Evil Relations (25 page)

He pauses and chooses his next words carefully. ‘From the outset, Mattin and Tyrrell were always . . . very stern. It was another atmosphere altogether. The station itself was grim, with interview rooms that felt like prison cells and an ancient smell of misery about the place. Mattin and Tyrrell never gave me time to think about what they were asking – if I didn’t reply immediately, one of them would bang down a fist and say, “Come on, you’ve got to give us an answer, we’re waiting.” Sometimes I needed to think it through, but they wouldn’t make any allowances. Hyde wasn’t much better. I hated having to sit with Benfield and Talbot to go over things. I couldn’t stick Talbot – we wound each other up – and I found Benfield faintly ridiculous. He looked like a womble, chubby, with little spectacles, and puffing away on his pipe until the room was so thick with smoke I could hardly see. At the end of every day I felt whacked out, drained of every emotion and incapable of thought. Then the next morning it would start up all over again.’

He takes the cup of tea Mary has made for him and explains: ‘No one listened to me. They all wanted to speak to me, but everything I said fell on deaf ears. The Hyde brigade were only interested in Edward Evans and ignored what I tried to tell them about other murders – the ones Ian had boasted to me of having committed. I think Jock Carr wanted to know more, but the big brass weren’t interested. Talbot and his cronies saw me as someone out to save his own skin. They didn’t believe what I had to say, that much was obvious. I couldn’t understand it because all I wanted was someone to listen to me. But no one did – until Joe Mounsey came along.’

Among the items removed from Myra Hindley’s bedroom at Wardle Brook Avenue was a notebook belonging to Ian Brady. When it turned up with the other exhibits at Hyde station, Ian Fairley flicked through the pages and in the midst of random doodles – roughly pencilled gangster caricatures and a list of film stars – one name stood out: John Kilbride. A call was put through immediately to Detective Chief Inspector Joe Mounsey at Ashton-under-Lyne; the case of the 12-year-old boy who had vanished from the town’s market on 23 November 1963 fell under his jurisdiction. His appointment as CID chief at Ashton-under-Lyne came in 1964, several months after John’s disappearance, but his determination to crack the riddle of the young boy’s apparent vanishing into thin air led to John becoming known in police circles as ‘Mounsey’s lad’. Upon being told about the notebook, Mounsey drove out to Hyde to look at it for himself. Then he asked to speak to David.

‘I had a great deal of respect for Joe Mounsey,’ David states unequivocally. ‘He was the first senior detective who took me seriously. He was like no one else. He didn’t bark questions at me, he never raised his voice or came down heavy, and he listened acutely, to the point where I could actually
see
him taking it all on board. The relief I felt at knowing someone believed me at last was just incredible.’

With Mounsey’s involvement, David’s days were split between Hyde, Manchester and Ashton-under-Lyne. He gives a short laugh: ‘I kind of looked forward to going to Ashton for questioning. The police station there was modern and clean, all sparkling glass, and I was only ever seen – as far as I can recall – by Mr Mounsey. He had a couple of sidekicks, but he was in charge. Being told I was going to Ashton meant a good day ahead because his technique was laid-back and calm. That was the impression he gave and it worked to his advantage – no one else got me to speak at length like he did. The interviews I had with him were more like straightforward conversations. He would open with: “OK, lad, how are you today? Got enough cigarettes? Right, then, in your own time. No rush. Just take it steady and we’ll get there in the end.” He’d send out for extra ciggies if necessary and give me a proper tea break instead of just having a pot brought in. We’d go to the canteen together and he’d chat to me about rugby or football to make sure I had a rest from everything. When we returned to the interview room, he’d let me ease into it again and if there was a difficult question to answer, he’d tell me, “Take as much time as you need, lad, on this next one. I have to ask it, but no panic. When you’re ready.” He’d wait five or ten minutes if he had to, which is a long time to sit in silence. That was the big difference between Ashton and everywhere else: I was treated as a suspect at Hyde and Manchester, but at Ashton I was seen as a witness.’

During the course of their interviews, Mounsey pushed forward a number of photographs found at Wardle Brook Avenue and asked David if he knew where they had been taken. Many were what the police termed ‘scenic shots’ or ‘moorland views’. Some featured Ian and Myra and their dogs, but others were of the landscape alone and seemed eerily devoid of purpose. In one, Myra’s car stood parked against a dark, jutting rock formation – the same rocks on which the couple posed individually in other shots. David was unable to identify the scene but agreed to visit likely spots with Mounsey in an attempt to narrow down the location.

In theory, it was an impossible task: hundreds of square miles of moorland lies between Manchester and Huddersfield and, other than the rocks, there were no immediately identifiable landmarks in Ian Brady’s photographs. Nevertheless, one Sunday afternoon Mounsey and Talbot collected David and Maureen from Underwood Court in an unmarked police car and headed out of the city in a direction with which David felt reasonably familiar. Driving east along the A57 Snake Pass, the winding road that leads out of Glossop, both detectives noticed a sign to Woodhead; ‘WH’ was an unresolved abbreviation on the disposal plan.

David recalls the difficulties he faced in trying to match a place to the photographs: ‘I was usually sat in the back of the Mini van whenever we’d gone out with Myra and Ian, completely blotto, and nodding along to Ian’s ramblings. I wasn’t even looking in the direction we travelled – my view was of the disappearing city and then lanes and fields. And we went out with them very often, to lots of different places. I never took any notice of names either, and it wasn’t until the police were later able to identify the spot by the reservoir that I knew, for instance, that the place in question was Saddleworth Moor. None of what I could tell them before then was of any use. But they did their best and took me to quite a few areas that might have been significant, though some obviously weren’t. But if a place had “special” meaning for Ian and Myra, they didn’t share that with me. It was between the two of them.’

The accused continued to keep their silence, unwilling to cooperate with the police on the matter of the photographs. In desperation, Mounsey asked David if he had any ideas for encouraging them to be more amenable. David’s reply was immediate: threaten to kill Puppet to rattle Myra, and release an insect into Ian’s cell. He recounted how Ian had recoiled in terror when a spider scuttled across the living room floor at Wardle Brook Avenue and that he’d reacted much the same when a daddy-long-legs had fluttered in from the balcony at Underwood Court. On both occasions Ian had screamed for Myra, who dealt with the cause of his panic swiftly and calmly. Mounsey listened in some amusement, but there was no question of following through with his suggestions.

Ultimately, it fell to a child to lead the police to the graves of other children.

Twelve-year-old Patty Hodges lived next door but one to Ian and Myra on Wardle Brook Avenue. Together with her siblings and a couple of other children on the estate, she had been befriended by the couple, and often spent time at their house or accompanied them on picnics to the ‘countryside’. Brought forward by her mother, Patty told surprised detectives that she was certain she could identify the spot she had visited with the couple but would have to be driven there because she didn’t know the name; Ian and Myra had only ever referred to it as ‘the moor’.

Patty led the police up to Saddleworth, and as the car followed the turn in the road, the jutting rock formation from the photographs loomed into view. Within the hour, the tentative search that had been taking place at Woodhead switched decisively to Hollin Brown Knoll.

The
Daily Mail
broke the story nationwide. When it was reported that police forces around the Greater Manchester area were checking their records for missing children, the news went global. Clive Entwistle, then a young journalist from Rochdale, recalls: ‘The whole thing just exploded. We had the world’s press coming to us. Not just Britain, but everywhere – New Zealand, America, Japan, France . . . It was a colossal story.’ Every night journalists would gather in the bar of the Queen’s Hotel in Hyde to trade information with the police. The case remained in the headlines for the next six months and sightseers’ cars clogged the A635 during the ongoing search of the chill, rain-spattered Knoll.

On Wednesday, 13 October, Edward Evans was laid to rest in Southern Cemetery. Two days later, on Alex Carr’s orders, Ian Fairley collected David from Underwood Court and brought him into Hyde for further questioning. Carr decided to head back to Hattersley to conduct the interview; the station was under siege. But when the three of them returned to Underwood Court they found David’s flat without electricity and none of them had a two-bob bit for the meter. Undeterred, Carr insisted on interviewing David in the car park below; the press had gathered in Hyde and on the moor. Ian Fairley sat in the driver’s seat of the CID car next to ‘Jock’, with David in the back. They remained there throughout the afternoon; twilight had fallen across the vast housing estate by the time the interview was wrapped up.

Ian Fairley’s contact with David had been minimal until then, but the young detective was quietly impressed with him: ‘Smith was cooperative, he never hid anything, and he never changed his story. He was . . . not belligerent, but I think he was fed up. During the course of the interview, Jock asked him where they spent their time. Where did they go? David said he’d already gone through all this – the moors, drinking, at home, drinking. Did they use the guns? No, only for target practice. Then he talked about this robbery they’d plotted and at that point mentioned the fact that Brady had told him to bring anything he had that was incriminating back to him. Like what, we asked. He said books, and we knew what he meant, the sort of rubbish you could pick up from a dodgy place. He said he’d taken it all back to Brady and we asked him what had happened to it then. He said, ‘Well, they put it in the suitcases.’ Suitcases?
What suitcases?
Now, I don’t know how many times this lad had been interviewed, and I don’t know if he had mentioned the suitcases before or not, all I know is that it was the first time Jock Carr and I heard about the suitcases. We asked him again about these suitcases and he said, ‘They were huge, packed with stuff, but I don’t know what else, just the stuff I handed back.’ We knew that no suitcases had been found because obviously there had been a search, and there was nothing. We started asking him again where they’d gone and he repeated what he’d said before. Then we asked where
they
went, Brady and Hindley, and he said sometimes they went into Manchester and Brady would go to the railway stations . . .’

David nods slowly when asked about the interview in the car park of Underwood Court. ‘I remember that. We were there for a long time – hours. It was dark when I got back to the flat. I
had
already mentioned the suitcases, but no one paid it any attention. The old story – no one seemed interested. Jock Carr picked up on it, though. He must have twigged it was significant, especially the link between the suitcases and railway stations, and wasn’t going to let it drop. He was a brilliant detective. It was through him that
the
major breakthrough was achieved.’

Alex Carr contacted the British Railway Police and asked them to search all their left luggage departments. By ten o’clock that evening, the suitcases had been found. A few days later, the receipt for their deposit at Central Station on 5 October was discovered in the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, tightly rolled in the spine of a prayer book given to Myra Hindley for her first Holy Communion in 1958. The finding of the receipt cleared up another enigma in the abbreviations on the disposal plan: ‘P/B’ (prayer book) and ‘TICK’ (ticket).

By mid-morning on Saturday, 16 October, news of the suitcases had spread to other constabularies and Hyde police station was inundated with senior officers arguing over access to them. Benfield had departed for Cheshire the day before, convinced that everything was cut and dried; he returned to Hyde quickly, together with Eric Cunningham, head of the Number One Regional Crime Squad, and Joe Mounsey. Benfield was firm that Hyde would remain in charge of the inquiry, since it was through his officers that the suitcases had been discovered.

With that settled, the objects in question were brought into his office and detectives from every neighbouring force looked on curiously as the buckles on the suitcases were unfastened and the lids thrown open.

* * *

Saturday morning, and I’m hoping for a day off from the suits, thinking that I might take Bob for a walk, then mooch around the flat, for a change. Nothing out of the ordinary, just getting back to normal for a while – or pretending to, at least. I know there are a few gentlemen of the press lurking in the car park but not many, not yet. They don’t bother me if I keep away from the balcony doors and ignore the intercom.

It doesn’t happen: today is when the whole thing erupts. After this, there’s no more pretending and no going back to any sort of life we knew before.

I’m picked up in an unmarked police car and whizzed to Hyde station. Even as I get out of the car on a typically grey, wet day I can feel the invisible quiver of something different in the air. In silence, I follow the copper who collected me from Hattersley; since telling me I was wanted down at the station he’s said not one word.

Inside the red-brick building there are so many detectives knocking about the place I begin to feel claustrophobic. The curtain of pipe smoke is dense enough to part, as well. I pass the desk sergeant, who glances up at me and then averts his gaze quickly, avoiding prolonged eye contact. I frown, thinking:
what the fuck is going on?