Evil Relations (51 page)

To some, I live an ideal elderly existence; even our sheepdog fits the picture. But underneath it all there is always something dark threatening to stir. I fight those moments, and being with my grandchildren gives me the strength to get through. Without them, the future would mean nothing and my time here would be empty, an abyss of absolute nothing. The past cannot be changed, although it is forever etched in the stone of memory. It’s a place I can’t unscramble, somewhere I have difficulty facing and resolving – somewhere I don’t want to be. In my darkest moments of self-absorption, I still feel like an innocent man trapped and convicted in a web of circumstantial evidence. The hood is upon my head and the thick, rough rope around my neck; my breathing becomes frantic, and as the floor disappears beneath my feet, all I can do is scream: ‘Why me?’

Everything happened so quickly. Between 1963 and 1965 so many fates were decided – five innocents and perhaps other unknowns, as well as the lot of Brady, Hindley and me. But how and why did this thing happen? I know that after the killing of Edward Evans I did what was right. No matter what drunken bravado had gone before – bank-robbing, gun practice, hating this and hating that – my actions were never in the balance. I knew what I had to do, and Maureen knew it too, even though Myra was deeply involved; before sunrise this thing would end.

I’m still haunted by what was in Ian’s head and why, but by far my biggest horror is Myra Hindley. Now she’s gone and only he remains. But the darkness is still there, stirring, forced back, then stirring again.

I sit in front of the open fire with our priest. He’s a good friend and a man in whom anyone could confide. Mary makes the regulation pot of tea; she enjoys his visits as much as I do. The conversation is unhurried and revolves around what’s going on in the village. Not gossip as such, just catching up on people we haven’t seen for a few days. Parsley, the sheepdog, stretches out across my feet. Rebel sits pressed against my legs, brown eyes beseeching. Various cats wander in and out.

Our priest knows what my life has been and realises that on this particular afternoon I’m hurting deeply inside, building up to the question I need to ask. He encourages me gently, but I tell him:
I don’t think you can help me, Father
. He answers that neither of us will know unless I speak, and, realising he is right, I blurt out what has long been on my mind and causing me physical pain:
can a child be born evil?

Silence. Our priest is troubled, struggling for the right words. His emotions begin to rise and I see the anguish surface in the dimmed light in his eyes.

A rotten apple is always the same
, I insist, biting my lower lip.
It’s bruised to the core. Can a child be like that, too? Bruised to the core, not just bad but rotten through and through – evil, in effect? I’ve met the devil in both disguises, male and female. But why
, I have to know,
why?

Our priest holds back emotion, eyes brimming. I don’t share his strength; my own tears fall into the thick, warm fur of the faithful dog at my feet.

Eventually, in a quiet voice, with every word carefully measured out, our priest tells me:
A child cannot be born evil, but I believe those two were
. He has answered me, and whether what he’s said is right or wrong, at least he’s spoken from the heart and I have something in which to put my faith.

As a child, I lay in bed fearing the bogeyman would get me. I remember not daring to move and breathing so shallowly that it felt as if I were running.
Go away
, I would whisper,
I’m not here
. But I’d feel him on the bed, the pressure on the blankets as he came closer, and the shadows in the furthest corner shifted with other, ghastly things. I couldn’t shout or cry. I was trapped and the bogeyman was coming to get me.

Of course it was always just my imagination. All children know about this make-believe horror, and while I was growing up, reading
Oliver Twist
and
Tom Sawyer
, I learned to be equally terrified of Bill Sykes and Indian Joe. Other children were frightened of ghosts and would be told in a no-nonsense manner, ‘The dead can’t hurt you, only the living can do that.’

The old adage is true. Human monsters are the ones to fear most, but as children we never thought about those. Human monsters lived nearby; they were male and they were female, they smiled and offered lifts, and because one of them was a woman nobody thought to glance at them twice.

Sometimes I dream that I am standing in a corridor. It’s a long and lonely place to be, full of nothing but whispers, regardless of how many people come and go along its sterile white trajectory. It has an odour I associate with nowhere else: the stench of hopelessness and yearning.

I am rooted to the floor. Two people stand in front of me, two tiny old people, lost and unblinking, caught up in a world they never knew existed until it closed around them. They stand alone, but together, uncomprehending, knowing only that his bed is empty and the absence left by its unfilled space will last a lifetime. They would give their lives for a reason or some sort of answer – even a flicker of understanding would be a comfort, but that can never be.

In the dream, I look silently at Mr and Mrs Evans, knowing that the worst thing that can happen to a parent has happened to them. I can’t offer them comfort because words are meaningless here. I was in the same room as their son when the last breath left his body, but I could do nothing to save him.

In my sleep, I twitch repeatedly, as if sizzling volts of electricity are being transmitted through the bed. Beneath my eyelids, the stark fluorescent overhead light in the corridor burns.

I take a step on the linoleum floor and then stop as other people emerge into the corridor. The families of Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Keith Bennett gather behind Mr and Mrs Evans, staring at me. I owe them an answer to the everlasting question:
why?
But it doesn’t come to me and I look down at the floor, hating my inability to help them.

A convulsion shudders through my body. There is someone else in the corridor now, someone who shouldn’t be there.

Myra stands with her back to the exit. Her smile is wide – friendly, even – but there is a black light in her eyes and a glitter deep within their depths that gives her away. Her fingers press the heavy door shut, letting no one past.

The first fin of daylight breaks through the open window of my bedroom in Ireland. I wake from the dream again, the smell of the corridor thick in my nostrils, and lie staring up at the ceiling.

* * *

Mary brings fresh cups of tea and sets them down on the long kitchen table.

After a brief silence, David muses: ‘Looking back, the single biggest question
I’m
left with is what would have happened if we’d buried Edward Evans on the moor that night? Though I still say that I’m not convinced that they planned to bury him on the
moor
. This was no small child for Brady to carry, as Lesley had been, remember – it would have been a very difficult task to convey the body from the car to the burial place, especially if it was far from the road. And Brady and Hindley hadn’t completed their usual preparations. Yes, they’d disposed of the suitcases and worked out where to pick up their victim. But their other customary precautions weren’t taken: no polythene protecting the inside of the car and no spade found in the vehicle. Brady had compiled his disposal plan, as was his habit, but I think that was written
after
I left the house. If you look at that plan, I’m in an end column. I have a feeling I know what that meant . . .’

He drains his tea, thoughts turning to ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the 45 rpm vinyl record given to Hindley by Brady on the morning of Edward Evans’s murder. This, too, was one of their routines; to mark each murder, Brady bought Hindley a current hit single, which the two of them referred to as ‘anniversary gifts’. David has no doubt about the meaning invested in Ian’s choice of record that day: ‘“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was sung by Joan Baez, but the music and lyrics were written by my idol, Bob Dylan, which is significant in itself. As for the words, I’m as familiar with them as I am with the back of my hand. That song is about one person replacing another, and the dead being left behind as the new relationship begins.’

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly: ‘That was a message from Ian to Myra. The murder planned for that evening was a means of proving himself to me. It was also a test to discover just how much of his “mentoring” I had truly taken on board.’ He pauses. ‘And if I passed, then the next stage was the one indicated in the Dylan lyrics – Ian intended that I should take Myra’s place . . . as his partner in crime.’

* * *

The darkness of thought is now at its deepest and most impenetrable. I sit alone in the early hours, in the kitchen of my home in Ireland, at a table I made with my own hands, and decide to address a few questions to the only person who can answer them: Ian Brady.

I’d like to know what you think you saw in me, Ian, and, even more than that, I’d like to know what made you think you had the right to kill? I’ve got no time for medical and psychiatric explanations. All that blaming your illegitimacy and misspent youth is bullshit, pure and simple. Take it from someone who knows. Each person, as they grow up, is responsible for their own deeds, and no amount of Freudian analysis should be allowed to diminish that. You love the old ego massage and mind games, though, don’t you, Ian? But you’re nothing special and you never were, regardless of how the doctors fuss over finding the correct label for your personality ‘disorder’. You are a man who got his kicks from raping and murdering children. I still can’t understand why anyone would want to make excuses for you.

I know you’ve spent endless hours wondering why you ended up in prison when you and she were so careful, so meticulous in planning your crimes and covering them up afterwards. But maybe I can help you with that, at least.

You’re where you are now because you misjudged
me
. You got it wrong, right from the very start. Whatever you thought you saw in me wasn’t there. When you told me you’d killed before, we were both drunk beyond belief – did you really think I took you seriously?

You did. But you took it to the point of obsession. From the moment we started drinking that night in September, you couldn’t stop yourself:
robbing banks, guns, photographic proof
. . . It was just white noise to me. I didn’t know then what Myra knew – that you were losing it.

You planned every second of that killing, Ian. You were probably running through the details in your head when I came to see you with the note from the rent man. 6 October 1965: the final moments of normality, you fastening your cufflinks and Myra lacquering her blonde hair. She must have known that the two of you were teetering on the edge of an endless abyss of lost freedom that evening. The prosecution got it right: you killed that night to prove yourself to me.

I read your interview with Fred Harrison and what you said about me: ‘He didn’t fail it . . . his hands were steady, no shakes. His casualness, wiping up the blood, complaining about the blood he had got on his jeans – the normal casualness. I knew he could take it . . .’ Again, you couldn’t have been more wrong. I’ve never known fear as I did that night, but the survival instinct was equally powerful, and that’s what got me through your front door and safely home.

‘What happened during those three hours [
at Underwood Court
], I don’t know,’ you told Fred Harrison. ‘I would love to know what happened in those three hours. He must have thought that things were getting too hairy. And I think on top of that he had an instinct that I was planning to shoot him.’

No, Ian.

I didn’t think things were getting ‘too hairy’, and it was only afterwards that I realised my own life had been in danger for some time. But the moment you let me go, and I heard the click of the front door as Myra closed it behind me, it was then that the two of you were finished. What happened in those three hours? I was sick, more bilious than you can imagine, and I wept with Maureen, waiting for dawn to break. Three hours passed because I was too afraid of leaving the flat while it was still dark in case you were waiting for me with the axe, but your freedom was over hours before that, when I ran up Sundial Close with the hounds of hell snapping at my heels.

This time you got it wrong, and I’m willing to bet that somewhere deep inside herself Myra knew. You and she nailed me, though, with your lies and insinuations. My name will always be filth to some people – you can at least take satisfaction in that.

I believe in fate; too much has happened for me to do otherwise. You didn’t, and that was your downfall. You never realised that fate was one step in front of you everywhere, silently leading to the end:

18 Westmoreland Street (your home until you moved in with Myra) and my childhood home, 39 Aked Street: the distance between them was five minutes’ walk. Wiles Street and Bannock Street: five minutes apart. Wardle Brook Avenue and Underwood Court: set your watch and see the minutes tick by . . . five times.

Fate arrived on your doorstep shortly after midnight on 6 October 1965. You invited it in. A few hours later it walked away and took everything from you.

I was your fate, Ian. You just never believed it.

* * *

‘Why tell my story now?’ David ponders. ‘Well, it was Mary who wanted me to do it initially, so that our grandchildren would know the truth. If Mary advises me to do something, I do it because I trust her judgement above everything. But it’s been an incredible experience for me and I can honestly say that at last I’ve come to terms with so many things. It’s been 100 per cent positive.’

He turns to his wife and smiles, ‘Hasn’t it, Mary?’

She nods. ‘Without a doubt. I won’t say it’s given Dave closure, but it’s definitely been like a
cleansing
.’

He taps a freshly rolled cigarette against the table, musing, ‘That family thing, too – it’s helped me to understand a lot of that, my feelings over Uncle Frank, for instance. It’s also made me realise that the biggest female influence in my life wasn’t Mum, as I’d always thought, but the Duchess. She helped me through so many difficulties. The other big thing has been reaching an understanding that those times – however bad they were, and regardless of how often I’ve asked why it had to be me – happened because that’s just how it was
meant
to be. I’m not referring to Brady and Hindley’s crimes, but events in my life. It’s been cathartic to reflect on it in such depth and detail, to take it all apart, talking and writing, and following that wisp of smoke home . . . It’s given me a new perspective on everything – a healthier perspective.’