Where There is Evil (3 page)

After an appeal only one of six passengers had come forward. James Inglis had been waiting for the bus and knew Moira: she had been playing in the snow at the bus stop when the bus arrived, he
said, but he was less sure that she had boarded it.

One other person reported seeing a child loitering at a bus stop in Whifflet around teatime. She seemed to be waiting for someone, they said, scuffing the icy pavement with her feet to keep
warm. Their description of her shoes was accurate, but they had not noticed who had picked her up. The buses had stopped because of the weather, but the child appeared to have had an arrangement
with someone. She had simply melted away into the night.

Instead of reconstructing the five-minute bus journey to the Whitelaw Fountain in the town centre and then on through Whifflet to the town centre, though, police concentrated their efforts on
issuing descriptions of Moira’s clothing to all policemen in Greenock, where a search was organized. All ships’ crews anchored in port were interviewed to see if they recollected a girl
answering Moira’s description. None did. Back at Coatbridge, police discounted the bus sightings, and visited schools to question pupils. This met with little success.

When detectives came to my primary school their talk was directed at older children in Primary 4–7. Gartsherrie Academy had a large central hall, and, a Primary 3 child on an errand, my
curiosity got the better of me. Clasping the jug I’d been given to fetch water from the cloakroom for painting, I listened. I watched as older pupils shook their heads. Many knew her or, like
myself, knew of her, although Moira had been at Coatdyke Primary in Muiryhall Street. I felt a flash of sympathy go through me when I thought of Marjorie, who was my own age. How awful never to see
your big sister again.

Inexplicably the 1957 investigation team failed to interview Moira’s best friend, who had spent part of that final day with her. That morning, Moira had visited the Limb Centre in
Motherwell with her father. They had returned after 11 a.m. and Moira had popped round to see Elizabeth Taylor with whom she spent most Saturdays at the Regal or Odeon matinées. Elizabeth
Taylor Nimmo, now a grandmother, can recall the events of that day vividly. Moira had come round to her house in Dunbeth Avenue, and asked her to come out to play despite the dark sky, which
promised bad weather, and an icy wind. Unusually for them, they elected to skip to keep warm and tied one end of a clothes rope to a lamp post, taking turns to twirl it while the other skipped.

Elizabeth Nimmo said, ‘The snow started to come on not long after we started the skipping. Funnily enough the morning had been fine, very crisp and bright with no hint of the blizzard
coming. It turned into a really terrible day, in fact I’d never seen snow like it. Moira said as soon as she turned up that she would have to go for some messages . . . Then my mother noticed
the weather and shouted to me from the window to come in, it was too cold to play. Moira asked if I wanted to go with her, but I wasn’t allowed, and that was that. I went into the house and
watched some swimming which was on television, which we had then. The last I saw of Moira, she was turning the corner towards her home, obviously popping into her mum before she left for her
gran’s house.’ Elizabeth added, with obvious sorrow, ‘Who knows what might have happened if I’d gone with her? Could I have saved her or would the two of us have vanished?
It’s a question that can never be answered.’

She can still remember how the news was broken to her, and her shock, on the morning after Moira vanished without trace. Usually on Sunday mornings she and Moira went to Band of Hope meetings
but that day her father, deeply perturbed, woke her and said, ‘Moira didn’t come home last night.’

More than thirty years later Elizabeth had her first opportunity to make a formal statement to the police about her friend’s disappearance and provided information not previously
known.

In April 1993, she gave an interview to the local paper, in which she spoke of the enormity of the tragedy with which the Andersons had had to come to terms. Maisie Anderson, Elizabeth Nimmo
said, had died in 1977, never having fully accepted the loss of her child, and Sparks, ironically, died in 1992, a few months after the police were approached to reopen the case. He never knew that
there had been a sudden and dramatic development.

‘It’s very sad,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Her parents must have gone through hell wondering if she would or wouldn’t walk through the door again. And for her sisters, Janet
and Marjorie, it must have been hell living with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Moira was alive or dead. I know that her mum believed for years that she was still alive and used to go out
looking for her. She even set a place for her daughter at the tea table every night and bought Moira a birthday present each 31st March. I don’t believe Moira ran away. She wouldn’t
have gone willingly with a strange man. Although in those days you could go out and leave your door open, our parents always warned us about speaking to strange men and being offered sweets. For a
time I thought she might have been abducted and could still be alive, but not any more.’

Until 1977 many others shared Elizabeth’s view. If Moira had still been alive then, she would surely have come to her mother’s funeral.

It would be a little longer before the key to the puzzle of Moira’s disappearance was unearthed.

My mother Mary once told me that in the days following my birth, on 7 January 1949, when she stared into my face, she had a sense of being scrutinized by one of the ancients. A
pair of eyes surveyed her that seemed to possess an inner knowledge. ‘Everyone told me you’d been here before, Sandra.’ She laughed. ‘They said you’d probably read all
the books and would keep me right. Such a serious wee face!’

My earliest memory is of being held on her lap, and having my little clenched fists prised open by her and her mother, Granny Katie. They were commenting on the length of my fingers.

‘I wonder what she’ll be when she grows up?’ my mother mused.

‘Perhaps with these fingers she’ll be an artist or play the piano,’ said Granny Katie.

To their amusement, I piped up, ‘Me gonna read!’ and tried to remove my gran’s spectacles.

Perhaps this indicated the way in which my relationship with my mother would progress. She discovered that I was a headstrong, independent child who thrived on responsibility. I was often
entrusted to keep an eye on my two little brothers while she ran to the Co-op near our first home in Partick Street. Even before their arrival, and before my third birthday, she had found that I
was resourceful. One day, the wind slammed the door shut as she hung washing outside. I amazed her by getting up from my nap, toddling down the stairs and stuffing the key, which I pulled from the
lock, through the letterbox.

My relationship with my father, though, was fraught with problems. My first memory is of him holding me on the parapet of a bridge overlooking the river Clyde in Glasgow. I was about three. I
remember with startling clarity the stark terror I felt when I gazed down at the swirling black water. Despite the knowledge that the arms encircling me were strong ones, I nevertheless felt real
mistrust and panicked. Howling with terror, mainly because my father suddenly pretended that he was going to drop me, I was put down. Ever since, I have been frightened of deep running water and
heights.

Otherwise my father adored me. I was the first child my mother had borne him who survived and I was named Alexandra after him, although I was always known to everyone as Sandra. He and my
mother, Mary Frew, had married, like many others, at the tail end of the war in October 1945. He called himself Sandy, to distinguish himself from his own dad, who was also Alexander Gartshore. My
mother, though, always called him Alex.

She had been deeply in love with a young man named Davey Thomson, who was drowned during the war. My father had been a friend of Davey and wrote to her to console her. Later, he suggested that
they meet up, since he lived in Bellshill and she in Whifflet, only a couple of miles away.

My mother was from a large family, which was respectable but not wealthy. The eldest child of eight, she was always acutely aware that no matter how bright she was, a wage was needed from her as
early as possible. And she
was
bright, but there was no question of her education continuing: she was found a job in Marshall’s shoe shop, earning a few welcome shillings a week. Her
parents had married at the close of the First World War. Katie Smith hailed from Denny, and went into service at thirteen in the big houses of Glasgow and Paisley. There she met my grandfather,
Norman Frew, who worked all his days in the huge iron forges at Beardmore’s in Parkhead, Glasgow. He brought her to set up home in Coatbridge, where his father had a profitable grocer’s
shop. But with eight in the family, they never knew a life in which they could have a holiday.

My father came from a quite different background. He was one of only three children and there was more to go round. By all accounts, though, he did not care about possessions and was a loner,
keen to skip tedious hours in the classroom for the bluebell woods of the estate on which he spent his early years. He was a constant source of anxiety to his father, who could never be quite sure
where he was. His maternal grandmother was heard to comment that young Alex reminded her of her philandering late husband – out at all hours, fond of females and feckless. To anyone who would
listen she said that her worries had ended when she was widowed, ‘because then I knew where he was’. My father, she claimed, was a chip off the same block.

Born in 1921, my father’s humble beginnings in a cottage on a rambling estate obscure the grand origins of the family from which he sprang. The Gartshores of Gartshore have been traced
back to the twelfth century by one of my relatives, Graham. Given lands and their own charter by a Scottish monarch, for generations they lived quietly on their estate by Kirkintilloch, a small
town near Glasgow. A brief skirmish with fame came in 1745 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops marched through the town and someone took a potshot at him. Angry at such audacity, Charles had
my father’s ancestor, the Laird of Gartshore, imprisoned to force the guilty party to give themselves up. According to records in Kirkintilloch Library, it was only on the intervention of a
beautiful lady in the entourage of the Young Pretender that the Laird was not hanged.

All went well with the family estate until 1813, when it passed to Marjorie Gartshore, known as May, who never married. She left everything to a child named John Murray, fourth son of the Lord
Lieutenant of Scotland, who came from Edinburgh. No one is quite sure why she did this and also insisted that he took the name – she had ignored her Gartshore relatives in the surrounding
areas – but John Murray Gartshore was a disaster. He drank heavily, gambled away large sums of money, and finally lost Gartshore House and all its land, including pits and brickworks, on the
turn of dice, to a powerful family of iron and steel magnates, the Bairds of Gartsherrie. They in turn passed it to a daughter who married Lord Whitelaw, now a peer in the House of Lords.

While my grandfather accepted this state of affairs with equanimity, I recall the bitter tone in my father’s voice when the subject came up. He brooded over it, and certainly felt cheated.
He always laughed when Grandpa related that the ultimate irony for Murray was that he had ended up working
for
the Bairds, cleaning out the blast furnaces, and indeed, his end was,
perhaps, fitting in that, in a drunken stupor, he fell asleep in a furnace and was cremated accidentally.

Perhaps it was this reversal in family fortunes that led to my father growing up with a chip on his shoulder. My granny’s sister, Aunt May, said of him that he seemed to think the world
owed him a living: his truanting was a way of flouting authority. Beaten frequently for running off, he shrugged off physical punishment until he stood over six feet tall and could no longer be
walloped easily. Aunt May also noticed that my father could slip with extraordinary ease into a fantasy world where he told lies so smoothly that it was only when people checked things out that he
was caught. Yet he could charm women effortlessly – but was regarded with some suspicion by most men.

I was the apple of his eye. Long before seat belts were invented, I am told that he would tie me with scarves into the passenger seat of the butcher’s van in which he delivered meat. Maybe
he did this because I was, perhaps, doubly precious to my mother: she had undergone a major operation to have children, then had conceived, only to have Catherine, her first-born child, survive
just six days.

Like many other newly-weds, at the end of the Second World War, my parents had to stay with their parents Katie and Norman, occupying one of their three bedrooms. After my birth, they were given
a room and kitchen at 26 Partick Street in the Greenend area of Coatbridge. Here, Norman was born in July 1952, then the youngest of the family, Ian Alexander. I recall his appearance in January
1955 very well, as I was entrusted with many tasks involving the new baby. A photo of Norman and me holding our tiny brother on the settee is one of the few that was taken in that home.

The house in Partick Street, long since knocked down, was a tenement building typical of many in Coatbridge. There was communal housing on stair landings, drying greens, which
were the hub of all activity for the squads of children, and the wash houses, in which the women chatted as they stretchered out row after row of clothes to flap in the wind. To own a little Acme
wringer with two rollers, which you could tighten over your own sink by turning little wing nuts, was the greatest thing my mother could imagine.

All the women were allocated different days to have their ‘stretch’ of the greens, but everyone coveted Monday as a wash day – it was traditionally thought the best. Certainly
no one would have dared hang out the tiniest amount of washing on a Sunday – not even a cloth over the rope many had suspended across their landings. This would have been regarded as
scandalous, blasphemous even!