One of Your Own (17 page)

Myra turned the van into Froxmer Street. Pauline was a short distance ahead, a little over halfway to the club, where the dance had already begun. Myra spotted her immediately, recording in her autobiography: ‘I saw a young girl walking down the street on her own with nobody else in sight. [Ian] flashed his light and I slowly drew up just behind the girl, opened the passenger door and called to her to ask if she could spare a minute. She turned round and to my horror it was Pauline Reade.’
³¹

To detective Peter Topping, Myra insisted that there was no truth in an earlier claim that Pauline was deliberately chosen as a victim. Ten years later, however, she told her prison therapist that there was one fact concerning the abduction she wanted to reveal ‘to put the records straight’, which, if she had admitted to it earlier, ‘could have sealed my fate forever’.
³²
Having previously said that
Ian
had decided Pauline was ‘suitable’, she then admitted, ‘That wasn’t the case at all.
I
chose to pick Pauline up because it was an easy option, less chance of failure and someone who was known to me. If I could do this without conscience, I could do anything . . .’
³³
Pauline was known to Myra, but her disappearance was less likely to cause a fuss than that of an eight-year-old girl who was a near neighbour of Myra’s parents. In an open letter to
The Guardian
, Myra wrote: ‘I knew I had a choice: I could either just wave at Pauline and drive past her, in which case she would have lived and I would have had to endure the consequences of Brady’s rage. This all happened in split seconds; I looked at Pauline and saw my sister there and my gran and my mum. I made the choice of having to sacrifice Pauline so that my own family would be safe. I felt sick with fear and self-loathing as I asked her if she wanted a lift. She readily accepted and I opened the passenger door to the car for her to get in.’
³⁴

On Railway Street, Pat Cummings and Dorothy Slater waited impatiently for Pauline to appear. Eventually, they gave up and walked home, puzzled by their friend’s disappearance and assuming she had turned back. In Wiles Street, too, Joan Reade was fretting, wishing she had never allowed Pauline to go to the dance alone.

Myra drove past Ian, parked on his motorbike outside the Vulcan pub, which was known locally as ‘the Monkey’ and was where the young apprentices from Gorton Tank drank. She asked Pauline if she fancied taking a detour to the outskirts of the city to look for a glove that had strong sentimental value. Although they were yards from the Railways Social Club and could have been there in a couple of minutes, Pauline agreed, accepting Myra’s offer of several records as a reward for helping.

It was still light as they drove along the A635 through Stalybridge and Mossley towards the moor. Myra recalled afterwards how Pauline’s fragrance suffused the air inside the van; the scent of summer flowers, fern and moss reminded Myra of her own perfume, Saville’s June. Pauline asked after Ian; Myra was aware of him tailing them in the mirror, but she said he had gone out and hoped to join her later to look for the glove. The road twisted and dipped through the blackened stone of Greenfield’s mill cottages, and Pauline asked Myra if she was all right – as they turned up onto the moor road, she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white, and she had hardly spoken. Myra murmured that she was nervous about the van. The light was failing and gradients of shadow rippled across the steeply sloping land. The rocks of Hollin Brown Knoll protruded like black molars against the sky as Myra pulled into the lay-by on the opposite side of the road. She turned off the engine and climbed out of the vehicle.

Myra and Ian each gave different accounts of what happened that night on the moor. According to Myra, Ian’s Tiger Cub had passed them somewhere and was already concealed behind a cluster of rocks.
³⁵
Myra feigned surprise to see him, and agreed when he suggested that she should park the van in a safer spot, just beyond the sharp bend, while he and Pauline began hunting for the glove.

In her writings, Myra claimed that she returned to the van. As she pulled away, she saw Ian leading Pauline over the rocks to where the black peat and plum-hued heather gave way to silken cotton grass, the soft white heads of the flowers vivid as stars on the dark ground. Pauline stumbled in her court shoes, and Myra averted her eyes, concentrating on parking the van. She turned off the engine again and stared out across the undulating landscape, down to the valley where lights flickered on in the small cottages. Beyond Greenfield lay the city and Gorton, where Joan Reade had opened her front door to let in the still, warm air, worrying about her daughter and expecting Paul home from the pictures soon. As Joan glanced up the street, she spotted something lying on the cobbles. She went across to investigate and realised it was one of Pauline’s white gloves. The unease fluttered in her chest; she hadn’t noticed the glove earlier, when she came back from saying goodbye to Pauline. She picked it up and returned to the house, placing the glove in the drawer of the kitchen sideboard, then went up to bed, a knot of anxiety settling on her chest.
³⁶

In Ian’s account, both he and Myra climbed onto Hollin Brown Knoll with Pauline on the pretext of searching for a lost glove belonging to Myra. He claims that Myra not only witnessed Pauline’s rape and murder, but, as he told writer Colin Wilson, also ‘took a very active part in the sexual assault of Pauline Reade’.
³⁷
He makes the same assertion in a 1990 letter, alleging that Myra carried out ‘some form of lesbian assault’ and caused injuries to Pauline’s nose and forehead.
³⁸
He also claims to have struck Myra during the course of the murder, when he sensed that although he had dropped to the depths of depravity, Myra had ‘dropped even further’ by taking the locket Pauline wore around her neck and taunting her with the words, ‘You won’t need that where you’re going.’
³⁹
In
The Gates of Janus
, Brady declares: ‘It is human nature that, if caught, the pupil will blame the master for his criminal conduct. But should the criminal enterprises succeed, I can assure you, from wide personal experience, the pupil’s zeal and devotion to criminal activities can
outdo
that of the master like that of a convert.’
⁴⁰

Myra was equally adamant that she remained in the van throughout and that Ian collected her after he had killed Pauline, banging on the window to indicate that she should accompany him to see the body. She followed him over the rocks, where the ground was heavily disturbed; that summer, trenches had been dug across the moor for a new trans-Pennine methane gas pipeline. The ditches remained unguarded at night, and Ian led Myra around the deep gullies in the waning light to where Pauline lay on her back on the cotton grass.
⁴¹
Myra stared down: Pauline’s clothes were dishevelled and her throat had been cut so fiercely that she was almost decapitated. Blood seeped thickly from the wound. Pauline wasn’t dead, but dying; a gurgling noise came from her as the last vestiges of life slipped away. ‘Did you rape her?’ Myra asked. ‘Of course I did,’ Ian replied.
⁴²
He told Myra to wait with the body while he fetched the spade he had hidden earlier in one of the pipeline trenches. Myra recalled being surprised by the throat wound because Ian had said that he intended to strangle the victim.

During Ian’s absence, Myra kept her eyes averted from Pauline. She realised she could hear nothing but the soughing of the wind across the moor; the gurgling had stopped. ‘I moved as far away from her as possible,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I stood and looked at the dark outline of the rocks against the horizon of the dark sky and three people died that night: Pauline, my soul and God.’
⁴³

Ian returned, complaining that he hadn’t been able to find the spade at first, which they’d bought from a hardware shop in Gorton for the sole purpose of burying the body. He told her to go back to the van and watch the road; his clothes were saturated with blood. Myra stumbled over the uneven ground to where she’d parked the van and saw that Ian had removed the keys to the vehicle, which she’d left unlocked. She slid into the driver’s seat and waited for him. Eventually, he appeared from behind the rocks carrying the dirty spade and the knife he’d used to cut Pauline’s throat. He placed the spade in a plastic bag in the back of the van and wrapped the knife, wiped almost clean on the cotton grass, in a piece of newspaper which he lay on the dashboard. He mentioned that for a while when he was killing Pauline she’d struggled so much that he’d thought he might need Myra’s help.

He told her to drive to the other lay-by, where the Tiger Cub was parked, and swore as she botched the three-point turn. They reached the lay-by and dragged two long planks of wood from the back of the van, using them as a makeshift ramp to get the motorbike inside the vehicle as they’d practised. After securing the back doors, they returned to their seats. Myra turned the ignition and asked Ian the time. He told her it was ten-thirty.
⁴⁴

She could feel the dull weight of the Tiger Cub as she steered the van down the A635 from the moor. Later she claimed that as they came to the outskirts of the city, Ian was the first to speak; he told her that if she’d shown any indication of wanting to back out, she would have ended up in the grave he’d dug for Pauline. She replied quietly that she knew that. As they weaved through the city suburbs, she contemplated her involvement in Pauline’s murder: ‘I felt doubly doomed; first by the crime itself and also because I believed it was impossible to envisage or hope for any other kind of existence.’
⁴⁵

The van trundled quietly through Gorton’s dark streets. Heading slowly down Gorton Lane, Myra saw two figures walking towards them from the direction of Cornwall Street: Joan and Paul Reade, searching for Pauline. ‘That’s her mother and brother,’ Myra told Ian as she turned the van onto the croft near Bannock Street and let the engine die.
⁴⁶
They dragged the Tiger Cub out and walked round to Bannock Street, where the glowing fire hissed and spat quietly in the otherwise silent house. Ian brought the knife and spade in through the back door and locked them in a cupboard. Myra had forgotten her promise to Ben Boyce about recovering his broken Dormobile; she swore when Ian reminded her with a small push towards the front door. He fastened the buttons on his overcoat to hide the blood seeping deeper into the fabric of his shirt. At Ben’s house, Myra apologised for being so late, telling him that she’d had problems with the Ford Prefect. The three of them drove out to nearby Abbey Hey. Ian kept up a steady stream of conversation and helped Ben attach the tow rope to the Dormobile. Myra climbed into the van to steer it, while Ben drove the vehicle in front. She claimed later that on the journey home she was so preoccupied with the events of the evening that she kept running over the tow rope and bumping into the other van.

After saying goodnight to Ben, Myra and Ian returned to Bannock Street. Ian was determined they wouldn’t make the same mistakes as Leopold and Loeb; every trace of what he called ‘forensic’ had to be eradicated. He’d compiled a list of everything they needed to account for, beginning with the van. Myra handed him a bucket of boiling, foamy water and shone a torch while he sponged the vehicle clean, inside and out, including the tyres. When he was satisfied that it was clean, they shut themselves in the house and laid out a plastic sheet on the sitting-room floor. Ian crouched on the sheet to cut up his clothes into small pieces that would burn more easily on the fire; he burnt his footwear as well. Myra’s clothes weren’t as soiled as his had been and she could wipe off any traces of moorland soil from her shoes. He attempted to break the handle from the knife, but it wouldn’t snap, so he threw it on the fire whole. Myra scrubbed the cupboard with hot, soapy water to remove any smatterings of blood and soil from where the murder weapon and spade had lain.
⁴⁷

Later she claimed that after cleaning up, Ian produced a bottle of Drambuie, which he’d bought to toast the crime: ‘He sat down next to me on the settee, sipping his drink and saying that after all the years of dreaming of it he’d actually done it: he’d committed the perfect murder. He asked me how I felt about it. I told him I’d never in my wildest dreams imagined that something like this could have happened and began to cry . . . He put his arm round my shoulder and kissed me clumsily on the cheek, telling me it was all over now; I’d learn to live with it and he’d try to control his temper and not hit or hurt me. I was so relieved I clung to him, still crying, and promised I’d do everything I could to cope with what had happened and do my best not to antagonise him, although I rarely did and he still hit and hurt me. He stroked my hair – I thought the merest touch would repel me, but in spite of what had happened this new tenderness touched the core of my heart and flooded it with all the love and emotions I’d felt for him for so long.’
⁴⁸

In his own book, Ian writes that the serial killer feels, in the aftermath of the first murder: ‘I am no longer of your world – if, as you might suggest, I ever was.’
⁴⁹
Years earlier, Myra had used precisely the same words in a conversation with her prison therapist: ‘After Pauline’s death, Ian and I were no longer of this world. I was frightened but equally felt safe in the knowledge that I was a worthy apprentice.’
⁵⁰