it would appear that my father,
probably because of the blizzard, had left his car at home, and walked a couple of hundred yards from our home in Dunbeth Road to start his shift. This type of arrangement was also apparently
common, to save crews going to the depot. At least one conductress told detectives that when she worked with my father on late shifts she rarely clocked off at the depot, which was the rule, but
left him alone on the bus with the last few passengers, arranging that he handed in time sheets and collected fares, which allowed her to catch the last bus to her own outlying area.

I was interested in George McNeil’s comment about my father being on foot that day. It had stuck in his mind, the association of such a tall man in such a small car being somewhat
incongruous. If he was correct and my mother’s recollection about ‘listening for Alex’s car arriving back’ later that evening was also accurate, then it suggested to me that
he had returned to Dunbeth Road at some point and taken out his car.

Some may question the idea of a man enticing away an intelligent girl like Moira, but I can see how she would have trusted this man in uniform, particularly if he had replaced money she had lost
– for which the old lady had seen her searching in the snow – to purchase the birthday card. My father was equally capable of persuading her to stay on his bus, or of having her
accompany him on some pretext to his car.

Once that had been achieved, whether it was in a large vehicle taken to a deserted terminus, or in his black Baby Austin which would cope better with treacherous road conditions, the victim
would have been at his mercy.

It was Easter 1993 and at last I remembered why I personally could be so sure that my father and Moira had known each other.

It had been a warm summer’s day in 1956, in Dunbeth Park, and I had gone there from Aunt Margaret’s house at the Red Bridge, pushing her eldest, Albert, who was sitting up in his
pram. When we reached the park we found Marilyn Twycross, with a cousin called Marion, and one or two others; Marjorie Orr, who was from a big house, and Marjorie Anderson. We were all the same
age.

We all ran to get on the swings. Several of us doubled up, one child standing, the other sitting, as the play area was busy.

There had been another group of four slightly older girls. My partner panted, propelling us higher, that two of them were Marjorie’s big sister, Moira, and her pal, Beth. We wondered if
they’d let us into their skipping game. Then my attention was diverted to the roundabout and we pounced on it, making it go faster and faster, accompanied by frenzied yells as we all felt
sick. I noticed regretfully that the older ones had melted away, taking their ropes with them.

Suddenly, there was an accident at the swings. Some kiddie had run beneath one, which had split his head open. I ran for help – the park-keeper’s house was just at the entrance and I
hammered at his door, shouting, ‘Come quick, Mister, there’s been an accident at the swings!’

For a few seconds, there was no response, and I looked behind me for him in his uniform. Instead, I spotted my dad’s little black Baby Austin through the gates. What was he doing there? He
seemed to be waving out of his window to some passers-by. I was still trying to figure this out, when the park-keeper opened his door, and I had to tell him what had happened. I pointed to the
little knot of children still gathered round the casualty, then turned back towards the gates as he went to deal with the emergency.

As I walked towards our car, I saw that my father was deep in conversation with the older Anderson girl and her chum. I wondered what on earth he could possibly want with them. He seemed to be
showing something to them, for their heads were close together as they gazed down into the interior of his car. Perhaps, I told myself, he had come looking for me. Various possibilities went
through my head as I marched closer to the vehicle, as my dad chatted to both girls, who were in fits of giggles. Just as I got to the car Moira, in a short-sleeved blue dress, and her friend who
was wearing culottes, ran off towards Dunbeth Avenue.

I looked at my father. Although he had seemed angry when he first caught sight of me, now he was smirking and fumbling about in the pockets of his bus uniform. He produced sweeties, and when I
asked what he had been doing there with those girls, he wouldn’t answer me. He asked if I wanted a lift but I told him of my task for the afternoon, grabbed the sweets out of his hand, and
ran back to the path.

I was convinced that he would have persuaded the girls to go with him if I had not unexpectedly appeared. I had had no idea then what my father had been demonstrating to those two girls that had
caused them to go into near hysterics. I only knew that something was wrong.

I wrote a summary of the incident and put it with the other half-dozen foolscap pages I had completed for the police. The one thing I could not force myself to write of, however, was the
aftermath: when I had attempted to tell my mother she had turned on me, which was entirely unlike her. She had even hit me hard, and had made me promise never to tell anyone else. I had remained
silent for nearly four decades.

Thinking that my sleepless nights might improve after this last flashback, I found instead that they worsened, to the point that I telephoned for an appointment with Brian Venters. He asked me
what was disturbing me. I explained that I had now had the same dream for the past three nights, where I had got so upset I had had to get up and make tea, and there was no possibility of going
back to sleep. Each time, I was woken by a blinding light, reminiscent of a lightning flash. In the dream the figure of a child was at the foot of my bed. The child was not Lauren, but was of her
age, and as she drew nearer I recognized Moira. I sat up in bewilderment, leaning forward as she beckoned as if to tell me something. As the gap between us lessened, her smile widened and she
nodded encouragingly. It was as if she was indicating that I should keep faith. No words were spoken but somehow I knew what the message was.

Then the image would blur, the light blue eyes turned into Lauren’s deep brown ones, and the hair was no longer short and fair but long and curly. The mischievous grin became a puzzled
look on my own child’s face. Then the image would fade and shrivel. When I leapt out of bed, I imagined was standing among the bones of a small skeleton, the fragments disintegrating under my
bare feet, the crackling sound only too real in my mind.

I looked at Brian Venters anxiously. He told me reassuringly that this was just my mind’s way of adjusting to the enormity of my father’s crimes. I was glad of his no-nonsense yet
kindly approach.

That Easter, articles appeared in the
Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser
that caused a stir.

The Monklands front page headline on 2 April read:
POLICE FIT ANOTHER PIECE IN THE MOIRA JIGSAW
, and the article revealed ‘the vital, new information that she might
have gone to buy a birthday card for a member of her family’. Former staff of Woolworths were being traced, and one of the theories being followed up now was ‘that Moira’s killer
persuaded her to stay on the bus she had used and return home with him because of the blizzard’. DCI Ricky Gray had spoken to Moira’s sisters, Janet, now fifty, and Marjorie,
forty-three, in Australia and England, respectively: ‘Both said they were “very anxious” to see the mystery finally solved. Their eighty-five-year-old father Andrew died
broken-hearted last July without ever knowing what became of the middle of his three daughters.’

Moira’s description was given once more, and DCI Gray stressed that he wanted to trace anyone who had been at the abandoned football match between Airdrie and Ayr United that day, and
anyone who thought they had spotted a little girl fitting that description getting on or off the bus, ‘possibly in the company of a man in his late thirties’.

The following week’s local headline was
MAJOR SETBACK IN MOIRA ANDERSON INQUIRY
. This broke the frustrating news that police thought the bus conductress on duty
that day had died six years before. Gus Paterson was quoted as saying, ‘No one else has come forward. It is a disappointment and typical of the type of setbacks we are encountering. Nine
people we wanted to speak to, who could have been important witnesses, are deceased.’