HOW often she had relived that journey, she could not begin to think. Out of the door of their end-of-terrace house in Eston Street in Longsight, Manchester, down Hathersage Road, across Plymouth Grove, up to the Stockport Road, the A6, where traffic thundered past. Winnie Johnson was always worried about that road. So although her eldest, Keith, was only going to his Gran’s, and though he was 12 now—as of four days ago, and with a brand-new bike to prove it—she went with him at least as far as the zebra-crossing, to see him safely over.

It was a Tuesday, June 16th, 1964. She was hugely pregnant, carrying her fifth child, so they did not walk fast. Keith trotted at her side, a small, thin lad, in his white leather zip-up jacket, his jeans and black plastic shoes. His fair hair wasn’t shaped in a pudding-bowl now, but in an untidy crew-cut above his cheeky grin. At the zebra she waved him goodbye and went off to her Tuesday-night bingo, blithe as a bird. She never passed that spot again without remembering his wave back, the last she saw of him.

He hadn’t been wearing his glasses. He could see very little without them, which made him behind with his reading and everything else at school. That Monday he’d come home announcing he’d cracked a lens at swimming. He hoped it would mean he couldn’t go to school, the rascal, but she was having none of that. She mended the glasses with blue tape and put them ready for the next day. He could manage for a little while. But that may have been why he didn’t notice the hard evil eyes of the two people in the Mini Traveller, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, when they drew up beside him and asked him to help them with some boxes in exchange for sweets; and then took him up on Saddleworth Moor and killed him, where they also killed and buried four other children.

The others were found. Keith never was. For 21 years, his mother was not even sure whether he was a victim of modern Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Then Hindley and Brady confessed. They had sexually assaulted him and strangled him with string. She didn’t know the full details, didn’t really want to know, couldn’t have stood to see the photos Brady had taken afterwards; she thought it might kill her. But suddenly the high, bleak moors that looked down on her wherever she went in the city seemed to challenge her. Keith was up there, and her duty as a mother was to find him and bring him home. Then he could have the funeral she had planned for him, with the horse-drawn hearse, and his grave would be marked with the wooden cross she kept on the mantlepiece.

For the next two decades she searched with all the strength she had. Her other sons helped her; the Greater Manchester police showed interest only in fits and starts. In sun, rain or snow she was up there, digging down through the turf and the fibrous black peat until she hit bare rock. She wasn’t scared of hard work: she’d worked in hospital kitchens, cleaned the offices of the electricity board, all while bringing up a houseful of children by two hopeless men she’d told to bugger off. (Her third partner, Jimmy Johnson, had at least been good to her.) She knew how to graft, and also how to live her own damn life the way she chose. So now she dug. When the heavy garden spade got too much for her, she took flowers and toys—a blue teddy bear, a cuddly dog—and hung them on a wire fence in the middle of the wilderness.

She was searching blind, though, in an area of five square miles. It was clear that only two people could help her: the killers themselves. So, over the years, swallowing the rage and disgust she felt, suppressing her longing to stab Brady from top to bottom and stuff his bloody balls in his mouth, she wrote to them. School had never done much for her; she preferred to mess around in the air-raid shelter, or go dancing; her first letter to Hindley, so important, so impossible, took five weeks to compose. Hindley, now repentant—not that that made one jot of difference—drew maps for her. These helped a little, revealing one more missing body. But it was not Keith’s. Brady replied too, but in his sick, cruel fashion he refused to tell her anything. Just before she died, it emerged that he had written her another letter to be opened after his own death (he survives, after more than a decade on hunger strike). It possibly contained the information she most wanted, but by then she was too ill even to be told of its existence.

Sometimes she went up on the moors with psychics, people with crystals and whatnot, to see if they could sense anything. They were no use at all. In any case, she didn’t believe in it. But she did feel Keith round about her, and once—very soon after, when she was still breastfeeding Joey—she heard his cheeky voice, saying “Mam, I’m at the back of you.” She liked going up on Saddleworth because she felt near him there, though never near enough.

She kept almost nothing of him: not the coin collection, or the scrapbook full of leaves, or the school reports (“He is willing and cheerful…Keep trying hard, Keith!”). There was just the goal he had painted on the red-brick wall beside the house, for noisy football practice. And, in a drawer of the back bedroom, mended with blue tape, ready and waiting, the glasses he should have been wearing. That day.