One of Your Own Read Online Free Page A

Myra rang the AA from a public call box to ask about road conditions in Saddleworth. She related their advice to Ian: no travel unless absolutely necessary. But she still had to pick up Gran, having promised to do so that morning. Ian fumed, reminding her that Lesley’s body lay in the back of the car. They drove on to Dukinfield, two hours later than promised; it was almost half past eleven when Myra, alone, knocked on Jim’s door. He recalled: ‘She came into the house and said, “I’m sorry, Gran, I can’t take you back. The roads are too bad.” I started to have an argument with Myra. As a result of going outside frequently to see whether Myra had come, I knew what the roads were like. It had been snowing, but there was only a light sprinkling of snow in the street where I lived.’ 12 Jim was angry; his son had died six months before his 21st birthday after a blow to the skull and neither Jim nor his wife Nellie wanted anyone else to sleep in his room, which they had turned into a shrine. Jim remembered: ‘The argument went on for about a quarter of an hour and ended when Myra said, “I can’t take Gran and that’s that.” Then she walked out. As a result, Gran stayed at my house on a bed made of cushions on the floor in the living room.’ 13
    At Wardle Brook Avenue, Myra parked the car and Ian scrambled up the slope with Lesley’s body, which he placed in Myra’s bedroom. She claimed afterwards that she never slept in that room again and hated going in there, even if just to dust it. Ian spent a while setting up his darkroom to develop the photographs he had taken of Lesley. They looked through them together and listened to the tape recording. Myra later insisted that she never saw the photographs or listened to the tape again, but begged him to destroy them.
    Despite the volume of words Myra wrote about her life, she failed to account conclusively for Lesley’s murder. Her prison therapist noted that the killing of Lesley was ‘difficult and painful for Myra to relate . . . because of three factors. It occurred at Christmas, which is normally a period of peace and joy. It happened not on the desolate moors but in the home that she shared with Ian, and thirdly she had witnessed events first hand “up to the point of death”.’ 14 Myra told her prison therapist that Christmas was always ‘the anniversary of many bad memories, not least of all the killing of little Lesley Ann, which gives me the deepest shame . . .’ 15 By her own admission, she would later concede that the lengthy description she gave of Lesley’s last hours in a statement to the Home Office was a pack of lies. She knew that the abuse and death of Lesley Ann Downey could not be explained without incriminating herself unreservedly: the tape recording condemned her forever as having been party to the little girl’s unmitigated, prolonged torment.
    On Boxing Day evening, while Myra and Ian curled up together on the sofa bed in front of the fire, with Lesley’s lifeless body in the bedroom above, Ann Downey grew almost demented with anxiety about her daughter’s whereabouts. She and her partner Alan had spent the evening running between the flat on Charnley Walk and the fairground. They called on Mrs Clarke, and Ann screamed at her for not having accompanied the children that afternoon, then left the flat to report Lesley’s disappearance at Mill Street police station. Finally, they returned again to the fair after it closed, picking their way around the mute, empty rides and shuttered stalls, shouting for Lesley.
    Gritting lorries rumbled along Mottram Road early the following morning as Ian carried Lesley’s body to the car again. Myra drove to Hollin Brown Knoll. She recalled: ‘There was thick snow covering the moor and the road was icy and there was very little traffic. When he’d checked up and down the road and made sure there was no traffic, he picked up the child’s body, which was wrapped in a sheet, hoisted the