Evil Relations (20 page)

Then I feel his breath against my neck.

Slowly, I turn my head, letting my eyes slide to where Ian lies behind me on the settee, shirtless but in his vest and trousers. I know he sleeps here every night, and Myra with him. But how did I get here? From the chair to the settee? A towering wave of nausea crashes over me, as I check myself quickly, making sure everything is in order, and almost pass out with relief when I realise it is.

But I feel like hell. I’m terrified of standing up because my head’s going to roll – hammers bang inside my temples. Carefully, I slide my legs off the settee and, by a miracle, make it up the stairs to the loo, vomit, douse myself with cold water and head back downstairs again.

Ian is sitting up on the bed, looking as if nothing has happened. And it hasn’t, but I still feel odd. Taking off his shirt and getting in next to me . . . I can’t get my sorry head around it and don’t want to, either. Usually the pair of us sleep wherever we conk out, and that’s fine by me.

‘Cup of tea?’ he asks softly, pinching the bridge of his nose with a long finger and thumb.

I nod and cough, and when he goes through to the kitchen I ease myself into a chair by the dead fire, cracking my knuckles and thinking:
I’ll be so fucking glad when it’s daylight.

Money was tight while David was out of work; for a time, only Maureen was bringing in a regular wage. Ian had a suggestion to solve their financial problems and his own: robbery. But what appeared on the surface to be an extreme solution to their difficulties was also Ian’s means of testing David, to see how far the 17 year old was able to enter into his and Myra’s secret world, without baulking at the tasks they set for him.

‘We discussed robbing the Williams & Glyn’s bank on Ashton Old Road,’ David recalls. ‘The idea was that I would stake it out – and this plan involved Myra. One morning the pair of them drove me down to the bank, opposite Grey Mare Lane market, and dropped me on the corner. I had a notepad and pen to jot down comings and goings – a bit like the tutorship thing again. Brady reckoned that the security van pulled up at a side entrance, and he told me to keep an eye out for when it appeared and left. He loaned me a watch because I didn’t own one. The difficulty was that I only had a clear view of the doors from the street corner, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so every couple of hours I would walk to the other end of the road. I was there from half past eight until closing time, and had nothing on me but my bus fare home. I jotted down page after page of nonsense, really, just to get something on paper. But I thought I’d done a good job and was meticulous about noting everything down. Afterwards I caught the bus back to Hattersley and went straight to Wardle Brook Avenue. I took it seriously, thinking we were in the early stages of something big, which is why what happened next really annoyed me.’

He pauses briefly, frowning. ‘When I handed my notebook to Ian, he lit a cigarette and asked, “How did it go?” Very casual, like. I told him, “Not too bad. Didn’t see any security vans or anything like that, but I think we did all right. I don’t know if there’s anything handy in there . . .” I pointed towards the notepad and Brady glanced down at it, then without so much as opening the first page he tossed it onto the coffee table and went through to the kitchen.’ David shakes his head: ‘Dismissive wasn’t in it – he didn’t even
pretend
to show any interest. I was fuming; but now, of course, I realise it was just an exercise to him. He was “putting me through my paces”, seeing how far I would go.’

He pauses again and then explains slowly, ‘It was through the
idea
of the robbery that he was able to raise the subject of murder . . . would I be prepared to kill, if necessary? It went like this: a few nights prior to my hanging about outside the bank, he outlined a scenario: “Imagine you’ve gone into the bank with the gun, Dave. What if you’re confronted by a security guard? What if he comes at you – we’re talking big money, remember. High stakes.” My reply was to use blanks, because the noise alone should do it – I had that starter pistol and if you put a blank cartridge in it, the thing made a hell of a racket. Brady used to fire it in Wiles Street when he was drunk. It was harmless enough, but the deafening crack it made was horrible. Your ears would ring for a long time afterwards. But Brady waved away my suggestion, insisting, “No way. We’re talking
live
ammunition. The guard is there in front of you. You’ve got to drop him, you’ve got to be ready to kill. Are you up for that – we’re talking murder. Myra will be in the car, waiting to get us out of there afterwards . . .”’

David lets the words tail off and hunches forward in his chair. ‘He had no intention of robbing a bank. The “stakeout” was a ruse of his, to give the idea a whiff of authenticity, but after I handed in my notebook he never mentioned it again. It was a test. Brady had his guns, the Webley .45 and Smith & Wesson .38, which we’d used for target practice on the moor, shooting at an oil drum on an old railway sleeper down in the valley. That was just larking about, as far as I knew, but he tied it in with the imaginary bank job to find out how far I would go – if I
could
kill someone. Then one night he turned the gun on me . . .’

* * *

Ian’s lost it. Why didn’t I see this coming?

We’re in the middle of our heaviest drinking session yet at Wardle Brook Avenue. Reason has flown out of the window and ego fills the room like brutal helium. The girls are asleep in Myra’s room upstairs, leaving us to our madness.

Ian wears his customary white shirt, tie, waistcoat and fancy cufflinks. At first glance he looks exactly what he is, a minor company stock-clerk . . . apart from a single detail: the Webley sitting snug in the heavy leather gun-holster under his left arm. That little accessory transforms him from an office worker to a city gangster, a 1920s throwback.

He’s got it into his wine-and-whisky-pickled head that I never believed his talk about robbing banks and shooting the moronic hero who’s prepared to die for the business. He doesn’t realise that I couldn’t give a fuck about anything any more. Life is running in slow motion or on pause, depending on my mood when I wake up. This dreary little house at the end of a dreary little terrace is just somewhere else to go, a place to get stoned on booze and talk about nothing. If I have to listen to shit to get pissed for free, then I will, and if I agree with what he’s saying, it’s just because I can’t be arsed to argue, but tonight Ian’s taken it personally and is spoiling for a verbal brawl.

The Formica coffee table displays the usual still life: empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays and an abandoned chessboard. There’s just one difference: the bullets Ian’s emptied from his gun. I half-close my right eye to focus, stumbling through the numbers . . . one short.

I hear a sudden whir across the table and jerk my head up as Ian spins the gun chamber. His narrow mouth is drawn back in a grin and his eyes are unusually bright.

‘This is how easy it is to kill,’ he murmurs. ‘Look at me and then look at the gun. Look at the fucking gun . . .’

I stare past his outstretched arm and straight into his face. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. I’m thinking:
he means it, he’s gonna do it.

Ian raises his voice: ‘Into the gun, look into the hole of the gun, you’re not going to see it coming, blink and you won’t even know I’ve shot you, look at the fucking gun . . . You’re about to die . . .’

He squeezes the trigger and I close my eyes tightly, a tremor passing from my skull to my feet.

Then silence.

I open my eyes slowly. He disengages the chamber and I watch one bullet fall to the floor. I sit with my head still on my shoulders, no screaming agony and no warm blood oozing from the centre of my forehead – just a cold finger of fear scraping down my spine.

‘That’s how easy it is, Dave.’ His voice is back to its normal low level. ‘You just have to press the fucking trigger . . .’

I feel numb. The tremor is a memory; I am still and quiet, as cool as Ian himself.

He watches me and I smile at him, the numbness growing stronger with each passing second. ‘You fucker,’ I say, and realise he’s no longer drunk but completely sober.

When I was a child, my mother would pull out my teeth herself when they were loose. I trusted her and hid my panic, but inside I was scared stiff. Now, looking at Ian’s pitiless face, I feel the cold, clean rush of absolute fear but somehow I am still able to subdue it and smile . . .

Writing this more than 40 years after that night, I wonder why I couldn’t see things more clearly then. But reflecting back on life is difficult. All the pieces that once seemed murky and blunt as glass washed up by the sea are suddenly transparent and sharp again. But at the time it’s very different – the intensity and speed carry you forward on a wave, thunder in your ears and salt in your eyes. Or maybe that’s just crap and life itself is meaningless in the end.

That night I felt death approaching, accelerating with unstoppable velocity.

I thought it was my own.

* * *

During another drinking session at Wardle Brook Avenue, Ian posed a question:
Was there anyone David hated enough to not want around any more?
Eventually, David told him about the rows with Sammy Jepson and Tony Latham. Ian asked for a few details and homed in on Tony rather than Sammy, for no other reason than that Sammy lived in Gorton. He told David that he would need a photograph of Tony; David replied that he could easily get a snap of him on his new Polaroid camera and the best place to do it was in Tony’s favourite pub.

A couple of nights later, Myra and Ian drove into Manchester and dropped David at the back of a cinema known by locals as the Flea Pit. Clutching the Polaroid, David climbed out of the car and walked down Hyde Road to the Dolphin pub, where Tony was chatting with a group of mates. David joined in their conversation, using the camera itself as a ruse and passed it round the gathering to give them all a closer look. When they handed it back, he pressed the shutter quickly in Tony’s direction, then nipped into the toilets before the photograph popped out. Examining the camera, he discovered he’d forgotten to load it with film. Mortified, he returned to Hattersley on the bus, convinced that Ian would be furious. Yet when he called round the following evening to explain, Ian merely shrugged. The subject was ditched as swiftly as the idea of the bank robbery.

‘Did we seriously intend to kill Tony Latham?’ David shakes his head slowly. ‘It was all part of the same nonsense, said in drink and about as real as anything else we discussed together . . . so no, it was just more crap. An element of intention was there, but what kind of assassin sets out to snap his victim without putting film in the camera? It was never followed up because, at the end of the day, it was just “big talk” again. I thought that’s all everything was . . . but I was wrong.’

David’s suspicion that his own life hung in the balance wasn’t without foundation: in September 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley discussed whether or not they should kill him. Over a bottle of wine on the hills above Buxton, the couple debated his murder. Ian declared himself profoundly irritated with David’s ‘domestic’ problems; Maureen had recently discovered she was pregnant again and David, still reeling from the loss of Angela Dawn, reacted angrily. The couple had a serious row, and Maureen left to stay at her mother’s house in Gorton. But she was only there for one night; David turned up full of apologies and they began looking forward to the birth of their child, due the following May. Ian was scathing about their relationship and uneasy about what he termed ‘a flaw’ in David’s character, which made him a potential liability to their future plans.

More than 20 years later, Ian Brady told journalist Fred Harrison how he had intended to get rid of David, but Myra convinced him otherwise: ‘Head out of Manchester. Take the .38 Smith & Wesson. Blow his head off. Mo [
Maureen
] some days or weeks later would have enquired if we had heard anything from him. Nothing. [
But
] it was always Mo this, and Mo that. [
Myra
] didn’t want to hurt Mo. Mo baby – you know, she was the younger sister.’

At the end of the month, David found out that his much-loved dog, Peggy, whom he had been forced to leave behind in Wiles Street, had been put to sleep. Jack Smith was then working several days away from home in London and had taken the decision to have Peggy destroyed without consulting his son. David responded by downing copious amounts of alcohol, and when Ian and Myra arrived at Underwood Court from a short holiday in Scotland they found him in bed, distraught and inebriated.

‘Ian walked into the bedroom and asked me if I was all right,’ David recalled for the benefit of the courtroom in Chester several months later. ‘Then he turned round and he said: “It’s that bleeder who should have got the needle and not the dog.” . . . I wasn’t angry with [
Dad
]. I was upset about the dog . . . He had had it humanely destroyed . . . Myra went out of her way to try and save the dog. She drove all the way down to the dog’s home . . . she was just too late.’ Despite the ban on dogs at Underwood Court, within days he and Maureen had acquired a handsome collie whom they named Bob. Taking Bob for walks was problematic; David had to sneak him down the stairwell, directly past the door of caretaker Mr Page, who was rapidly getting to the end of his tether with the young couple in Flat 18.

Earlier that month, Ian had considered killing David. For reasons known only to himself and Myra, he now set aside his unease completely about the ‘flaw’ in his younger friend. Having bided his time while he weighed up whether David could be trusted or not, he took the final plunge one night after the girls had gone to bed. Following vast quantities of wine and whisky, Ian Brady at last split open the secret he and Myra Hindley had so carefully concealed for the past two years.