Where There is Evil by Sandra Brown

board. I had been employed on graduation by my old primary-school head teacher, Mr Allan. Ronnie put his meagre wage as a
graduate civil engineer straight into a joint bank account. We knew, without ever discussing it, that the only way we could have a family wedding ‘do’ was to pay for it ourselves.
    He also knew, intuitively, that there were elements of my childhood I did not feel able to discuss with him. He had never met my father although our families lived near each other. His parents
seemed to like me, and I respected them. The ugly parts of my past remained locked inside me.
    It felt strange to be back at the school I had attended so many years ago, but I enjoyed teaching. The staff at Gartsherrie Academy still contained some of the old guard, but happily they were
held in affection and were more than helpful to the new raw recruits. Miss Pringle, the delightful infant teacher, dedicated to educating children since a whole generation of young men had not
returned from the First World War, was still there; so was Miss McLean, a real character, whose sisters owned the most amazing drapery shop in the town, renowned as a surrealistic labyrinth of
underwear and hosiery you could get lost in. I renewed a childhood friendship, too: Fiona, a long-ago playmate from Dunbeth Park, was in the nextdoor classroom, to my delight.
    After our engagement, I heard Granny Jenny and my mother discuss Ronnie approvingly and knew what was coming next. Jenny’s bottom lip trembled and she said to my mother, ‘He should
give away his only lass.’ I flatly refused to consider sending my father an invitation.
    My mother agreed, and said to her mother-in-law: ‘Sandra and Ronnie are paying for everything themselves, so it’s up to them who they invite. I’m divorced from Alex, now, and
it’s certainly up to the bride who gives her away, Jenny, she can ask whoever she wants.’
    When I got married Uncle Robbie gave me away in church. He was delighted to help out, and brought all his family. They no longer lived in Leicester but had settled on Canvey Island.
    ‘Stupid bastard,’ was his pithy comment when he saw me in my wedding dress, and we got into the limousine. ‘He’ll live to regret what he left behind him.’
    For the first three years of our married life, my husband and I lived fifteen floors up in one of the new high-rise tower blocks that suddenly dominated the landscape in
Coatbridge, just a stone’s throw from my old home in Dunbeth Road, which had been demolished in the mid-sixties. We joked about our penthouse with its panoramic view. Our town had its very
own version of American skycrapers. From my lofty vantage point, I could see that, despite the coming of the high flats, the old games had not disappeared completely: girls still thumped balls off
the walls of the flats, and when I visited the basement launderette, I was pleased to see an occasional game of peever going on.
    Everywhere I had lived as a child, my mother always worried about ‘rough elements’. It never seemed to occur to her that the worst influence I ever came across was my father. I also
noticed that these ‘skyscraper weans’ did not venture far from their homes: the lessons of 1957 had not been forgotten.
    People still discussed the mystery of Moira Anderson. The whispers and pointing fingers had been hard for the Anderson family when some malicious tongue started a rumour that Mandy Rice-Davies,
the call-girl involved in the Profumo scandal of the sixties, was none other than Moira. A likeness, they said, had been spotted, and the next thing was the ‘story’ broke in the press,
causing the family more heartbreak when the tabloids asked if Moira could be one of many runaways from the north who lost their identity deliberately in London, only to surface years later under an
assumed name. Most townsfolk, though, thought that Moira’s tender age, her background, and the way in which she had disappeared did not match that of a