Local MP's five-hour talks with Brady

Fifteen years ago, Tom Pendry secretly visited Ian Brady in his hospital prison. It was 1987, 21 years after he and his lover Myra Hindley were convicted of three gruesome child murders. By then he hated her.

Yesterday the former Labour MP for Stalybridge and Hyde spoke for the first time of their five-hour meeting .

And he remembered the killer's contempt for Hindley. "He disliked her intensely – and that is being polite. He thought that her turning to Catholicism was a charade. It was just part of her plan to getting back to being an accepted being. He didn't like her very much. The love had gone."

After the visit, Brady kept in touch with Lord Pendry, as he now is, by letter – the last one arrived two months ago.

"Every time this is raised the people here, especially on the Hattersley Estate [where Brady and Hindley lived] and in surrounding areas, naturally get very upset," Lord Pendry said yesterday. "They still feel it. The scars are still there."

Lord Pendry had gone to see Brady in the hope – soon dashed – that he would lead police to the body of Keith Bennett. He recalled Brady's "boast" that he could find the grave. "I would have been happier if he had been able to live up to that boast, that he could find the grave. That was a great disappointment to me and my then constituents."