PRAISE FOR MATT WESOLOWSKI

‘Few books creep me out, but Changeling is insidiously terrifying … Featuring possibly the creepiest woods since Blair Witch, it cleverly strikes the balance between supernatural, superstition and reality until, like the characters, you’re unsure of what to believe. A genuine chiller with a whammy of an ending’ C J Tudor

‘Just getting my breath back after reading the last few pages of this. Matt Wesolowski is one of most exciting new writers of the past few years. Never disappoints. This is a creepy, chilling read that is ridiculously difficult to put down. The ending is just incredible’ Luca Veste

‘I loved it. The combination of Matt’s style of writing and his imagination is superb, and a tough subject was beautifully tackled. I loved the first two in the Six Stories series, but Changeling is frighteningly wonderful and one of the best books I have read in years’ Khurrum Rahman

‘Mysterious, always. Intense, yes. Twisty and turny, totally. But emotional too. What an ending! I want to read it all over again. Wesolowski’s best so far’ Louise Beech

‘Bold, clever and genuinely chilling with a terrific twist that provides an explosive final punch’ Deidre O’Brien, Sunday Mirror

‘A genuine genre-bending debut’ Carla McKay, Daily Mail

‘With a unique structure, an ingenious plot and so much suspense you can’t put it down, this is the very epitome of a must-read’ Heat

‘This is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, perhaps in memory’ Nudge

‘He’s fashioned a thriller that slowly drip-feeds us plenty of gothic horror while keeping us guessing right up to the end’ The Crack

‘King’s podcasts draw strangely personal warnings to desist, but he persists, provoking further tragedy. Through this unusual format, Wesolowski skilfully draws readers into a story of increasing depth and force’ Publishers Weekly

‘Sharp as a butcher’s knife, cutting straight through to the nerve of its reader. A read-in-one-sitting experience that will surely inspire many authors to explore new methods of narration’ Irish Times

‘A wonderfully distinctive, intense, and piercing read … provokes thoughts and rattles feelings, creating an original and enthralling read, highly recommended’ LoveReading

‘The execution perfectly allows the reader to see and believe every event as the mystery develops … as surprising as it is good, and should appeal to readers who enjoy crime with an eerie, dark vibe’ Mystery Scene

‘Thanks to Wesolowski’s mixture of supernatural elements and firstclass plotting, this is one of the most addictive of new crime novels’ Sunday Express

‘This is a compelling story in an original format … It’s a whydunnit and an intelligent psychological thriller that pushes at the edges of the supernatural crime genre … Matt Wesolowski knows what to deliver and what to leave to our imaginations’ Crime Fiction Lover

‘It’s a relentless and original work of modern rural noir which beguiles and unnerves in equal measure. Matt Wesolowski is a major talent’ Eva Dolan

‘Wesolowski evokes the ominous landscape and eerie atmosphere of the area with sharp, direct prose … Impeccably crafted and gripping from start to finish’ Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

‘His unique storytelling shows a great deal of understanding of how young people might deal with secrets, unspoken feelings, unrequited love, fear of being an outcast and most importantly with a desperate desire to belong’ Crime Review

‘A new style of mystery, one that encapsulates the twenty-first century, the internet, and social media, even as its characters struggle to recall – or forget – a time before such things … a dazzling fictional mystery’ Foreword Reviews

‘Wonderfully horrifying … the suspense crackles’ James Oswald

‘Its plotting, pacing, and unique content make it one of the most impressive books I’ve read recently. Wesolowski is a major new talent in crime fiction, and I cannot wait to see what he does next’ Crime by the Book

‘A complex and subtle mystery, unfolding like dark origami to reveal the black heart inside’ Michael Marshall Smith

‘Original, inventive and brilliantly clever’ Fiona Cummins

‘For fans of thrills, chills and an up-to-date take on the darker side of society’ J.S. Collyer

‘Wonderfully atmospheric. Matt Wesolowski is a skilled storyteller with a unique voice. Definitely one to watch’ Mari Hannah

‘A stunning piece of writing – chock full of atmosphere, human insight and beautiful writing. Take a note of this guy’s name. He’s going to be huge!’ Michael J. Malone

‘A tight, claustrophobic mystery’ David F. Ross

‘A remarkable debut from a fine new fictional voice’ Shelley Day

‘The literary equivalent of dark metal – gritty, dark, often shocking, and always exciting. A masterful debut’ Kati Hiekkapelto

‘There’s a disquiet, an unease that runs throughout Changeling, suffusing the story that Wesolowksi is telling and imbuing it with an unsettling sense of darkness. Changeling is a chilling read, a sinister story and the best Six Stories yet’ The Tattooed Book Geek

‘The writing is top notch as ever and I really think Matt has surpassed himself this time. Wentshire Forest certainly felt very creep and real to me. Hauntingly atmospheric and lyrically pitch perfect’ The Book Trail

‘The most remarkable and memorable psychological thriller and mystery series I have read in a long time. If you need me I will be nursing my book hangover for quite a while’ Always Trust in Books

‘Changeling is an intense, dark and utterly absorbing book. The pages crackle with tension, the characters have real depth and the writing is truly stunning. Matt Wesolowski has to be one of the most imaginative and talented young writers out there at the moment’ Bibliophile Book Club

‘The plotting is ingenious, and the way those six stories mesh together is played to perfection’ Espresso Coco

‘Changeling gave me goosebumps and the sound of tapping is forever going to creep me out! … Once again I forgot it was fiction and wanted to find out more about the mystery of the missing child and the creepy woods. That’s how good Matt is’ Not Another Book Blogger

‘Changeling is definitely my favourite of the three Six Stories books so far. I’m not sure if that’s down to the emotional subject matter, chilling storyline or overall creepiness of the prose … Matt Weselowski is one of the best emerging horror/crime writers. Bring on the next one! (I hope there is a next one…)’ Off-the-Shelf Books

‘Changeling is the BEST book I have read in a very long time, if not ever. I devoured it in three and a half hours! Matt Wesolowski you are a genius. I don’t know how I’m supposed to read anything else ever again’ Thirty Pages In

‘Just finished Changeling and WOW. Just WOW. What an utterly brilliant book. I’ll need time to digest it before I review but congrats Matt Wesolowski, Changeling is just brilliant from first page to last’ Shelf of Unread Books

‘Changeling by Matt Wesolowski is SO good. The beauty of the podcast-style narrative means that the book just flew by. I also had to keep reminding myself that it is fiction and not a real-life case; you really do forget that. Wonderful stuff’ Beardy Book Blogger

‘If ever a series of books was going to shake up the psychological thriller genre then this is it. This book is both inspiring and depressing in equal measure. Inspiring because of the sheer creativity and how assured and confident the writing appears’ Jen Med’s Book Reviews

‘Compelling, intelligent and beautifully written – each voice is distinct, each setting is brought vividly to life. Matt Wesolowski has crafted a cautionary and chilling tale that cements his place as one of the freshest writers around today’ Hair Past a Freckle

‘Genre busting, it’s a crime story, a psychological thriller, a coming-of- age story. It will appeal to readers of all ages and genders. Gripping, fascinating and wholly entertaining, Matt Wesolowski is a very welcome new voice in fiction. An absolute triumph and highly recommended by me’ Random Things through My Letterbox

‘Refreshingly different with its quirky structure and clarity of description, and Wesolowski taps in perfectly to both the teenager’s experiences, but also intuitively counterbalancing it with their later perspective on events as adults. Highly recommended’ Raven Crime Reads

Changeling

MATT WESOLOWSKI

They stole little Bridget

For seven years long;

When she came down again

Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back,

Between the night and morrow,

They thought that she was fast asleep,

But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since

Deep within the lake,

On a bed of fig-leaves,

Watching till she wake.

—William Allingham, ‘The Faeries’

‘Nurse had told me all about them long ago, but she called them by another name, and I did not know what she meant, or what her tales of them were about, only that they were very queer. And there were two kinds, the bright and the dark, and both were very lovely and very wonderful, and some people saw only one kind, and some only the other, but some saw them both.’

—Arthur Machen, ‘The White People’

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Episode 1: The Party Palace

Episode 2: The Fair Family

Episode 3: Cauliflowers Fluffy and Cabbages Green

Episode 4: The Wood-Knockers

Episode 5: How Beautiful You Are

Episode 6: The Monster

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 1

00:00:00

A Letter

When the letter comes, the handwriting on the front sends a tingle of fear from the base of your spine, up to the knobbly occiput at the back of your skull. As if an icy finger has been placed delicately on each nerve ending. The handwriting is frail and spidery; the letters are either too big or too small. It’s like a child tried to write in copperplate.

You can hardly bear to hold the creased, yellowed envelope. You stand in the hall with it, balancing the edges against your fingertips.

But you open the letter because that’s what you do: you look at things that shouldn’t be looked at, you read things that are best left unread.

Dear Mr King,

I am writing to you as a recent convert to your show. I have always been interested in true crime but I am new to podcasts. I am an old dog learning new tricks! I have listened to every series of Six Stories to date and I have been entertained and fascinated by the cold cases you investigate. You have brought me great comfort as well as company and for that I want to thank you.

I am sorry about the bad things that have happened to you during the last few years and hope you are keeping well. It’s sometimes what happens, though, when we raise our heads above the parapet. When we make ourselves known, we can be judged.

But I digress. The reason for my writing is, I imagine, probably quite common. You’ve seen many requests like this, I’m certain. But I will not be able to rest knowing I did not ask.

You see, I want to suggest a case – one that I think would fit perfectly into Six Stories – just as Six Stories has slotted perfectly into my life. I am an old person – in more than just year – and your podcasts have brought me comfort in my old age. I am reaching out to you to help you like I feel you have reached out to me and helped me.

You’re old enough to remember Alfie Marsden – the little boy who disappeared in 1988. I write this as a statement, not a question.

You sigh. Alfie Marsden. You’ve heard that name, as have most people. You don’t need to have been alive when he disappeared to know about him. The little boy who vanished in a wood.

It’s not the first time someone’s suggested you scratch through this particular shallow grave. But this one is worse than a grave. There’s nothing but a hole – an empty space where a child has been.

It’s been thirty years since Alfie Marsden disappeared and his name still carries a faint resonance. Alfie Marsden is no longer the name of a missing boy, he is a euphemism for caution, for keeping your children close.

You realise you’re clenching your teeth. That place – Wentshire Forest. The name thrums through you like a heartbeat and you can hear yourself whispering it:

Wentshire Forest, Wentshire Forest, Wentshire Forest.

You’ve heard all the stories about the place. Apart from the missing boy, you know of the strange things that are said to go on in that darkness between the leaves.

You shiver and nearly drop the letter.

Alfie Marsden. It’s a case that’s tailor-made for Six Stories, right?

Maybe that’s why you don’t want to touch it. Maybe that’s why even the thought of looking into Alfie Marsden and Wentshire Forest fills you with…

What?

They say that there’s a curse – that going in there does something to you. But that’s all nonsense. And you can’t even get into the forest anymore, can you? Didn’t the army or the air force buy it up?

You find yourself pulling out your phone to check this. But then you stop.

Leave it alone.

I think that Alfie Marsden and what happened to him shouldn’t be forgotten. Anyone can see that this is already happening. There are young people these days that don’t even know the name. I have a home help – a lovely boy not long into his twenties. He’s the one who told me about you: Mr King and your podcasts. He had no idea who Alfie Marsden was, and this made me rather sad.

I imagine you’ve probably had this suggested to you before and my voice is one of many who implore you to look over another cold case, another dead child. But I think I have something I can offer in return.

I’m sure this is something else you’ve heard from people asking you to investigate cases – especially ones that are close to their hearts. I’m afraid I’m no different: I was close to the Alfie Marsden case and I can offer you insights that I believe have not surfaced before. I don’t want anything in return, save to speak to you in person and tell you what I know.

So I’ll leave you with the choice: reply to me or not.

Thank you for reading.

There’s a name.

An address.

And a choice.

1st August 2018, 12:05 p.m.

I’m going to do this like I’ve always done it: start recording now, at the point of conception. It works best this way; on the nights I can’t sleep I listen back to myself gabbling on like this. Sometimes it helps. Also, it’s a record. For my own safety.

OK. Alfie Marsden. There’s a whole thread on the Six Stories Reddit about him. Let’s just pull it up:

‘A missing kid and a forest full of ghosts, someone’s said. ‘What’s NOT Six Stories about it???’ That’s true, to be fair.

So why is it that I. Just. Can’t?

I’ve read about it. Christ, hasn’t everyone? I’ve pulled up some YouTube videos here. There’s that press conference – the parents. I just can’t bear to watch those two in that grainy old footage.

I’ve got that other video up as well, the one everyone’s seen. That psychic who talked to the Sun. The one who said the kid was somewhere in the woods. How could anyone do that?

I can’t watch that one either. It makes me feel awful, as if a storm cloud has floated in through my ear and parked itself in the middle of my brain.

I’ll bring up Google Maps. That’s proactive. I’ll type in the postcode, find out who sent that letter.

Where is it? Oh, OK. Have I even heard of this place? Let’s zoom in. Here we go: a nondescript row of houses, flanked by hedges and pavements.

So it’s right here, in one of these houses, that I’ll apparently hear something new about the Alfie Marsden disappearance.

It’s like an urban myth, a legend that has refused to die; this case has resurfaced again and again in my life. This case has an inexorable pull. Whether I like it or not.

So this is why I’m recording now. This letter will be the place where I’m going to start.

Can you hear that? The ice-cream van outside? That little twinkly tune that means summer and laughter and holidays? The call to seven-year-olds across the country.

I’m going to turn off before the tears come.

Episode 1: The Party Palace

—Nine-nine-nine emergency. Which service do you require?

—Police. I need the police.

—Can you tell me the nature of the emergency, sir?

—My boy … they’ve got my little boy [indistinguishable]. He’s gone! Oh God, please hurry! [A noise that sounds like wind interspersed with indistinguishable shouting.]

—Sir. Sir?

—I’m here. I’m here. Please hurry!

—Sir? I’m having trouble hearing. I need you to give me some details: can you tell me where you’re calling from?

—Are they coming?

—Sir, I can get the police dispatched quicker if you remain calm. Sir … can you hear me?

—Yes. Yes, I’m here. I’m calling from a phone box. I don’t know [indistinguishable].

—Can you tell me the area, sir? Can you give me an address?

—I don’t know. I can’t think!

—You need to tell me where you are, sir. Can you see any landmarks?

—Baxter’s … Baxter’s Buildings. That’s what the sign says. Over the way.

—Baxter’s Buildings. Can you tell me which road you’re on?

—I’m not. It’s … my son! He’s gone!

—I know. It’s OK, sir, just be calm and tell me where you are.

—He was asleep. Strapped in. I don’t understand how he could just have gone!

—Can you stay calm and tell me where you are? Baxter’s Buildings, that’s all I have.

—Wentshire! Wentshire Forest Pass…

—Thank you. I think I know where you mean. Are you near the development? The place they’re building that resort?

—I see it! Through the trees, the sign.

—Sir. I’m alerting local services as we speak. Is your vehicle on the road?

—The layby. In the parking place.

—So now we know where you are, can you tell me again what’s happened? You said your son is missing, correct?

—I was out of the car for a minute – five minutes! The engine, it was coming from the engine! [Burst of static]

—How old is your son, sir?

—Seven. He’s got, um, blond hair – sandy, short. He’s little – three, four foot tall? He’s called Alfie! Oh God!

—You’re doing really well. So, he’s called Alfie. We’re going to help you find him, OK?

—He’s wearing a red knitted jumper with a … with a lion on it [sobbing]

—Can you tell me your name, sir?

—Sorrel. Sorrel Marsden.

—OK, Sorrel, a car is on its way. Is there a road sign or anything? What about inside the phone box? Are there any details, a place name, or a number?

—There’s nothing here. Just this road, and the phone box. And the building site. Diggers. There’s no one here, though – it’s empty.

—OK, OK, you’re doing great, Sorrel. Keep talking to me. The police are on their way.

—Please hurry! There it is again. It’s … [indistinguishable]

—Sorrel, I need to know what happened with your son. You said he was in his chair and then he was gone, is that right?

[indistinguishable crackling and wind before a violent tapping noise]

—Sorrel? Hello? Hello?

—Please … [indistinguishable] have to help me! [indistinguishable] can’t believe he’s gone!

[indistinguishable crackling, tapping and wind noises]

What you have just heard is the full 999 call from the night of 24th December 1988. Christmas Eve. The night that seven-year-old Alfie Marsden disappeared, never to be seen again.

Alfie Marsden was officially declared ‘presumed dead’ in March 1995, seven years and three months after his father, Sorrel, made that call.

It is now just over thirty years since Alfie vanished. He has been legally dead for twenty-three of those years.

Some say that Alfie’s disappearance in 1988 was one controversy too many for Wentshire Forest and led to the majority of the site being closed to the public. But this only meant the ghoulish draw of the forest intensified, as did the speculation in the press. Descriptions of the various alleged occurrences between the tangled branches of one of England’s most ancient woods became distorted and bloated. With story upon story, claim upon claim, Wentshire Forest had become a place synonymous with horror.

—I’ll tell you something: that child disappearing, bless his little soul, was what stopped us in the end. Not any of that other nonsense.

It was out of respect for that poor family – his mother and father. Who would want to go stay in Wentshire Forest after that?

The voice you’ve just heard is seventy-year-old Sir Harrison Baxter, co-founder of Baxter’s Homes. You’ll know the name – pretty much every town in the UK has at least one Baxter’s development. What you may not know, however, is that before Baxter’s Homes, there was a smaller, burgeoning enterprise known as Baxter and Blackwood’s Great Escapes.

Baxter’s became a public limited company in 1990, and after the death of his business partner, Humphrey Blackwood, Sir Harrison retired. Today, he lives in comfort on the Devonshire coast. His former company still thrives today, rivalling Barrett Homes in the UK property development market. Sir Baxter is forthcoming and spritely, staring out over the English Riviera with a glass of orange juice in his hand.

—Back then, we made luxury holiday parks. Great Escapes, we called them. Lovely little log-cabin communities. We had them designed and built by a small firm Humphrey discovered on holiday in Norway. We expanded the designs and helped the firm build up their workforce, then brought them over to the UK to make our holiday homes.

But after what happened to Alfie Marsden, God bless him – after what happened at Wentshire – we lost all our impetus. That’s when we moved into property development. It was a natural direction to take, and had nothing – I tell you, nothing – to do with anything else.

It should be mentioned that Wentshire Forest’s reputation as a hotspot for paranormal activity was established long before Sir Harrison decided to clear a spot of land and create Baxter and Blackwood’s biggest and most ambitious holiday resort so far.

—We actually got further than was reported, you know. We’d levelled the land, drained it and begun building the cabins before everything got halted to look for the child. I’ll tell you now, not one contractor reported anything out of the ordinary on that site. Not to me anyway. All of that stuff is just hokum, made up by cranks and the media.

I believe he’s still going, isn’t he? The father? Still looking? Best of luck to him, I say. The poor man.

I pray to God that one day he finds some peace. I pray that one day he’ll find what he’s looking for.

But I believe that day may never come.

Welcome to Six Stories.

I’m Scott King.

A great many of you presumed that this series would not make a comeback after the controversy surrounding the death of Arla Macleod in 2018, and the incident with Brian Mings the previous year. I have done a lot of soul-searching about both those incidents and have come to a simple conclusion:

The show must go on.

Over the next six weeks, we will be looking back at the disappearance of Alfie Marsden on Christmas Eve, 1988. We’ll be doing so through six different perspectives, seeing the events that unfolded through six different pairs of eyes. You know, by now, that, after that, it’s up to you. I don’t pretend to have the answers to any of the cases I cover. I am not here to offer opinion; I simply rake up old graves.

Let’s start by stating the facts.

Sorrel Marsden was driving his seven-year-old son, Alfie, along the A road known as Wentshire Forest Pass, travelling from the home of his ex-partner in Audlem, Cheshire, to his own home in Wrexham, North Wales. At 11:05 p.m., a 999 operator received the call you heard at the top of the episode. Sorrel Marsden’s story has not changed since that day. Whether his story is fact remains to be seen. What is true is that, at some point in the evening, he stopped his Fiat Panda because of a strange sound coming from the engine. Sorrel claims that Alfie was asleep in his booster seat and did not wake when he pulled the car over to the side of the road. Sometime while Sorrel was looking under the car’s bonnet, Alfie disappeared.

Sorrel Marsden’s account of what happened that night has been held up to the light, speculated upon and debated. Yet it has never been proved. Nor has it been discredited.

But let’s stay with the facts for now.

Let’s slip between the trees.

Wentshire Forest straddles the border of England and Wales, bleeding into both countries like a green ink blot on the map. Predominantly oak, some of the trees at the forest’s heart are more than five hundred years old, and the whole site is classed as ‘ancient woodland’. Wentshire Forest was a declining National Park with little tourism when it was purchased in 1999 by the Ministry of Defence. Wentshire Air Force Base now squats amid the trees. The woodland on either side of Wentshire Forest Pass is now enclosed by barbed-wire-topped fences and the occasional security camera. A fine of £1000 has been levied on a couple of occasions against those who have attempted to creep in.

Wentshire Forest Pass is a former Roman road. It was once known as the ‘Cripple’s Road’ and, uncharacteristically for a Roman route, snakes up and around the steep incline before descending into either England on one side and Wales on the other. An archaeological dig conducted in the early eighties discovered what are thought to be Iron Age weapons.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, a Bronze-Age skeleton known as the ‘Wentshire Cripple’ was found in the early 1900s beneath a burial mound at the top of the hill, alongside an array of pots and animals. The skeleton was first thought to be a chieftain of the ‘Pobl y goedwig’ or ‘People of the Forest’. These forest people were a Celtic tribe, an offshoot of the warlike Deceangli. The origins of the skeleton, however, are a focus of debate. Recent CT scanning and modern archaeological research techniques have revealed that the deceased, a woman, had both legs purposefully broken before she died. Marks on her teeth and the position of her jaw suggests a stone was placed in her mouth post-mortem. And why it might have been done is unknown. It is also unclear whether the road was named after the skeleton or vice versa.

‘The Wentshire Witch’ is a cautionary local folktale about the forest, but its origins are unclear, although it’s difficult not to connect it to the ‘Wentshire Cripple’.

Extract from ‘The Wentshire Witch’, Border tales: New Versions by Felicity Kilbracken

(Ellie Hill Publishing, 1981)

And thereupon, the traveller heard such beautiful singing, which drifted out to him between the trees. He heard lyres and lutes and the sound of breath in wooden pipes, all of these sounds swirling and whirling and dancing in his mind. He was sure he could smell roasted meat, and his mouth began to water as, in his mind’s eye, he could see a merry camp of folk all laughing and singing. The thought stirred his heart, as well as his nose and stomach. The traveller quite forgot his journey, he even forgot his horse, and found himself walking into the trees, his feet barely touching the ground as the music guided him deeper and deeper into the forest.

From the folds of her hollow oak tree, black and dead at the centre of the forest, and on which no leaves grew, the Wentshire Witch kept calling, kept singing her song, rubbing her belly and smacking her lips as she heard the traveller approach. She would not go hungry today…

Perhaps, like many cautionary tales, the story of the witch was dreamed up to keep young children from getting lost in the forest. As we will come to see, it does share many elements with the folklore surrounding the forest and the rumours about what dwells beneath its branches.

I ask Sir Harrison about whether the history of the site had any influence on his purchase.

—Tommyrot, the lot of it. The only horror story that ever happened in Wentshire Forest was the disappearance of that poor little boy.

It clearly pains Sir Harrison more to talk about Alfie Marsden than it does his failed business.

—I went there personally to join the search for that boy, I even paid for a load of extra bodies to assist, most of whom declined the money but searched anyway. The issues with the equipment were … unfortunate. I found the backlash to that particularly upsetting – personally I mean. It was beyond our control.

The disappearance of Alfie Marsden prompted waves of sympathy and would fill the front pages of the British press for months.

Sir Harrison’s contractors were the first to assist the police in the search of Wentshire Forest, but the issues with their equipment, which Sir Harrison mentions, would remain a bone of contention for years to come, and their first good intentions would be widely forgotten. These contractors searched through the night for the missing boy, but their lack of judgement and their malfunctioning equipment ended up doing more harm than good. For example, the brakes and engine of a flatbed truck gave up the ghost only metres from Sorrel Marsden’s car, sending the vehicle almost onto its side, blocking the road and obliterating any forensics that might have otherwise been salvaged. With no single person to blame, the vitriol and outrage seeped its way back to Blackwood and Baxter, and their company was condemned for hindering the search.

Local and national searches for Alfie went on for years after he vanished. Sorrel Marsden still makes a yearly pilgrimage to the area, and walks the Wentshire Forest Pass in search of his son. A bus stop, erected after Alfie disappeared, but which then fell into disuse, now serves as a small memorial to the boy. The local people treat Sorrel Marsden with great sympathy. On cold days, people are known to drive up to the pass with food and hot drinks, which are passed through the windows of vehicles to the shuffling pensioner, a shadow bound to the forest by his grief.

But back to that night.

As I’ve mentioned, Sorrel Marsden placed the call to the emergency services at 11:05 p.m. He was at the edge of the Baxter’s development site, not far from the pass. The contractors had recently demolished a row of abandoned buildings. Back in 1988, phone boxes were much more common, and it was not particularly strange that one stood in such a remote location.

Officers from Heddlu Gogledd Cymru (North Wales Police) arrived approximately an hour later to find Sorrel Marsden curled into a ball inside the phone box.

While a statement was being taken from Sorrel, the first responders began a preliminary hunt for Alfie, and more police and the ambulance service were called to the scene. A perimeter was quickly established and that was when Sir Harrison’s company was asked to assist.

—Those lights … that was the start of it. There was not a single piece of equipment that behaved as it should that night. Some people even thought we’d deliberately sabotaged it all! Humphrey himself drove down there on Christmas Eve to try and help. We did all we could. But that forest, it was as if it was against us from the start.

These are pertinent words, as we will discover.

Sir Harrison now explains to me the effect the calamity surrounding the initial search for Alfie Marsden and the resulting negative press had on his business partner.

—That was the beginning of the end for Humphrey. It ripped him open – the idea that anyone would think we’d done any of this for our own gain. When I got to the site myself, I could already see what it was doing to Humphrey, the newspaper reporters around him like vultures.

—Do you think that’s what killed him in the end?

—Doubtless. He used to dream about that little boy, you know? Humphrey said he used to dread going to sleep, because he kept hearing his little voice crying from the forest and he couldn’t do anything to help him.

Humphrey Blackwood was found dead at his home the following year, a cocktail of prescription medicine and alcohol in his system. His death was reported as suicide.

Back to the night of 1988.

The initial search effort had already been hindered by the weather and the denseness of the forest. The pass was closed so that a new team of officers could comb the area, but this was only after a huge delay while they moved the contractor’s vehicles and equipment. The half-constructed development in the forest was searched first. One of the most famous – and poignant – photographs of the time shows a rough line of police in oilskins, drenched through, heads down, sticks in their hands, pushing through the relentless forest. The oak trees in that photograph rear up all around them like claws. Between the trees great swathes of hedge woundwort and ferns lap at their shins, as if trying to push them back. The searchers’ faces are grim, eyes downcast. It is an image of futility.

The perimeter was widened further and further as the days passed. Cadaver dogs were brought to the forest and people from the surrounding communities arrive to aid in the search.

No trace of Alfie was ever found.

Let’s now go over the statement given to police by Sorrel Marsden.

Sorrel Marsden was driving seven-year-old Alfie back to his home in Wrexham from his ex-partner’s home in Audlem.

Sorrel’s former partner, and mother of Alfie, Sonia Lewis, was, allegedly, an alcoholic. According to Sorrel, he and Sonia had been trying, for Alfie’s sake, to spend Christmas together. Sorrel says he had an additional reason: Christmas was always a bad time for Sonia, so he couldn’t trust her to be alone with their son.

Sorrel states that he bathed Alfie, read him a story and put him down to sleep at around 8:30 p.m. According to Sorrel, Sonia had been drinking for most of the day and by 9 p.m. was ‘a mess’. Sorrel began wrapping presents to fill the boy’s stocking when Sonia became argumentative and abusive. Sorrel says she was angry because he was being ‘too loud’ with the wrapping paper and began to raise her voice. Alfie woke up, crying, at around 10 p.m., whereupon Sonia threw a pair of scissors at Sorrel. At that point Sorrel decided that his and his son’s safety was in jeopardy. Sorrel dressed Alfie and put him in the car. Sonia was, by this point, ‘shrieking and delusional’ and ‘could not be reasoned with’.

At around 10:30 p.m., Sorrel was driving along Wentshire Forest Pass when he heard a strange noise coming from his car. He describes it as a ‘tapping noise’ coming from the engine.

Sorrel states that he was afraid of driving any further in case he had an accident. So he stopped. At this point Alfie was still asleep. After looking under the bonnet of the car, Sorrel states he went to check on Alfie, but found the car door open, Alfie’s seat belt undone and the child nowhere to be seen.

Sorrel says he panicked and began searching in the nearby forest for his son, but the persistent rain and the darkness made this impossible.

This is when he decided that the most sensible course of action was to alert the emergency services. Sorrel, like anyone else in the area surrounding Wentshire Forest, knew about the Baxter and Blackwood development and thought he might find a phone box at the site. You heard the call he made at the start of this episode.

When the forensic search was eventually conducted at the site, it was found that Sorrel’s car had no mechanical problems whatsoever. The persistent rain and the complications with the contractors’ vehicles left little else for the police to examine.

The most unpleasant and disturbing element of Sorrel’s story is the empty car seat. What drove Alfie Marsden into the darkness of Wentshire Forest? Some have questioned whether he was driven in there at all, suggesting instead that he was lured. If that is the case, then who or what could entice a child away from his father? And this is when the idea of the Wentshire Witch is inevitably raised…

Aside from the witch, however, there are other stories that abound about the inhabitants of Wentshire Forest.

—Hey Scott. First of all, it’s a pleasure to see you’re still here, if it is you, that is!

—Who knows anymore, right?

[laughter]

The voice you’re hearing may be familiar – if you’re a fan of paranormal podcasts that is. It’s Howie Dove, host of the long-running They’re Out There.

—Seriously man, I’m honoured to be on.

—So, They’re Out There covered Wentshire Forest a year or so ago, didn’t it?

—Correct. I steered away from the Alfie Marsden disappearance as much as possible though.

—OK, so your podcast looked into the history and folklore of Wentshire Forest. I’m going to play an extract from it now.

Audio extract from They’re Out There, Episode 19: Wentshire Forest

The earliest known inhabitants of that part of North Wales were the Deceangli or the Tegeingl, who were a Celtic tribe, obliterated by the Roman invaders in around ad 48. According to the records of General Pullius Ostorius Scapula, an attempt to clear the forest to construct a silver mine was thwarted by some sort of resistance from what were known only as ‘forest people’, who held the oak trees ‘as dear as a dwelling or a palace’ and defended them ‘with terror’.

The Romans were able to build their road around the Celts’ forest but not through it, so were unable to make it a straight route.

So what do we know about these ‘forest people’? Almost nothing. There is a passage in Tacitus’s The Annals that mentions something about ‘forest ablaze’ or ‘forest lights’ … but these terms seem at odds with the idea that these people held the trees sacred.

—Howie, Wentshire Forest is a popular UFO hotspot, is it not?

—Yeah. Although, claims of bright lights above a military air force base, to me, at least, are not exactly surprising. And with the witch story and the UFOs, it’s like people are trying to layer stories upon stories to obscure other stories.

—How do you mean?

—There’s a lot more to Wentshire Forest. During the fourteenth century, the black plague was spreading across Europe, killing thousands. A passage in the writings of a local scholar states that in this area, the ‘Pobl y goedwig’ were ‘unaffected’.

—The what?

—The ‘people of the forest’. There’s no more detail than that, it’s incredibly frustrating. I did, however, read a medieval account from a pastor in a nearby village that spoke of local children being sent into the forest in exchange for some sort of ‘cure’.

—That sounds significant, given Sorrel Marsden’s story…

—Sorry, Scott, but I’d say it’s just coincidence.

—You did discover other accounts of people being lured into Wentshire Forest though, didn’t you?

—I did. During the mid-1900s, there was another pastor, this time down in Pontypool – that’s South Wales, the other end of the country. His name was Edmund Jones and he firmly believed that the ‘Tylwyth Teg’ were part and parcel of Christianity.

—Tylwyth Teg?

—The fairy folk.

—Jones stated that they favoured the oak trees, and those who cut them down ‘lost their lives by a strange aching pain’. He was also apparently ‘led astray’ by the ‘old woman of the mountain’ on Llanliddel Bryn near Pontypool. He says the same thing happened to him in Wentshire, but this time, it was a ‘dancing company with music’ that tried to ‘entice him to join their merriment between the royal oaks’. According to Jones, he held tight to an iron cross around his throat and recited scripture until they went away.

—The story of the Wentshire Witch has something about being lured into the forest with music, does it not?

—It does.

—Was there any more detail about these ‘fair folk’?

—Yes, and this is another pertinent point for your investigation. Jones claimed that the Tylwyth Teg have an admiration for ‘lovely children’ and will do their best to ‘take’ them or else exchange them for their own babies.

—Changelings?

—Precisely. In fact, Edmund Jones said he had first-hand experience of a baby that had been swapped for one of the Tylwyth Teg. When he described the changeling, he said there was ‘something diabolical in its aspect’.

—Poor kid.

—These folk beliefs were strong at the time, but that’s all they were: folk beliefs and superstitions. It was easier back then to blame birth defects or mental illness on witches and fairies.

—I suppose another big question, then, is whether Sorrel Marsden had any knowledge of these stories?

—I’m sure both Sorrel and Sonia will have known about the Wentshire Witch. But as far as I know, neither of them ever mentioned anything about fairies. Sorrel still sticks to his story, doesn’t he?

—I believe so, yes.

—Do you think you’ll interview him?

—It’s an interview that the world would want, but I very much doubt Sorrel Marsden would talk to me.

—Poor fella. Can you even imagine losing your kid like that? Have the whole world speculating on whether you killed him or not.

—I still hope he’ll speak to me, though.

—I get it, man.

Sorrel was the prime suspect in Alfie’s disappearance, and was even questioned officially for his murder, before being released. In fact, no evidence that any wrongdoing occurred has ever emerged.

—So when did you first meet Sorrel Marsden?

—It was in the kitchens at the Crown Royal in Penmaenmawr. We were just a pair of boys, like – only seventeen.

Darren Morgan is in his mid-sixties but looks ten years younger. His frame is statuesque: rugby player’s shoulders and a square jaw. We talk over a pint in his local pub in Conwy, where he lives with his wife.

—Grotty little commis chef, I was, when I left school.

—You were good friends with Sorrel Marsden?

—That’s right. Best friends, I would say. It’s amazing what a kitchen can do … it makes or breaks you.

—An intense environment then?

—Oh, it was brutal. That’s what brought us together, see? Chef burning your backside, while you’re deep in the shit in the middle of service. You’ve only got each other you to rely on, see?

—You became close quickly?

—I’m not sure if close was the right word for it. We were mates, but we were never close. Sorrel wasn’t an easy man to get to know; he put up a lot of front. He was short as well, and always had a bit of rage, didn’t he?

But kitchens are more or less like the military, and I think he liked that. You have to wear uniform, do what you’re told and put up with a big fat fucker shouting in your face. You also spend half your wages on booze at the end of the night to wind down. Ironic.

—Do you remember those times well?

—They’re all a bit blurry really. I remember seventy-six because that was the year we both moved away.

The two friends separated naturally: Sorrel had found temporary work in Wrexham and Darren found a more permanent job in Conwy, where he met his wife-to-be. Darren doesn’t know much about what Sorrel did during the time they were apart, save that he never stayed anywhere long. There’s nothing untoward about this, high turnover being common in the catering industry. But while Darren was putting down roots, Sorrel was still drifting in the wind.

A few years later, and purely by chance, Darren and Sorrel were brought together.

—We were back together again. The old team. Living in a shared house in Shrewsbury, I think. We were in our mid-twenties by that point. Working in hotels.

—Was Sorrel still the same?

—More or less. Moodier though … Angry.

—What had happened to make him that way?

—The thing about kitchens, right – well, not just kitchens, the whole catering industry – it’s incestuous, you see. Chefs shag the waitresses, waitresses shag the chefs. It’s just how it goes. Thing with Sorrel, though, he could never get on board with all that. He was always trying to have a proper relationship, you know? Boyfriend-girlfriend, kids and marriage, that sort of thing. He was only in his early twenties.

—Would Sorrel ever bring girls home too?

—Sort of. We’d bring a load of folk back and have a good drink, play some records. Then one of us might get lucky.

—I understand.

—Sorrel, though, he was always funny about it. He always had this belief that if one of the girls stayed over with him, that they were his afterwards.

—Perhaps he wanted more than a one-night stand.

—Aye. More than just a shag. That was how his mind worked. I think that was how he’d been brought up – to have respect, you know? He never really talked about his family, though. I think his gran brought him up.

—Did Sorrel ever have a stable girlfriend around this time?

—See, the way he was – that was why he ended up going with … I don’t know how to put it … girls that weren’t so good for him…

—What did he tell you, if anything, about these relationships?

—He would say he was sick and tired of dating ‘psychos’. They always seemed to be messing him about, he said. They would always be phoning him, crying and screaming and making a fuss.

—Why? Did you ever know what was going on?

—He seemed to attract the damaged ones – broken girls, girls with problems. And when you try and be nice, you end up getting hurt, that’s what Sorrel used to say. I think he wanted to look after them, be a father figure.

—Can you remember any of these women?

—Yeah. The last one he ever spent any amount of time with – the one before Sonia – Mad Mary, we called her. Oh, dear me! She was one of the chambermaids at the hotel where we were. Just another one passing through.

—Did everyone know her by this name?

—Not at first, no. Only afterwards; only after Sorrel had been with her. That’s when everyone found out. I think it was because of him.

—So she seemed fairly reasonable when they met?

—She was a character, like. She was only our age, but she’d … lived a life. She was one with the drugs and that, you see – she had a habit. Acid I think, LSD. She was bad news, that one. You could tell that just from looking at her.

—But Sorrel fell for her like he did the others – straightaway?

—Oh yeah, big time. You could see it happening. He was all over her – giving her lots of attention, lots of compliments. He was always in and out the kitchen, making sure she was OK – sometimes having a go at people if they were mean to her, that sort of thing.

—So they dated?

—Yes, and she was very … receptive, shall we say, to Sorrel’s old-fashioned charm. She liked him putting his arm around her when they were out. If we were in the pub and anyone looked at her, he was straight over, in their face. Threw it all back in his face though, she did, in the end.

Darren tells me that, much as he did later with Sonia, Sorrel distanced himself a little from his friends while he and Maryanne were together. Darren would see her sometimes in the boarding house where the two were staying, or in the pub after shifts. On her days off, she would come to the house and stay in Sorrel’s room or they would spend the afternoon in the pub.

—When did you notice things beginning to unravel between them?

—Sorrel would tell me little things. He would say she was always on at him about other women. He started to feel like he couldn’t even talk to a waitress without Maryanne finding out.

—Did you see this first-hand?

—You don’t really notice unless you’re looking, do you? Sorrel was always trying to do his best for her, but I think he found it hard. He was everything to her. Her parents weren’t in the picture, and she seemed to be all alone, save for the bad lot she bought drugs off. And he found them hard to manage.

—What was wrong?

—He says they were talking about him behind his back. Whenever he went anywhere with her they were whispering about him, bitching.

With people like them, druggies and losers, it was the drugs, see – made them all paranoid. And he and I reckoned they were jealous. I think that was true. No one else was like him. All the young girls in the restaurants and the bars, they used to flock round him, you know.

—What about when Sorrel and Maryanne were together – how did they seem then?

—Oh they used to have rows. I could hear her screaming at him in the night. He would always look tired the next day – ground down, fed up.

—But the two of you never talked about it?

—Not properly. He would say things occasionally – tell me he thought she was losing it. I think he tried his best with her, you know? But it was when she told him she was pregnant – that’s when it all went out the window.

—Pregnant?

—They’d broken up, see? He ended it, I think, but she wasn’t having it. I wasn’t there, but he told me the whole story. She came to the house on his day off with a pillow under her jumper; she was screaming and told him it was his.

—What happened?

—He told me he pulled the pillow out and threw it at her, told her to get out and never come back. She was hardly ever in work anyway. After that, everyone started talking about her, calling her ‘Mad Mary’.

Darren tells me more about the many other times Sorrel Marsden tried to cultivate a stable relationship with the various waiting staff and occasionally with fellow chefs who passed through the hotel system. All these relationships ended disastrously. Darren puts this down to unstable people trying to take advantage of Sorrel’s good nature.

—Did Sorrel find it difficult to cultivate friendships too?

—You all get along, have a drink and that after work but you don’t really have proper friends in that sort of environment. And if you do, it’s rare.

—You were Sorrel’s only real friend?

—There was someone else, now I come to think of it; another chef. I think she might have been the only woman Sorrel didn’t try and put the moves on. I forget her name – Winnie. Wendy maybe? She never tried to mess him about. I think that’s why they were mates. Like him and me, they were equals. Of course he forgot all about her when Sonia came along. Poor woman, I wonder what became of her.

I wonder what it was inside Sorrel that made him yearn to settle down.

I think of that Christmas Eve back in 1988 – Sorrel desperately clinging to an ideal of a perfect family Christmas for his little boy, despite knowing that Sonia was more or less consumed by her alcohol dependency.

Darren and Sorrel eventually moved away from Shrewsbury in early 1981, this time taking seasonal work at a holiday resort in Prestatyn, North Wales. Both men were now in their early thirties.

—This was when Sorrel met Sonia, is that right?

—It was indeed. It was her home town. Mad Mary joined us there too … unfortunately.

—Sonia was only young when Sorrel got to know her, correct?

—Oh yes. This was – what? – Eighty-one, eighty-two? I remember it well: Dayton’s, the holiday park. It was great there. We got to live in and, I tell you, it was like a holiday for us too. Sonia was working there, and Sorrel and me were in the kitchens.

—What did Sonia do?

—She was working with the kids and that, and doing the entertainment in the evening. They only picked the young, pretty ones for that. I tell you what, though, they liked to party – we all did. That’s why we called our apartment ‘the Party Palace’.

—You two would throw parties there, I take it?

—That was all Sorrel. He was single again, escaping from another crazy one, no doubt. So the whole Party Palace thing was all for his benefit.

—Was that where Sorrel first got together with Sonia?

—Oh, yeah. He was after her from the first moment he saw her. I could see when he was showing off, laying on the compliments, puffing out his chest.

—There was a bit of an age difference between Sorrel and Sonia, wasn’t there? He was, what? mid-thirties? She was much younger?

—Aye, but, you know, when he met her, I really thought that she was the one for him, despite her age.

Sonia Lewis was nineteen years old in 1981. She came from Prestatyn and worked at the holiday camp full-time. Sonia didn’t live in like the others, so she spent her nights staying on the floors of the friends she made there.

—I always felt a bit sorry for her, you know? She wasn’t like the others – she was younger, she’d never really been anywhere. Staying in our scabby apartment instead of at her parents’ house was an adventure for her…

—So, Sonia wasn’t transient like most of the workers there?

—Pretty much everyone who worked at Dayton’s moved on to somewhere else. Sonia and the older people, they were the only ones who stayed. I kept my eye out for her, I did. She was like a lost little lamb.

—Do you think that appealed to Sorrel?

—I think so, after what he’d been through with Maryanne. He was good to Sonia; he looked out for her. And he was smitten with her from the off. And as soon as he worked his charm, well, she was just besotted with him.

—Did their age gap ever bother him … or anyone else?

—I only remember one time anyone else getting funny about it. It was one of the old ones – a cleaner – been there for a hundred years, thought she owned the place. Sylvia, she was called. Face like an old boot. Sonia had taken our clothes to the laundrette, see? But she came back crying her eyes out. I’m sat in the living room, smoking my first fag of the day, trying to shake off my hangover. Sorrel’s still asleep, I can hear him snoring.

She sits down, and I ask her what’s the matter? Turns out Sonia’s been walking down the path to the laundrette and that little witch Sylvia pops out from nowhere with her mop and bucket and gives Sonia an earful!

—What did she say?

—She had a right go, apparently. Told the poor girl she should be ashamed of herself. Said that Sorrel was old enough to be her father!

—That’s harsh!

—I know. Little Sonia was in pieces. I told her that Sylvia was nothing but a dried-up little ratbag with no friends and she should take no notice of her. That made her laugh.

—How did Sorrel take it?

—You know what? We never told him. Sonia thought that was best. She didn’t want no trouble, she said. I thought he wouldn’t have cared one bit. He said that Sonia was ‘the one’ and he didn’t give a stuff about her age. But I did what she thought was best.

—Did you ever hear any other negative comments from the other staff about the two of them?

—Well, what can I say? She was pretty, and he was like a cat that got the cream, always showing her off. I think he was proud of how young she was compared to him. And I think she couldn’t believe it herself. He wasn’t a big fan of her friends, though, the young ’uns, like. And I think the feeling was mutual.

—Did you notice any signs in those early days that there might have been any problems between Sonia and Sorrel?

—They had their ups and downs, but what couple doesn’t? I think he found her hard to deal with sometimes. He told me she’d get a bee in her bonnet, get in a sulk over little things. She would start an argument then turn on the tears. That drove him nuts. I hoped she wouldn’t be another Mad Mary!

—How often would these arguments happen?

—Like I say, all we did back then was work hard, and when we finished we went on the drink. So there were arguments – it was inevitable. On her days off, Sonia would come and sit in our chalet like a good little girl, waiting for Sorrel to finish his shift. He would come back tired, and she would be on his case.

Then we’d all start drinking. That’s when it got bad, see?

There were always people coming and going at the Party Palace, and he would get attention off a lot of the women. He had the gift of the gab, see, and Sonia was still a girl, more or less. So it upset her when women more Sorrel’s age tried it on.

—How bad did the arguments get?

—I remember one time I went to the toilet in the middle of the night and found poor Sonia curled up under a towel in the bath!

—What?

—I know! I didn’t know what to do. And I was bursting for the loo! I had to wake her up. I remember it quite well actually: she was all sleepy and soft – looked even younger. They’d had a row. Then he’d fallen asleep, and was snoring his head off in his room. I was close to asking her if she wanted my bed and I’d go in the bath.

—Why didn’t you?

—I just thought it wasn’t worth the aggro. It wasn’t like Sorrel was jealous, it was more like … I knew that he’d dwell on it. So she left the bathroom, I did my business, and she came back in. I remember asking her if she was OK. I said it twice: ‘Are you OK? Really, though?’ And she said yes. That was it.

—Did Sorrel mention it? Did you mention it to him?

—Like I say, we never talked about those sorts of things. Everything just moved on, and they seemed happy. Then one day, out of nowhere, he announced that they were moving in together!

—Wow. That was a little premature, don’t you think? Especially with the relationships Sorrel had had before.

—I thought so too at first. He never said anything and suddenly he’s gone and got himself a sous-chef job somewhere else. Him and Sonia were going to buy a house. Crazy. I’d never seen Sorrel settle so easily and with someone so nice. Maybe he’d finally had some luck!

—What about you?

—I had to move on, didn’t I? When the summer season at Dayton’s ended, I was off on my merry way. My Briallen found she was pregnant, and my days at the Party Palace were at an end.

—Did you and Sorrel stay in touch?

—Sort of. I found a job back here in Conwy. Thought I’d make an honest woman of Briallen, lay down some roots. We both moved on. So we only saw each other now and then.

Darren recalls the occasional barbeque and party at the flat in Prestatyn where Sorrel and Sonia lived. Sorrel was now in his early forties, Sonia in her early twenties.

—I couldn’t keep up with the two of them anymore. As far as I could see they were still partying, drinking. I think it was better for him because he could choose who came round to see them – his mates, men his age. Sonia would totter around in her skimpy dresses; Sorrel was cock of the walk.

—Was it a happy home?

—As far as I could see. He was very protective of her still, very attentive. The drinking was a worry sometimes. With her more than him. Always pissed, she was, just legless; you couldn’t get much sense out of her. So it took me right by surprise when they told me they were trying for a baby. I mean, they were still the life and soul of the party, them two. I didn’t know if she would be able to just stop like that. I worried a bit, I suppose. I could see my own life was about to change, you see, with the little one coming. Sleepless nights, nappies, all that.

—I would have thought that was perfect for Sorrel. You said he always wanted to settle down.

—That’s what he always wanted, yes. I think he thought with Sonia, that he could … I dunno, tame her, I suppose. He could make a wife and mother out of her.

—When was the last time you saw the two of them?

—I was up there in Prestatyn for a jolly. Sorrel and Sonia were having one of their parties. He was loving it, strutting round. I was so happy for him, that he’d found happiness at last. Sonia though, she was quiet.

—Why do you think that was?

—I think it was all a bit much for her, poor lass. She was pregnant by then. Bless Sorrel, he was by her side, just like always, looking after her. That gave me hope.

There was one moment, though, when I wondered if everything was right in paradise.

—Go on.

—Well, I came across Sonia on my way to the toilet. I’d had a few myself, see? I was half-cut, babbling some rubbish about how happy I was for her. And she gave me this look. It was just for a second – just a moment.

—What did you see in that look?

—I remembered the early days, back in Prestatyn, at Dayton’s – how I used to feel sorry for her, you know? I says to her, ‘Everything alright, bach?’ And I saw then, just this sort of sadness in her eyes. I was sure she was about to say something, when Sorrel comes along and takes her in his arms, kissing her, telling her how lucky they were, all that.

—What do you think she was going to tell you?

—You know, looking back now and knowing what happened with them and their kiddie, I think she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Sounds harsh, don’t it? But I reckon she knew it herself. And that was what she wanted to say to me.

—What makes you think Sonia wasn’t cut out for motherhood? You mentioned the drinking, but was there anything else in her personality that made you feel this way?

—Her age had to come into it. Sorrel was having to look after her. He was like a father more than anything. And I think Sonia was ashamed of herself a bit. It was like she was Sorrel’s daughter rather than his lover.

After the birth of Alfie, Darren and Sorrel drifted even further apart. Aside from a few odd phone calls, the two fell out of touch completely. So, unfortunately, Darren cannot shed any light on Sorrel and Sonia’s relationship during the seven years after Alfie was born. However, Darren has helped us build a little bit of history around the couple.

I feel we’re at a point where we have all we can get from Darren, but there are two more threads I want to explore with him.

—Can I ask: what do you think happened to Alfie that night?

—Oh well, that’s just such a puzzle, isn’t it? You know how I felt the day Alfie went missing? You know that feeling – that sudden guilt when you realise you’ve forgotten something important, like your mam’s birthday? It was like that.

I saw it on the news and I felt like I should have had some idea, some insight. I remember sitting by the phone, sometimes picking it up, sometimes dialling Sorrel’s area code then putting it down again. What was I going to say to him? Briallen and me, we talked about going up there, lending a hand. We didn’t, though.

I did wonder if I should try and speak to Sonia rather than Sorrel, but I didn’t want to get between them. I sometimes wonder, though, about Sonia, about what became of her.

After Alfie’s disappearance, Sonia Lewis seemed to vanish, shunning media attention. In fact, as far as I am aware, Sonia has never spoken out about the night in question, nor has she attended the small memorials on the ten- and twenty-year anniversaries of her son’s disappearance. Apparently she now lives alone in some remote location. She has been dubbed ‘uncaring’ and ‘a disgrace to motherhood’ by the press.

Darren has become a little emotional and overwhelmed. I get from him the sense of hopelessness that pervades the case of Alfie Marsden. I decide to change tack.

—What do you take from some of the more … ‘paranormal’ theories that abounded when Alfie wasn’t found?

—Load of rubbish, isn’t it? I tell you something: there’s folk out there that have no shame, no morals and no consideration. I heard about that psychic who said Alfie was still in the wood ‘crying out for his mammy and daddy’. That made me feel sick. That was the only time I felt like going down there – so I could find that psychic. They prey on the weak and vulnerable, those people.

—What do you make of Sorrel’s story?

—I wish I had an answer. He just told the facts of what happened, didn’t he?

—If you had to come up with a theory, what would you say happened that night?

—Only Sorrel knows what went on that night. And I have no reason not to believe him. Maybe the boy woke up and got scared? Maybe he ran off and got lost? I don’t think Sorrel could have done anything different. He was in that situation by himself, no one to help him. The man I knew would have done anything for Sonia and that boy.

I just think that maybe he was telling the truth…

Darren’s utter bemusement about what happened to the son of his old friend suggests he’s coming from the same place as the rest of us. But I do feel that there’s a part of Darren that can’t allow him to face the possibility that Sorrel might have played a part in what happened to Alfie.

So what conclusions, if any, can we draw from this first episode?

We now have a little understanding about the types of people that Sorrel and Sonia were, and about their uneasy relationship. Their story is a little unconventional and there are elements that are troubling – such as the arguments they had, and, of course, Sonia’s descent into alcoholism. Their age gap, perhaps, could also be seen as controversial.

From Darren’s account, it sounds as if Sorrel rowed like mad to keep his relationship off the rocks but ultimately ran out of strength, watching in anguish as his dreams of a happy family were dashed, all of which accentuates the tragedy of Alfie’s short life.

We have also begun to build from Darren Morgan’s account a picture of Sorrel Marsden. This is a foothold – a start, I hope.

In addition, Darren mentions the ‘psychic’ who tried to assist in the Alfie Marsden case and curses the false hope that person gave to Sorrel and Sonia. Sir Harrison also discounted any talk of paranormal involvement in this case. As we all know, though, there are some stories that beg to be told.

So in episode two, we are going to stray slightly from our initial path of reason and convention. We are going to go against the grain of Darren’s final sentiments, and of Sir Harrison’s assurances. I want to look back at a few of the stranger things claimed about the forest itself.

We will hear an account from someone who actually experienced preternatural occurrences in Wentshire Forest. And we will question what, if anything these occurrences may have to do with Alfie Marsden.

So, we’ll be heading into uncertain territory – into the mystery of the forest. We’re beneath different trees this series, but our feet are sounding against the same darkness and once again we’re facing our fears head-on.

I hope you’ll join me.

This has been Six Stories with me, Scott King.

Until next time…

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 2

00:00:00

First Impressions

8th August 2018, 12:30 p.m.

I think it’s this one, this number here. Whoever wrote that letter, whoever knows where I live, lives here. They might be sitting a few metres away from me right now. This one doesn’t look like the other houses in the street; it’s not neat and trim – no astro-turf or decking; no pot plants. I can only just see the front windows past that privet; they’re mould-flecked. The porch looks like it might fall down any second.

What did that letter say? Let’s have a last look.

I can offer you insights that I believe have not surfaced before. I don’t want anything in return, save to speak to you in person and tell you what I know.

I dipped my finger into the Alfie Marsden case and something reached up and took hold. That’s how it feels now – like I’m completely immersed. That’s how some of these series happen – you don’t choose them; they choose you. I’m not putting this series out till I’ve recorded everything though. I need to keep myself safe. Anything I do could be important.

I need to get out of the car before someone twitches their curtains. I feel ridiculous but I’m really sweating here.

Right. Come on. I’ll be back.

Right. I’m back. I didn’t have the balls to walk up to the door and stand beneath the porch that looks held together by dust and dreams. I rang the immaculate doorbell of the next-door house instead.

A man answered. Glasses, checked shirt.

I gave him the cover story. It held. He told me about the letter writer. She’s a woman. He told me what he knows about her, which isn’t a lot. He puts out her bins, drags them back in. The home help comes once a day. Apart from the home help, there have been no other visitors. Not to his knowledge.

She’s not a murderer or a maniac. At least, if she is, he didn’t say, which bodes well.

OK, come on.

There was a smell; earth and rust and rain. The window beside me was a huge black eye. When I knocked, it reverberated through the house, like it was empty.

A few moments later I heard hands scrambling and shifting on the other side of the door, and this childhood terror came slithering down my spine. Some memory – just for a second. More like a feeling. A scream trapped in my throat.

When she opened the door there was a gust of air; warm like breath.

I was frozen solid, staring into her face, her eyes, unable to look away.

She shuffled towards me, holding hands out in front of her, grasping at the air. Her eyes. Her eyes! That’s what was scary at first; two sightless, milky orbs. They made her look incredibly old – older than she otherwise looked.

There was something else about her, though.

Something familiar.

And when I said hello and told her who I was, she smiled.

I made sure I didn’t wince when she reached for me with her wrinkled fingers, each one bearing a silver ring. I let her hands touch my face.

She’s a blind old lady. Nothing more.

Her name is Anne.

She invited me inside. That feeling of familiarity wouldn’t abate.

Inside, it was just a sad little house – dark and sparse with no photographs or pictures on the walls. I wondered why for a minute, before catching myself. There was a faint smell of disinfectant. The carpet in the hall was worn almost to nothing. There was a kitchen, the surfaces made of faded and blotchy Formica. A vast microwave grinned from one corner and there were two chopping boards with anglepoise lamps positioned at each corner. Turned off.

Anne’s not completely blind, she says, only nearly. The lamps help her if she wants to make a cup of tea or a snack. She’s stubborn, refuses to give up her independence. She’s certainly strange; and the way she talks is dreamy. She trails off sometimes, but that’s nothing to do with her age, she says.

Anne wears her hair long still and, along with the rings, she has bangles on her wrists. Anne says she’s still an old hippy at heart.

She sat down in the living room, and I took the only other seat. There was nothing else in the room apart from a high coffee table that sat between the two of us. On the table were an MP3 player, headphones and an archaic-looking mobile phone. Anne held out the MP3 player. The Six Stories logo appeared on the screen.

She said her home help had told her all about YouTube, and it was him who got Anne into Six Stories. And then she told me to pull out my phone and go onto YouTube.

I searched for what she told me to search and then I realised where I knew her from. I knew why Anne was familiar.

She’ll be familiar to anyone who knows the Alfie Marsden case.

After we had watched that video, Anne told me with a straight face that she stood by it – every last word.

I remained quiet. That’s always been my way. Let the other person speak. Let them tell their story.

As far as I know there’s only ever been one officially recorded incidence of the British police force approaching a psychic. Which case this was has never been revealed. All other psychic involvement in British reported crime has been instigated by the psychics themselves. Doris Stokes, one of the most famous mediums, did try to assist in the Yorkshire Ripper case at the end of the seventies, but her predictions were way off. However, it is alleged that psychics were involved in the Atlanta child murders in the eighties and the Madeleine McCann disappearance in 2007.

Anne’s involvement in the Alfie Marsden case was limited to a controversial broadcast on a UK news channel back in 1988. She looked a lot younger back then, dressed in a gypsy skirt, a beaded headband and the same bangles and rings she wears today. Her eyes were different then though: wide and brown, ringed with thick kohl.

—He’s in a royal court; safe in a royal court.

The reporter asks her what she means, and Anne looks right into the camera with those deep, brown eyes. She repeats it over and over again: ‘a royal court’. The headline everyone remembers the day after was ‘A Royal Disaster’.

Anne was intending to use her psychic powers to tell the world where Alfie Marsden was, but she also wanted to show the world that those powers were real.

She did neither.

I know I should have asked about the information she was supposed to be giving me. But even now I’m wondering if she really has anything of substance to say.

I was expecting … I don’t know what I was expecting. To tell the truth, I had forgotten all about the letter, the ‘new’ information about Alfie Marsden. In fact, I’m only remembering that right now. I can’t go back in again, though. Not today anyway.

Episode 2: The Fair Family

—I went for a slash. They didn’t have no proper toilets or nothing yet. They were supposed to come before we got there, but they didn’t. But I didn’t care. I liked it out there at first. So off I go, into the trees.

It was dark in there, proper thick an’ all. You couldn’t see nothing. The ground was dead spongy with the rain and the mud. Roots and bushes and that everywhere. I was only nineteen, and still a bit bashful, I guess, so I went in just a few trees, so no one could see.

I started pissing up against this massive tree and I remember feeling, like, proper bad about it – like I’d farted in church or something.

It was proper silent in them woods an’ all. No birds or nothing. All you had to do was go a little way in and the trees just sort of shut out the noise. I could hear the generators and the machines and that behind me but they seemed miles away, like I was in another world or something.

You know when you want to have a quick piss, right, but your bladder decides it’s time to empty about five litres out of you, yeah? It was like that … I remember it so clearly. I was pissing and it wouldn’t stop, and I just wanted to get out of there, I just wanted to run, get back to the lads. I dunno why; there was just something wrong in there, in them trees.

We all knew the Wentshire Witch stories, we were all from round the area, you know. They never scared me, even when I was a kid; I just thought they were daft. But right there, between them trees, it was eerie. It was proper dense forest; I’ve never seen nowt like it before. All the branches and that all tangled in with each other like they were holding hands.

So this is going to sound proper mad, but it was real, I swear down. Thirty years ago and I remember like it was yesterday. I don’t care if everyone who listens to this thinks I’m a divvy. I saw what I saw. I heard what I heard.

So, I’m finishing off, like, and I hear something. Like I said, all the noise behind me – the lads shouting and carrying on, the machines getting going; Clive’s radio that he could never get tuned right – seemed dead far away, you know? And what I heard wasn’t any of that.

That sound, it proper gave me the shivers. I nearly screamed. It wasn’t coming from nowhere specific, just all around. It came from one side of me and then another, like surround sound or something. It was a voice – a human voice, and it was all whispery. But it wasn’t saying proper words; they were sort of half words – you know, like when you’ve got a bad phone signal? Just bits, fragments. Proper scared me crooked, it did. I remember standing there, stock still. I could feel the hairs on me body all standing up straight, and me heart going nine to the dozen. I think I shut me eyes.

I know what people are gonna say: it was the lads messing about, like. But I swear to God it wasn’t. We’d stopped all that after the gaffer said any more and we’d be off, no questions. And if it was the lads winding me up, how did they manage to make a sort of wind noise come at me from every angle – sometimes close, sometimes far away? It can’t have been them.

Then I heard something else: the sound of branches moving, feet against leaves. I shouted out then, out of simple fear: ‘Finished. I’m on me way!’ or something, trying to sound casual. I still had me eyes closed. That movement noise just stopped and … it was like the whole place held its breath.

It was like the forest was waiting.

Then they came again – those wind words – but this time I … I recognised the voice.

I remember this feeling washing over me, this proper grief. I felt like I was going to break down. Because it was me nan. I swear on me kids’ lives, it was me nan. I opened me eyes. And I nearly screamed again. There was this old woman stood there. Well, she was sort of there but not … I dunno. There was something not quite human about her. She was old, proper old. And I knew she weren’t me nan, but at the same time, she might have been, somehow.

Me nan had been dead almost a year.

The first thing I should’ve thought of was that daft old book with the witch what lived in the tree, right? But it wasn’t the witch. And I never even thought about her.

So, I’m staring at this old bird, this old woman in the trees, and I felt this sort of pull inside me. I could hear me nan’s voice in me head saying, ‘Come ’ey, I’ve got these toffees need eating, our Cal.’ And even though I knew she weren’t me nan, something made me want to go to her. I felt like I was six years old again and I’d come off that swing at Sefton Park. I could smell that old-lady perfume she used to wear. I swear, it were proper weird … proper wrong.

That’s when I did remember the story of the witch, and I knew I had to do nothing; I had to just stand still, not go nowhere with her.

When they found me, the lads were laughing and calling me a poof and that, cos I’d been crying. I never told them nowt about what I saw.

Not at first.

Not until that little laddie disappeared.

The voice you have just heard is that of fifty-seven-year-old Callum Wright. Callum was a labourer on the Great Escapes building site in Wentshire Forest in 1988. These days he is a reliable small-business owner based in Liverpool, specialising in masonry and brickwork. Callum talks to me over a Guinness in a friendly corner bar in Liverpool city centre.

—I was a bad ’un then, you know? A proper little divvy. I didn’t give a fuck about school or owt like that. As soon as I could, I was out of there. But me mam said to us, ‘Cal, you either get yourself a job or you go back in that school, say sorry to all them teachers and get your head down.’ There was no way she would have us on the dole.

So I got on the Baxter’s site. It was easy – me mate put a word in for us, and I got picked up in a van with a load of other little divvies. The foreman said, so long as we didn’t fuck about and grafted our arses off, he didn’t give a shit. It was cash in hand, no questions asked.

As soon as we got there, though, we all knew that there was something dodgy about them woods. Even if no one said it, we all knew that there was something wrong with the place.

And when that poor little lad went missing, I mean, it was almost like we’d been warned.

That’s how it felt.

Like we’d all been warned but hadn’t listened.

You couldn’t pay me to go back to Wentshire Forest, I swear.

Welcome to Six Stories.

I’m Scott King.

Over the next six weeks, our case is the disappearance of Alfie Marsden on Christmas Eve, 1988. We’ll be looking at what happened from six perspectives. We’ll tell a story in six ways.

This episode seems like a dodge – a sudden diversion onto a side path, as if we’re taking one of those faint tracks that wind through Wentshire Forest. For it is the forest we focus on in this episode. The forest that swallowed Alfie Marsden.

Often when people talk about Wentshire Forest, it comes with a strong dose of local folklore – the witch especially.

There are a number of eyewitness accounts of strange things in the forest: lights and sounds, odd animals and apparitions. But no more than any at other site of tragedy or intrigue. And unfortunately, there is no real corroboration of any of these sightings. Only rumour and speculation. And now the Wentshire Air Force Base stands guard over those woods.

Callum Wright could be easily described as a sceptic – a working-class Scouser who doesn’t suffer fools. He has no interest in the paranormal, and in the short time that I speak to him, does not appear to be interested in the tall tales of Wentshire Forest.

—All I can tell you, mate, is what I seen. No more than that. And I’d like to say, on record, that all that witch stuff is just there to sell stuff. At least it was, when you could still go into those woods.

Throughout the build-up to this interview, Callum has been very clear that he doesn’t want to sound ‘disrespectful’ about what happened with Alfie Marsden. And despite what he claims happened to him on the Great Escapes site, he doesn’t want to seem to be trying to explain what happened to that little boy in 1988.

—I tell you one thing, mate: it’s stuck with me, it has. That poor kiddie. No wonder the father’s the way he is. I was there; and I helped with the search, when all the machines were failing. I was stood in the dark, in the rain, trying to make those lights, which had worked no problem up until then, come back on again.

Callum recalls the initial search for Alfie that night. He says even then it felt futile. He can’t explain why, but he knew they’d never find the child.

—And he’ll never be found now, will he? Breaks my heart, stuff like that.

—What do you think might have really happened?

—You know, if that poor little lad hadn’t gone like he did, what I’m here to tell you would just be some mad story – one of those tales that you tell in the pub. But now, after all these years, here I am in a pub, about to tell you that story.

I feel as if Callum is hedging in order to avoid having to start telling his tale. So I assure him that so long as he’s sincere and tells his side of things, no one will accuse him of disrespecting what happened to Alfie Marsden.

—Why don’t you just tell me about what you saw and experienced when you worked on the Baxter’s site?

Callum takes a huge gulp of his pint. He sighs and shakes his head.

—So, the first morning I went down there to graft, it was a bit of a clean-up job. They’d just felled a load of trees, made some space and that, and we were there to get it ready for the diggers. We’d been bombing along the country roads in the back of this van for fuckin’ hours. I felt like I was going to vom. We stopped for a breather about halfway, and we were on this track in the middle of the wood – just one set of ruts in the earth really. The trees were packed all around us. You couldn’t see nothing. I remember everyone kept their voices down, and there was just this huge silence. And then, all of a sudden, there was this big rush of wind, hissing through the trees, and everyone jumped. It was like that fuckin’ place was laughing at us. I was scared. We all were, but no one wanted to admit it.

Callum describes the site as being in its infancy. None of the diggers and excavators had arrived yet. There was a perimeter, made up of hoardings, keeping the public out, and there were a few shipping containers, Portakabins and storage boxes for tools. The crew of young builders ate their meals in the vans. Later, some Portakabins and Portaloos would arrive. The builders had been given the opportunity to stay over in the Portakabins so the work could be done quicker. Callum was game for staying, as were some of the other younger lads.

—I was all good with that. They were gonna provide us with a free brekky, sleeping bag and that. It was going to be a laugh.

There were also, Callum says, remnants of a few older buildings on the site.

—I have no idea what they were. Barns or something, maybe? One of those overnight places for people who do hunting and that? Some stones and bricks, half a wall here and there. There was a phone box, though; we called it the Tardis, cos it looked proper mad, just sat there in the woods all on its own.

—What was the work like in those early days?

—It was dark and it was cold and it was quiet. It was like the day had only got started then it was over. The first job was shifting all the old bricks from them old buildings into this massive skip. Each time one of them bricks hit the skip, the clang sent a little shiver through us. And whenever anyone started trying to chat, the conversation just sort of died. Like, no one wanted to speak. You could feel the trees all around you, pressing you in. The foreman had this boom box that he tried to get working – the radio and that, you know? He gets it plugged in but all he can get is static. The volume was fucked as well, it was dead loud, just this blasting static for ages while he tried to get it working. Must have been the trees. No signal or whatever.

So we’re about halfway through that clearing job. Me back’s aching, me hands are hurting despite them gloves, and I’m sick of me life. We’re all stood about with our fags and that, glad for the break…

—Did something happen?

—Yeah. Must have been out the corner of me eye, I seen something move, so I looked round.

—What was it?

—It’s gonna sound daft, this: it was like an animal. Of course there was probably loads of animals in the woods, but this wasn’t like any animal I’d ever seen. Never seen nowt like it since. Never want to either.

—No?

—So, anyway, after them bricks were done, we had to do some digging. Getting rid of roots and that from the trees that’d been felled. The digger was due and the gaffer was going off his nut cos it was late. He spent half his time in the Tardis – that phone box – shouting and swearing and kicking the door.

So we got a load of spades out one of them storage boxes, and we start digging around them tree stumps. It’s dead sticky and awkward, full of roots and rocks and I’m working up a bit of a sweat when I get this nasty feeling.

—What sort of feeling.

—Me nan used to talk about a ‘goose walking over your grave’. It was that sort of feeling.

And I know without looking that something’s watching us. I go a bit slower, not letting on that I’ve noticed. I can feel all the hairs on the back of me neck rising up, and I’m sort of playing this game with meself. Like, I’m trying dead hard not to look. Every time I want to, I don’t. And somehow, somehow, whatever is there, behind us, in the trees, knows that I’m playing this mad little game.

—And when you did finally look…?

—I nearly shat meself, cos I thought it was a wolf. A dirty great wolf stood there not five feet behind us. I remember I must have jumped or gasped or something, cos one of the others who was working next to us, he follows me gaze.

‘What the fuck’s that?’ he says. I remember, in that moment, I wanted to give him a hug.

—Why?

—Cos it meant if someone else had seen it, I wasn’t losing me mind. We both watched whatever it was slinking away, back into the dark.

—What do you think it was now?

—See, that’s the funny thing. The other lad, he reckoned it was a boar. He said they look more like wolves than pigs. But I remember it wasn’t shaggy like a boar, it was … sleek. Smooth haired, like a dog.

—Was it only the two of you who saw something? Did you tell anyone else?

—Yeah just us two that day, and no, we didn’t say nothing. Not then anyway. Remember this was only a few days in. It was time for dinner then anyways, and nothing else weird happened. Not till the next day anyway.

This is when Callum tells me about seeing the old woman – the account you heard at the beginning of the episode. He didn’t tell a soul about what he’d seen, convincing himself that it was a dream or a hallucination.

That same afternoon, the digger appeared to help pull out the stumps of the trees. But it worked sporadically, sometimes the engine was chugging away, sometimes it was dead. The work seemed to take an age and in the weeks that followed, very little progress was made.

—We were all getting bored, pissing about like school kids. That nervousness hadn’t gone away and everyone was buzzing. People started talking. They started joking around and that: ‘Watch out for the cat that’s sat up the branches’, that sort of thing. You were trying to make your mate jump, like. ‘Hey, Cal, you seen that six-legged pig over there?’ Trying to make each other turn round. If you did, everyone’d laugh. Then – I can’t remember when – everyone started saying that they did see stuff in them woods, like me and that other lad had.

—And these weren’t just jokes?

—No one was laughing. When we were sat having a brew and that, people started talking about the animals they’d seen in the trees while we were grafting. They’d just ‘appear’ – a dog, a goat, and this divvy lad said he’d seen this massive black ram with curly horns and red eyes that stood there, glaring at him and growling. You would see someone look behind them and you’d look too, just to see a flash of something vanishing into the trees.

—What were people’s reactions to these sightings?

—We were funny about it. No one laughed, no one took the mick. Cos it rattled us – we didn’t want to hear stuff like that anymore.

Especially me. I didn’t see her again – that old woman – but there were times when I thought I could hear her. Always whispering, always saying something I couldn’t quite hear. So if anyone talked about stuff they’d seen in the woods, I just put me head down and got on with it.

—Was there any kind of consensus about these sightings?

—Not really. It was like … like everyone was waiting for someone else to say something. Like at school when something bad happens and everyone waits for the teachers to take control. Except no one was. But then, one morning, the foreman put us all in a line – like when someone goes missing, you know?

—You mean he was having you sweep the area?

—Yeah, but he was vague about it. He just told us to look for ‘anything that shouldn’t be there’.

—And was there?

—No. Of course not. It was just trees and roots and rock and bracken. No wolves, no sheep, nothing like that.

—Did the sightings stop?

—Well, by then we were a few weeks in, and the rest of the stuff had started to arrive – the toilets, the Portakabins, all the machines. It was becoming more like a proper building site, well, sort of. It wasn’t like any building site I’ve worked on since. It was a comedy of errors that place, a proper mess.

Callum goes on to tell me about how even basic tasks seemed hampered. Deliveries of materials simply didn’t show up; machines kept losing power or else seemed to move of their own accord. This was becoming a safety risk and many of the lads on the site began to quit. Some just called their dads or their mates, asking them to pick them up. Some of them just walked off. That’s when the press began to cotton on and started printing stories about what was happening.

—We all knew it was the lads who left who went to the papers. For a little while I thought it’d be a good thing, you know? Might shame the bosses into getting their fingers out, sort out some decent kit for us.

—And did it?

—It was the exact opposite, mate. The papers started taking the piss, calling it ‘The Witch’s Curse’. They were laughing at us – listing everything that was going wrong. The whole thing became a joke. But for those of us who were actually there, it was horrible.

Things became desperate on the site. Costs were increasing daily and the completion date for the project was looking increasingly unrealistic. It certainly explains why, when Sorrel Marsden drove his son through Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve, Great Escapes was still a building site.

—It was getting daft. The gaffer was kicking off, his boss was kicking off at him. He was never out of that phone box. I remember one afternoon, it had started raining – it always seemed to be raining there. Me and the other lads were in one of the new Portakabins, having a brew and that. Anyways, we’re chatting and dossing about when Clive, the foreman, comes in with his face all red, in a proper rage. He almost tears the door off the hinges.

‘Which one of you little pricks keeps doing it?’ he’s shouting, and we’re shocked, just looking at each other. No one knows what he’s on about.

‘Come on!’ he says. ‘Who is it? Tell me now or the lot of you will be out on your arses, and walking back!’

No one said owt, and none of us laughed or anything.

—What exactly did he think you had done?

—We didn’t know for ages! We only found out later when one of the older fellas told us. Apparently, when Clive had been on the phone, in the Tardis, someone was knocking on the door and running away.

—Did you know who was doing it?

—No! I mean we were all young and a bit daft and that, but we weren’t that dumb. Besides, we were all in the Portakabin. And no one wanted to get kicked off site.

Clive was on one after that though. You only had to look at him wrong and he’d go for you.

The pressure from the press and the missed deadlines were getting to everyone. Nevertheless, the work continued. But, yet again, another problem arose. Callum explains.

—We had to expand the site. There was some planning rule or other that meant we had to widen the areas around the cabins a bit. It was only a metre or so. But that meant clearing more of the trees.

—But you were builders.

—That’s right. We knew nothing about cutting down trees. But we had the lads coming to make the cabins in a few weeks. They were specialists coming over from Norway. Their kit had already arrived in a shipping crate. Anyway Clive told us young ’uns that we would just have to get on with cutting down the trees. I dunno what he was thinking; things must have been desperate.

—So you young lads who stayed over at the site, it was down to you to clear some more trees.

—Yeah. You couldn’t get away with it now. Basically what we had to do was get up when it was still dark, stick the big lamps on and work together, one tree at a time. Clive didn’t let us use the chainsaws or nowt like that, but there were axes and all sorts on site. It’s a wonder no one was hurt. But we just got on with it.

And that’s when stuff started getting weird. Really fucking weird.

Clive had us all up at 4 a.m. the next morning. He was in a proper stink, shouting and banging on the Portakabin. We made our way up to the edge of the site. Right to the tree line. I remember in that morning gloom, it looked so … solid. I remember thinking where would we even start with this. Clive’s just stood in front of us, swinging his torch. He’s grumbling and swearing and he starts giving it:

‘Right, which one of you little bastards was it?’

We’re just dead confused. He just stood there, shining that torch in our faces and yelling about someone knocking on the door of his Portakabin all night. He looks like he’s not slept a wink. Then he starts handing out these axes, points to one of the trees and just tells us to hurry up. I remember walking past him and seeing his face; his eyes all bloodshot, he looked haunted. I said something to him about how none of us were doing any knocking on his door, and he just looked at me, uncomprehending, like I was something from another universe. Maybe that’s when I knew that there was something wrong with all this.

Anyways, so we select this tree, the one nearest by. And as soon as we do, the wind starts up and all the trees start waving back and forth, we could hear the branches hissing, like a snake if you get too close. We’re all standing there, looking about, and Clive starts shouting, waving the torch. He gets a couple of the lads to set up the lamps and some of the others to pull some of the rope out of the shipping container and attach it to the tree.

Dawn was breaking as the crew got set up and began to clear some of the forest. Using the hand-axes, the group managed to get a rhythm going and felled two of the trees. The trees were then stripped and added to the piles that were to be used for the log cabins. Callum says it wasn’t too bad a job and after the initial unpleasantness from Clive, spirits were high.

—When it got light and them two trees were down, we went to get something to eat. The rest of the lads were up and had breakfast going. It was cold so we all went back to the Portakabin to eat. We were just having a laugh and that, stuffing our faces with bacon butties, when it started…

—What did?

—The banging. I say banging, but I think that’s the wrong word. It was more like loud knocking.

—Knocking on what?

—The door, the windows, the walls. All over, I remember we just thought it was the other lads messing about. We were banging back at first, shouting all sorts, laughing. But it didn’t stop; it just went on … all this knocking on the walls. After a bit it started getting annoying. One of the lads stuck his head out the door and when he came back in, he was all crumpled up, confused. He said there was no one there.

We all went out then, looked up and down, but he was right, there was no one. The other thing that really got to me that day was just how still everything was. Like, when someone’s messing on and that, you can almost feel this energy in the air, like you know they’re hiding behind something, laughing at you. Not this time.

—You were saying that the banging didn’t sound like banging.

—Like I say, it was definitely a knocking, but loud. It’s hard to explain. Like a tapping. With a finger or a knuckle rather than a hand or a fist. I tell you what, though, that knocking was what undid everything.

—How do you mean?

—Mate, that knocking. It. Never. Stopped.

Callum’s entire body stiffens and his hand curls into a claw around his glass. I’m worried it will shatter all over the table. He lifts his other hand to the side of his head and the wrinkles around his eyes and forehead deepen.

—I still jump, mate. I still wince if I hear it.

Callum raps on the underside of the table with his knuckles. He winces and swirls the dregs of his drink. I am about to offer to buy him another, but he waves me back.

—Don’t. Let me get this out.

—OK, no problem. You said the knocking was constant.

—I don’t know how no one went insane. All day and all night it went on. On all the Portakabins – the doors, the windows, the walls. Sometimes it would stop for a bit. Five minutes, an hour, sometimes nearly a whole day. There was no pattern to it. It was cold but no one wanted to be inside. We spent as much time as we could outside, grafting. You couldn’t hear it when you were shifting logs and pulling up roots. There were these rocks as well, and we had to get the JCBs in for most of them. But the lads that were working them soon stopped.

—Why?

—It was the knocking – on the doors, the windows, the ceilings of the vehicles. I remember going and sitting in with someone once, so they could prove they weren’t losing their mind. It was fucking insane. That knocking came from anywhere you weren’t looking. Above your head, behind your back, over your shoulder, it was horrible. If you tried to look round it would move. It was like it knew.

—And everyone heard it?

—Everyone. More of the lads left the site cos they couldn’t take it. And I don’t blame them.

The tabloid press had a field day with the knocking and tapping stories. They ran a few sensationalist pieces, comparing Wentshire Forest with Borley Rectory, ‘The most haunted house in England’. Callum tells me that, oddly, these headlines helped; they diffused a lot of the tension and fear that was spreading around the site.

—It just became normal, like a running joke on site. We even gave it a name: Bob. You’d be doing some digging or trying to get the machines to start, and you’d hear it on the side of the concrete mixer, even on your lunch box. ‘Piss off, Bob,’ you’d say.

—And you’re sure it wasn’t someone playing a joke?

—I can’t put me hand on me heart and say I’m sure it wasn’t. But I really have no clue what it was. A ghost? The Wentshire Witch? Some stupid bugger? To this day, I’ve no idea.

By now, there’s a question forming in my head – and I’m sure in yours as well: what does any of this have to do with Alfie Marsden? It is true that stories about strange and unexplained things abound in Wentshire Forest. Now we have Callum’s sighting of an old lady and the disruption on the building site. Let’s also not forget Sorrel Marsden’s claim of a ‘knocking’ sound in the engine of his car as he drove through Wentshire Forest.

We have to ask ourselves some questions as we proceed into this case: whether there was indeed something in Wentshire Forest – some spirit, some willo’ the wisp? And if so, does it explain Alfie Marsden’s disappearance? We should also ask whether those who walked beneath those trees had prior knowledge of the forest’s legends. I’m certainly not trying to pave the way for a paranormal explanation for what happened in 1988, rather I’m trying to get a side of the argument that perhaps has been dismissed outright. Was Sorrel aware of Callum Wright’s story? The ‘Witch’s Curse’ story Callum mentions was certainly prevalent in the local and national press at the time and brought unwanted attention to the area. Could these claims have influenced Sorrel’s story, perhaps motivating his own claims about a ‘knocking’?

Callum continues.

—One time, there was a couple of us in the Portakabin: me and a couple of the others, and the knocking starts up. We were tired, pissed off, freaked out, you know? We were sick of it – sick of being scared.

—That’s pretty understandable…

—We looked outside – we just did it automatically by then – but there was no one there, as usual.

So you know what we did? We started knocking back. Just copying the pattern, you know? It was me that was doing it, trying me best to make the same sound. I used me fist at first, then I tried using me knuckles, but I couldn’t get it loud enough.

—Did it … well, did it hear you?

—So I felt like a proper divvy but I says out loud, ‘One knock for yes, two for no.’ And I’m only half joking. But then it just goes quiet. And … it’s hard to explain, but it suddenly felt full in there, like, you know when you’ve been swimming and you’ve got water in your ears. Your whole head feels full to the brim. It was like that. I dunno if the others felt it.

Then someone says, ‘Ask Bob something, then.’

I remember being suddenly scared. I had this whirling feeling in me belly. The last fucking thing I wanted to do was ask a question.

—Why?

—Because in that moment, mate, I thought … no, I knew that something really was listening.

—Go on.

—So I said something daft like ‘Who are you?’, and there was just nothing, no knocking, just this sort of waiting. I tried again, I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And there was just silence again. Eventually one of the lads goes, ‘You’re not asking yes or no.’ So I plucked up me courage then and took a big deep breath.

‘Do you want us out of here?’ I says. We stood there, all of us, just listening. But there was nothing.

Callum stares into his glass, lost in the memory. He tells the next bit of the story in a whisper that’s so low, I’ve had to enhance the audio for you to be able to hear it.

—We were about to leave. That strange feeling in me ears was gone and it was like we’d just woken up from a dream or something. I remember walking towards the door, putting me hand on the handle and there’s just this huge bang – like the whole cabin has been hit with something. It wasn’t a bang on the door; it wasn’t on the walls. It’s … it’s too hard to put into words, but it was like … an earthquake, but from all over. It just shook the place.

—Was that your answer, do you think?

—I don’t know, mate, but we got the fuck out of there as quick as we could.

I have no way of verifying any of this. I have been unable to track down the other workmen who were at the site at the time, so all we have to go on is Callum’s word.

There have been numerous requests by paranormal investigation groups to conduct experiments, vigils and investigations in Wentshire Forest. The Ministry of Defence, which has owned the land since 1999, has never, to my knowledge, allowed any such thing.

Callum makes no attempt to leave the pub. His coat hangs from the back of his chair. He stares into his empty glass, shoulders rising and falling rhythmically.

—OK, if that’s all you’ve got to tell me, would you like me to leave you to it…?

—Just wait there, lad. This story’s far from told.

Callum’s clearly fighting some internal battle, while all around us there is the cheery tinkle of the fruit machines and the occasional blast of traffic as the front door opens to admit more drinkers. No one acknowledges the quiet man in front of the recording device in the far corner.

—After that, mate. It was hell, being on the site.

—How so?

—Something changed. I can’t put me finger on what, but everything just got worse.

—The knocking?

—The knocking more or less stopped. But now it was the least of our worries. The lads started waking up with these scratch marks on them – their arms and their sides, sometimes on their backs. Like something had been at them in the night. And there were a few fights, people started blaming each other, saying the joking had gone too far.

—Did you get any scratches?

—A couple of times, yeah. And I had bruises as well. It was proper horrible, on parts of your body you don’t really look at. They didn’t hurt or nowt, they were just there. It was like someone had punched the tops of me arms a few times, you know? But there was even more than that…

—Go on…

—That’s when it – whatever it was – started messing with the vehicles and that, too. We had this excavator: one of them with a big arm and a claw, you know? I don’t think I’d ever seen it work since it arrived. Now, you’re gonna think I’m having you on, but I swear, I was walking past and that arm came swinging round – silent, no engine on. Nearly took my head off. Would have done if I hadn’t ducked.

—Wow.

—Sounds mad, doesn’t it? But stuff like that happened to the others too. One of the lads said he was walking past one of the front loaders one night on his way back from the bogs, and its lights and its engine turned, just on like that. No warning. He said he ran, cos he thought it was gonna come after him.

—Did this happen to anyone else?

—No. But it was like the banging. Stuff was going on all over the place, just random. But it was what happened with Clive that made me think enough was enough.

—What happened?

—Some of the older lads were saying that he’d been funny lately; they’d seen him at the edge of the tree line, just stood there, like, leaning into the forest, as if he was looking or listening for something. They said he stood there like that for hours sometimes.

So that particular day was brutal. The site was a mess, the rain never stopped; it was never heavy, just this fine sort of mist that soaked your clothes. There was rubbish everywhere and half-filled holes, tape and that all over, a proper shambles.

Clive was on one, proper raging he was. He couldn’t get any of the machines to start and so he got us carrying a load of chainsaws into the forest. No one dared to say nowt to him; we just followed. Even though it was daytime, that forest was dark. It was like we were walking for hours through the bracken and great coils of brambles and goose grass that grabbed onto your trousers and bit at your legs. That’s when some of the other lads started sharing their stories: they were saying they’d heard things in the forest – shouts and cries.

—Were you tempted to tell the others about what you’d seen? The old lady?

—No way. Like I said before, I never told no one about that. I was too scared. I thought something bad would happen if I did. Some of the others were talking about hearing the same kind of stuff I had. Voices. Whispering words that weren’t words, that were sort of half formed. What everyone said, though, was that there was something that made them feel like they wanted to follow those voices into the trees.

—So, you were telling me about Clive that day?

—Yeah, so he’s up ahead of us, storming through the trees, and eventually he stops, waits for us to catch up. He was just stood there, in this little clearing, like he was lost. Like he’d walked into a room and forgotten why. Then it’s like he suddenly snaps back into life. He’s mad again, raging.

‘All of these!’ he’s shouting and pointing at these massive oak trees. Huge they were, thick as owt. ‘Get them down!’

I was shitting myself. He never wanted us using them chainsaws till now. It was like he didn’t care no more. So we all start trying to get the chainsaws going, but none of them’d start. It was the rain, it must have been, cos they was just dead. Clive’s getting more and more angry. He’s screaming at us to get the trees cut down. Eventually he picks up this axe and starts laying into one of the trees, just hacking at it like a madman. That’s when it happened.

—What?

—The accident.

—Go on…

—Thing is, everyone had a different story. Some of the lads said they’d seen something up in the tree. Some of them said they’d seen something on the ground, under his feet. Whatever it was, Clive’s grip on the axe slipped, it bounced off the tree and the blade hit his knee. His screaming was like nothing on earth. But that’s not what I’ll remember all me life. It’s not his screams that still come back in me dreams.

—What does?

—We heard knocking. Tapping. But it wasn’t like the tapping back at the site. This sounded like … well, like laughter.

—What did you do?

—There was panic. Clive was screaming. And that noise – it must have been the wind in the leaves, it must have been. There was these gusts of wind all around us. The trees and bushes were all moving, so no one knew which way to go. It was like one of them nightmares where you can’t run away. A couple of the lads ran to the Tardis – that phone box – to call an ambulance. No one would go by themselves. The rest of us stayed with Clive. We didn’t want to move him, there was blood everywhere, but at the same time we wanted to get him out of there. We wanted to get him away from…

—What?

—I dunno. It’s like there was something there. Something waiting.

—What happened to Clive?

—It was proper horrible. He was just lying there, sweating, gibbering, talking bollocks. We’d tied stuff round his knee – bits of our clothes and that. We just made this little knot of us around him, to protect him. I swear, waiting for the ambulance was the longest hour of me life. We all got to thinking that those lads who went to the phone box wouldn’t come back. We thought they’d got lost and that’s what was going to happen to us too. A couple of the younger ones couldn’t take it; they ran off into the woods. I can still remember seeing their faces – pale, their eyes huge.

Paramedics eventually arrived and Clive was taken to hospital. He survived his ordeal but never returned to the site.

—What about after that incident. Did you stay on site?

—Yeah, but there wasn’t many of us. So the work was slow going. We did get a new foreman and that.

—Were there any more incidents?

—I don’t remember much. You’d hear knocking and that, but we all just stayed quiet, got on with the job. It was like what happened to Clive had … fed it somehow. Kept it quiet.

—So things returned to normal?

—It was never normal. But it was … quiet. Until … well, until that poor little lad…

We sit in silence for a while, me with a thousand questions running through my head. Callum’s demeanour after telling his story is that of someone who’s been drained of all hope.

He’s made some fantastic claims, none of which I have been able to verify. Certainly, there were problems, as Sir Harrison explained last episode. I do find out from Callum that the Norwegian building team who were to construct the cabins never arrived. I ask Callum about these Norwegians – whether he knew why they didn’t show up.

—I heard two stories. One was that they were too scared to come, that they saw all that Witch’s Curse stuff in the papers and thought better of it. The other story was to do with their ship. Some technical fault or something. I dunno.

—I have to ask about the search, when Alfie Marsden went missing. You said you were there.

Callum visibly twitches at this, the memory jolting through him.

—Me dad took us. Christmas Day. I was on at him from the moment I heard it on the news. He thought I was mad, but I couldn’t get the thought out of me head – that little lad lost in that fucking place. It had only been a few weeks, but I’d done me best to forget. It all came back though: the animals, that woman. What happened to Clive. I remembered how scared I’d been. Christ almighty, how would it have been for a little ’un?

—You said you helped with the lights, that there was a problem with them.

—The whole thing was a fucking mess, mate. Me dad’s car wouldn’t start. He was pissed off, and me mam was in tears.

When we got there it was a shambles. The coppers’ cars stuck in the mud on the tracks. That front loader was on the road, on its side nearly. I just knew that none of the lads would have driven it there. I tried to help them. God knows why, but they let me try and help get those lights turned on to help find the kid. They were one of the things that’d always worked. But not then. And that’s when I felt it again – like that place was mocking us.

—That must have been awful.

—I want to cry right now, thinking about it. It was the worst night of me life. It was worse than anything that had come before – that driving rain, the coppers shouting, people crying the lad’s name. I still lie awake sometimes, remembering it.

—You’ve told me a great deal about your experiences in Wentshire Forest. The knocking, the accident. All of this occurred before Alfie Marsden disappeared. Does telling me all this now change what you think happened to him?

—I want to believe that it was something normal. Maybe him and his dad got separated somehow and he just got lost.

That’s what my head tells me.

But my heart says it’s that forest. It’s pure evil. I saw first-hand what that evil could do. What if whatever was in that forest was hungry again? What if it reached out and touched that car? What if it called that little lad into the trees?

The question of what happened to Alfie Marsden has not been answered for forty years. There are plenty of theories we can draw from Callum’s account.

I am aware we have strayed a little way from the path with this interview, but I do feel it gives us some important information about the situation in Wentshire Forest at the time Alfie Marsden disappeared. Was Blackwood and Baxter’s strategy of employing cheap, inexperienced labour and their bad management of the site in some way responsible for what happened to Alfie?

Or were there other things at work that defy explanation?

There was certainly shoddy workmanship and negligence on site. If Alfie ran from the car into the forest and took refuge in the site, it is possible that some sort of accident may have occurred. Did he come across a hole, a fissure, or some faulty machinery?

I contact my fellow podcaster Howie again to discuss the assertions about the strange occurrences at the Great Escapes site.

—So, Howie, you’ve listened to the recording I made with Callum Wright. What do you deduce?

—First of all, what I’ve heard from Callum Wright isn’t new to me – it wouldn’t be the first time such things have happened when building work takes place in remote areas.

In Iceland – near a place called Kópavogur, just south of Reykjavík – there’s a hill called Álfhóll, which literally means ‘elf hill’. It sits between Kópavogur and Reykjavík, and when, in the 1930s, the authorities decided they’d build a road between the two cities they planned to pass it straight through the hill. However, things didn’t quite go to plan. Just like what Callum Wright alleges happened at Wentshire Forest, the machines stopped working, tools were lost, and finally the money dried up. And Álfhóll remained unscathed. It didn’t only happen once either. There were plans to level Álfhóll in the eighties, but this time the workers themselves refused to go near the place and the media reporting on the story claimed that their cameras wouldn’t work on the hill. The road that’s there today goes around Álfhóll rather than through it.

And it’s not just Álfhóll. Workers suffered injuries when they tried to build a highway near Siglufjörður on Iceland’s northern coast. An ‘elfin lady stone’ was covered with earth while they were digging. That was the issue.

—A what stone?

—Throughout Iceland there are large stones that are claimed to be sacred to the elves.

In Iceland, they call them huldufólk or ‘hidden people’. In the UK, they have many names: púca, sídhe, goblins, pixies, piskeys. Significantly for your case, in Wales they’re called the tlywyth teg – the ‘fair family’. In all these cases they’re considered to be a parallel race of spirits that dwell in nature. To upset them incurs a cost.

—So upsetting the elves could be a theory behind what went wrong at the Great Escapes building site?

—It’s a theory. However, the similarities to the Icelandic accounts are pretty significant, wouldn’t you say?

—That’s all interesting stuff, Howie, there’s no denying it. There’s also no denying the link between this folklore and the events of 1988. It certainly begs the question whether Sorrel or Sonia were aware of these stories and ancient beliefs.

—I’m certainly not suggesting that fairies were to blame for Alfie’s disappearance. I’m just saying, from a folkloric perspective, there are some interesting parallels. But there are other things about Callum Wright’s account that have raised some more similarities with other famous cases.

For example the Bell Witch case of 1894.

The Bell family of Adams, Tennessee saw all sorts of strange creatures around their farm – beasts with the head of a rabbit, the body of a dog, for example – as well as an old woman walking in their orchard.

—These sorts of things are not exclusive to the Bell Witch, though.

—No, but there are some other similarities to Callum’s story. Members of the Bell family claimed that next there was knocking – on their walls, on their doors, just like Callum describes at the site.

—Thank you so much for your input, Howie.

—I just hope I’ve helped, man. But, like I say, I’m not suggesting that the poor kid was whisked away by fairies.

—I know that, Howie. Thank you again.

Like Howie, I don’t feel that the solution to this case lies in superstition. I do think, however, it is important to cover all possible aspects to Alfie’s disappearance.

We’ll be examining this case from four more angles after this episode. We have to look at those closest to the disappearance – namely the child’s parents. But this is easier said than done. Sorrel has his tale and Sonia has been driven into hiding.

And I would also like to see what we can find out about the child himself. His voice in this whole affair has not been heard. I hope in the next episode that we will be able to glean something of the lost little boy’s perspective.

This has been Six Stories.

This has been our second.

Until next time.

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 3

00:00:00

Echoes

You’ve written out your questions. You wrote ten of them in the morning dark, scrawling them on the edge of an old newspaper. You’ve copied them up – neat handwriting in a fresh notebook.

Lack of sleep is clawing behind your eyes. It’s been hot this week; too hot at night. That’s the excuse you’ve been using for your insomnia. But you were sleeping fine before you began this case.

And now almost like the meeting you’re about to have with Anne is a break – offering solace from the case.

15th August 2018, 10:12 a.m.

I’m only recording this because I swore I would record everything from now on. Any visit. Every interview, regardless of who it is. It’s a safety net. I know that there’s nothing to fear with Anne … But just in case.

Take two. I’m going in.

OK, so that didn’t work. Anne asked me not to record her. She wouldn’t say why not. I could have done it anyway – brought this thing in, hidden in my pocket. But I didn’t. I didn’t record her, because I respect her. Despite everything.

My head is all over the place after our discussion. I made notes, but I want to talk about Anne right now, while it’s still fresh.

There’s something about her. I’ve known it since our very first meeting. The best way to express it is this: I should hate her … but I don’t.

Perhaps it will help me if I say it out loud.

Anne Manon gave Alfie Marsden’s parents false hope after Alfie vanished. Her psychic ‘abilities’ did not find their son.

There.

Now how do I feel about Anne Manon?

No different. But saying it out loud does help me to put my feelings into words. You see, I don’t think she intended to give them false hope. I am convinced that Anne Manon believed she knew what had happened to Alfie Marsden.

When Anne went into her ‘trance’, when she asked the spirit world to find Alfie, she received only a single phrase – that Alfie was inside ‘a royal court’.

What was she claiming about Alfie when she communicated this message? It could be taken in any number of ways. The most common interpretation harks back to something Howie told me when I first contacted him about the case: ‘The fair folk of the Welsh woods were precious about the breninbren – their sacred monarch oaks.’

So did the vague message Anne received from the spirit world suggest Alfie Marsden was trapped in Wentshire Forest? Was the royal court a clearing surrounded by these ‘monarch’ oaks? The same monarch oaks that Clive the foreman took an axe to? If this is the case, why didn’t Anne simply say so?

It was a question that had been bothering me all week.

So I asked her it, and she answered me straightaway. She said interpretation of messages was not the job of the medium – that she was only a vessel and she was merely trying to help. She told me that words from ‘the other side’ can be seen in many ways.

That pressing question answered, I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to know why she had written to me. And most of all I wanted to find out what she knows about Alfie Marsden that the rest of us don’t.

Frustratingly, though, Anne did not disclose to me anything that pertains to Alfie Marsden. The worm she dangled in front of me in her letter has turned out to be threaded through a hook. But in a way, I don’t mind.

I guess the point I am making is that I believe her. I believe she was trying to help.

I enjoyed sitting with Anne today. She told me a bit about her early life. At the age of seven, she was removed from her parents and placed in a children’s home in Bangor. The home was run by Catholic nuns back then. It was a place for ‘wayward girls’ and the abuse Anne received there was systematic and catastrophic.

By the age of twenty-one, Anne was living in Shrewsbury, near the Welsh border. She describes herself at this time as ‘flotsam’. No real purpose, no direction, no dreams. She was floating around, sleeping on sofas, taking what work she could.

There were men in her life at that time, she said – men who used her and abused her just like those nuns. Then they discarded her, just like her parents did. She deserved it. That’s what she kept saying to me, and I longed to comfort her, to hold her hands and tell her that no one deserves that.

Anne showed little emotion when she was telling me these terrible things. She told me not to cry for her. She said she isn’t worth it.

Then I remembered what she said in her letter: ‘I was indeed close to the Alfie Marsden case.’

But I couldn’t press her on this. Not after she’d told me her story.

Then she stopped speaking. She had had her head down while telling me her potted, terrible history. But then she looked up at me, and I swear it was like she could see … but into me. She asked me how I was sleeping.

I nearly passed out.

Does this mean that Anne’s claim of being psychic has any truth? It’s possible. Or it could just be good guesswork. I told her all about the sleepless nights, the dreams. I told her how I’ve been waking up and making notes, writing ‘monarch oaks’ on scraps of paper.

She smiled at me and nodded. She said she understood. And I felt lighter. I felt like telling Anne she had shifted the load that this case has been building up inside me. Maybe we’re good for each other. Maybe it’s the fact we don’t really know each other that allows us to chat like this.

Or is it that Anne is playing a game with me? To keep me coming back? I don’t know if she knows anything more about the Alfie Marsden case. And I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that I don’t care.

What I do care about is that there’s a lonely old woman in that house whom everyone’s hated for the last twenty years for something that she said – for trying to help find a missing child.

An old lady that needs a friend.

And for some reason, despite the fact I am trying to research, record and produce a new series of Six Stories, despite the fact that she lives a good few hours from me, I believe I could be that friend.

Episode 3: Cauliflowers Fluffy and Cabbages Green

—Case study. Child A. 13th of December, 1988.

Where to even begin? I mean … oh dear…

Christmastime is hard for them at this age. I know. It’s supposed to be magical, isn’t it? And it is, for us. It’s when they’re all in their costumes. Little boys in tea towels; little girls in tutus. Silver-foil halos. The dolly in the manger and Mrs Pugh clonking away on the piano.

Oh, I could have fallen asleep on my feet on the day of the performance. It’s like herding cats: tears and tantrums. So-and-so wants to bring in his own cuddly toy lamb to hold. So-and-so’s angel wings have a hole in them. I swear to you, I never want to see white crêpe paper and garden wire again for as long as I live!

Hang on, is this a C90 or a C60? It doesn’t matter. It’s just nice to get this all out. When I’m as good as Mrs Moss, able to get them quiet with one raised finger, I’ll listen back to these recordings and laugh. Keep them for posterity, Mrs Moss says to me. Like a diary.

It’s easier than writing it all down.

So anyway, on to business. It was me who volunteered to sit with Child A during the first performance, the one they do for the staff. We stayed in the classroom after the others set off in a crocodile to get changed in the hall.

Child A is sat at the back of the room beside the nature corner with his back to me. He’s allowed nowhere near the nativity. Thank God!

He’s calmer when it’s quiet, less unpredictable. I walked over to him and … oh, dear me … I have to admit I was feeling a little bit scared. Of a seven-year-old. I ask you. But I’m going to be honest here. I have to be. For posterity. Child A is sat at one end of the room with his back to me. I can tell he’s angry; his ears are all red. I’ve still never seen him cry. None of the others have, either. He screams though. It’s unnerving, it is. Scary. I’ve never heard a noise like that in my whole life. If you look at his face when he’s doing it, it’s even scarier. He’s screaming but there’s no emotion in his eyes. It’s almost as if he’s doing it just to upset us. I hate thinking like that, but that’s how it feels. Everyone else wants to say it but they don’t. He’s all squinty, his face screwed up. He’s little as well – smaller than the others. There’s nothing going for him, is there? Poor lamb.

So, I start straightening chairs and picking up paper. We’ve not even done any cutting-out today, but there’s still bits of paper all over the floor. It’s like the children are shedding.

If I go over to him straightaway, Child A will run. That’s what he does if he’s singled out. And he’s quick and slippery – like an eel. All wiry and hot with rage. He bites too. The caretaker had to get him off the roof the other week; he’d swarmed up the drainpipe like a spider monkey, left Mr Camberley with a red ring of teeth marks on his arm and some terrible language on his lips! Getting Child A down was like coaxing a wild cat. I’m sure I heard Mrs Moss asking if anyone knew a vet with a blowpipe. In the end they had to call his mam to come and get him. She didn’t drive – had to walk to the school, so she took ages, and when she got there she looked like she’d just got up. I don’t know what she said to him, but he came down alright! He didn’t even look at her. She just said sorry to us then scuttled after the little boy like he was lord of the manor. Stank of drink, she did.

When she’d gone we all rolled our eyes. No wonder he is the way he is, poor little soul.

This is the voice of the late Delyth Rice. In 1988, Delyth was a trainee primary school teacher in Audlem, Cheshire. Delyth passed away in 2015, having spent the majority of her adult life working with nursery and primary-age children. She never actually retired, instead working on a reduced timetable right until the end of her life. Staff in the schools and nurseries where Delyth worked have nothing but good things to say about her: ‘Like a grandmother’, ‘hugely popular with staff and students’, ‘still missed’ are just a few of the ways she’s described.

—I am careful as I go over to him. I’ve found that the thing to do is pretend you’re busy with something else, so I start singing away to myself, humming nursery rhymes that I used to sing when I was a little girl.

Wrth ddychwel tuag adref, mi glywais gwcw lon

Oedd newydd groesi’r moroedd i’r ynys fechan hon.

He’s not looking at me, all crumpled up in that chair like a lump of Plasticine. His ears are almost beetroot. I’m picking up the paper and the blocks. They’re a bit beyond blocks at their age but Child A loves them and I think Miss Moss keeps them in her room to keep him quiet. Child A goes out of his mind if anyone else touches them. They’re old and scuffed, the colours on them long gone, but they feel nice in your hands. And they slot neatly back into the box, all of them in their right place. Maybe he finds them comforting. I wish I knew why it’s the blocks and putting them back that’s the only time I ever see Child A peaceful. That might be a good place to start my dissertation, actually. The blocks are a flashpoint for him, too, though. But Mrs Moss says that’s what he needs to learn – that it can’t always be his turn.

Holi a ci,

Holiacici a holiacwcw,

Holiacici a holiacwcw…

I know he likes this one. The cuckoo song. I’ve seen him swaying back and forth to it, almost like he’s trying not to.

‘Oh dear!’ I say. ‘Oh dear! All these blocks. I wish I knew someone who was good at putting away blocks!’

It breaks my heart, thinking about it. How he jumped out of his seat, his face flushed, not with anger, but with desperation. The Christmas songs were drifting down from the hall: Oh little town of Bethlehem… Child A’s never going to sing those words; he’s never going to stand there with a tea towel on his head, poor lamb. But now he’s putting away the blocks and looking up at me, all earnest. In that moment, I can see the little lost boy, and I want to take him in my arms and give him a cuddle. That’s a big no-no; if I get caught doing it I’m in trouble. So what I do is take out the little pot of bubbles I keep in my pocket. ‘Emergency bubbles’ I call them. I take them out and blow a stream of them into the space between us. Child A loves it. He’s laughing and popping them with his finger, as fast as I can blow them.

I’m laughing, too, and our laughter’s drowning out all the singing. He looks up at me again and his face twists, that little boy gone – almost gone; it’s still there … just in his eyes.

‘Miss Rice?’ he says, and I give him a big smile. ‘Miss Rice?’ he says, ‘can I call you “mum”?’

Delyth Rice sadly passed away in a house fire in 2015. The recordings I have at my disposal came my way courtesy of her son Emyr, who I managed to track down. It is one of these recordings that you have been listening to.

There is no more of this particular recording. It is telling, however, that the abrupt clunk as the recording device is stopped is preceded by a sob. The recordings were made onto cassette tapes, which were in a box salvaged from the fire at the Rice house. Emyr only opened the box a month or two ago and nearly threw it away. It was filled with college papers and folders from his mother’s training years, along with the pile of cassettes. Unfortunately, the water used to extinguish the fire has rendered most of them unplayable and the dissertation paper mostly unreadable. However, the child she is discussing, as far as I understand it, is Alfie Marsden.

Welcome to Six Stories.

I’m Scott King.

Alfie Marsden was seven years old when he vanished on Christmas Eve, 1988, somewhere in Wentshire Forest. He was in the care of his father, Sorrel Marsden, who was transporting the child over the Welsh border via Wentshire Forest Pass.

Relatively little is known about the child, so in this episode we’ll try to address that deficit. Before we start, though, I think I should warn my listeners that there are things in this particular episode of Six Stories that some may find distressing.

You see, when someone goes missing, especially a child, it’s easy to talk about how lovely they were – how well liked and how popular. It’s easy to flash their cherubic school photograph all over the press. What’s not so easy is to say that that someone was difficult. It’s uncomfortable to describe such a child as challenging, to say that the family of that child was also challenging. It doesn’t quite fit a story like this one to say that a missing child wasn’t particularly liked.

So, as I say, in this episode we will try to get at least a little insight into Alfie Marsden. Whether this has any bearing on the case is yet to be seen. I’m no analyst, no forensic scientist. This podcast is something more like staring at an old crime scene, raking over old graves…

I found Emyr Rice after searching local Welsh newspaper archives. It was an article about the fire that killed his mother that brought him to my attention. Delyth’s son lives in Cardiff and it is in his house that we conduct our interview. On a table in the corner of his immaculate living room is an array of photographs of his mother. The scorched box filled with paper and cassettes looks very tatty against the well-kept furnishings. Emyr has plugged in an ancient metal-rimmed hi-fi. Its bright-yellow paint has dimmed somewhat but looks remarkably intact.

—Look at that – still going after all them years. Always had this on, I did. Never broke, not ever. Hard-wearing. When I got a CD player when I was a teenager, I couldn’t bear to chuck it out. My mam stuck it in the loft. Even the fire never hurt it. Look here, you see where one side’s a bit melted? Meant to be, eh?

Emyr brings over a couple of photographs and shows me his mother. A studious, bespectacled woman – probably around thirty – looks back out at us with a smile.

—These must’ve been taken when I was little, when she started her training. Late eighties, it was. I remember her coming to pick me up and telling me all about what she was doing. She was so happy. I was only about six or seven. Same age as that kiddie, eh?

From what we can gather, looking at the documents that weren’t fire- or water-damaged, Delyth Rice was completing a dissertation on behaviour in young children. It seems the tapes are audio records of her thoughts that she made as soon as she got home from work, and then typed up later.

—It made sense for her to record it all on tape. She was always a slow writer, my mam. Took her ages to even get a shopping list down. Very neat handwriting, though – look at this. She told me that was her school. They used to make them practise handwriting for hours at a time. You couldn’t do that now, could you? It’s all SATS and league tables and that. It made her a bit sad, all that, she said, when there were kiddies who couldn’t even hold a knife and fork, let alone a pen. She was like a surrogate mam to those kids, you know. Always chasing a lost cause. Always going on beyond the call.

While Delyth Rice’s personal story is not strictly relevant to the case of Alfie Marsden, it’s useful, I think, to include a little background. From what Emyr remembers of his mother, she took her job incredibly seriously. It wasn’t about the money, or long school holidays. She did it, he says, because she cared.

Delyth seemed to maintain this attitude throughout a career spent working with early-years children. Emyr remembers the thrill of accompanying his mother into her schools during the holidays to take down old friezes, pulling out tacks from the corkboards with an old spoon, being allowed to use the staple gun to stick up paintings and coloured paper until the classrooms looked like a ‘fairyland’ – Emyr’s word, not mine.

All these touches were well received and lasted long in the memories of Delyth’s pupils, apparently. However, it was something else that drove her, according to Emyr.

—It was the naughty ones she liked, although I dunno if ‘liked’ is the right word. Maybe they were the ones she cared about the most. She had a thing for the ones who came to school with no breakfast, who couldn’t sit still, who didn’t get a bedtime story. I remember the day of the funeral. I was having some time, walking about round town and that, trying to keep it together. I see this massive bloke, scars on his face, tattoos on his neck. He’s coming straight at me. And I think, Great, the day of my mam’s funeral and this fucker’s going to stab me up. Anyway he’s right up in my face and he says, ‘You Miss Rice’s boy?’ I nod. I’m shitting myself, you see. He says, ‘That woman, boy. She cared about me when no one else did. She gave a shit when I was a kid. No one’s ever given a shit like that since.’ And he just walks off.

This story is a good summation of Delyth Rice’s career. It seems that, if there was ever a hard-to-reach child in her class, she’d take the time to reach them.

—I never even knew that Mam had taught him. She never said, when he disappeared. If she remembered him, she didn’t tell no one. It was only when I decided to chuck out some junk in the garage that I saw his name written in her handwriting. That’s what made me listen to the tapes, see? I put two and two together. Mam must have worked with him for a little bit. And I remembered then her telling me about a boy called Alfie when she first started. She always used to tell stories of the naughty ones at teatime. I loved it. ‘Poor little Alfie’ she used to call him. It all made sense, suddenly.

There are other tapes that document the progress of another child – ‘Child B’; nothing to do with Alfie Marsden.

Emyr tells me he nearly threw out the box without looking at it. The half-scorched cassettes he thought were just junk. But it appears that fate had other ideas.

—Here’s the thing. I’d packed my car full of a load of mam’s old stuff for the tip. But it wouldn’t start. Engine just wouldn’t go. I thought it might be too heavy, see? So I takes out this box and it slips out my hands, spills all over the drive and I see all these tapes and that. Then I see the name; it was written on one of the burned tapes. I could just make it out – Alfie Marsden.

Then it all came back, those old memories. I got down my old stereo from the attic, tried playing the tapes. And I couldn’t believe it!

Interestingly, Alfie’s name is nowhere else in the documents, and when I ask Emyr to find me the tape in question, he can’t. He does remember his mother’s stories, though.

—I don’t know if that was right or not. Her telling me about them kids. But I was only little. I was hardly going to tell, was I? It sounds like a horrible thing to say now, but I loved them stories of ‘Poor little Alfie’.

—Do you remember the first time she told you one of these stories?

—I don’t remember one story that started it off. She used to tell me about the naughty boys who smashed stuff up. The first Alfie one I remember wasn’t so much naughty, though … just weird.

—Weird how?

—It was one of Mam’s first days in the classroom, it must have been. She was always dead happy when she talked about it.

The kids mam worked with would have been six or seven – same age as me. Anyways, she told me she goes in there and all the kids say hello to her. She says they all sit on the carpet with their legs crossed, all nice. Except one. He sits with his back to her, at the back, facing the wrong way. ‘What a funny little boy,’ she thought. Later on that day the kids were doing cutting and sticking and that. She says she goes over to the ‘funny little boy’ who’s sat at the back on his own, facing the wall. She asks him if he’s OK, if he wants any help. She says he turns round then and he’s cut up all these bits of paper into strips. How do I remember this so well? Because when he turns round she sees he’s been sat there gluing all these strips of paper all over his face. He looked like the invisible man, she says, just these eyes peeping out.

That’s the first story I remember. Maybe that was the one that got me interested in that lad.

Delyth began her practical teacher training at a primary school in Audlem in 1988, the year Alfie Marsden vanished. She would have been in a placement position in the school, shadowing teachers on the job, leading a few activities with the children. She would, therefore, only have known Alfie for a few months before he disappeared. Her study was focussed on the behaviour of this ‘funny little boy’ and ‘Child B’. Unfortunately, the first few cassettes documenting Alfie Marsden’s behaviour are too damaged to hear.

—Are there any other stories that you remember about Alfie Marsden?

—I remember she used to say he would never sit still. He was always moving about, always running, round and round.

—Or else sat with his back to everyone?

—Yeah. He sounded like he was a pretty weird kid, God rest his soul. You never heard that though, did you? You never read it in the papers, that he was weird. But what good would it have done for anyone to know that?

The recording you heard at the start of this episode is a section from one of a number of cassettes that Delyth made concerning Alfie Marsden. I feel it communicates the ‘weirdness’ that Emyr describes and the burgeoning connection with children with extra needs that would come to characterise Delyth’s career. However, I also feel it should have raised huge red flags. It saddens me as much as it shocks me that a child of Alfie’s age, having only known a teacher for such a short amount of time, is asking to call that teacher, ‘Mum’. Now, any professional involved with Alfie Marsden would see his behaviour as deeply concerning.

I want to play you some of the other cassettes. This extract is from the cassette Emyr and I both believe to be the earliest concerning Alfie.

—Case study. Child A. 19th of October, 1988.

They all say he never used to be like this. By all accounts in his last school he was a little angel! That’s what happens when mams and dads split up, isn’t it? Poor little soul had to deal with all that disruption at home then had to come to a brand-new school. If only I’d known him over in Prestatyn when he was all sweetness and light, eh?

I’m so tired today. I never thought it’d be like this. However much sleep I get, it’s never enough. Is it terrible of me to be wishing for the holidays already? I’m not even full-time. Dear me. Maybe Child A was a bad idea. I have to spend so much time with him. Maybe that’s what’s making me tired.

He’s hard work, I’ll give you that. If only I’d been here last year when he was all sweetness and light, eh?

Anyway. Today.

Child A’s not allowed out at break. They haven’t told me why, and I don’t really want to ask; I’m still too new. They make him sit in the classroom while the others play outside. It’s sad cos you can hear them sploshing about in their wellies, having a great old time. Child A’s not got wellies on today. He’s got his plimsolls that he wears for gym. One of the dinner nannies is off sick so they’ve asked if I’ll sit with him. ‘He’s no trouble one-to-one,’ they’ve said. I’m scared. I’m not ashamed to say it. I mean, the boy’s only little. But I am scared.

I didn’t think they’d leave me in here on my own with him. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do! There he is, Child A. He’s just sat there, slumped forwards at one of the tables. Head down. Forehead pressed on the bench. To tell you the truth, I’m not brave enough to approach him. I’ve heard the stories about the things he does: biting, spitting, hitting. What am I supposed to do if he starts all that with me?

It looks like he’s pretty quiet, though, so I start just tidying away. I’m not making a big deal but as I’m going round the room I’m circling him, dead calm, dead gentle, like. I see him look up once and there is this flutter in my heart. Poor little thing. His face is always twisted up in an angry knot. I can feel these trickles of sweat running from under my arms. I remember something that my dad told me when I was a girl. Dead scared of dogs, I was. ‘Don’t show them no fear,’ he said. ‘They can smell it on you. And it only makes them angry.’

I don’t know what else to do, so I just started singing – just a little harvest song I used to sing when I was in primary school.

Cauliflowers fluffy and cabbages green

Strawberries sweeter than any I’ve seen

I’m watching him out the corner of my eye and he’s not moving, but some instinct, some mammy intuition tells me he’s listening. So I keep going, circling closer and closer.

Beetroots purple and onions white

All grow steadily, day and night

All the while I’m playing out this little fantasy in my head. I’m wondering whether, maybe – just maybe – I might be the only one who can tame him. It might be me who he chooses to get along with. I get closer and closer to him, just singing away. I’m looking at him now, and when I get a few feet away he looks right back at me with that scowl on his face.

Just for a moment our eyes lock together. We stare at each other and I think that maybe this is a monumental, profound moment in my career; that maybe we’ve clicked. That this funny little boy will begin to open up.

Then the moment bursts like a balloon, and he’s off – chair on end and he’s racing round the room, rolling against the walls, pulling off the paintings. He’s over at the nature table, and the bird’s nest that Glenda Roberts brought in is shredded and all over the floor. He’s a tornado, a demon. But I just … I just stand there. I think my mouth is saying, ‘Stop it,’ but no sound is coming out.

I should have thought about how much trouble I was going to be in, but all I could think about was this poor little boy. He was banging himself against the walls and screaming blue murder. I thought he was going to hurt himself, so I ran to the door to get someone to help. But as soon as my hand touched the handle … he … just … stopped.

It was like someone had flicked a switch. I looked back at him, and this time he was looking right at me with those slitted eyes and that pinched little face. He slithered. That’s the only word I can use that feels right: he slithered down the wall and back into his chair. I swear – and I’m going to hell for this, I know – but he looked … evil. And he gave this crafty little smile like he knew exactly what he was doing. It was scary.

I took my hand off the door and turned around, and just walked over to all the paper on the floor, the paintings off the wall, and picked them up. I swept the bits of bird’s nest up with a dustpan and brush. Put it in the bin. All the time I was doing it, I could see him out the corner of my eye, watching me with those empty eyes, that pinched face that stayed the same whether he was angry or sad or happy.

So I thought I might have to write up a report of some sort. I spoke to Mrs Moss, explained what he’d done, and she just shrugged and shook her head. It was like all the fight just drained out of her.

‘It’s hard to feel sorry for him, Delyth,’ she said. I was shocked. ‘It sounds terrible, I know, but it’s hard to have much sympathy when he does things like that.’

I think that I knew what she meant. She’d have seen that evil face of his, too. God bless his little soul, she was right.

Emyr gives me a sardonic look after the recording clunk-clicks to a halt. He tells me that this is a good example of his mother being ‘the queen of lost causes’.

—Is that how you think she saw Alfie Marsden – as a ‘lost cause’?

—If he wasn’t a lost cause, then what is? Kids behaving like that at his age – needed a clip round the ear, if you ask me. She never told me how much he had scared her, though. She definitely told me about him ripping the paintings off the walls. He used to do that all the time, apparently. Just to be a pain. At least that’s what it sounded like.

—Your mum did make a difference, though, didn’t she?

—If only there were more like her.

I want to play another recording, this time from the same tape. Unfortunately there is no way of verifying when exactly it was recorded as there is no date read out at the start.

—Mrs Moss said to me that I’m good with him. I thought she was joking at first. Good with him? I never even did anything. I wanted to say I only sang a song, and then he went mad when I tried to get too close. Mrs Moss said he’s usually much worse than that, especially with a new adult. She said it was a good start.

That’s when I could have said that Child A was too much, that it wasn’t a good idea for me to use him for my dissertation. I could have saved myself so much hassle. But the truth is … I wanted to. Even though it was too much, even though I felt like I was in too far, Child A was just … fascinating.

So I said I’d start keeping him company at lunchtime, and Mrs Moss looked at me like I was off my rocker. She said that’s what dinner nannies are for and that I should go get something to eat. Secretly though, I think she was glad.

Then I told her about the dissertation and she shook her head at me and threw her arms up like, what could she do about me?

So, when I go in there, the dinner nanny gives me this funny look. As she passes by she does this funny signal with her hand. I just smile cos I don’t know what that means.

He’s sat there, slumped at his desk. He doesn’t even look up at me. This time I know better, so instead of going near him, I go and sit at Mrs Moss’s desk. There’s this little part of me that wants to provoke him a bit. The kids go mad if any other teacher sits in Mrs Moss’s chair. They like routine. Child A though, he looks up, just once, with that scowl of his, then puts his head back down again. He’s not rising to the bait.

I don’t know what to do, then. So I just sit there. There’s a paperback in my bag. An Angela Carter I got from the library. Something about a circus. I start reading and I must have tried to read the same page a hundred times, but I don’t take anything in. Really, what I’m doing is watching Child A, seeing what he will do.

I don’t know what I was expecting, really. Another whirlwind around the classroom? It doesn’t feel like that’s going to happen, not this time. There is none of that tension in the air. No. He just sits there. Head on the desk. It’s like he knows. Like he knows that this time I’m waiting for him to do something, and so he’s doing nothing on purpose to spoil it for me.

It feels like hours, we sit there. Stalemate. I remember thinking, Fine, just fine. I’ll get plenty of stories from the staffroom.

That’s when I hear it.

Tap-tap-tap.

I almost drop the book. It sounds like it’s coming from right under Mrs Moss’s desk.

I look straight at Child A, expecting not to see him in his seat, but there he is. The same position, no sign of movement. I stare at him for a little while longer, willing him to raise his head, to grin … anything.

Nothing.

I’m shaken, a little bit. You see with kids, when they do something naughty, they can’t help looking at you, to see if you’ve noticed.

Crafty, I think. Not like a normal child at all.

Tap-tap-tap.

Louder this time, and I nearly cry out.

I swear, it’s like there’s someone underneath the desk. I even push my chair back to look – to see for myself that someone isn’t lying there, tapping the underside of the desk with a pencil. That’s what it sounds like.

Of course, there’s no one there. Of course there isn’t.

I look back up, pull back into the desk.

And I see that Child A has moved. He’s taken himself to the back of the room and is sitting there, his back to me. Is he trying to tell me something? I don’t know, but I have this strong notion that in some way he is reaching out, that he’s asking me for something. Asking me to understand.

And I can’t.

During the rest of the afternoon, we both heard it, Mrs Moss and me. We both heard that tapping. I looked at her once. I wanted to tell her, but she just raised her eyebrows at me and I knew what she would say. Ignore it. Pick your battles. Thing was, I had my eye right on him, and he was quiet all afternoon, kept his head down, got on with his colouring. But every time I was looking anywhere but at him, every time my eye moved off him, it came again.

Tap-tap-tap.

This is probably one of the oddest of all the recordings.

As you’ll recall, tapping features strongly in Callum Wright’s account in episode two, and, of course, Sorrel Marsden reported tapping coming from his car engine. I cannot even attempt to give an explanation for these apparently similar phenomena. And Emyr tells me that his mother wasn’t in any way superstitious and had no belief in the supernatural.

We’ll come to more strange occurrences that surrounded Alfie Marsden in due course, but I want to stay on slightly more earthly matters for now. Clearly, Alfie had behavioural problems. I cannot say with any certainty but it sounds like he might have been somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and possibly suffering from ADHD.

Let’s listen to another recording, which shows the difficulty that staff had when dealing with some of Alfie’s more extreme behaviours. I don’t play it for any gratuitous reason. I just hope by sharing these recordings that they paint a picture of the depths of Alfie’s problems.

—Case study. Child A. 21st of October, 1988.

Oh dear, oh dear. I just sat down to get this recorded and it hit me. I’m so tired I could just sleep right now and it’s – what? It’s only half past seven. Dear me.

I knew it was going to be a bad day from the moment I got in. It was raining. Hard. There was a nasty icy wind and it was darker than usual. The kids go mad when it’s like this. That’s what everyone says. Poor little Alfie. He came in wearing his plimsolls again when the rest of the kids were in their wellies. The little thing’s feet were soaked through. Mrs Moss said nothing. Just helped him peel off his socks and trousers, and gave him some fresh ones from the spare-clothes box. I didn’t know until later on that day that Mr Camberley took Alfie’s trousers and socks to the laundrette at lunchtime, they were that filthy with mud. Poor lad. It was like he’d been walking to school through the woods!

Well, the rest of that day he was all out of sorts. Wouldn’t sit still on the carpet. Wouldn’t even sit with his back to the rest of us in a chair. I could see Mrs Moss’s patience was wearing thin from the moment she came in, so when Child A started playing up, I knew it was all going to go wrong.

So Child A’s coiled up in a little ball of anger – half in and half out of the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Feet sticking out.

‘You can just stay there then!’ Mrs Moss calls out, and the rest of the kids look confused, scared. Some of them cry when Mrs Moss gets angry.

When I say I’ll help, she just gives me the slightest nod. So off I go, skirting around the edge of the room, singing that harvest song about the cabbages, just to get a bit closer to him.

This takes until break time, because when Child A is like this, no one can get anywhere near.

The rain lets up and so we let the kids go outside. Coats on, wellies on. Mrs Moss has them lining up just as I manage to get about three feet away from Child A. He’s looking at me this time, glaring through his squinty eyes. His face looks all puffy, as if he hasn’t been to bed. He looks sick too. I feel a huge wave of sorrow for him.

The other thing that I was doing right then – and I’m not writing this down, because if I do, they’ll put me away in the nuthouse – the other thing I was doing was trying not to hear that tapping. Like I say, all the kids were getting ready to go outside, so it could easily have been one of them with a pen or a ruler against the radiator pipes. But I was sure, I was sure I could hear it, over everything, as if it was … I don’t know, mocking me somehow.

I looked away, over the kids’ heads, waiting for them to leave, and when I turned around, Child A had his back to us. He was more or less inside the bookcase.

You know, I just thought it best not to try and move him. At least he was quiet. I let the noise and the bustle of the kids die away before I started over to him. Slow and steady. With the rest of them gone, the room was quiet as the grave. I braced myself, ready for an explosion, or else that infernal tapping.

But it never came.

Eventually I get close enough to see what Child A is doing in that bookcase. I fully expect him to be curled up, red-faced and furious. But this time he isn’t. This time he’s sat, cross-legged, with a book open on his lap. A book! I didn’t even think the boy had the capacity, never mind the patience, to read. Anyhow, he’s just sat, staring at his book and from where I am I can see which one. It’s one of the kids’ story-time favourites, this big battered hardback of The Faraway Tree. Child A’s opened it to the picture of the angry pixie leaning out of the window in his little pointed hat, shouting at Jo, Beth and Fanny.

I follow Child A’s gaze and stare at the picture. A few seconds of silence pass. It shouldn’t be funny. I shouldn’t have laughed. That’s why it all went wrong. Oh dear.

I still don’t know how he knew what I was thinking. But the longer I stared down at that picture of the angry pixie – his turned-up nose, his scowl … I mean, it just … it looked so much like Child A. If Child A had pointed ears he would be the double of him … those round, red cheeks, that pinched little mouth. I knew, I knew that if I mentioned it to anyone, that’s what they would all begin to call him. That would become his name from then on.

So I just stare at that picture and I can feel the laugh coming, unwanted and unwelcome. And out it comes – a snort, a giggle. And I wish I could take it back.

In that moment Child A looks up. He looks from the book, to me and back to the book again. It’s like he knows! It’s like he’s read my mind!

I open my mouth to say something, anything, and I see that little face of his go from the angry pixie to furious pixie. He snaps that book closed and flings it at me. It hits me in the shin and it hurts. It really does. It still hurts now.

I didn’t say anything to him. I felt so bad for laughing. Maybe I felt I deserved the pain.

Oh, how on earth am I going to explain all this? I’ll just write down that he threw a book at me. That’s what I’ll say. And I’ll say that I wound him up; that it was my fault.

But I’ll leave out the bit that really worries me, the bit about how afterwards, at home time, when I stayed behind to tidy up, I couldn’t find that book anywhere. That it had simply vanished.

It’s still missing.

Emyr shrugs and tells me if his mother told him this particular story, he doesn’t remember it. We both doubt she did.

I wonder if the claims of fairies, ghosts and witches in Wentshire Forest weren’t known to me, what I would think about this recording. Obviously, the tapping features again. But what can we really infer from this? Are these simply the delusions of an exhausted trainee teacher left to deal with a very challenging pupil? A Google image search for the characters from Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books show a myriad of peculiar fairy-tale characters – Moon-Face, the Saucepan Man, Silky the Fairy.

What’s significant here is the disturbing behaviour of Alfie Marsden. Today, I feel the situation would have been different. Schools have better and more extensive child-protection training, and although this kind of training for teachers was beginning to become more prevalent, perhaps Alfie Marsden slipped through the net. Ostracised by his teachers and separated from his peers, there is no sign, from these recordings, that there was any adequate intervention for the boy.

The next recording I want to play follows on chronologically from the previous one. Significantly it features mentions of Sorrel and Sonia. Whatever opinions we may already have about Alfie’s parents, I think that, after listening to this next recording, we have a better picture of Sorrel and Sonia when they were still together.

—Case study. Child A. 6th of November, 1988.

What a day. I know I keep saying it, but I feel like I’m asleep on my feet. Still, I’m nearly done with this placement and I can say goodbye to the place for good. I have enjoyed it, though. And I’ve certainly learned a lot. Has it put me off teaching? Mrs Moss asked me that after the meeting. She said it was OK, and that some trainees think the kids are all going to be sweetness and light, until they get this bit of insight into school life. She looked right into me, and said, ‘It’s more common than you think to have to deal with kids like Child A. Well, maybe not quite like him, but…’

I wanted to tell her no, that, if anything, dealing with him had made me more interested in the job. I wonder how many others there are like him? Hundreds, I imagine. I don’t know why, but even though he is the way he is, I feel we have something, some connection. I want to help him. I wish I could stay and work just with him. Maybe when – if – I qualify, I’ll come back.

So … the meeting.

I don’t know what I’ll be able to write about this in my dissertation, but so long as I don’t use names, it might be useful for context. I just want to talk through it now, though, to get it all out.

Things had come to a head. There was no doubt that Child A was getting worse. There was the incident with the goldfish. I don’t want to get into all that again, but it was the final straw, and Mrs Moss called in his parents. Now we all knew that they were split up, but Dad made the effort to come all the way over from Wrexham to help out. Everyone said that was the sign of a good father. I agree. I don’t know if there’s many who’d make that sort of effort. I tell you now, there was a bit of me that was hoping, that was praying, I’d get invited to the meeting. I just wanted to speak to them. I wanted some insight from his mam and dad. If he was like this at school, what on earth was going on with him at home?

Mrs Moss said to me that there’s two types of parents: the supportive ones who are interested in their kids, and the ones who don’t give a stuff – who think that teaching their children manners is all down to us. She’s told me about kids who come here and sit under the table to eat, who can’t walk properly because they’re never let out of their buggies. There was a little girl, she said, who had to have a nap in the cloakroom after lunch. She didn’t sleep at home because her father had let her watch The Exorcist, for Christ’s sake! Mrs Moss says it’s difficult with these sorts of parents because they either think it’s all our fault or else they just don’t care.

I was dying to know what the Mar … which type Child A’s parents were.

So I was pleased when Mrs Moss told me that I had to be there as I’d been working with Child A. I expected her to give me some kind of warning – some insight about the parents, but she didn’t say anything.

We had the meeting at lunchtime in the head’s office. It had taken a while to arrange because the dad works funny hours. That’s why Child A stays with Mam. But this was Dad’s day off and Mrs Moss said that she wanted them both in together. Child A is now spending his lunchtimes in his classroom with Mrs Evans. Mrs Moss won’t have him in her room anymore, unless she is there. That makes sense after what he did to the goldfish.

I could tell that Mrs Moss was nervous. She went quiet and her lips were pressed together, two thin lines. I didn’t know what to expect. When a car pulls up outside the front gate, we were all stood there, watching them out of the office window. He got out first and opened the door for her. I thought that was nice. He wasn’t a tall man, not much to look at either really. But there was something about him. Something in the way he moved maybe? He’s a chef, they told me. He had a suit on. He cared. I could tell that from the moment I saw him. He’d made the effort.

Her, though, the mam. Oh my dear God. Oh my word, what a mess. At first I thought she was ill or disabled or something. She stepped out of that car and nearly fell flat on her face. Lucky Dad was there to hold her up. Was she drunk? Mrs Moss made a little whistling noise through her teeth, and she and the head raised their eyebrows at each other. Mam had this mop of straggly hair that was stuck half to her face and was wearing these denim dungarees that were too big for her. Dad brushed her down and took her by the shoulders. We could see him talking to her, and she was nodding. Then he hugged her before taking her arm again. That was when we all looked away.

We met Mam and Dad at the door and walked with them to the office. Dad was chatting away about his job and his funny hours. He was saying how glad he was about the meeting; all he wanted was to do right by their boy. Mam didn’t say a word. She didn’t even look at us. Kept her head down, that hair hanging over her face. So rude.

The head sat Mam and Dad down, and Mrs Moss explained all about Child A’s behaviour since he started at school, and how they understood it was hard to come from a broken home and start afresh. The head said, at the end of the day, he wanted Child A to be part of the school. He wanted him to be involved.

Mam just sat there, didn’t even look at any of us, couldn’t even be bothered to nod. I wondered if she even cared about that poor little lamb. Dad, though, he was on it. First off, he apologised to the head and Mrs Moss. He said he wished he could help out more, that he could be involved, but he had to work and provide for the boy. He came back from Wrexham when he could ‘to help out’. He was sincere, and I could see tiredness in his face. He said he hoped we could all work together to do what’s best for Child A.

There was this silence in the room after he said that. It was suddenly dead awkward and tense. Then I heard something that made me jump out of my skin, and I nearly screamed in front of everyone. I managed to hold it in though, thank God.

It was a tap. Just one. Quiet. Muffled. But I heard it.

It came from the table where Mam and Dad were sitting. Under the table, I’m sure of it. If Mrs Moss or the head heard it, they said nothing. I thought I was going out of my mind for a second. It can’t have been … it just can’t have been the same as … no. Impossible. It was me. It was all me just tired and worn out.

Mam heard it though. She must have done, cos just as I jump, she gives this little shake.

He looked at Mam then, and she raised her head for the first time. Her face appeared from behind that curtain of hair and she tried to smile. She agreed in this reedy voice. It was like she was only pretending to care. Acting like a parent but not doing it very well. I’m still dying to know what Mrs Moss thought of her.

We talked through Child A’s behaviour now – the running, the hiding, the climbing up onto the roof – and poor Dad just looked distraught. He told us that he’d tried everything, that he did his best, but he worked odd hours – weekends and evenings. We all looked at Mam. We all knew Mam has custody of Child A. She’d offered almost nothing to the meeting so far. She just emerged from behind her hair again and Dad put his hand over hers. That’s when she smiled and I saw how young she looked. She looked younger than me! That couldn’t be right.

Mam told us in her thin voice, barely above a whisper, about how she kept her house organised, tried to maintain a routine for Child A and how his behaviour was something that troubled and upset her. A little part of me felt sorry for her; she sounded like a child herself. Dad squeezed her hand and rubbed her arm. So supportive, so sensitive.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she looked us in the eyes for the first time. ‘I’m sorry for his behaviour.’

Mrs Moss and the head nodded and said they understood, that some children are challenging, and how good it was that Mam and Dad had come to try and find a way forward. Mam looked grateful and nodded back. I could see her eyes were glassy, like she was about to cry.

No one knew what to say.

Dad broke the ice, cracked a couple of jokes and put us all at ease; he promised that the two of them would work together – they’d step things up at home and that it was easy for things like discipline to lapse. He said he shared our view that school and home have to work together. That’s when I noticed something else, something brief. It was a look between Mrs Moss and the head. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was there. For a fraction of a second, it was there.

Then Dad looked at me. Right at me. He had these piercing blue eyes and he looked straight into mine and … oh my gosh … I felt something flutter in my chest, something I’d not felt for a long while!

‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,’ he said. Mrs Moss apologised and said I’m Miss Rice who was a trainee and had taken it upon herself to work with Child A. I could have kissed her. Dad took my hand, looked me in the eye and gave me this lovely smile.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for helping my boy.’ And, oh my gosh, there was this electricity going through my hand from his hand where they touched. Oh my word. He had these little curls of chest hair just poking up above the open button of his shirt and … well, let’s just say it’s been a while since I’ve been so … felt so … like that. Not since Jeff and I broke up, and that was, what, six, seven months ago? Dad held on to my hand for just a fraction of a second and his eyebrows rose just a miniscule amount, like a secret something special passed between us.

To stop myself blushing I told them about Child A’s outburst. I left out the bit about him throwing the book and hitting me in the shin. I left out the tapping, just in case they thought I was nuts, although I was desperate to know whether they’d heard it too.

‘Sometimes,’ Dad said – and I’ll never forget this because it was such a strange thing to say – ‘Sometimes we wonder where this boy came from! What’s he done with our son?’

And everyone laughed.

I remembered then about how lots of the staff had said that Child A used to be good, that he was lovely. I wonder what went wrong.

Mam and Dad left not long after, ushered through the door and back outside. We watched them get back into the car, him holding the door open for her. Such a gentleman. Old-fashioned, like my dad. I wondered if he’d look back, if he’d see us watching them and save a little glance for me.

The thing is, now, I don’t know what to write when I talk about Child’s A mam and dad. What was I expecting? Monsters? Abusers?

Not these two. No way. I’ll write that the parents are supportive, loving. I can’t fault them. Maybe if Dad was home a bit more, perhaps that would help Child A? But Dad’s a wonderful role model, so what’s going wrong? Maybe it’s medical. Maybe Child A is ill? I wish I could take him to a psychiatrist or something – bundle him away when no one’s looking, just to find out what’s gone wrong in his brain. What makes him tick. It would be great to have a secret video camera in his house. I wonder what he’s like there…

So what can we glean from Delyth’s recordings? Sorrel and Sonia appeared to be supportive parents, although Sorrel’s work took him away from the house for extended periods. He was, at this point, a sous-chef in a local restaurant, which demanded a great deal of his time. There are a couple of troubling moments in the recordings: Alfie’s inappropriate clothing for bad weather doesn’t look good for either parent, but with so little to go on, it’s difficult to judge what happened.

We should not ignore Delyth’s sudden attraction to Sorrel. Was the look that passed between the two invented, or did Sorrel really reciprocate, with his ex-partner, the mother of his child, sat right next to him?

I share – as I imagine you now do – Delyth’s fascination with the Marsden household. As far as we know, Alfie lived with Sonia in Audlem; with Sorrel visiting as and when he could. Therefore, it was Sonia who was facing the most pressure – more or less single-handedly raising a child while allegedly dealing with an alcohol problem. Was this behind Alfie’s behavioural issues or was there something else? Remember, the teachers were claiming that Alfie had been well behaved in his last school and that the move to Audlem must have affected his behaviour in a detrimental way.

There is, before we end, another recording I’d like to play. It’s tacked on to the end of one of the tapes, so Emyr and I nearly missed it. It was only because I accidently left the cassette running when we were talking that we found what I am about to play next.

I’m not sure what you will think about the following recording and I have struggled with my decision to air it. Emyr can’t add much context, and claims he has no clue what it’s about. Unfortunately it’s not dated and frustratingly, no one is named. It is possible, however, to infer who Delyth could be talking about.

—[Indistinguishable] … even recording this, as it could … I mean, it’s a worry. It’s always when I’m on my own, late at night … that’s when the guilt creeps in. But it’s also so exciting. You know when you have chocolate in the fridge and you just can’t stop thinking about it? It’s like that. You know you shouldn’t, you know it’s bad for you, but there’s that little part inside that knows you will. It’s just a question of when. The only difference is that this ‘chocolate’ isn’t bad for me. He’s explained that it’s OK, that I don’t need to feel any guilt about what we do. This is my pleasure, and I’m allowed it. I’m allowed to have as much as I like.

What am I like? I jump every time the phone rings. I sometimes pick it up when it hasn’t rung, just to check that there’s a dial tone, that I haven’t put it back wrong and he’s trying to call.

That’s what I’m doing when I should be working. Times like now when I should be getting on, I’m checking the phone. I’m getting up and straightening things, making sure the carpet is freshly hoovered. I know he likes that. He once looked in my kitchen cupboards and gave me that smile – the one that makes me go weak. I asked him why. He put his arms round my waist and said that all my tins faced the right way. I hadn’t even thought about it, but it made me smile too. He said I had a beautiful mind – a mind like his.

And since he said that … well, I don’t know how many times I’ve straightened the bed sheets; they keep crinkling up when I turn my back. I keep all the chairs at the right angles and all my ornaments are dusted. I know he won’t look, I know that all he wants is me, but you never know. To see that smile, it just makes my heart sing…

What am I talking about? I’m like a teenage girl again. But it’s not like with Jeff – he wasn’t a proper man. I see that now. Jeff was like a child. He didn’t know how to make a meal or iron his clothes. All his towels had a funny smell. His kitchen smelled of burnt bacon fat. That’s not how a man should be. How hard is it to have manners? How hard is it to treat someone right, to give someone a compliment once in a while? Jeff just wouldn’t make the effort. I never felt beautiful with him. Not like I do now.

He makes me beautiful.

Oh dear, why am I even recording this? I just have to let it all come out. It’s all bottled up inside me and I have to let it out somehow.

Oh, I know it’s wrong … but … it just feels right, him and me. He says it as well. He tells me it’s never felt this right before now.

Right now I would just do anything for him.

The recording does not end here. There is an additional part that comes directly afterwards, marked by a click, presumably where some time has passed. A lot of the following is an empty digital hiss, occasionally punctuated by some indistinguishable speaking, which, despite trying to enhance the recording, I cannot make out. In the following, you will hear what I have been able to compile. I have cut out the longer stretches where there is no discernible noise and included every sound so you can judge what you’re hearing, although a great deal of it is movement and breathing. The voice, though, is definitely Delyth’s.

Finally, there’s no indication of when this was recorded in relation to the previous recordings. What are the implications of what you’re about to hear? … I have no clue.

—[Clicking and clunking of recording buttons. Then rustling that distorts the first few words] … that? There!

Oh my God, so it’s … it’s some ungodly time in the morning. I don’t want to … Hang on … there. There it is. That’s it! Listen.

[About 30 seconds of hissing and behind it, a faint, flat sound for a few seconds]

That. That, scratching. God, I hope we don’t have mice! Or rats! What could it…? There…

[Another few seconds of silence]

Is that you, luv? Has he gone home? He’d better bloody not have! Luv? Maybe he’s just gone downstairs. Shhh, don’t wake the little one … There! … I just want to get it on tape … So I … so when I wake up tomorrow I can listen back and know that I’m not losing my mind.

[Another bout of hissing and shuffling noises]

There, there! Oh that had to be it! Oh my gosh, I’m going to feel like death tomorrow, I’m sure of it. But I can’t sleep.

Not with that … that noise.

[Hissing and more rustling then a sudden thud]

There, that was it. Oh my word, I’m all – I’m tingling … my whole body. I’m cold. I’m going to…

[Indistinguishable, then a rustling. Delyth’s voice fades away. In the silence that follows, three distinct taps can be heard. Then a high-pitched sound that lasts for about half a second]

…fine. He’s fine, little lamb. Hot though. His room’s hot but it’s freezing in here. [sigh] I need to go to sleep…

[A loud rustling]

[More rustling]

[Heavy breathing]

[Scraping noise]

[Tapping and a high-pitched noise, similar to before]

Speculation will abound, I’m sure, about the similarities between this recording and the accounts of tapping provided by Callum Wright, Sorrel Marsden and, of course, Delyth Rice in the classroom. There certainly are tapping sounds on this recording, but with such a poor-quality audio and with little context, there is no way of confirming what they are. That high-pitched noise, though – I know there will be a thousand different explanations for what it is. To me, it sounded like laughter.

It is entirely possible that Delyth Rice created this particular recording as an elaborate prank. I doubt it, though, as does Emyr. And why bury such a prank at the bottom of a box? As far as we are aware, no one else has been privy to any of these recordings since Delyth used them to write up her dissertation.

This final cassette, throws up so many questions, which are almost impossible to answer. Which leaves us with only Emyr. I encourage him to search his memories to attempt to confirm or deny any of the details we’ve heard.

—My dad left us when I was little, three years old. Tosser just walked away. Done a lot of damage, that did, to mam and me. Especially mam. It was just us two for a while. She had one or two boyfriends but they never lasted.

—Did you meet any of your mother’s boyfriends? She mentions a ‘Jeff’ in the recordings we’ve heard.

—I met all the blokes that she dated. Some were alright, like Jeff. He was a good one, he was. They were together for a while. I was older then. Same age as Alfie Marsden, six or seven. I remember most of them after Jeff. I hated all of them. I think it was cos she didn’t think much of herself, see? She went with some right … characters.

—What does that mean?

—You know, blokes that weren’t … great. God knows why. I think that attracted a certain type, if you know what I mean? People who’d take advantage of her good nature.

—That must have been hard for you when you were little.

—It must have been harder for her than me.

—Do you remember anything out of the ordinary that happened around this time?

—There was something funny she used to do in my bedroom. I thought it was just a game at the time. It was after I found something in the garden.

—What did you find?

—I was mucking about in the grass when I found these little fossils.

—Fossils?

—No, not fossils – they weren’t bones or bits of dinosaur. They were more like archaeology or something. Arrowheads. Made out of stone or crystal, dull, crystal. They were buried in a little circle, all the heads pointed inward.

—Flint perhaps?

—Yeah maybe. I remember picking them up and running in to show Mam and … well, she must have been in a bad mood or busy or something, cos she took them away.

—Really? Why was that?

—I dunno, she never said. But that night, Mam came in to my bedroom with this big biscuit tin, all rusty and dented.

—What was in the tin? The arrowheads?

—I thought it was, but no. It was full of junk. Just my dad’s old stuff from the garage.

—What sort of junk?

—Nuts and bolts, that sort of thing. These great thick screws and big lumps of iron. I remember the smell of them on my hands. We put them in little piles round the room; I remember that. I suppose it was my idea. I dunno. Kids are mad, aren’t they? They do mad things. Maybe she thought it’d help me forget those arrowheads and remember my dad or something? I think Mam was just at a low point.

And it’s here we reach a rather frustrating impasse. A stressed, overworked student teacher encounters a child with complex needs. That is virtually all we can deduce from Delyth’s recordings. It is interesting, though, that Alfie’s behavioural traits have, to my knowledge at least, never been mentioned in the context of his disappearance. Perhaps the reasoning was that they had no real relevance to his disappearance. But Sorrel’s account of what happened on Christmas Eve, 1988 could point to Alfie getting out of his seat and running away. After hearing about Alfie’s behaviour, and his needs, I believe this is entirely possible.

We do get a small insight from these recordings into what life was like at Alfie’s home. Sorrel was working hard to keep the family together, and Sonia it seemed, from Delyth’s point of view, at least, was a defeated and rather feeble character who could barely keep it together.

Is any more light shed on what happened to Alfie Marsden in 1988? I feel we’re getting closer. Particularly because one of Delyth’s recordings alludes to staff in the school thinking that Alfie was once sweetness and light and then changed. When I’ve tried to contact these members of staff, though, to get their views, they’ve either not responded to me or have expressed their wish not to discuss Alfie Marsden, at least not while there is still the possibility, however remote, that he might still be alive. So we’ll have to look for other ways to find out what changed him. And that is where we will begin next time. A fated camping trip that could possibly be seen as a catalyst for the change in Alfie.

To end this episode, though, I want to include a postscript from Emyr, whose part in this story has been either small or large – depending on how you look at it. He had no real part in Alfie’s story. But if it were not for him we would not have had any of these insights.

—I ask everyone I interview the same question, so you’re free to speculate. What do you think happened to Alfie Marsden?

—I don’t really want to say. I just feel like everyone else, I suppose; there’s not much hope left is there?

—What about Sorrel and Sonia? Your mother seems to have shone a light on a part of their life that really hasn’t been explored.

—Look, I don’t know what people will think of me if I talk about that boy’s dad. But I’m going to say it. So he seems like he was a good bloke, doesn’t he, that Sorrel?

—I have no reason to believe otherwise.

—Well there’s something about him that reminds me of the blokes my mam used to go on dates with. Everyone thought they were good blokes too. They used to come back to the house sometimes. They used to bring me stuff – presents and that. Some of them used to take me for rides in their cars. But like I said, I didn’t trust any of them. That Sorrel, though. If him and my mam were together, why did she never say nothing about it? Why did she not introduce me to him? I don’t think he’s as good as what everyone makes out. Don’t ask me why. I mean it’s not like he’s done anything, is it?

Indeed.

‘It’s not like he’s done anything.’ It is this statement that will carry us from this episode into our next. We have seen a snapshot of Sorrel and Sonia’s life. The only way to get a bigger picture is to talk in depth to someone who was there, in the middle of things. So I have made it my mission to try and speak to at least one of Alfie’s parents.

Until next time.

I have been Scott King.

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 4

00:00:00

Insomnia Summer

22nd August 2018, 9:15 a.m.

So, just for the record, and in case I never come out: here I am, in my car and I’m just about to go in to talk to Anne. I’ve brought my questions again. Last time I didn’t even remember to look at them. Maybe I will this time. I’m not counting on anything. I can’t even believe I got here to be honest. I can’t believe I was in any state to drive. I’m exhausted.

Well, I think it’s safe to say you can never predict anything about Anne Manon. I went in expecting to try to ask my questions, but I realised I’d left my notebook in the car. That’s what happens when you’re sleep deprived.

I was actually a little early. The home help was still there. Anne had him busy, hoovering and polishing the windows. Nice young lad. He seemed a bit star-struck when she told him who I was. There were biscuits out, Bourbons and Jammie Dodgers. I felt myself welling up just seeing that. Like I said, I’ve had very little sleep.

If she’s doing that for me it means she values my friendship as much as I value hers. Next time I’ll bring a gift. That’s why recording this will help. It’ll make sure I don’t forget.

I told Anne about the insomnia, the dreams. The orange lights, the roaring that wakes me up, soaked in sweat. I nearly asked her what it meant. But I know what it means. It means I’ve gone too deep into this.

I also told her about the tapping at the front door a few days ago; and how I thought someone was knocking on the window last night.

I laughed, but she didn’t.

She said she understood.

Maybe that’s all I needed – someone to understand. Someone to smile and offer me a Bourbon. Someone who doesn’t think I’m losing it.

Another funny thing was that I felt myself getting a bit choked up. It was as if I was finally letting something go.

Anne was asking about me, so I found it was me who was doing most of the talking. It’s only fair that Anne knows a bit about her new friend.

I wondered how she’d react when I was telling her about my life. Our upbringings were chalk and cheese. In fact, I felt a bit guilty telling her about what I remember from being a child. Which, to be fair, isn’t that much. I’ve never really looked back that hard. And it was difficult to remember a lot of it. Anne told me it’s the same for her. She remembers nothing of her real parents – nothing about the days before they sent her away. She says it’s probably some sort of defence she’s built up.

So it was tough telling Anne about the beautiful house of my childhood, with its garden and the pond. She kept asking though; she wanted to know more and more.

While Anne was abandoned to the wrath of Catholic nuns, I had things: my little plot of land in the garden where I grew potatoes and radishes; the tree house my father constructed; my bedroom with its thick carpets and bookshelves. I have very few memories of playing with other children, however. I must have been quite a solitary child.

Anne at least had other children around. Anne told me that her friends were the one thing of value she took from the home.

We were educated in completely different ways too – Anne at a local comprehensive; me privately at home. She said she and her friends used to deliberately get into trouble so they could receive after-school detentions. She said writing lines in a freezing classroom was better than being back at the home.

I told her about Marty and Susan – the private tutors who would come to our house and teach me. Anne was amazed! She was giddy with what looked like happiness and kept clapping. I suppose that, for Anne, it was like reading Malory Towers or Harry Potter. I felt my privilege and was embarrassed by it. But Anne loved it. She lapped up all of my memories and kept asking for more.

Being with her is like having a gran. That’s how it felt today, like I had a gran.

I never knew my real grandparents.

Maybe what I’ve found in Anne is something I’ve lacked in my life?

Maybe I should remind myself why I’m really here.

So somehow I got us back on to Alfie Marsden. I told Anne that I feel like I’ve reached an impasse. There’s too much that isn’t known. All I have is the official story of what happened. The car, the vanished child. What else is there? I don’t feel like I’ll ever find an end, I said.

It was then that Anne asked me what made this case different from all the others in the series. I didn’t know what she meant. Then she said something that had never occurred to me.

‘Why are you trying to solve this one?’

And I realised she was right.

Anne’s binged all my past series over the space of a couple of weeks, so she’s pretty qualified to ask me a question like that.

It made sense. It made total sense. Maybe I have been trying to solve this one rather than just presenting it?

It took Anne to tell me that.

I began to thank her, but she stopped me – held up her hand and told me to wait. I watched. Anne picked up a pen and a pencil and began to write, her near-blindness making her slow and careful, spacing out each letter with a crooked finger.

As she wrote Anne said something along the lines of, ‘You’ve always just sat back and let people tell their stories, Scott. You’ve let people make up their own minds. Here’s a story that’s never been told.’ It was something cryptic like that.

It’s probably the psychic in her talking.

All she’d written down was a name and a phone number. Anne told me to introduce myself, to explain what I was doing. And to mention Anne’s name.

She said she couldn’t guarantee anything, but it might help.

I’m going to call the number as soon as I get home.

Episode 4: The Wood-Knockers

—When I went to work at Dayton’s, I was just reeling from everything. I thought it was impossible I could get any lower. But I did – afterwards. Back then, at Dayton’s, I was just floating through life. It was like I was only half a person. I don’t even remember how I got the job. I was just on autopilot, just going through the motions. Before I know it I’m living on the site and I’m in the kitchens.

I think that’s what helped me out at first. In a job like that you didn’t have to think too hard. It was like being back at the big hotels, working there, ’cept the food weren’t as good. The kitchen was huge, a load of fryers and a big range where all the meat went. I could have done that job with my eyes closed. Suited me just fine.

And there wasn’t a proper hierarchy, like head chef, sous-chef, chef de partie, all that. There was the head chef and there was the rest of us.

And that’s where I met Sorrel Marsden. And we became mates.

Well, I thought so. You see in the kitchens, all you really have is each other. You’re all from different places, different walks of life, but you all have something in common – kitchen people are a bit, well, messed up. We’re all wastrels, misfits … addicts.

Welcome to Six Stories. I’m Scott King.

This is episode four.

In the last few weeks we’ve been looking back at the case of Alfie Marsden, the child who vanished into Wentshire Forest in 1988. We’ve been building up some context to the story, trying to understand how a seven-year-old boy could disappear and never be seen again.

The Alfie Marsden case, for most, is resolved. The boy is officially deceased. The name is synonymous with a family’s sorrow. Despite that, I want to look again – from six different perspectives – to unearth anything that may change this well-worn narrative.

Wendy Morris took some convincing to talk to me. She is a resident in a ‘sober living home’ in rural Cheshire – a group facility for addicts and sex workers, owned by a charity. The home, which I will not name, is beautifully kept. There are well-tended flower beds in the front and a small allotment in the back. There is even room for a small menagerie of animals; chickens scratch and burble in a wooden pen, and a goat sleeps in the shade of a small shed. Wendy’s link to Alfie Marsden has never before come to light. Wendy has never told her story. This is, I think, because she believes it does not matter, because she believes she does not matter. Whether she’s right is up to us to decide – the Six Stories ‘book group’ who meet at the edge of an old crime scene.

I chat with Wendy over a pot of tea at a wooden picnic table at the back of the home. The smell of honeysuckle and the languid buzz of bees is all around us.

—So yeah, I knew Sorrel. He was alright, he was. He looked after me a bit, when I first started.

—Looked after you?

—He was one of those blokes who’s good at seeing if someone’s in a mess, not doing well. I think he saw that about me the moment I walked in the door. He was straight over, looking after me. He stood out from the others.

—What makes you say that?

—Cos he was different. I know the sort of blokes that work in kitchens, and Sorrel wasn’t like any of them. I remember when I came into the kitchen for the first time and one of the other chefs made some smart-arse comment. Sorrel was on him straightaway, sent him off to go and peel some spuds or something. That’s what he was like at first. He was nice, you know? He saw I was in a bad place and stopped the other lads having a dig. And he told me I was a decent cook – which is a massive compliment.

—Did you ever think Sorrel had any romantic interest in you?

—I dunno about that. I knew Sorrel had just come out of a messy one with someone else.

—Mad Mary … I mean, Maryanne?

—Yeah, her. Anyway. It wasn’t long after I started that Sonia Lewis walked into the place and that was it for him.

—Sorrel fell in love?

—In love? He was obsessed with her! We used to take the piss out of him no end. We used to call her his little dolly bird and he’d get all red in the face and start swearing. It was funny!

—Did you get to know Sonia at all?

—We all knew each other, but she wasn’t a mate. All I knew of her was that she was more my age than Sorrel’s but she was a kid inside. She’d hardly lived – never even been out of Wales. Sorrel was much more my type of person. He’d lived a life as well.

—I don’t know a lot about Sorrel before this point in his life.

—You know I said before that all kitchen people are weird, fucked up? He was no different.

—Did he confide in you?

—Sometimes. When we was drunk. Before Sonia came on the scene. He was brought up by his grandmother. She was one of those horrible, old-fashioned ‘children should be seen and not heard’ types. She sounded like a witch, filling his head with scary stories when he was a boy.

—Really?

—She told him a whole load of nonsense, told him if he didn’t behave that ‘things’ would come and get him. She scared the life out of Sorrel when he was a boy. He said she told him he was different from the rest of his family, that he was the black sheep. I think he’d spent most of his life trying to please the old fucker.

My mum was a piece of shit, and Sorrel’s grandmother was, too. Maybe that’s why we became friends.

This is interesting, but how significant to the story it is, I’m not sure. Wendy explains that she saw the way Sorrel behaved in the kitchen and, thinking about the drunken snippets he’d reveal about his grandmother, wondered how she’d influenced him.

—He was a bloody control freak. Everything had to be done his way or he’d lose it. Ninety-nine percent of chefs are the same, but still…

—Did you feel sorry for him?

—If I’m honest, no. But back then I didn’t feel much of anything for anyone. But since I’ve been here, since I got sober, I can see where all that came from. People try and make up for the lack of power in their lives by focussing on what they can control. Sorrel couldn’t control how his grandmother felt towards him, but he could control what went on in the kitchen.

It’s an interesting observation from Wendy. But she tells me that’s the only real insight she ever got into Sorrel.

—He was a hard bloke. Not physically, but emotionally. He was like me: didn’t let much in or out. I guess that’s why we became mates. Maybe we saw each other as safe…

Wendy and Sorrel became better friends when he began dating Sonia. Wendy says she was the only one who could get away with ribbing him about how protective he was. Sorrel would often confide in her about Sonia, how worried he was about her. Wendy, in turn, told Sorrel about her life, about her brother Sam who’d died, something she had never opened up to anyone about.

I ask Wendy about the early days of Sorrel and Sonia’s relationship. She remembers Sorrel always checking his watch during service and, no matter what he was doing, downing tools at a certain time and going to the payphone in the back corridor. This sent the other chefs mad. His explanation was that he worried about Sonia when she was out, that her friends – the other younger waitresses and front-of-house staff – were, as he put it, ‘idiots’ and he didn’t trust them with her.

In turn, Sonia, wherever she was, would then call the number on the payphone to tell Sorrel she was safe. Wendy corroborates what Darren Morgan told me: how, when they had days off, they would spend them drinking in the Dayton’s staff bar. Again like Darren, she also says that the few times she saw Sorrel lose his temper were when he thought someone was looking at Sonia wrongly. He would square up to them, so enraged, that whoever was the subject of his ire would immediately back down and apologise.

Thus far, then, we’ve learned nothing that we don’t already know about the early days of Sorrel and Sonia’s relationship. I feel like we’re going over old ground, albeit from a different perspective. Wendy, however, tells me that we’re only halfway done.

—I just needed to tell you that bit first, because otherwise the next bit won’t make sense. You see when Sorrel and Sonia were together, I was low. But Sorrel … I really thought I had a friend in him. I really did.

—Did something happen between the two of you?

—He left. He and Sonia just upped sticks and left. Maybe I’m selfish, thinking that he should have stayed for me. It’s just that one day he was there and one day he’d handed his notice in; him and Sonia were getting a place together.

—How did that make you feel?

—Like I didn’t matter. It’s not like we were best mates or anything, but I thought we were close! As close as either of us could get to having a proper friend. I mean, I told him about Sam, he told me about Sonia. It just seemed cold.

When Sorrel and Sonia moved, all contact between Sorrel and Wendy ceased. Wendy, who was already unstable after her brother’s death, began to sink into lower realms of addiction. Without her friend to look after her, she began drinking more and was introduced to drugs. After her seasonal contract at Dayton’s was over, she didn’t look for another job and instead spent her time with other addicts. By the time Sorrel got back in touch with Wendy, she was taking cocaine and living in a squat with dealers and heroin addicts, somewhere in Prestatyn.

—When he called, I didn’t even recognise him. This would have been, what, eighty-six, eighty-seven? He’d been gone for a few years.

—What did he want? To catch up?

—You won’t believe it, it was that strange. I guess it showed who and where I was back then that I agreed to do it. It was almost like he knew I was low enough to do anything anyone asked me to.

—And what was it, Wendy? What did Sorrel want you to do?

—He wanted me to come on holiday with him and Sonia and their little boy. I didn’t even know that he was a father.

This is quite the revelation. Based on what we already know about the family, Alfie would have been about five or six years old at the time and Sonia already deep into addiction. Sorrel was the fabric holding the family together at this point, so it’s no wonder he needed someone to help out.

For those unfamiliar with Sorrel Marsden, it might be a mystery why he chose Wendy for this job, so I want to take you back to a throwaway remark Darren Morgan made in episode one.

—You were Sorrel’s only real friend?

—There was someone else, now I come to think of it; another chef. I think she might have been the only woman Sorrel didn’t try and put the moves on. I forget her name – Winnie. Wendy maybe? She never tried to mess him about. I think that’s why they were mates. Like him and me, they were equals.

It’s quite sad that the only person deemed ‘equal’ to Sorrel was Wendy; and it’s also sad that Sorrel had not been in touch with her for a number of years.

Or is that strictly true? I ask Wendy about whether she’d had any word from Sorrel since he got together with Sonia.

—I thought that at the time: Why me? Why now? Then I remembered something…

—What was it?

—It’s daft really. I was probably mistaken. I was off my head – drugs, drink, everything…

—It’s ok to say what you think. Even if you were mistaken.

—OK. It’s just that there were times back in those days when I could have sworn I saw him.

—Sorrel Marsden?

—It was probably just someone who looked like him. Like I say, it was nothing. But there were a few times I was sure. I thought I would see him at the back table in a pub; a face on a dance floor or crowded into the kitchen at a house party.

—And did you ever approach him, or the person you thought was Sorrel?

—I remember once, at this party, I was completely out of it. But I was talking to a bloke. And I was sure the next day that it had been him. Like I say I’d been so out of it, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

—Did he recognise you? Did you remember that?

—He didn’t say anything that I remembered. I did know that he kept giving me drinks, and kept rolling joints and lighting them for me. Then he was gone. Or I was gone – passed out, you know. I did used to think about him after that, though. Sometimes picked up the phone and wondered if I could track him down somehow. I never did.

—Why not?

—I think he would have been disappointed to see how far I’d fallen. He was that sort of bloke; I couldn’t bear to have disappointed him. That’s why when he did get in touch, I was so eager to go – to do it. I wanted to impress him.

—That was why you agreed?

—I thought it would be good for me…

—Did you agree?

—I thought it would be good for me. They were going camping, he said; taking Alfie to Wentshire Forest. They wanted me to help out with him cos Sonia was finding it hard. He said something like, ‘Sonia needs you’.

I’d never been needed before in my whole life. I think he knew that and that’s why he said it.

The next thing Wendy knew was that Sorrel Marsden, someone who had abruptly walked out of her life, and who hadn’t been in touch for years, was on his way to pick her up.

—I hate to ask, Wendy, but was there any … gain for you from this arrangement?

—How do you mean?

—Aside from what I presume was a free holiday, was there any money offered?

—I don’t think there was. I mean, I had no job. I was beginning to get a habit and I was in a dark place, so I could have done with the money.

—What was it made you to agree to go, then?

—I guess … I have to say it was Sorrel.

—He convinced you?

—You see, Sorrel had this thing about him, he had this way about him that was hard to resist.

—He was charismatic?

—Yes and no. I mean, he wasn’t particularly attractive. But he had this … this charm. This is going to sound stupid, but it was like he had this light shining out of him.

This charm has been mentioned by others who knew Sorrel. A notable example is Darren Morgan in episode two. It’s clear that there was something about the man that drew people to him. However, I think the fact that Wendy agreed to Sorrel’s strange proposal says more about where she was at this point.

Sorrel drove the three adults and the toddler along the Wentshire Forest Pass in his car loaded with camping equipment.

—So how was it, seeing Sorrel and Sonia again?

—Oh it was OK. Sonia was a bit quiet. She was always like that though – timid and shy. She looked rough. I suppose giving birth and that does it to you. She was a pretty little thing when she worked at Dayton’s but that prettiness had almost gone. Sorrel was just as I remembered him, though – chattering away, making jokes.

—And Alfie?

—Yeah … that poor little boy. He was just lovely, sat there in his little car seat, looking out the window. I was sat in the back with him, with half the bags across my knees. I spent most of the journey laughing and singing with him. He wanted ‘Wheels on the Bus’ about a million, billion times. Sorrel joined in loudly every time. Sonia though, she just sat there, staring out the window. It was like she couldn’t be bothered.

—What was going on with Sonia at this point? Did she have problems of her own?

—Everyone knows – from the news and that – that she was drinking. I think it was just getting really bad around then. I didn’t know what was going on at home with her and I wasn’t really looking to be completely honest with you. I didn’t smell drink on her. She just looked defeated.

At some point on the journey, Sorrel pulled off the pass and opened a gate onto a dirt track leading into the trees. Wendy says she’s sure they were trespassing as there were no official signs pointing to any sort of campsite.

—We drove for ages, the car bumping about. Alfie was having a great old time, laughing and giggling. When we stopped, I realised we’d gone totally off road – there wasn’t even a track anymore. Sorrel had just driven into the middle of the forest. It was lucky it was summer or else the car would have got stuck, I reckon.

—It seems a rather odd place for a holiday, did you think that at the time?

—I remember that we were the only ones in that whole forest; there was no one around. But that would’ve suited the Sorrel I knew.

—What do you mean by that?

—He hated scrutiny. He was defensive, always thought that people were judging him. Being away from everyone like this, I guess it gave him a bit of freedom. And he would have been embarrassed by Sonia. And, I shouldn’t say it, but probably the boy, too.

—Sorrel saw Alfie as an embarrassment? Really?

—Sometimes I think Sorrel saw that boy, not as a person in his own right, but a reflection of himself. I think he felt that Alfie’s behaviour reflected on him as a parent, which to some extent, it did. So going somewhere remote kind of solved that problem for a bit. As for me, I thought it would be good for me to be in the middle of nowhere. No pubs, no temptation. It felt like I could regain who I was with my friend beside me. It was an opportunity for me to sort my life out a bit.

Sonia and Wendy pitched the tents and looked after Alfie while Sorrel went off into the woods to gather firewood. Wendy says that Sonia came out of her shell a little bit then and the two women were able to chat while they worked and played with Alfie.

—It was a funny place, that forest. It was dark and huge. The trees were massive, blocking out most of the sky. It was quiet too, just faint rustlings of birds and that. We couldn’t relax, we couldn’t settle in there.

—Why was that?

—It sounds daft, but it felt like something was watching you. All the time. And we found we was talking quiet, shushing Alfie if he made too much noise. As if we was in a church or something.

I think it was cos we knew we wasn’t supposed to be there. We listened out for Sorrel, thought we’d hear him chopping branches and that – he’d taken this little axe and a spade with him – but there was nothing. It was like the forest had swallowed him up.

—Did Sonia confide in you at all while Sorrel wasn’t there? Did she say anything of note? Perhaps about how things were at home?

—No. She didn’t come across like she was … anything really. There just wasn’t a lot to her.

—What about Alfie? How did he seem?

—He was like any other little boy; wandering about, grabbing sticks. He loved it in them woods. I was glad because I just found the whole place weird. I couldn’t relax. I remember he had us playing this game. The trees were dead close together outside the clearing, the woods were really dark. Alfie kept walking over to the line of trees and pointing.

—Really? What at?

—It was funny. He kept saying ‘Doggy!’ and either me or Sonia would go over to look, and Alfie would shout, ‘Doggy gone!’ He did it with other animals too: ‘Piggy gone!’, ‘Goat gone!’

I don’t want to mention what Callum Wright told me about the animal sightings in the forest, I don’t want to plant bias in Wendy’s mind or taint her story. All of a sudden, her smile turns to a frown.

—Kids are funny, aren’t they? They come out with all sorts. I remember Alfie toddling over to another clump of trees; he had his hands out as if he was trying to catch something. Me and Sonia, we’re just sat there, looking at him, and then he stops still and stares into the trees. Dead quiet. Well, Sonia was trying to lie down, she was done playing, but I go over to him, quiet cos I can hear him chuntering away.

—What was he saying?

—It was just gabble – made-up kiddie speak, but he was whispering it. It was weird cos it was like he was answering back, you know? As if he was talking to someone.

—I don’t follow.

—Like someone was speaking to him.

—Who?

—No one! There wasn’t no one there! I get closer and squat down in front of him and he starts laughing. Well, when a little one laughs like that, you can’t help yourself, can you. I started laughing, too. We’re laughing and laughing, and I ask Alfie what’s funny. He’s still looking away from me, into the trees.

He stops then and turns round to face me. He does this funny thing: he puts his hand up and touches my lips with his finger, dead soft.

‘Shh,’ he says.

So I play along, like it’s a game, and I start whispering. I ask Alfie why we need to be quiet.

He looks at me, right in my eyes and says, ‘Bad piggy wake up.’ And the corners of his little mouth turn down like he’s going to cry. Well, I dunno why, but there was something I didn’t like about the way he said that. ‘Bad piggy’ – it sent a chill through me. God knows why.

—Did Sonia know what he was talking about?

—She acted funny about it. She shouted at Alfie to stop it, which I thought was pretty harsh. I asked her what the matter was and she got all sulky. She said it was a thing that Sorrel did. She said she wasn’t having it while they were away.

—What did she mean?

—She said Sorrel and Alfie had a game they liked to play together, without her. She said it started cos she’s scared of mice. The game was simple; Sorrel and Alfie used to make scratching sounds with their feet when she wasn’t looking, point at the floor and say ‘bad mousey’ – it would make Sonia scream out. They thought it was hilarious, she told me.

—It just sounds like a kids’ game. It doesn’t sound particularly nasty.

—She said that Sorrel did it to Alfie, too. If Alfie didn’t do what he was told, Sorrel would make a scratching noise, a snuffling, a growling. He would tell Alfie that ‘bad piggy’ would come and eat him if he didn’t behave. I think it was just a way for Sorrel to try and control him.

—Perhaps that’s all it was…

—Anyway, I think he was getting tired then, cos he starts playing up.

—Playing up?

—Sonia tells him to come and get a drink and something to eat, but he won’t. He keeps telling her to shush. He keeps shaking his head and pointing into the trees, babbling away. Sonia’s fed up with it and she tells him to get over there now. Alfie though, he starts getting red in the face, his little hands curl into fists and he points at Sonia. He starts shouting ‘Bad lady!’ at the top of his voice. Over and over again: ‘Bad lady! Bad lady!’ It took both of us to calm him down.

—What do you think was wrong with him?

—No idea. I tell you what, though, I didn’t like all that ‘bad piggy’ nonsense. It messed with me head. I kept thinking I was seeing things in the trees. I thought I was hearing footsteps or whispers in the wind. That was probably cos I’d not had no drink or anything, though. You hear things when you’re drying out.

And another thing – by the time she’d finally calmed him down, Sonia had all these cuts on her arms. There were bruises as well.

—Alfie did those to her?

—Who else could have? He must have been scratching and hitting her. Then Sorrel came back. And that’s when everything started going really wrong.

—What happened?

—Sorrel had been gone for ages and after Alfie had some food and a drink, we were getting a bit bored. Once we was used to the fact we was in a forest, there wasn’t actually anything to really do. We had put the tents up, dug the fire pit and Alfie had helped us put stones all round it. Sonia said that Sorrel would like that. We had all the food ready to go, we was just waiting for the firewood. None of us wanted to go far from the car and the tents, we didn’t want to explore or nothing. Not after all that ‘bad piggy’ nonsense.

So finally Sorrel comes back with a handful of firewood, just enough to get a fire going, and there’s suddenly this tension.

—How do you mean?

—Before, in the car, he was laughing and joking and that, but he came back with this scowl on his face. I’d seen that scowl before, when he wasn’t getting his way in the kitchen. I remember Alfie running over to him to give him a hug and he just stands there, looking at Sonia. I could feel her tensing up beside me.

—What was the matter with him?

—I dunno. He was filthy; all covered in mud and sweating. I remember how red he was, like he’d been running or something.

—Did he say what he’d been doing?

—He never said, but he was tired, irritable, started asking Sonia all these questions: where’s this, where’s that? She starts getting flustered and he’s getting more annoyed. He didn’t even have much firewood.

—So what do you think he’d been doing instead of collecting wood?

—I had no idea. Must have been pretty hard work, whatever it was. But I didn’t want to ask. Sonia and me, we were just scuttling about, trying to appease him.

—Was Sorrel angry with her? Was he … abusive in any way?

—No. It was more like he was disappointed. Every time he asked her something and she didn’t know, or hadn’t done something, he just did this face. He sighed. That was the thing with Sorrel: he was so charming that you didn’t want to disappoint him – you wanted to make him happy. So I starts scratching around, trying to get the fire going. And Sonia’s trying to get Alfie to go down for a nap. The whole time, Sorrel was just looking at Sonia like she’d failed him.

This behaviour went on for the rest of the afternoon. Wendy says the tension was almost unbearable. She kept her head down, assisting Sonia with trying to do everything right and keep Sorrel from being disappointed. She reiterates that nothing Sorrel had asked Sonia to do was overtly unreasonable, she just couldn’t seem to be able to do anything right for him.

—Alfie was getting silly, too; he kept trying to run off. Every time Sonia tried to soothe him, he would start doing his ‘bad lady’ thing and laughing. Sonia gave up after that. That’s the only time I seen Sorrel actually do anything with Alfie that trip. He sits down on this log and starts telling Alfie a story.

—Trying to settle him?

—Well, not really. It wasn’t like no fairy story, I tell you. He starts telling him that there’s little men what live in the woods. He called them ‘the wood-knockers’. He says to Alfie that if he listens, he’ll hear them knocking. So we all go quiet. The sun was going down and there was a wind in the trees. You could hear the quiet of the place like a rushing in your ears and every so often there’d be a snapping noise or a rustle, and you’d look round but there was nothing there.

Alfie was looking up at his dad, his eyes wide. He was wearing this little yellow rain coat and blue wellies, and my heart just … I could see how scared he was. But Sorrel goes on.

He says that the wood-knockers have no eyes, but they have sharp teeth and their favourite food is children. He says that if you run off into the wood without a grown-up, they’ll catch you and eat you.

—Wow.

—I know. But Alfie, he’s a spirited little one. He says ‘Dad, how can they catch me if they got no eyes?’ Sorrel doesn’t miss a beat. He says that they can smell children, that their noses are stronger than dogs’. He says that, if they smell you, they’ve got these long fingernails what they tap against the trees to let the others know you’re coming. He must have thought this story up when he was collecting firewood cos he’s got this stick in his hand and he starts tapping it against the log he’s sat on, behind his back so Alfie can’t see.

—That’s … unpleasant.

—Poor Alfie. I can see his lower lip going and Sorrel’s face is deadpan, serious. Alfie looks at him and back to his mum. Sonia opens her mouth and I swear, she’s about to tell Alfie it’s just a story, but Sorrel gets in first.

‘Mum’s heard them, too,’ he says. His eyes go wide. It’s a warning look, and Sonia nods her head. Something comes over Sorrel’s face then. I’ll never forget it – it was like he was telling an inside joke.

‘Mum hears a lot of strange things, Alfie,’ he says. ‘Mum hears a lot of things that Daddy doesn’t.’

‘Listen,’ he says, and we’re all just stood there like lemons, listening to nothing. ‘Hear that?’ Sorrel says, and Sonia sort of twitches. Her whole body jerks like she’s been electrocuted.

Alfie’s just looking up at us all like the world’s gone mad. I just keep my mouth shut.

—Why? Did you hear something?

—Yeah I did and I didn’t want to say nothing cos this was obviously not my business. It was some family thing that I had nothing to do with.

—What was?

—It was obvious. Sorrel’s got that bit of wood behind his back and he’s tapping on it with his knuckle. I could see him. But Alfie’s pretending like he can’t hear anything, and Sonia’s acting like she’s got ants in her pants.

I have no idea what’s going on, and all I want to do is take that little boy in my arms and tell him it’s not real, that he’ll be OK. Sorrel and Sonia are just staring at each other.

I’m interested that Sorrel didn’t use the story of the Wentshire Witch, which he surely must have known, and instead made up this rather gruesome tale of sightless ‘wood-knockers’. I also note the grim recurrence in this case of the ‘tapping’ noise.

Wendy explains that, after this, it was an easy way to keep Alfie in check. If the boy ventured too far away, all Sorrel had to do was tap a couple of sticks together behind his back and Alfie would come haring back into his mother’s arms. And he stopped all the ‘bad piggy’ stuff.

—I imagine none of this was conducive to getting Alfie to sleep that night?

—Poor little mite. It was Sonia who had to try and get him down while Sorrel just sat in front of the fire. We could hear Sonia in the tent, singing and soothing, trying to get Alfie to settle. It was dark by then. The darkness in there … it just fell. All we had was the torches and the fire, but even they weren’t bright enough.

—What about when Alfie went to sleep?

—We sat up for a bit, the three of us. It wasn’t cold and we had the fire. And Sonia perked up a bit then, too.

—Why was that?

—She had a drink then, didn’t she? They’d brought a wine box. Sorrel and her was drinking it. I was trying to stay off the drink, though. I was thinking that I’d be getting up with Alfie in the morning. After all that’s why I was there – to be like a babysitter.

—Did you think of just leaving?

—How could I? I couldn’t drive. You know how big Wentshire Forest is? There was no way I was going to start walking through that place on my own. Also, I felt for Sonia. I felt for both of them, to be honest.

—Did Sonia drink a lot that evening?

—Yeah. She was chatty for a bit before slumping into a stupor. She must have drank about half that box. Sorrel just had that disappointed look on his face and packed her off to bed. I heard him muttering, her slurring her words. Then they started arguing, I covered my ears for a bit cos I didn’t want to hear it. The argument went on for ages, then he came and sat back down. That’s when he told me what was going on.

This idea of Sonia drinking wine before passing out is consistent with Sorrel’s accusations against her made during his account of what happened when Alfie disappeared. So perhaps we can see why he took Alfie away that fateful night. However, Wendy says Sonia, on that trip, never showed one iota of aggression toward Sorrel or Alfie.

—Sorrel gives me a plastic cup full of wine. I couldn’t turn him down. He says thanks for today; he says he knew I’d be the best person to come and help.

—Did you not ask him why it had been so long since he’d been in touch?

—That was another thing about Sorrel; when he talked to you, it felt like you were the only person in his world, that you were the most important thing in his life. I didn’t want to disappoint him by moaning about why he’d not been in touch. We was sat together on that log, just the two of us, and the only sound is the crackling off the fire and Sonia crying.

Then she comes out of the tent again. She’s all bedraggled, her face all blotchy. She’s sniffing and sobbing, asking Sorrel just to talk to her.

—Sounds awkward.

—It was awful. He gets up and marches over to her, chest puffed out. For a moment I think he’s going to slap her, but he just sends her back to bed, tells her to go to sleep like he’s scolding a little kid. I didn’t know where to put myself.

—Did he come back to you?

—Yes. And he wanted to talk.

—What did he say?

—He wasn’t really emotional – he just told me sort of facts. He was working all hours to keep the finances above water. He was souschef in a restaurant and working in a bar, too. It sounded relentless. Sonia didn’t work at all; she was supposed to be looking after Alfie. She had a few hours in the day when Alfie was at school, but Sorrel would come home and the house would be a mess, and she would be drunk.

He kept refilling my wine, and I just couldn’t say no. He was saying how Sonia was getting delusional – seeing and hearing things what weren’t there.

—What sorts of things?

—I don’t know. I just remember his face in that flickering firelight. He looked like he’d given up. I felt sorry for him. He says that this was their only holiday since Alfie was born, but she’s even managing to spoil this for him. She’ll be a mess tomorrow, he says. That’s why you’re here. Cos I know I can trust you. I know you’ll have my back if anything … happens.

—What did he mean by that?

—I honestly think he was scared.

—Of what?

—Sonia. He said she was really good at pretending. She was good at hiding her drinking. He said he just wanted someone to see what he had to deal with. Just once. He said I was his best friend; he had never known anyone like me, that he always thought about me and wished we could have kept our friendship going.

—Did you ask him why it had been so many years since he’d been in touch?

—He said it was all Sonia’s doing. She was unreasonably jealous; she used to open his post, go through the phone bill. He said that if he wanted to go out and do things with his female friends, she wouldn’t let him. If he so much as talked to a woman, she would lose her mind. ‘What do you need female friends for when you’ve got me?’ That kind of thing. Sorrel said that, despite all the years that had passed, I was the best friend he’d ever had, and I always would be. He said that if I was there with them, he would be safe, but more importantly, so would Alfie.

—What?

—I know, right? But right then it made sense somehow. Like I said, he had this way of talking to you that made you feel amazing. I’d forgotten how he was able to do that to me. All those years he’d been gone, and I’d fallen further and further, but now I felt like I was something again, thanks to him. It all feels so cheap now, though.

—Why is that, Wendy?

—Cos he went and spoiled it all, didn’t he?

—What do you mean?

—Well, we’re talking, and he’s getting closer and closer to me, snuggling up. I didn’t think nothing of it, but suddenly I can feel his hand on my thigh.

—Sorrel made a pass at you?

—Yeah and it felt so awful. After all those years of us being friends, of being able to talk. I didn’t want this. I wanted to help him, maybe even tell him what was going on in my life. But he didn’t even give me that chance.

Wendy says that, despite being half drunk, she managed to wriggle away from Sorrel. She also says that maybe the move was made out of desperation and tiredness rather than any sort of real desire.

Unfortunately this tumultuous first night does not end here.

Wendy says she feigned tiredness and retired to her tent but was unable to fall asleep.

—I was just so het up after what happened – the argument, Sorrel, I just lay there in the dark with my eyes open. And I kept hearing things.

—What sorts of things?

—I’ve always lived in the city so I’m used to noise at night: cars, people shouting, cats, whatever. In that forest, the silence was massive. Every little noise seemed louder. Everything sounded like footsteps, like something brushing against my tent. I kept thinking of Alfie pointing into the trees, all that ‘bad piggy’ stuff. It gave me the chills. It was cold. I could feel every single goose bump rising on my arms. I kept wondering what would happen if I looked out of the tent and I was on my own. The car, the others, all gone. Then there was that stupid story of Sorrel’s; those wood-knockers. It was stupid, but there in the darkness, I could see them; their rows of little teeth, their blind eyes, making snuffling noises like pigs. I was terrified. And I swear on my life I could hear tapping as well. Far off in the distance, tapping and laughter, like someone was playing a joke on me.

—Are you sure you could hear tapping?

—No. I’m not. It could have been a dream, it could have been my imagination. It could have been, I dunno, a woodpecker or something. But it scared me so bad.

—Did you fall asleep at all?

—I must have done. But I kept waking up. I kept hearing things.

—What sort of things?

—It must have been a dream, but it was like something was touching the outside of the tent.

—An animal?

—I can’t say. Whatever it was, was pressing on the canvas. Then it would move and make this sound, a high-pitched scraping. It was as if someone was running long fingernails over the side of the tent. I just closed my eyes and pulled my sleeping bag over my head.

—Did the noise go away?

—Eventually. But if anything, the silence was worse. I was just waiting for the next thing. For a while I considered going to Sorrel and Sonia’s tent and seeing if either of them was awake. But I was too scared to move. That’s when things got worse.

Because suddenly there was a scream and I woke up. My mouth was all dry and it was pitch-black, I had no idea where I was.

The screaming was still coming, though. It was Alfie.

—Alfie had a nightmare? That’s not surprising I guess.

—It wasn’t coming from their tent, though. I’d pitched my tent right next to Sonia and Sorrel’s. The screams were coming from further back, in the trees.

—Could you have been confused?

—Yeah. Of course. But I wasn’t. I felt around and got out my torch. I turned it on but cupped the light with my hand. I still dunno why I done that. I think it was the feeling in the forest, like it was watching. I didn’t want it to see me.

But I could still hear Alfie. He was screaming and crying, like a little baby, you know?

—Jesus.

—I’ve never been more frightened in my whole life. I know what they say about that forest: that there’s strange things in there. I thought, what if it’s a spirit or something, trying to get me to come out of my tent? What if the others are gone and it’s just me on my own with the ghosts?

—And did you look out of your tent?

—Eventually. I listened out for a while first cos I thought if it was Alfie he must be with Sorrel or Sonia. I didn’t think he would be wandering about on his own in the dark in the middle of the night. I started to unzip the tent, slow and steady, trying not to make any noise. I had it in my head that if I looked out something would look back. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t hardly hold the zip.

I got braver, pulled the zip all the way down and got out. That’s when I heard something else. It came from far away in the trees. It still sounded like Alfie, but muffled, as if he’d put his head inside something. Or something had been put over his mouth. I’m shining the torch about at the sound of the noise. My hands were still trembling and the light was everywhere. There was this big wall of trees and I could hear something crashing around. I froze. Something was coming out of them trees. Something was coming for me. I shone my torch at the trees and that’s when I saw them.

—Them?

—You’re going to think I’m insane. That’s ok. No one’s going to care what an ex-smack-head, alcoholic waster like me thinks she saw a few decades ago in a wood in the middle of the night. No one. So I’ll tell you.

In that torchlight, shaking all over the place, I saw a figure between the trees. It was flitting in and out like a faulty video.

—Was it Alfie? Sorrel?

—I saw my brother between those trees. Seven-year-old Sam. He was pale, like a ghost. He was reaching for me. All around him there was eyes, peeping out of the darkness. It was like something out of a kid’s story book. He was mouthing something, but no sound was coming out. Then he flickered and disappeared…

And suddenly Sorrel comes bursting out the trees with Alfie in his arms.

Sorrel’s got no top on and his hair’s all over the place. Alfie’s got his pyjamas on. And they were both covered in mud and leaves, like they’d been rolling around in the earth.

As soon as he sees me, Sorrel freezes, with his mouth open, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Then he comes back to life and starts saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ And he tells me he heard a noise and he woke up to find that their tent was unzipped and Alfie was gone.

—Gone?

—He says that he found him wandering around in the woods; thanks God he woke up cos of what might’ve happened to him.

—Poor Alfie.

—That little lad was inconsolable. Clinging to his dad like a limpet, he was. He’d gone beyond tears, and his mouth was just opening and closing like a dying fish. He was wheezing, gasping for breath, it was awful.

—What had happened to him?

—I don’t know! It was like he couldn’t breathe, like Sorrel had pulled him from the sea or something.

—Sounds like he was in shock.

—Sorrel said Alfie had got lost, panicked, caught himself up in some brambles, and got a mouthful of earth – nearly suffocated himself. Then I asked Sorrel where Sonia was. He stopped dead, stared off into the trees and in that moment I thought he was going to say something else. And when he turned to me, the look on his face … it was pure hate. He wasn’t disappointed anymore. He said she was still asleep, passed out cos of the drink. And for a second it was like a mask had dropped. There was hate on his face, and then it turned into disgust. I’ll tell you, I felt disgusted too. I started asking him what had happened, how it had happened. But he said we just needed to go. I said I’d go and get Sonia up and tell her, but he stopped me. Alfie was still clinging to him, gasping, and Sorrel, he told me to go and get in the car. I did and then Sorrel peeled Alfie off him and strapped him into his seat. Then Sorrel got in and sat in the car, too. It was the three of us in the back. Sorrel shut the door, turned on the ceiling light. This seemed to calm Alfie down but Sorrel was just looking at me.

He said, ‘Wendy, we need to keep this between us. Sonia won’t get it. She won’t understand.’

I didn’t know what he was on about, but he said we couldn’t tell her what happened, we had to keep it a secret. I asked him why and he said she’d just turn it against him. She’d make out like it was his fault.

‘It wasn’t, though,’ I said, ‘how could it be your fault that Alfie wandered off?’

He told me that Sonia had been different on this trip. Worse than usual. He said he worried about Alfie, that she might do something stupid to him.

—To Alfie? You mean hurt him in some way.

—Or worse.

—Really?

—That’s what Sorrel said. He said Sonia had insisted on coming to Wentshire Forest, where no one else would be. She was the one, he said, who had let Alfie wander off into the woods.

—So why did he tell you, you needed to keep what happened between the two of you?

—He told me how Sonia was at home; that she became ‘unreasonable’ when she was drunk. He was almost in tears, and he said she sometimes got violent. That was the reason for me being there. To protect him. He said that she’d been getting more aggressive at home, that she blamed him whenever things went wrong. And that, if anything bad happened to Alfie, she said she’d take him and she’d get full custody.

—That seems out of character, wouldn’t you say?

—I dunno really. I couldn’t imagine her being like that, but you never know, do you?

—What about Alfie? He still seemed traumatised?

—Yeah, the poor lad. He was different after that. We left just as it started to get light. All the way home, he was quiet. He never tried to sing or nothing like that; just stared out the window. When Sorrel tried to give him a snack, he threw it against the window and screamed. Sorrel didn’t know what to do.

—And Sonia?

—She was no help at all. We had to pack away everything, load up the car at God-knows what time. Sonia just lay in the back of the car, Alfie beside her. They weren’t even touching. He was curled up into a ball; she was just on her back. Still drunk. She could barely even look after herself, let alone Alfie.

—And after that?

—That was the last time I saw them. That was Sorrel, just marched back into my life and out of it again. I never heard from him again, not even when Alfie disappeared.

—Why have you never spoken about this to anyone? Surely this trip into Wentshire Forest must have something to do with what happened?

—Does it really, though? Alfie was never scared of that forest. I have no idea why he ran away in the middle of the night. What could I say that anyone doesn’t already know? Yes, he’d acted strangely on that trip, but imagine if I said that to the media? They would crucify me! He was probably just playing up. There was a lot going on in his life. After that trip I went back to my life. It only got worse. I was on gear until I was forty – until I came here. I saw what the press said about Sonia, how they said it was because of her drinking problem that Alfie disappeared. How Sorrel had to get away from her, how she was violent.

—Did you believe that?

—No. I don’t claim to know Sonia well, but I know her better than them. If she had something to do with it, Sorrel’s covering for her. What I do know is that, despite it all, she loved that boy. She just wasn’t a good mum. All this story does is reinforce that. And who’s going to listen to an old smack-head like me?

—I’ve listened to you.

—I know. But I only spoke to you because someone I trust said that would be OK.

—That’s the same someone who put me in touch with you. What’s their part in this story?

—That’s not for me to say. She’ll tell you, I’m sure of that.

—In your opinion, what happened to Alfie Marsden on Christmas Eve, 1988?

—All I can tell you is that there’s something wrong with that forest. I’m glad you can’t go in it anymore. Someone should burn it, get rid of it. It got in everyone’s heads: mine, Sonia’s, Sorrel’s. Them woods made up that horrible wood-knockers story; something in them woods got Alfie out of his bed, I swear.

—If that is actually what happened…

—Right.

—What do you believe happened when he disappeared?

Wendy pauses and leans forwards in her chair. She takes her teacup in both hands as if to warm them, despite the sun. The chickens cluck contentedly and in this moment, in this little pocket of light, with the scent of the flowers and the stillness in the air, I wish I could take my question back. Wendy’s come here, to this place of peace, to hide from her demons. But there are things in this world that cling to us wherever we go, that permeate whatever defences we put up to guard against them.

Finally, after staring into her tea, she looks up and I see her eyes are glazed over. Her voice is choked when she speaks.

—That little boy wasn’t scared of those woods. I was, though. I was terrified after I saw Sam in those trees. It wasn’t Sam though … it was something in there. I reckon that same something lured little Alfie into them woods all those years later.

Wendy stares at me then, her bottom lip trembling. Her look begs me to laugh, to challenge her. I don’t dare.

—I’ll tell you one last thing. When we were driving home, we were all silent. I had my head against the window, watching the motorway go past. It was raining, everything looking smudged. I just let myself drift asleep. Then suddenly there was this tapping, like someone was outside, like someone with a long fingernail was tapping right on the other side of my head. I jerked awake and screamed. Sorrel swerved and I thought we were going to die. Another stupid dream.

—What about Alfie and Sonia?

—They never even made a sound. I looked up and Sorrel was turned around in his seat staring at me, not looking at the road. I wanted to beg him to turn back round. He took one hand off the wheel, put his finger to his lips and said, ‘Shh.’

And we just kept going like nothing had happened.

Wendy clams up now. She looks worried, tired. These old memories have clearly been difficult for her to recall.

What can we make of her story of that night in Wentshire Forest? There are several things that need our attention. The first is why Sorrel called Wendy out of the blue and asked her to accompany the family on their holiday? It seems odd, considering they’d not been in contact for a number of years and that, according to Wendy, Sorrel wasn’t in touch afterwards either.

The second point for our attention is the tapping sounds, specifically the ‘wood-knockers’ Sorrel invented to dissuade Alfie from wandering off. Is it a coincidence that others – Callum Wright and Delyth Rice – mention knocking and tapping sounds? It’s possible.

Thirdly and most importantly: what happened in the middle of the night during that camping trip? Did Alfie wander off? Or was he by then too scared of Sorrel’s wood-knockers? Or did something lure him into the trees? Did Sonia Lewis ever know that this happened? And what were the noises that Wendy heard? What was Alfie talking about when he mentioned the ‘bad’ animals in the woods?

These are all questions that Wendy cannot answer.

What we do know is that Alfie Marsden changed significantly after this incident in Wentshire Forest. The amateur and ill-informed psychologist inside me points to this trauma being the switch between the young, sweet Alfie described by his teachers, and the Alfie that Delyth Rice encountered. His home life was certainly also fractured. If we are to believe Sorrel, Sonia’s behaviour at home would have certainly had a huge impact on Alfie’s developing mind, making it prey to the trauma of an incident such as the one Wendy describes.

And then, there are other considerations. Should we take seriously the presence of some sort of other-worldly entities in Wentshire Forest? And if we do, was it them who lured Alfie Marsden from the car on that fateful Christmas Eve? Was Alfie drawn between the oaks and into that darkness for the second time in his short life?

There are two more perspectives on this whole story that we need to address. I need to talk to Sonia Lewis and Sorrel Marsden.

Until next time.

This is Six Stories.

This has been our fourth.

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 5

00:00:00

Man

You tell yourself that it’s logical that the tapping has started. Of course you hear it, too. You hear it when you’re editing the podcast, sat in the studio for those endless nights, waveforms undulating like strange jellyfish. The series without an end. You sit and stare sometimes, just listen to the interviews over and over. Just behind the words, the descriptions of tapping, you hear it. Always from another room; under the floor, the attic. It’s as if it’s playing with you.

Once you’ve see Anne, you know the tapping will go. You don’t know how, but it will.

Because if it doesn’t, if after this series is done and the dreams and the darkness and the tapping are still there…

You don’t even want to think about it.

29th August 2018, 10:02 a.m.

OK, I’m here, at Anne’s house. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to be somewhere in my life.

I’m driving as I record this. I need to get back. There’s so much I want to get down. I couldn’t write anything, it was too much. So I need to get this out here and now.

Anne was as glad to see me as I was to see her. We embraced. We stood on her doorstep and held each other. Like old friends, like long-lost relatives. I’ve never felt such a strong connection with anyone before.

I made the tea. Anne asked about the dreams. She stroked my hand, told me she understood. I wanted to cry. I felt like I could cry without being judged. But I held back.

Anne wanted to talk about herself today. She said she had a couple more things that would help with the case. I wanted to ask her to tell me those first, but I had to wait.

Anne said that she wanted to talk to me about men. It was a curveball, and she told me to prepare for a hard listen.

So she began by telling me about a man she met when she was in her mid-twenties. She said he was around her age, maybe a little older. They met at work, she said. He was charming, polite, a real gentleman. He courted her, gave her flowers. She’d never been given flowers before. She wasn’t anything special, she said. She was run-of-the-mill. She said this man breathed light and life into her. This man built up her confidence, one brick at a time. He made her feel like she was worth something.

I listened, waiting for the punch.

It came in slow motion, more vicious than I could possibly have anticipated.

Anne said that she would have done anything for this man, walked over hot coals for him. She said she felt like she owed him something. She said that this notion made her put up with a lot from him.

It started small, as these things do. He began to make comments – little suggestions about her clothes, how he liked to see her in certain things. This moved on to telling her what would make him happy and insisting she wore it. ‘Have you got anything new?’ he would ask. That was code: it meant that Anne should wear something low cut, revealing. That’s what he liked. It made him happy. This was the man that had made her believe she was pretty when no one else had given her a second glance, so she did it for him. She never felt truly comfortable, but because he told her she was beautiful, bragging about her, showing her off, he made her somebody.

Anne’s degenerative eye disease meant she had to wear glasses with thick lenses. The man always moaned about them, telling her she was much prettier without them. This soon became insistence, so Anne began to struggle on in a blurry world. It was easier to spend more time at home then. ‘It made him happy,’ she said.

He then wanted to know where she was when she wasn’t at home or work. When they had days off together, he liked her to stay where he could see her. It wasn’t her, he said. He just didn’t trust other people.

He became more and more insistent that she tell him who she had spoken to, even if it was customers. He began to isolate her; he told her that her friends were bad people, that he didn’t like her hanging around with them. And Anne said she agreed – they were bad. Drug dealers and ne’er-do-wells. But there were also good people, she says, good friends. He hated them, too. He told Anne that they were talking about him behind his back. Whatever he said, however much she tried to assure him this wasn’t the case, he didn’t believe her.

And he was always right.

He hated the drugs, she said. He told her they would make her lose her mind, become a lunatic shuffling round the streets, talking to herself. Every time Anne dropped something, bumped into something, couldn’t see something, he blamed it, not on her eyesight, but the drugs.

He told her that she talked to herself, that she didn’t know she was doing it. Anne became paranoid. She began shunning other people, worried that she would make a fool of herself. He told her they were probably all talking about her too. She began second-guessing her every move, her every thought. She said their colleagues began to look at her strangely, as if she was insane.

Finally Anne gave up everyone. She kept to herself – worked and then went home to this man. So Anne broke up with the man. She told him it was over. I almost didn’t want to know his reaction. ‘He refused!’ Anne said. ‘He told me no! As if he had the choice.’

Then she found out she was pregnant.

Anne said that this was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was elated and terrified – all the emotions that came with such a discovery. She couldn’t wait to tell the man. She wasn’t a disappointment now, was she?

But he told her that she was utterly incapable of bringing up a child and she had to get rid of it.

When Anne suggested she might want to keep the baby, he told her she couldn’t. He told her that if she had the baby, he would make sure she never saw it, that he would take it from her. He said he would win custody easily. And Anne knew that, with her track record – the drugs, the drink and the isolation – this was true.

So Anne got rid of the baby.

The bottom fell out of her world. She still had to work in the same place as the man; she had to see him on a daily basis. But she had no friends left and no family to help her.

Then something inside Anne changed. She said she had no idea where that last iota of strength came from, whether it was something in her upbringing in the home, or just something in her personality. Whatever it was, she realised it when the baby was gone. She understood something about that man. She recognised him for what he was.

A controlling, remorseless monster.

He wore a gilded cloak. He’d perfected the image he presented to the world, but inside he was empty and dead. To him other people were objects to manipulate, to bend to his will. Once he broke them, he discarded them.

Anne said she still has waking nightmares, sometimes – intrusive thoughts about the child that never was. A little boy, a little girl growing up with that monster as a father. It still scares her to think of what that child might have become.

She said to herself that day that she would never let that happen. She would die first.

So this time Anne left him. She told him it was over. Again, he told her no. He would not allow it. But that child, the one who never was, gave her the strength to get away, to end things.

Of course, he acted like she thought he would. Like a spoiled child. Like someone used to getting their own way. He ruined Anne’s already brittle reputation at work. He made everyone believe she was crazy, that he was the one who was hard done by. And of course, it worked. Everyone believed him. And she became a figure of pity, of ridicule.

Then the man left. Got a job somewhere else.

Anne followed him. She knew what she had been to this man: training. Experience. Practice. The next woman he ensnared would have no chance. So Anne promised if she saw this pattern repeating itself, she would help. In whatever way she could.

I begged Anne to tell me who this man was, but she told me I already knew. She said, instead of his name, she would give me hers, as it was worth more.

‘My real name’s Maryanne,’ she said. ‘Maryanne Manon. Or, as they used to call me … Mad Mary.’

I couldn’t believe it. I stood there, like a goldfish, opening and closing my mouth. A thousand questions racing through my mind. Mad Mary. Sorrel’s girlfriend – the one before Sonia.

I remember what Darren Morgan said about her; how he said she told Sorrel she was pregnant, but Sorrel told him she’d stuffed a pillow up her top and lied.

It’s all falling into place now; it makes sense. This is flowering into something more horrific than I could have imagined. I didn’t know what to ask. Why on earth hadn’t she come forward at the time? Why had she given a bizarre psychic reading about Alfie that wasn’t true?

Anne … Maryanne, infuriatingly told me that it would make sense … next time. She told me I knew already why she hadn’t come forward. And I do know. Who was going to believe her over Sorrel? The press would turn on her faster than they did on Sonia. But the question remains: why on earth did Anne get in touch with me? Does she really know what happened to Alfie that night?

She gave me another phone number. She said to mention a different name this time.

Another name, another number. I feel she’s been controlling me this whole time – moving me like a piece on a chess board. I go where she sends me, trusting only in her word.

She told me we’d meet one more time.

Then she wished me goodbye.

Episode 5: How Beautiful You Are

—I made casserole. Casserole was easy. I remember how long it took me to cut up the vegetables, though – my prep was always the weakest part of my cooking. I started with the carrots – orange witches’ fingers, all wrinkly. Leeks and onions that made my eyes water. I almost stopped and gave up because it was pathetic, crying over a vegetable. I kept on, though. I diced up the lamb and dipped it in seasoned flour. Neck. That’s the best cut for casserole. Cheap, easy to braise. I can still smell it. Brown it in the pan, the thick-bottomed one. I nearly stopped again when a few pieces stuck. I thought I was going to be sick. I thought it was all over. But it was OK. I held it together. It’s OK if it sticks to the pan. I was a good pupil; I’d learned a lot.

There was a fat bottle of red wine waiting for me to take a break. The cork lying on the worktop. It was breathing. I could almost hear it.

The first glug would be harsh, raw-tasting; it would linger around my gums – bitter fruit, purple like innards. Then beautiful. Plums and grapes and chocolate. And it would do the job.

I looked at the clock. The timing would be perfect; I was a pro. I learned how to pull that casserole dish from the oven and let it stand, all that steam rising and curling like little fists. I learned how to fill the house with that smell. That wasn’t all – the food was only a part of a whole. I wanted to be perfect, too – smiles and an apron; a spot of flour on my nose; a home that smelled of wine and meat. All I wanted to do was make him happy. If I was perfect he would be happy. I used to be able to do this with my face, by simply being. That was a long time ago.

After the veg was prepped and the meat sealed, I’d allow myself a glass, less than a mouthful, just to give myself a little buzz. That’s what they did in the films when they cooked – wine and laughter, orange oven light while the weather wailed outside.

The knife I was using was sharp, one of the good ones. I remember those shitty serrated ones that my mam had got me from the catalogue. He’d laughed them out the back door and down behind the dustbin. When I finished using his knives they had to be washed and sharpened on the whetstone. Just so.

I drank more wine, the same colour as the blood that was running down my finger, soaked up with a plaster as pink as my cheeks. The first mistake; the pain thrumming through my finger. Time was beginning to run out and I could feel the wine flooding my system, thudding round my heart. The cogs were loosening.

I’m getting a dry mouth just thinking of it.

So another glug of wine and I was looking for the tinfoil. Where was the fucking tinfoil? It had been there. I had taken it out of the drawer and it had been there, right next to me, and when I went to the bathroom to get a plaster it had gone. Just like that!

Then the laughter came, just like it always used to when I messed something up. Trickling out of the cracks of my life; laughter, like the voices of ghost children. I turned up the music to drown it out. Sang along with Robert Smith. I let his voice, his words, his poetry of loss drown out everything. I sang and I sang, wailing and crying along.

The time! Where had it gone? There’d been hours to go and suddenly there wasn’t. It was as if the time had been eaten. I tried to stand, swayed, looked around me.

Veg peel was in piles of smiles all over the chopping boards, and little chunks of leek had fallen into the cracks between the floor tiles. I went to my knees to pick up the mess. But when I was down there, the roll of foil came back, threw itself off the worktop and hit me on the back of the head. I jumped. Because it hadn’t been there. It hadn’t! And when I jumped I hit my head against the oven. When I got up I was hot and my head was spinning. Knives and foil and spoons and even a whisk were all over the worktop, arranged in pretty little circles. There were saucers on every work surface, filled with crumbs and melted butter. Plates with slices of cake, bite marks and raisins everywhere. I wanted to scream. That hadn’t been how it had started. All this wasn’t here when I began. Simple casserole didn’t end like this. One chopping board, one knife, one pan, everything swept up into the bin and tied tight. Nothing on the floor. That’s how he’d taught me to do it. It wasn’t that hard. My finger throbbed like a second heart worn at the end of my hand.

Why did I always make everything such a chore?

Why was I such a disappointment?

The music kept me going. I was dancing. Another glass of wine. But it didn’t help. The knife was gone now and the noise had started up. More wine to squash it, to silence it. Red grapes in my ears. Old songs, old memories.

Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…

A faulty metronome. The tapping and the laughing struggling together against Robert Smith.

Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…

Where was the knife? Why was it in the corner? Why did it have icing and crumbs all over it? I felt sick. There was a blur and tap-tap-tap behind it all.

Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…

Driving me mad, like something was in my head and wanted to get out; tap-tap against the inside of my skull. Dry mouth, water. Water and wine. A blur of water and wine.

Then they came home. The boys, the men. I turned off the music like a flash, leaving only the echoes of laughter and the tapping. Keys in the door, voices in the hall.

The clock swallowed up all the time. It sat there, swollen on the wall, grinning down at me, full of spite.

They went straight upstairs. Of course, he couldn’t bring our boy in here. In a kitchen full of knives and hot things. Take him to his room instead, somewhere safe, full of toys and games and books and all the lovely things. If our boy was in here with me, something would have gone wrong. Something always did.

The wrongness of me resonated with every fall of his foot on the stairs. As I stumbled and bounced against the sides, all the lost things – the tinfoil, the wooden spoon, the Tupperware – came back at once in a clutter of peel and blades and spilled wine. The empty bottle shimmered, a fat green beacon of my failure.

He just stood in the doorway and looked at everything – at the sides, the floor, the wine, the cake, the CD player and finally at me. He had the face on, and for good reason, I thought. He had every reason to have the face on.

I tried to explain, I tried to tell him about the things going missing, the tapping and the laughing, but my tongue was all wrong. Swollen with wine. I tried to tell him how it all went wrong and the words teetered on the edge before falling back in my throat.

‘A whole bottle, eh?’

He picked it up and studied it while I tried to stay still. I was being pushed and shoved from every angle, back and forth. The tapping came again, louder. Then the laughing, and suddenly it was in my head. He didn’t react to it in any way. I tried to stay upright. I tried but I was shoved and toppled sideways. I held on to the back of the chair.

‘A simple thing,’ he said. ‘One job I left you to do. I’ve been busting a gut all day. All I asked was for some food for us when we get home.’

There was a dribble left in the bottom of the wine. He lifted it up where the afternoon light was pouring in through the window. He waggled it, sniffed it and placed it back.

He looked at me and shook his head. He sighed, a sound that pulled the air from my chest.

‘Why do you have to make our lives so hard?’ he said.

And my fat, useless tongue just lay there between my lips.

The next morning he got the boy ready for school. There was no shouting, no tears, no tantrums. That was always what it was like with him. His short, sharp instructions; little feet thudding across the floor to do his bidding as fast as he could. I wanted to get up to help, to bring a softness to this hard day. His hard ways. That’s always how we balanced, hard and soft, yin and yang, me and him.

My heart wanted to get up, to get out of bed and make you boys your breakfasts, to be happy families again.

Just like we always said we would.

But I couldn’t. I just lay there, my mouth dry, and a black crack of pain across my vision. Another spider-web of cracks across my heart as I listened to our boy trying to please his father.

I wondered where it had all gone, all those happy days. It was me who had thrown them all away.

When those two had gone, I went downstairs. The kitchen sparkled as it always did after he’d been in there. Egg cups dripped on the draining board.

Casserole in the bin.

Red.

An abortion.

Welcome to Six Stories.

I’m Scott King.

It rains there endlessly, I’m told. I cannot see, because I conduct the interview by phone.

It takes a long time for my interviewee to get herself together enough to talk to me. I feared that when I got in touch she would simply hang up. Instead, though, her response has been overwhelmed, breathless, punctuated by spells of sobbing. Sonia Lewis was practically hysterical and it has taken a long time to calm her down.

Sonia Lewis is the mother of Alfie Marsden, the seven-year-old who vanished in Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve, 1988. In this series we’re raking through the soil of a mystery that has never been satisfactorily solved. We’ve already looked at four other perspectives on the case. Finally, we now have a view from one of Alfie’s parents.

At Sonia’s end, this interview takes place in a dismal caravan situated on the edge of a dismal field on a dismal coastline. The caravan is not in a park, she tells me – it stands alone, hidden from the main road. If you don’t know it’s there, you won’t find it. I can relate to that. Sonia Lewis tells me that she deserves every bit of this misery, her enforced solitude.

As with Wendy Morris, when I got in touch with the mother of Alfie Marsden, all I had to do was drop a name, and she agreed to talk. Sonia would not meet me in person, she said. She couldn’t risk it. Not now. Not until her story has been told.

I can hear the rain drumming an endless tattoo on the metal roof of Sonia’s caravan. She says she cannot remember the last time she had a proper conversation with another human being, and she needs frequent breaks to compose herself. As we go on, though, Sonia becomes more lucid, more controlled. She often emphasises that her story will not matter, that no one will want to hear it. People have certain long-held views about her, she says. She does not believe that this interview will change them. In fact, she’s not interested in trying to change anyone’s view. This interview is for her.

The fallout from the Marsden case was huge for Sonia. Photographs of her slack, glazed expression appeared in the press, along with accusatory headlines; ‘Not Bothered’ being the most iconic. One famous picture shows Sonia, caught in a half-stagger, staring past the camera, a scowl on her face. She tells me she has no memory of those photographs even being taken. There is one that the whole world remembers, though. In it, Sonia looks like she’s smirking. Whichever photographer caught this millisecond of a mother’s grief is responsible for much of the invective directed at Sonia. I have watched the few press conferences that are available on YouTube and feature in documentaries about the case. Throughout all of these, Sonia slumps, her stare glassy, her hair falling over her face. By contrast, her ex-partner, Sorrel, stares out into the eyes and hearts of the country, the world, begging for the return of their son. It reminds me of the meeting at Alfie’s school, as recalled by Delyth Rice in episode three.

Sorrel has always claimed that he took Alfie back to his home in Wrexham for the child’s own safety. According to Sorrel, Sonia was ‘shrieking and delusional’ and ‘could not be reasoned with’. She allegedly threw a pair of scissors at Sorrel, who was wrapping Christmas presents. Sonia had been drinking all day. All of these issues, none of which have been proved, have made Sonia an easy scapegoat.

Sonia does not seem drunk when we speak, although it’s hard to tell from the end of a phone. Today, Sonia is in her late fifties. No one knows who she is now and she lives a life of almost complete solitude. Sorrel has kept up his mournful annual pilgrimage to Wentshire Forest, while Sonia has shunned any attention. For some – in fact, for most – this is Sonia admitting the part she played in her son’s disappearance.

So why has Sonia never told her story? Why has she shut herself away? I tell Sonia that this is an opportunity finally to give her point of view.

—You don’t know how many times people have told me that. That’s all anyone says: ‘Give your point of view; tell your story.’

But when I began, they didn’t want to hear. The journalists, the television people, they wanted me to tell their version. They wanted to know how I failed my boy and what turned me into that failure. What turned me into a monster.

—Are you admitting culpability in your son’s disappearance?

—Of course I am. What mother wouldn’t? There isn’t a day that goes by that his ghost doesn’t haunt me. There isn’t a night when I don’t lie awake, asking why? That’s where my story starts – with why.

—And are you ready to tell that story?

—I’ve always been ready. The question is whether you’re ready to hear it?

—Of course. You can start where you want, and we can talk for as long as you like.

Sonia does not speak. It’s as if she’s been waiting for this moment. But her guard is still up and she’s having difficulty letting it down. Perhaps her long silence is proving hard to break. Perhaps, as she says, her previous experiences are making her wary.

So why does she think now will be different? Why is she here with me, agreeing to try again? And I realise a huge part of me wants there to be some special reason Sonia finally wants to share her story.

—Can you … can you start by asking me something; just let me hear your voice, please.

—Of course. I—

—I’m sorry. I’ve been saying that all my life and I want to say it once more before I start. Now … please…

—I’m not sure I understand why now, after all these years, you’re prepared to speak out. I cannot imagine there’s anything special about me…

—It’s a funny place, the internet. If you have enough time, you can find almost anything. People. Places. Old things.

My hackles rise at this statement and I am immediately reminded of the trolls that plagued me a while back. I remember that fear and think that this must be what Sonia’s life has been like since Christmas Eve, 1988. Fear.

I know that Sonia was living in a different location in 2000 and was somehow discovered by a UK tabloid. She was hounded out of the estate and was placed in police protection for a while, to the uproar of the media. So we share something. Sonia’s used to hiding, too.

Whatever Sonia has found out about me online, though, I want to be ready for it.

Sonia sighs, clears her throat.

—I got a phone call. Not long before yours. No one ever calls, save one person. That person told me to look up some things online. So I did. I looked you up. I checked you were the person I could tell my story to.

—What made you believe that I’m the one?

—We’ll get there, Scott. I promise, OK? But right now, if I say any more, I’ll … I’ll not be able to tell my story. So let me get this out, before I can’t, OK?

—That’s fine. You go at your own pace.

—I’m not asking for sympathy for the way I am, you understand that, don’t you? I know I don’t deserve it.

—That’s fine.

—I was a virgin when I met Sorrel Marsden. Nineteen years old and a virgin. I’d never even been drunk before. All my adolescence I’d kept my head down, lost in music for most of it. There was a part of me that didn’t want to grow up. I never went anywhere, did anything. If it was up to me I would have lived in my bedroom for my whole life, with my cuddly toys and my record player. Mam and Dad were lovely, and they let me be like that. They never pushed me out into the world. I was still their little girl, and that’s all I ever wanted. Then I met him – that’s when I met Sorrel.

That was when my life changed. It was turned upside-down. And that’s where my story begins. You see, I’d always wanted it to be special. I’d been kissed before – grudging, beery kisses after the attractive girls had all been taken. So I’d never chosen anyone. Until him there’d never been someone who made me feel visible, let alone special. The man I lost my virginity to was going to be the man I stayed with forever. That’s what I thought. The man who I gave my virginity to would be the one who saw me. When I met Sorrel, I knew it was him.

—Why was that, do you think?

—I think the best way to describe him is this: when he’s around, everyone around him blurs into the background. He shines. I remember him now and again, and I wonder whether that was really the case or it was just me. Maybe I was just looking for someone to come out of the darkness and take me away?

—If you don’t mind me asking – what did you want to be taken away from?

—Every girl wants to get away, don’t they? To escape to the bright lights. I was an introvert, no life experience, no skills. Overprotected, perhaps? I think Mam and Dad thought by indulging me, that I’d stay their little girl forever. I just wanted to be somewhere else, away from my parents, my whole life. But I wanted to come back eventually and have my supper waiting for me.

—That doesn’t sound so different to most teenagers.

—There was nothing to feel sorry for me about – no abuse, no violence, nothing like that. I just think Mam and Dad didn’t understand me. They were loving, but we didn’t talk – about my feelings, what I wanted. I think they were happy for me to stay in my room with my nose in a book. It was easier than having me out in the great wide world.

—Why do you think that was?

—It was just their nature. My dad, particularly got distressed about such little things. And there were all these rules he thought you had to play by. Don’t be late; don’t make a fuss; don’t do anything unexpected. By the time I was nineteen, all I was good at was keeping the house tidy, wiping out every sign that I existed. I remember the day I put up a poster in my bedroom. My favourite band at the time was The Cure, and it was the ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ poster – I loved it, a silhouette of the singer, Robert Smith, staring off into the distance. I loved that. I loved him. My dad went mad, though, cos of the Blu-tack on the wall. He said it would make marks. Maybe all this was why I was waiting to be swept away. By some handsome prince…

—And that was Sorrel?

—It was Robert Smith. I’m sorry, that was a joke. He was my first love though, Robert Smith.

—So tell me about 1981. When you met Sorrel.

—I was in a … a transition phase, I suppose you could call it. I was beginning to create my own image, my identity. I was into that New Romantic look. I must have looked a fright. Crimped hair and too much eyeliner. I had started to go out as well, just to a few discos here and there. I never had the courage to talk to anyone, though.

—So when was it that Sorrel Marsden walked into your life and changed all that?

—When I was nineteen, Mam said I had to get a job, to help out. I couldn’t just mope about listening to Siouxsie and the sodding Banshees! So I got a job in Dayton’s holiday park up the road. I was going for a job as a glass collector but they told me I was prettier than that, that I could be one of the gold-coats, the entertainers. Me! No one had ever told me I was pretty before. And I didn’t want to be pretty. But that’s what they said at the interview: ‘Get all that crap off your face and you’re in. You’re pretty enough under there.’

I think that’s why I said yes to the job. It was the first time anyone had ever called me pretty since I was a little girl. There I was trying to be angry, to have an edge with my crimped hair and wonky red lipstick, and they’re telling me I’m pretty.

So I told myself I was just doing the gold-coat thing for money, pretending to be one of the normal people. But then I found this whole different world at Dayton’s from what I’d experienced before. The way people would look at you in that gold-coat uniform. The boys would have the blazers and we had the white shirts with the big red ribbon on the front and the sparkly gold waistcoat. I looked like a Christmas present! Then, not long after I started, they asked me to be in the gold-coat cabaret. Only the prettiest girls got to be in the cabaret. Of course I said yes. We had to wear these sequinned black leotards and our sparkly waistcoats, fishnet tights, little black bowtie. I swear the way people looked at you, it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I have one photo of me back then. I keep it in an album under the bed. I never look at it. It’s too much, looking at who I was – that little girl with her life ahead of her.

—This was where you met Sorrel Marsden in 1981, at Dayton’s resort? He was working in the kitchens, is that right?

—He was. I remember I never saw him in his chefs’ whites. The other lads, when they clocked off for the night, they just came and sat in the bar all covered in muck, stinking of grease.

—Sorrel was different though?

—That’s why I started talking to him before any of the others. He was clean. He always had a shower after his shift, I found out. And he was polite.

—Do you remember the first conversation you had with him?

—I remember it because he was someone who I’d thought would never speak to me in a month of Sundays. I was only a few weeks into the job and I still wasn’t used to being a gold-coat. We got a lot of compliments – sly slaps on the arse, that sort of thing. Dads with their families were the worst ones, watching the show, licking their lips, eyes all over you. It was horrid but we all pretended to laugh about it. His compliments, though, they weren’t like the ones from the lairy punters. He was a proper gentleman, I thought. And he was telling me I was beautiful. There was something about the way he said it – so sincere.

—What were your first impressions of Sorrel?

—Sorrel was traditional, a meat-and-two-veg man. He wasn’t anything special to look at. He didn’t dazzle me from across the room. But the way he spoke … He said things to me I thought he would say to other girls – ones who deserved them more. But he said those things he said to me.

—Did you tell him about yourself? About your music, about how Robert Smith would always be your first love?

—No. I knew he wouldn’t have liked that. He didn’t know nothing about music, you see. He liked ABBA and all that. The Bee Gees. That should have mattered to me, I wouldn’t have ever gone with someone like that. I wanted my Robert Smith – backcombed hair and wonky lipstick. But I chose Sorrel. I took that as a sign. Maybe it was time for me to grow up.

—So that’s how it started? With compliments. It sounds like you were ready to get serious with someone.

—Yeah, I thought I was. And he was like a drug. I was instantly addicted to this man – this older man who thought I was beautiful. That’s when I started spending more and more time at Dayton’s. I took on extra shifts, worked in the bar, the restaurant. I told myself I wasn’t doing it to see him, but that was bullshit.

—You lived quite close, is that right?

—Yeah. I could walk to and from work easily. But I didn’t. I spent less and less time at home. It was a different world, Dayton’s, you see. Being there was like going to one of the parties that I’d never been invited to at school. And suddenly I was the belle of the ball. Me and Sorrel – prom king and queen, whatever you want to call it.

When work was done, that’s when you got to know everyone. Properly, I mean. On the hot nights in the summer we all used to take a few boxes of wine from the cellars and go out onto the beach, have a fire. Us gold-coats were always first, then the floor staff. The chefs always came last, when we were already half drunk. We were on the beach the night that Sorrel and I got together. The first night we kissed.

When I got home the next day, Mam had taken down my Robert Smith poster. She left the Blu-Tac marks, though, just to remind me. ‘You’re too old for all that nonsense now,’ she said. I remember not even caring. I just had this light feeling in my tummy. I was walking on air. That was one of the last days I spent at home. That’s when I realised I’d found where I really belonged, and it wasn’t there with Mam and Dad.

—I’ve spoken to Darren Morgan, a friend of Sorrel’s from way back. He remembers you fondly.

—Oh, he was lovely, was Darren.

—Darren filled me in on the staff accommodation where you all lived, the parties there – the Party Palace.

—Oh yes. Sorrel and I were properly together then. That’s what he wanted: no messing about; a ‘proper’ girlfriend, not just casual. I thought that was wonderful, that someone like him wanted someone like me officially. But not everyone was happy about it.

—How so?

—Sorrel was popular with everyone – particularly the other women. They hated me because I was so much younger than them. So much prettier. When Sorrel was out of earshot, they would look over at him, then at me, up and down and whisper to each other.

—How did that make you feel?

—It was horrible at first. Sorrel though, he just took me in his arms and smiled. He explained to me softly, how all it was, was jealousy, that they were just bitter. They were jealous of me because I was young and beautiful. After he said that, they could say what they liked, I didn’t care. That was his power. That was how he made me feel. Like I could do anything. Like I could be anything.

—And that changed you?

—Fundamentally. Mam was right. I wasn’t a little girl anymore with stupid band posters on my bedroom wall. I had arrived in the adult world. Sorrel, he was a big part of that.

It’s hard to choose which parts of this story to include. However, I do want to capture what was a life-changing experience for Sonia: meeting Sorrel when she was nineteen and he was in his thirties. I’m sure people will make judgements about this age difference, but for me, it’s not their ages, but the degree of life experience that was the big imbalance in the couple.

—We had our problems, and they weren’t always of my making. Not at first. She was always calling him up, always hassling him.

—This was Maryanne Manon, I presume?

—Mad Mary. That’s her. She was Sorrel’s ex. She was older than me, closer in age to him.

She reared her head again, didn’t she, when our boy … when Alfie … She was all over the news, with her ‘psychic’ abilities. A witch, though – that’s about right, isn’t it? To call her a witch?

I don’t answer this. And Sonia lets the silence linger before she laughs.

—It’s funny isn’t it? How someone can tell a story about someone and everyone believes it. You know all about that too, don’t you?

—I’m interested in what Sorrel told you about Maryanne. Back then I mean.

—He said he wasn’t even that into her. He settled for Maryanne cos he thought he’d get no one better. She was a drug addict when he met her, off her face on all sorts, he said. She was mates with drug dealers and wasters. Other addicts … I can talk, can’t I?

—Let’s put that aside for now, Sonia. Let’s just concentrate on Maryanne. What else did you know about her?

—These are all Sorrel’s stories: she was a stalker. She was obsessed with him. She’d followed him from some hotel and was working at Dayton’s because of him. She told him she was pregnant when she wasn’t. She came to him with a pillow up her jumper, started asking him for child support. She was insane, unhinged. She would walk round Dayton’s bumping into things and talking to herself. He did give her money; he did stay in touch – because he was a gentleman. He could have binned her off, ignored her, but he didn’t. He would make sure she was OK. Like, he would go to her house and make sure she got home from work alright. He told me they had a little code: he would tap on her window twice and she would know he’d been looking out for her. It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Why would he bother? Any why tap? Why not just go in and say hello?

—I’ve heard this story before, secondhand, from Darren Morgan. So you were aware of Maryanne and Sorrel’s past when the two of you began dating?

—Yeah … unfortunately I was. He told me everything about it. He said he was being honest with me. I thought that was so different from other men – they would have hidden something like that. But I would have been better off not knowing some things. Things that got to me.

—Like what?

—He told me she wouldn’t respect his privacy. All he wanted in a relationship was mutual trust. He said she used to go through his telephone bills. He told me she would sit there with a highlighter pen and call every number she didn’t recognise, and if a female voice picked up she would lose her temper with them, start screaming down the phone at them, tell them to leave her man alone. Sorrel said she wouldn’t let him ever interact with other women.

—He did though, didn’t he? I mean Sorrel worked in catering. There was no way Maryanne was able to police that.

—Yes. And he told me that he used to do it on purpose, to wind her up, to teach her a lesson.

—What would he do?

—He told me that women – waitresses, bar staff, even guests – were always giving him their numbers. He would call them from his chalet. He said he regretted doing it, but she drove him there. It was her fault. It was just harmless fun, just flirting. Besides, she was a whole lot worse. She was the bad one in all this, wasn’t she? She told him she was pregnant when she wasn’t, right?

—I’ve heard this from you and from Darren.

—Imagine if none of it was true.

—What do you mean?

—Imagine if everything I just told you about Maryanne Manon was a lie? It’s amazing to think that all it takes is a single story to destroy someone.

—Are you saying that Sorrel concocted this lie about Maryanne?

—You’ve met her. What do you think? Who was telling the truth? Mad Mary or Sorrel Marsden?

I find myself at a loss. Sonia is not aggressive in her scrutiny of my opinion. Her voice is kind. I know Maryanne Manon’s version of events. I know that she was pregnant. I know what sort of a person Sorrel Marsden was. And I know that Sorrel did indeed concoct this lie. But I don’t want to tell Sonia any of this. Not yet.

—I wasn’t there. I don’t know.

—No. You haven’t joined the story yet, have you?

I pause, not sure what she means. Then I switch my questioning, begin asking Sonia about her and Sorrel’s early life together in Prestatyn, before it all went wrong.

—We moved in together quickly. I wanted to be away from home, and living in the staff accommodation at Dayton’s just wasn’t for Sorrel.

—There was a lot of partying going on there, right? I thought he enjoyed that.

—Sorrel was at the heart of it all. It wasn’t a party without Sorrel. But it was having a bad effect on him. On me, too, all that drinking and partying. It brought out the worst in us. We’d spend our days off drinking, never going anywhere or doing anything interesting.

—Do you think that’s when your problems with alcohol started?

—Perhaps. Perhaps it had always been there and being at the Party Palace just unlocked it. But that’s all we did, Sorrel and me. We worked, we drank, and on our days off we drank more. There was a little entertainment room at Dayton’s. Sorrel would play on the slot machines for hours at a time. Drinking. I would just sit there with him, drinking, too.

—Did none of your colleagues, your friends ever have a problem with that?

—If they said, I didn’t listen. I was in awe of Sorrel. His compliments were everything to me. They gave me life. I would just sit there, usually wearing something low cut. He liked that. I’d just sit and wait for him to say something nice about me. That was the real addiction.

I mention the story Darren told me about finding Sonia asleep in the bathroom, and she tells me this was a common occurrence. Sorrel would drink himself into a stupor and collapse onto his bed, leaving Sonia to find refuge somewhere else. She tells me that was the least of their problems, though.

—Sometimes it seemed like Sorrel hated everyone else who worked at Dayton’s. It got really boring. He was always moaning about someone – even Darren. And he would tell me everything: who was sleeping with who, what people had done in their past. He would just rant on, saying awful things about them, telling me how much he hated them.

—Why do you think he did that?

—I have no idea. I’m not sure he did either. People just frustrated him. He never showed any real emotion other than bitterness. It was always facts with Sorrel: facts and resentment: ‘He slept with so-andso again, what a dick.’

—Did Sorrel ever make any sort of effort with your friends?

—Sorrel couldn’t bear those people. All he could say was how they were all so immature compared to me.

—Did you continue to socialise with them though?

—Yeah, it wasn’t like he stopped me going. But Sorrel didn’t trust other men. And he worried about me, he used to say. So I used to have to call him on the hour, if I was out, because otherwise he would worry. So in the end I stopped going out with my friends. We would just drink with his friends instead. And he would show me off, see? He would always tell them how young I was and you could see their tongues practically hanging out of their mouths.

—And how did that feel for you?

—It was amazing! I made someone happy. I made Sorrel happy.

Sonia repeats this idea of making Sorrel happy a great deal when describing their life together.

However, the drinking and partying was getting too much for the couple and not long after they met, they decided to up sticks and move into their own place – a top-floor flat on the outskirts of Prestatyn. Sonia fell pregnant and she stopped working at Dayton’s. Then Sorrel relocated to a small restaurant a few miles out of the town. His hours were unsociable – early mornings, late nights, weekends, bank holidays. Sonia found it hard to cope on her own. Her friends were as young as her, so had no experience of childcare, and anyway weren’t welcome at the flat. Sorrel could not tolerate Sonia’s family at his home, and the animosity was mutual. Sonia quickly found herself completely isolated.

—Can we talk about your parents? They were nearby weren’t they?

—They couldn’t stand Sorrel. But they would never tell me why. It was infuriating. Why didn’t they say something? Instead of just talking to me about it, they made me feel like it was all my fault – tell me how upset I had made them, how I had disappointed them. I needed them more than anything, and they didn’t want to know. So I forgot them and raised Alfie by myself. I had no idea what to do and Alfie was hard work. He wouldn’t settle, there were always problems with him. When the health visitor and the GP came to visit, Sorrel did all the talking. He said he didn’t trust me to say anything. He said, if I did, they would build a case to get Alfie taken away from me. He said it was up to me to do better.

Sonia says it was after Alfie was born that Sorrel seemed to change. He became much more stringent about checking up on her. She would never know when he was going to come home, and when he did, he derided her for not keeping their flat immaculately clean. Sorrel was used to high cleaning standards at work and told Sonia that all he wanted was to come back to a clean home where he wouldn’t have to do any more cooking. He also began to spend more and more nights away from her and Alfie, often, she found out, for no other reason than more drinking and partying.

—I was just stuck at home with the baby. I was utterly alone.

Sorrel said I shouldn’t go to the mum’s groups in town. He said the people there would fill my head with nonsense. And my family weren’t speaking to me. And to make it worse, when Sorrel did come home, he was full of stories about all these young waitresses, how beautiful they were, how much fun he was having.

—That must have felt awful.

—I just felt empty and useless and after the baby, frumpy and fat! I used to try and do everything at home to make him happy – to try and keep him at home.

—What about Alfie? Was Sorrel there for him as a father?

—Not really. If Alfie cried or wouldn’t sleep, Sorrel would hand him back to me with this look on his face, like it was my fault, and I had to take Alfie into the other room. If Alfie got ill, Sorrel would stay overnight at a hotel nearby so he didn’t catch whatever it was. Alfie was lovely, but he consumed my entire life. I felt like it was me doing everything. But Sorrel would always tell me, he was the one working; he was the one who made us able to afford nappies and food.

The couple eventually moved again. There was no discussion about it. Sonia tells me that one day Sorrel came home from work and just told her it was happening. He had got another catering job at a small restaurant near the Cheshire village of Audlem, around sixty miles east of Prestatyn, over the Welsh border into England. Sonia’s problems with alcohol had developed way beyond her control by this time. Alfie was two.

—The drinking, that was the only thing to have come with me from Dayton’s. And I didn’t even like it. I drank because Sorrel did. Because everyone did. And it gave me a confidence I’d never had before.

I can’t remember how the drinking started at home. I wouldn’t touch a drop when I was pregnant, but once I knew it wouldn’t hurt Alfie … I just … it just seemed to make the days go by quicker. When you’re on your own with just a toddler, it’s hard. As I say, Alfie was hard work, and every milestone took longer than it should: walking, talking. I was a disappointment as a mother as well as a girlfriend. And people don’t tell you and no one wants to admit it, but being alone all day with a little one is boring. Long, empty days cleaning up shit, feeding, napping. Drinking passed the time.

—When did the drinking get bad for you?

—It just happened before I knew it. I suppose it was really noticeable when Alfie started at nursery and I had some hours to myself. I had nothing to do but drink.

Sonia was even more isolated in the small village of Audlem. She didn’t fit in with the community. As Alfie moved on from nursery to school, Sonia was still drinking.

—It all came to a head about a year later, when we went on holiday. It was supposed to be just the three of us … It became four though…

Sonia tells me the story that you heard in episode four. How Sorrel coerced Wendy Morris into joining the couple to ‘help out with Alfie’.

—Sorrel told me that she was an old friend, and that she was the only woman he’d ever trusted. Charming! I didn’t even know who she was. He said she was just like him, that she would be able to help me with Alfie. I thought she was another one of Sorrel’s exes. She said she was at Dayton’s and I thought I could remember her face, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything then. I had no will of my own, no fight left.

—It sounds to me like it was Sorrel, not you, who was in the wrong.

—But what was I doing? How was I fighting back? I wasn’t. I was just numbing myself. And when I tried to speak up for myself, it was only because I was drunk and foolish.

Sonia recalls the night on holiday – the one on which Alfie ran into the forest.

—I remember just little bits. I remember Sorrel sending me back to bed, telling me I was a mess.

—That was him humiliating you, surely?

—So what? Who was it who stayed asleep when Alfie ran off? Who was asleep the whole time? Drunk Sonia, that’s who. Drunk, useless Sonia. I remember when Sorrel rescued him, brought him out of the forest. Something changed after that.

—Changed? In who?

—In Alfie. It was like he’d gone into that forest and come back a different child. That was my fault. Sorrel told me over and over again that I turned into a different person when I was drunk, that he had to protect Alfie from me. Maybe when Alfie came back from the forest and I’d been asleep, it was the moment Alfie realised that it was true: I couldn’t look after him. Couldn’t protect him…

There is a sudden burst of noise, as if the rain at Sonia’s end has become heavier. Her voice cuts in and out. And then Sonia stops speaking. I wonder if we’ve been cut off.

—From…?

—Nothing. It doesn’t matter. When we got back home, Sorrel was different too: meaner, angrier. Justifiably so. He never let me forget about that night, how he had saved Alfie while I slept. That’s when I first began to hear the noises.

—Noises?

—It was the drink. It had to have been. If I think back now it just seems ridiculous, but I remember it so clearly. They seemed real.

—What did you hear?

—It started in Alfie’s room: a scratching, scraping sound that seemed to come from inside the walls. I thought it was mice at first, or rats. I was so scared of mice. I still am. Sorrel thought being scared of such small creatures was irrational, stupid. But I knew he would go off his head if we had pests. So I left traps and poison out – not in Alfie’s room but round the house. That didn’t do any good. Then the scratching turned into tapping. It followed me round the house. I drank more and more to block it out. But it was always there, in the background. Sometimes it would go away for a few days, a week, but then it would come back again.

—Did you tell Sorrel?

—I had to. Because he didn’t seem to hear anything. It would always happen when he was out of the room. He’d come back in and I’d ask him to listen. Then he’d just shake his head and give me that look, like I’d let him down. I always felt like I disappointed him. He was already telling me I was losing it. He’d find things all over the house that I’d ‘lost’ – Sellotape in the fridge, the radio in the bed. He was right. I was losing my marbles, he used to say, like it was a big joke. He would say that I was always seeing mice that weren’t there. He got Alfie laughing at me, telling him mummy was scared of ‘bad piggy’.

—Bad piggy? Wasn’t that something Sorrel used to say to Alfie?

—Yes but he started saying it to me, both of them did. It was all a joke at my expense! They used to say that there was a bad piggy in the bath or a nasty goat in the cupboard under the stairs. Sorrel used to tell me I believed it! He even had Alfie saying it: ‘Bad mummy. Mummy mad!’ I went to the doctor once. Sorrel was there of course. And he did most of the talking. I got given some pills. No questions, nothing like that. Sorrel charmed them, as per usual.

—What medication was it?

—Amitriptyline. It didn’t help. It just made me drowsy, turned me into a zombie. Sorrel told me when and how much I should take. He said I wasn’t capable of managing it myself. But when Alfie started school again after that holiday, things got worse: tapping, things going missing, then the laughter. Sometimes I would be on the sofa and I’d hear things running up and down the stairs. But when I looked there was nothing there. I couldn’t get up in the morning with that medication, so Sorrel would take Alfie to school. Those days are a blur. I don’t even remember what my boy did at school. What a failure of a mother. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

—You don’t need to apologise, least of all to me.

—I would give anything to go back and be stronger, be better – be a good mother. You understand that don’t you? I need you to understand that.

—Of course. I understand. I’m not blaming you, Sonia. Not at all.

Alfie’s behaviour at school was worrying his teachers. This is clear from episode three. Sonia tells me that he was on a final warning from his primary school for fighting with other children, and it was clear that Sonia could barely cope with him. It’s heartbreaking that Sonia takes full responsibility for what was happening. She reiterates Sorrel’s mantra that he was the one earning the money. But when he wasn’t at work he was at the pub, preferring that to sitting in the house with his alcoholic partner and their unruly child.

—There’s so much that I see differently now, in hindsight. Too late, though, isn’t it? Those days are just a black fog of drink. All I wanted to do was look after my son and make Sorrel happy, and I couldn’t do either.

Things began to come to a head between the couple in early 1988, when Alfie was nearly seven. To put things in context, this was around the same time the Baxter’s development in Wentshire Forest had begun. Already, the stories of the strange events at the site were starting to bleed into the press.

—I was obsessed with Wentshire Forest. I had every article written about it. I was convinced that there was something wrong with the place; that our holiday there had changed Alfie. That it had changed Sorrel. They had both gone in there one way and come out … different.

—Did you ever express these feelings to anyone?

—To Sorrel, but he just used to laugh at me. And he’d encourage Alfie to laugh at me, too. He said I was losing my mind. He asked why I always had to blame him and Alfie for my own problems.

—It sounds like you needed support.

—I’d lose things, then they’d reappear in random places. When Alfie was there, Sorrel used to say that the wood-knockers had followed me home from Wentshire and stolen them. When Alfie wasn’t there he would show me where my things had been all along. He said he couldn’t help me, that I was a nutter.

—That sounds like bullying.

—Like I said, I deserved it. I couldn’t make my man or my child happy. But it got to me, the tapping and laughter. I tried to block it out with music but I could always hear it. I thought Sorrel was right. He always was about things like that. I was losing it.

Sonia tells me the story you heard at the start of the episode. She tells me she thinks that was the final straw for Sorrel, who left her at around this point and moved to Wrexham.

—Sorrel told me he’d come home early from work that day. He said he’d stood outside the house and watched me through the kitchen window as I tried to cook that casserole. He said he’d watched me drink that bottle of wine and fall about around the kitchen, ruining the dinner I was supposed to be making for my family. He said he’d let himself in and I’d been too pissed to even notice him. He said after that he’d been so disgusted, he’d had enough. He couldn’t trust me with our son anymore.

Sonia stayed in Audlem. With Sorrel out of the picture, Sonia’s parents stepped back into her life and helped pay her rent. They also replaced most of what Sorrel took with him to Wrexham, which was virtually everything. Yet, she tells me, they wouldn’t discuss her problems with alcohol or Alfie’s deteriorating behaviour. They wouldn’t even discuss how Sonia was feeling after the breakup, focussing instead on how the relationship had affected them. Sonia tells me that her parents had been ‘traumatised’ by her relationship with Sorrel. They needed time to recover from it – the stigma of the couple being unwed, having a child and then breaking up. It was not at all, they said, what they had dreamed of for their little girl.

—So how did that break-up make you feel? You were free now…

—I had no idea how to do it on my own. I didn’t want him back, though, I knew that. I wouldn’t have taken him back if he was gift-wrapped. He would call me, though, saying he was ‘worried’ about me. ‘Worried’ about other men taking advantage. I wanted to laugh, to ask him, what ‘other men’? I had no friends and I spent my day drinking by myself.

Sonia’s account paints a very different picture of Sorrel Marsden, far removed from the grieving father that everyone thinks they know. Sonia’s version of Sorrel comes across as a domineering and controlling bully. I want to discuss this with Sonia, who still, heartbreakingly, seems to blame herself for what went wrong between them. But before I do, there is still something I want her perspective on.

—What do you remember about the time when Alfie disappeared? That Christmas.

—It was such a blur. I should have been better. Mam and Dad were back in the picture, helping with Alfie. Sorrel hardly ever saw him anymore. He blamed work, blamed me.

—From what you’ve told me, I would have thought Sorrel would have taken Alfie with him when you split up?

—That’s what he told everyone – that he was going to get full custody. But it never happened. He only ever had him for the odd weekend here and there.

I suppose there are good reasons for this: Sorrel was a chef, he worked most weekends and bank holidays, only seeing Alfie when he could. We also have to remember this was the 1980s, when custody of a child was still very much on the side of the mother, regardless of how unsuitable she might have been.

—Sorrel rang me out of the blue and said he wanted to come over for Christmas. He’d worked every Christmas Day I could remember, as the money was so good. But this year he had the day off, he said. Sorrel was forever telling me how he’d moved on from me. There were other women, I know that. So maybe something wasn’t going well? That was why he suddenly wanted to see us?

—What did you tell him?

—I didn’t say yes straightaway. But I was really tempted. He was Alfie’s father, after all. And the thing was, I still wanted to please him. I wanted to show him that I had it together. I was doing better by then. I had a couple of friends from the primary school; Mam and me were closer than we’d been for a long time. And the tapping and the laughter had stopped too. I worried that it might return, but so far it hadn’t. I thought I would be strong enough to stand up to him. I told him I would think about it, though. I didn’t want him to think he could just walk back in.

—How did that go down with Sorrel? You asserting yourself?

—He told me he’d already booked the time off – already bought presents and food to cook. He was going to make Christmas dinner for us. He asked, how could I let Alfie down like that? How could I refuse? I know, he was barely a father, but he still had this way about him. And I heard myself telling Sorrel he could come and stay. My mam and dad, they’d invited me to their place, so they said it was my choice: them or him.

—That doesn’t sound particularly helpful.

—It wasn’t. I think they thought it might bring me to my senses, but it didn’t. Sorrel came to stay at the flat the night before Christmas Eve.

Sonia’s words are a murmur now. I wonder if she’s been drinking while we’ve been talking.

—I’d moved on so well, moved on from him. But he’d brought Alfie all these toys, loads of stuff, huge parcels. And even though I’d set up a bed for Sorrel on the sofa … he just … He wasn’t aggressive. He just kept saying he’d done all this for the both of us – the presents, the food. I suppose it was because of all that, he somehow talked me in to sleeping with him that night.

The shame that emanates from Sonia is palpable even through the phone line, and I feel a chill pass over me.

—Afterwards, I was so disappointed that I’d been such a pushover. I wondered if it meant we would be getting back together. And that terrified me. I stayed awake while he snored, spread out in my bed – our old bed. I got up and paced round the house on tiptoes. I had that same sick anticipation in my stomach I’d always had when we were together, scared of how he was going to be. And I had this need to make sure everything was right for Christmas. The need for a drink, though, was like claws and teeth in my veins. And I knew Alfie would be up at 4 a.m., like usual at Christmas. He had been angelic for Sorrel the day before, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I felt lost. Terrified, panicky.

But then I remembered something. Call it coincidence, whatever. I remembered a letter.

—A letter?

—Yeah. Sorrel used to open all my mail. Not that I got much. I used to have to leave it on the worktop for when he got home. This one, I managed to keep away from him though.

—Before he had full control over you, you mean?

—That’s right. It was in eighty-one, just before I found out I was pregnant. I never showed it to Sorrel, but I never threw it away either. It was almost the one thing of mine that he hadn’t managed to claim as his own.

—Who was it from?

—I hadn’t taken it seriously at first. And I nearly threw it out. But I didn’t – something had stopped me. I don’t know what. A presentiment maybe? That night, the night before Christmas Eve, I took it out and began to read it again, listening to Sorrel snoring away in the bedroom, in my bed. Maybe that was why I remembered it. Maybe because it was like the bad old days – he’d just waltzed back in and taken his place. Suddenly the letter started to make sense. I’d seen those words, read them, but never truly read them. They said things that I hadn’t even thought of before.

—Sonia, please, who—?

—Sorrel had his own secrets. I knew about them. Other women.

—Who was it from? Can you tell me?

—I’d read it and put it away. Then seven years later I picked it up again. Seven years later it made sense.

There’s a silence, a rustling of paper. I am on tenterhooks as Sonia clears her throat and begins to speak. I immediately realise that she’s reading – the rain in the background, her voice soft.

—‘Dear Sonia,

I know you don’t want to hear from me and these words are not for now. But if I could ask you one thing, it is to keep this letter. Don’t show it to Sorrel.

There are things you need to know about Sorrel, things you probably know now but are yet to see clearly. One day, you will see these things with new eyes. So please, please, keep this letter.

Sorrel Marsden is not who or what he seems. It has taken me a few years apart from him to realise what he is. I want nothing more from that man anymore, nothing. I want nothing from you, Sonia, either. Save to hear me out.

Sorrel Marsden is polite, he is charming. He can make you feel like you are a glistening jewel. I know that feeling. But all of this is an elaborate pantomime.

Sorrel Marsden is a monster.

Sorrel Marsden preys on the vulnerable – those with low self-esteem. At first it’s wonderful. At first you think that he is saving you from all your bad feelings. But he isn’t. He’s charming you to control you. Think of how he’s isolated you from everyone you know. Think about how you will do anything he asks, even if you don’t want to. All he has to do is say the word, correct? But it isn’t your fault.

I know you’re about to crumple this up because you think that someone like you could never let this happen. That’s how smart he is. It’s not overt, and it takes years; a steady drip of poison until all that you were is corroded and bends to his will.

Maybe you’re too far gone. I know I was by the time I was reduced to nothing but Sorrel’s concubine. You have more at stake, Sonia.

Please, think of your child.

How do you feel about that child growing up with such a twisted individual as his father? Could you allow your son to grow up with someone as incapable of love as Sorrel Marsden? And how would you feel about your child becoming like Sorrel?

Is that what you want for your child?

I know I couldn’t live with that.

I want you to know there’s a way out for your son. I know, as a mother, you would lay down everything you have for your child.’

Sonia’s crying silently now. She tells me again that she received this letter not long after she found out she was pregnant. How the sender knew, she has no idea. She could have thrown the letter away, or else shown it to Sorrel, she says again. It was the next part, she tells me, that made her hide it away instead.

—‘I’ve met many Sorrel Marsdens in my life. They’re dangerous. But Sorrel is the most dangerous one of all.

I believe that one day Sorrel will try and take your child. Like he threatened to do with mine.

You won’t be able to stop him. He will be able to manipulate you like he has done me and the others before me. He has honed his technique over years and years of practice.

If you have an inkling, a suspicion that Sorrel Marsden wants to take your child, call me, call this number.

Help will come.

You want to know why I am doing this for you? Because I escaped Sorrel Marsden. Just.

I, and hopefully you, will never want a child to grow up like him.

The Sorrel Marsdens of this world should never win.

Yours,

Maryanne Manon’

—Jesus.

—The same Maryanne Manon who put you and me in touch, Scott. The same Maryanne Manon who was vilified and destroyed because of a story that was constructed around her. A story she had no one who would stand by her and help her refute. Sorrel was really good at making you utterly alone. He would drip his poison into the ears of everyone you knew, and before long you’d realise that no one was coming to your rescue. Sorrel did that to Maryanne and he did that to me. When we found each other, we realised that we could help each other. Now we’re helping you. Together.

I called her that night. The night before Christmas Eve. We talked for an hour, while Sorrel slept. And I made the most difficult choice I’ve ever made. I did the one thing that would redeem me after all the damage I’d done.

Then I called her once more. The minute after Sorrel took Alfie.

After being quiet for so long.

I called for help.

And it’s the one thing in my life I don’t regret.

This last line sounds like an end. It feels to me like Sonia Lewis has said everything she wants to say. It takes me a few moments to compose myself. Between us, the silence gapes. Perhaps she’s holding back tears.

Maybe it’s best that I leave the woman alone now. Allow her to deal with the emotional impact of telling me what she has told me.

But I can’t. There is a huge question I still need to ask. And I fear what I am about to ask will seem like another accusation.

—Sonia. Please don’t take this as a judgement, but I need to know something.

—I know you do, luv. I know what you’re going to ask me. I’ll answer first so you don’t have to say the words.

The answer is that, despite Maryanne’s help, I was scared. I was too scared to go out and find my boy. I was too scared of what might happen if I did. Because, you see, Sorrel had made himself a hero; and he’d made me a villain. He was the grieving father and I was the cold, wicked mother. That was the story and those were our characters. And I knew what Sorrel would have done if I’d tried to change that story – spoken out, exposed him for who he was, and did what I wanted to: tried to find my boy. He would have come and taken the last threads of hopes I had away. He would have done that.

—So you did have some hope? Even after Alfie was declared officially—

—There’s always hope. Declaring Alfie dead, I never wanted to do it. That was all Sorrel, you see. It fit in with the story. Like I say, he’d created a story, and he’d do anything to keep it going.

—So you did believe Alfie was still alive?

—It was Maryanne – she was the one who helped me believe that there was hope. I’m a mother. If there was even a sliver of a chance that my boy was alive, I was going to hold on to it, wasn’t I? But I knew I had to hide it from Sorrel. And if I had to stay quiet and wait for my boy to find me then that’s what I was going to do.

You see, even if no one else believes you, even if you’re sat on your own cupping a flame against a wind that’s raging all around you, there’s always hope: maybe he was somewhere safe. Maybe, somehow, he’d come and find me. That’s what I thought. And all I could do was let the years pass and live with my hope.

I am amazed. Did she really believe the story of the ‘Royal Court’ and if so, why?

I want to ask Sonia if she still believes she will find her son. But it would be too cruel – too callous a question. She clearly does. The belief has been keeping Sonia Lewis going for all these years.

Maybe she’s been waiting for this moment…

This has been Six Stories.

This has been our fifth.

Until next time…

SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG

6 00:00:00

End

You’ve come here twice today. It’s not your scheduled visiting day but Anne’s house pulls at you, draws you to it. All points lead here.

You don’t know what you want from Maryanne right now. Maybe it’s just a fix of her to hold back the dreams – the darkness, the wetness and the incessant tapping.

At the end of it all, you just want answers, and for this to end. You want to tie off the loose threads of this case like the veins and arteries of an infected limb; amputate and move on.

It’ll leave a scar.

But you knew that when you started, somehow.

5th September 2018, 10:00 a.m.

If there’s one time I want to go against all my ethics, it’s now. I want to hide my recorder in my jacket and record this one.

But I won’t. I’m better than that. I won’t betray Anne … Maryanne, I should call her. It’s hard to think of her as this person now. It’s hard to think of her as a young woman. It’s even harder to think of her being with Sorrel Marsden. It’s hard to believe any of this is happening, unspooling around me.

My head has been all over the place since last week. Questions scream out from the tumult. What did Maryanne actually do to help Sonia? How did they keep it quiet? Does this have something to do with Alfie’s disappearance? The answer to that is it must. Does Maryanne actually believe she is or was a psychic? What was the point in her going on television and giving false hope to Sorrel and Sonia?

I want to say I won’t leave without answers to all these.

But I think Maryanne, as always, will call the shots.

So … here we are. I’m back.

I think … I think I’m OK to speak. There’s just so much to consider, so much to say. I’ve been driving for a while, and I’m not sure where I am. It doesn’t matter. There’s hardly any cars here. On either side of me are fields, stretching away to a fuzzy horizon. That’s all I want right now: an empty landscape and quiet.

I got answers … in a way. I also got instructions. I also have this. It’s an envelope. It’s like the one that Maryanne posted to me all those weeks ago. The same writing on the front, that scrawl. On the front it simply reads, The End. She’s told me I’m not allowed to open it until I’ve told the sixth story.

I will obey these instructions, though every part of me wants to tear open the envelope and read it.

But I won’t.

I believe Maryanne has constructed this whole thing. From the moment she first heard Six Stories, she chose me to be the stone with which this case is cracked open. She’s been planning this for a while. Maryanne’s been waiting for me.

So what did she tell me?

First, let’s go back to that night. Christmas Eve, 1988. It almost feels like I was there. When Maryanne told me the story, I could see it, feel it, smell it.

Maryanne Manon had been waiting for Sonia’s phone call since she sent her that letter back in 1981. She prayed every day that Sonia would call. She never gave up hope.

When Sonia eventually called, the night before Christmas Eve, Maryanne was prepared. She booked herself in at a hotel close to Sonia’s house. When Sonia called again, not long after Sorrel left with Alfie, Maryanne drove to the house and the two women talked. This was much earlier than Sorrel claims. More like 8 or 9 p.m. Sonia was drunk, yes. But Maryanne says she was far from unreasonable, far from violent. She was, however, broken. Sorrel had destroyed her. Not physically, but emotionally and psychologically. Sonia was a wreck.

Almost.

Calling Maryanne was Sonia’s last stand.

Maryanne followed Sorrel, driving behind him until he reached the Wentshire Forest Pass, where she saw Sorrel stop in the layby. It was raining heavily by then. Maryanne got out of the car and put her hood up to obscure her face and approached. Slowly.

But by the time she reached the car, she realised that Sorrel was not there. He was not looking under the bonnet, as he would claim.

Maryanne was confused. Had he known what was happening? Where had he gone? Had she missed him in the rain? She approached the car to see Alfie asleep in the back seat. Maryanne was horrified but also elated. This was her opportunity, placed before her on a golden platter. Sorrel’s car was unlocked.

But where on earth was Sorrel?

Maryanne paused by the passenger door, hesitating over whether to simply snatch the sleeping child. If she was caught, she thought, if this was some ambush, at least she would have tried. At least she would have done what she swore she would try and do. She leaned inside, and what she saw at Alfie’s feet chilled her to the bone. In the footwell lay an axe, rubber gloves and a roll of bin bags. For a horrible few moments Maryanne thought she was too late. She thought Alfie was dead. She checked his pulse. He was unresponsive but breathing. Maryanne now thinks he’d been drugged. Sonia, remember, had been prescribed Amitriptyline for her depression. Maryanne thinks it was this that had been given to Alfie.

Maryanne had made her promise: she’d sworn Sorrel would have no more victims.

She bundled the sleeping boy into her car and drove away.

For all Sorrel knew, on his return from whatever he had been doing in the woods, his son had run away into Wentshire Forest. Therefore, Sorrel’s story of what happened that night is only partly true. He did stop. But if it was because of the engine, where was Sorrel when Maryanne arrived? She certainly didn’t see him looking under the bonnet. Whatever plan he was putting into action deep in the forest, whatever hideous act he was preparing, involving the axe and other objects Maryanne saw in the footwell, when Sorrel came back to his car, Alfie was gone.

But then there was Sonia. Poor, broken Sonia, utterly consumed by alcohol and still within Sorrel’s control. Almost. She’d made a choice, too, when she called Maryanne.

Sonia believed Alfie would be taken from her eventually. Sorrel had her believing that social services were primed and ready to remove the boy from her care at the drop of a hat. So, however she looked at it, she could see no way that she wouldn’t lose her son. Maryanne gave her at least some control over how it happened.

And when Sorrel took Alfie that night, Sonia, despite her drunken state, noticed something. Her medication had gone along with her son. Used to Sorrel’s tactics, she could see only one explanation. That medication was going to find its way into Alfie, and then Sorrel, posing as the ever-devoted father, would alert the authorities to his little boy’s drugged state. Sonia realised if the authorities found her meds in Alfie’s bloodstream, it would be the end for her, the inept mother.

This was Sorrel. He went for her like a predator, straight for the jugular.

Sonia clearly didn’t know about the rubber gloves and bin bags. The axe. Thankfully, she hadn’t ever considered such a fate might await her son.

Maryanne had a completely different fate in mind for the boy, though. One she had promised Sonia she would make happen. She knew somewhere. Somewhere Alfie would be able to grow up. Where that little boy would want for nothing. It wasn’t strictly above board. But money can buy you secrecy, she said.

A long time before Sorrel Marsden was even in her life, when she was still ‘flotsam’, Maryanne Manon had met a couple. She wouldn’t tell me who they were. All she’d reveal was that she’d been an imposter at some rich people’s party. At the end of that party, in the early hours, Maryanne had confided in this couple and they in her. It was an earnest 3 a.m. conversation that Maryanne had never forgotten.

She could never get the couple’s plight out of her head. Somehow it made Maryanne think of the nuns and the home, of her parents tossing her away without a second thought. Maybe meeting the couple was meant to be, she often thought.

She wanted to do something for them. And she had waited years to be able to do it.

As she told me this, it was all I could do not to get on my knees and beg her for clarity. Maryanne’s story was coming together, a half-finished jigsaw. But still it wasn’t complete.

In return for helping the couple the rest of her own life would be comfortable – paid for. She knew her eyes were failing, and she knew one day she’d be blind. By helping them, she was ensuring that she’d be looked after – and looked after well.

The high-end home-help service confirms this part of the story for me.

And the knowledge that Alfie would be safe – the way this plan worked for Sonia, for Maryanne, for the little boy himself, suggests Maryanne is telling the truth.

But how on earth was it so simple?

Serendipity and chance meetings have plagued this story. And is that not what life is? Moments, meetings, chances carved from some vast and infinite chaos? Don’t we carve ourselves little paths through a never-ending miasma? Do we carve them for others – consciously or unconsciously? Did Maryanne carve one for a vulnerable little boy?

And what about the ‘psychic’ thing? It’s the one thing that still makes no sense to me.

Maryanne tells me that was a message – a message for Sonia. To let her know that Alfie was still safe. They couldn’t contact each other in the normal ways. If the authorities found out about their plot, Alfie could have been returned to Sorrel, who may have gained full custody of him. Neither Sonia nor Maryanne wanted to risk that outcome. So Sonia instead waited quietly for Maryanne’s ‘sign’.

I asked her how that could possibly have worked – all she said was that Alfie was in a ‘royal court’ – what was that supposed to mean? Was it a preagreed code?

I did beg then, I begged Maryanne to be clear, to finish this story. I admitted that, yes, I had been trying to solve this one all along. That it was the only one of my investigations that needed an end.

For me, for her, for Sonia, even for Sorrel. This needs an end.

Maryanne told me it would all become clear. We were nearly there. She said there were a few more people I needed to talk to. She gave me their numbers. Then she gave me this envelope.

She gave me The End.

‘Open it after you’ve talked to your last,’ she said. ‘You need him to tell this story. You’re the only one in this world who can get him to do it.’

We both knew who she meant.

Episode 6: The Monster

—I was a virgin when I met him. In my head, I thought the first person I ever slept with would be the person I would stay with.

He knew that. I told him.

We were fooling around. He told me to close my eyes. He told me he was going to do something and I’d like it.

It hurt. It hurt, and I cried but he kept going. He told me that I’d loved it.

I didn’t consent.

—He used to make me do things I didn’t want to. I was young. I wasn’t experienced. If I told him I didn’t like it, he would get angry. He would say everyone else liked it and there must be something wrong with me … So I did it … I let him.

—I dyed my hair. He said he loved it. His exact words were: ‘When I’m doing you from behind, I can pretend it’s someone else.’

I told him I would dye it back and he told me I wasn’t allowed to. Not until he was bored of it.

—He wanted it six times a day. Whether I wanted to or not. The rest of the time he ignored me. I would just sit there wondering what I’d done, what was wrong with me, why he didn’t want me…

—I got upset with him, I got upset with all the other women he was flirting with, all the phone numbers and photographs he would leave lying around. I cried and shouted at him. I was furious. He put his hands around my throat and squeezed until I was quiet. He did that every time I spoke up for myself. He did it so many times that I never dared to speak up again.

—We had a signal. He would put his hand on mine. On the outside it would look like he was showing … love? Affection? Those words don’t even … they sound so wrong. When he put his hand on mine like that, it meant ‘shut up’. It meant ‘stop talking or you’ll pay later’.

I only ever paid once. That was all it took.

—He held the number of people I’d slept with against me. He mentioned it at every opportunity, whenever he wanted his way. He made me feel disgusting. He made me believe I was nothing, no one. It wasn’t long before I believed it too. I was nothing and so he could do anything he liked to me.

And that’s what he did…

—He made me sleep on the floor. He said if I behaved like an animal, that I deserved to be treated like an animal.

He woke up in the middle of the night and found me there. Then he … I’m sorry … I can’t…

Welcome to Six Stories.

I’m Scott King.

The voices you have just heard have all been digitally altered to hide the identities of the speakers. All I will say about them is that they are many. And they are all talking about the same man. None of them has ever spoken out until now. And there are many more I could have included.

When Sorrel Marsden’s seven-year-old boy vanished in Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve, 1988, it seemed that the entire world sympathised with his plight. Rightly so. The world then empathised with the agony that Sorrel and Sonia must have felt when their only child vanished and was pronounced legally deceased in 1995. It is this case that we’ve been looking at, through six different pairs of eyes.

We have now reached our final account.

I want to warn listeners that what you’ll hear in this episode may disturb and may upset you. We’re heading down a dark path. So be prepared.

The outpouring of sympathy, the fundraising, the support that came the way of Sorrel Marsden in the wake of Alfie’s disappearance was tremendous. Alfie Marsden was a household name. He was even mentioned on BBC’s Comic Relief appeal in 1989. All of it, to no avail though.

And while Sorrel has been empathised with around the world, Alfie’s mother has been condemned. Sonia Lewis has been portrayed as a cold and uncaring alcoholic. Her behaviour and lifestyle have, in fact, been the subject of significantly more scrutiny than Sorrel’s claim about what happened to his son that night.

I want to get the story from the horse’s mouth, as it were, so let’s hear Sorrel speaking to BBC Cymru Wales in 1988.

—It was pouring down and it was dark. I just wanted to get Alfie somewhere safe. And it was safer to get out of that house and over to my place. I just wanted him to have a proper Christmas.

He was fast asleep for most of the journey, thank God. Then, about halfway into the forest, I heard this sound coming from the engine, this rattling. It didn’t sound mechanical though. More like a tapping. It was horrible. It was almost like something alive in there that wanted to get out! I had no choice but to stop. What if something had gone wrong and we crashed? I knew that that building site was nearby, so I pulled over. I didn’t know anything about cars, engines. When I went to take a look that was when … he must have got scared and run away … I couldn’t find him … I had no torch or nothing like that. I’ll never forgive myself…

Sorrel Marsden has stuck to this story since he told it to first-responders on Christmas Eve, 1988. He’s never wavered. And there has never been any evidence to prove Sorrel had anything to do with Alfie’s disappearance.

Sorrel doesn’t often mention the strange occurrences at the Great Escapes site. However, he, like anyone who lived nearby, must have been aware of the alleged haunting of the building site, and the whole of Wentshire Forest. This is all the audio I could find where Sorrel talks about the forest. It makes me wonder if there was a part of him that was trying to portray himself as a fearless hero.

—I knew all the stories about that place, but I had no choice. What if Alfie was there? What if something had happened to him? I didn’t even think about all that nonsense; all I wanted was to get help, to find my boy.

Thus Sorrel Marsden cemented himself early in the world’s psyche as a poster boy for the hardworking, grieving father. He attended every press conference and spearheaded every search, while Sonia was marginalised, driven away and then eventually forgotten. Even to this day, Sorrel’s annual pilgrimages to the site help maintain his carefully constructed character. Sorrel’s last television interview about what happened was for a rather tawdry documentary series in 2013 called Missing: UK.

Extract from Missing: UK – series 1, episode 1, 2013 (Down There Productions)

—Sonia moved on quickly after Alfie disappeared. She found it easier than me to forget about him. Without guidance, without help, she was vulnerable to, let’s say ‘outside influences’. Other men. There was a steady stream of them the minute I left, apparently. It showed how much she cared for Alfie and me, didn’t it? But people like Sonia can’t change. No matter how much we want them to.

It’s taken an inordinate amount of time to get Sorrel Marsden to agree to an interview. It was only when I told him I’d talked to Sonia that he said yes. I just want to point out that we only have Sorrel’s word about who Sonia saw after the two of them broke up. And if she did, I don’t see what bearing it has on, well, anything.

The interview took place on Sorrel’s terms. There would be no face-to-face. No Skype. I was to call him on a phone number that would be emailed to me. It was rather cloak-and-dagger and, I felt, unnecessary. However, he clearly wanted control over the situation, so we went ahead.

I’ll be honest, speaking to Sorrel conjured some strange emotions in me. I managed to hold myself together as we spoke, but it was difficult.

Sorrel Marsden exudes an energy and charm that I’ve never before felt about another human. Despite our interview being over the phone I feel myself drawn to him when he speaks. I hang on his every word. Despite everything. But I know that this is a skill he has spent years perfecting. I wonder whether it’s conscious, what he’s doing. Is he aware of his inflection, his power? Or is it instinctive, like a snake waiting to pounce? Unfortunately for Sorrel, he’s not the only one who has hidden venom.

—Do you know how many times Sonia came to look for Alfie? Less than the number of men who came to her door in the weeks after he disappeared. That tells you all you need to know about her, doesn’t it? I knew that’s what she’d be doing as soon as I left. Sorry to be so blunt, but it hurt to see how little she cared for me and for Alfie.

Sonia’s alleged promiscuity is something Sorrel never fails to mention when discussing Alfie’s mother. I wonder what it has to do with him, but I stay quiet.

—It was the same when he was first born and I was working all the hours God sends to earn enough money to provide for them; to keep him in nappies and her in booze. Sonia wanted to take the easy way out. But parenting isn’t easy. It’s a full-time job. All she could do, though, was laze around the house, drinking. She used to be so lovely, so beautiful, such a good person. It was a tragedy what Sonia became. I did everything I could, but ultimately it was her who was supposed to be looking after our child and our home.

And when Alfie went missing, I was out with every search party, and when they had stopped, I kept going. But did Sonia ever come to one? We both know the answer.

Sorrel’s right. Sonia was not present at the searches for Alfie. It was something I did discuss with her. In fact there is quite a lot I discussed with Sonia that did not make the cut of episode five. This was intentional, as I want to put some of Sonia’s claims to Sorrel. Not right now though. They can wait. There will be a time when I know I can spring not just Sonia’s words on Sorrel but the words of others. I need to choose my time carefully, though. I need to wait until he is in a corner, a place where he cannot back out. There is always the possibility that Sorrel will hang up. And I am more or less sure he is using a burner phone to speak to me. If he does hang up and slips away, I suppose that will say more about what’s being levelled against him. Let’s see.

Wentshire Forest was eventually bought by the Ministry of Defence in 1996, a little over a year after Alfie was declared officially deceased. The forest became inaccessible to the public, and it was clear that Alfie Marsden, nor his remains, were ever going to be recovered. Sorrel has the utmost respect for the military and does not resent the MoD for buying the forest.

I talk Sorrel along his well-trodden paths. We discuss his visits to the area, the shrine along the Forest Pass dedicated to his boy. I’ve been to visit it – an old bus-shelter, lovingly converted for free by a local craftsman. Inside it’s rather cosy, the walls lined with bunches of wilted flowers and soggy cuddly toys – donations from well-wishers. There are handwritten cards with religious sentiments and two battery-operated candles flicker atop a makeshift altar. In pride of place stands a framed school photograph of Alfie himself. It’s the one that everyone knows. The bus stop is technically on MoD land, but they turn a blind eye to its existence. A well-maintained barbed-wire fence looms ominously between the trees just behind it. When he comes for his annual pilgrimage here, Sorrel walks the length of the pass every day. Rain or shine. In the corner of the shed is a bucket containing umbrellas and a waxy, fleece-lined rain jacket hangs from a hook on the far wall.

—You’ve probably spent more time in Wentshire Forest than most people, Sorrel. I’ve often wondered if you’ve ever experienced anything strange here.

—There’s a lot that’s strange about the forest. People say there are things there, things that no one can explain. I remember all that was going on at the time. The builders couldn’t get anything done.

Yes, strange things happen in Wentshire Forest. Even now.

—What sort of things?

—Lights, sounds. This is MoD land, though, so it could be anything – they could be testing some sort of experimental weapons, couldn’t they?

—What have you seen, just out of interest? While you’ve been walking here?

—I’ve seen things that you’d tell me I was lying about. White lights going in and out of the trees. Odd noises I couldn’t explain. It’s why the MoD keep people out.

—What do you think the MoD are actually testing?

—Sonic weapons and stuff, I imagine. And I reckon they were conducting all sorts of tests in the forest long before they set up the base. That would explain all the nonsense people say – about the witch, the fairies, ghosts and all that rubbish.

—Do you think your story has anything to do with the MoD? The tapping in the engine?

—I don’t know. I could never explain that. We were driving along the pass. Yes, I might have been going quickly, but not too quick. I had my boy in the back, after all. Then there’s this noise … this tapping sound coming from the engine. I’ll admit, I was scared.

—Alfie didn’t wake up, though…

—No. He was tired. And they sleep through anything, don’t they? Anyway, I had to stop. And that’s when … Oh God, it never gets any easier telling this story. I was looking at the engine for all of five minutes and … and when I looked back, he was gone.

Maybe he ran off, he was a strong-minded kid. A handful. No wonder, with Sonia the way she was, and me working all hours. All he needed was a bit of consistency, some decent parenting.

—Is that what you think you could have given Alfie if he’d been with you and not Sonia? Decent parenting.

—Yes. Of course. We all know what Sonia was like.

There is a degree of prickliness about Sorrel as he tells his story. I wonder if he repeats the same account all these years later through stubborn resolve or because he actually believes it.

—I’ve told the story a great number of times. I can tell it without thinking. I’ve never changed it. There’s been no need.

—The thing is, Sorrel, I don’t really want to talk about Alfie. Not just yet.

—So what is it you think you want to discuss? Sonia? Whatever she’s said, you need to know how much someone like that lies. You need to have a think about what she wants out of all this.

—What do you think she wants?

—Oh, I don’t know. Exposure on your podcast thing? Sonia will say anything to anyone. She was probably just glad someone could be bothered to listen to her. She’s had people whispering in her ear about me from day one. Such an impressionable woman.

—I’ve not implied that Sonia’s said anything bad about you.

—It’s the principle of the thing. Sonia is Alfie’s mother, but she’s never given a stuff about him. About me. She likes to pretend that I’m the bad guy in all this. But I had to work to keep a roof over our heads while Sonia spent all Alfie’s food and nappy money on drink. That’s the facts.

—Did you ever think about getting help for her? You knew she was struggling with her drinking, right? Her mental health.

—I tried alright. But there wasn’t that much out there in those days.

—Sonia was taking medication, wasn’t she?

—Yes.

There’s a tense silence. I am seized by an impulse to blurt something out. Sorrel, though, is being careful, never saying too much. He’s good at manipulating silence. I am too.

—I searched for my son in that forest, all the way to the building site. In the rain, in the dark. I was screaming his name. It was pitch-black in there. I was soaked to the skin. And I couldn’t find him…

Sorrel’s sincerity is infectious, I want to draw these questions in another direction, away from that night. Sorrel, however, has conjured up his grief, his story.

—Did anyone know about Sonia’s problems? Her family? Her friends?

—They were against me from the start. They filled Sonia’s head with lies, with rubbish about me, trying to turn her against me. She refused to stand up to them; left it to me.

Finding out that I have tracked down and spoken to Sonia has clearly upset Sorrel. He remains stoic though, not answering when I ask him further questions. For a few minutes I wonder if I’ve spoiled this opportunity. Like everyone who’s met him says, there’s something about the man that makes me want to please him. It’s uncanny.

—How does it feel, thirty years on from that night? I can’t imagine it gets easier.

—I still find it hard. They say time is a healer, but not for me, it isn’t.

—And do you still have hope? That Alfie might just one day walk out of the forest and into your arms?

—Yes. I dream of that day.

Another powerful silence, and the rage that is simmering deep in my belly is beginning to bubble over. I think of Sonia, who has given everything she had to Sorrel. I think of her sacrifice. There’s something in Sorrel’s voice that dares me to disbelieve him, dares me to challenge him. And it’s hard not to let this mask of faux-objectivity slip. I find myself choked with emotion, a lump forming in my throat. I try to laugh and it comes out as a sob. Because the thing is, I believe him. I believe that he believes what he’s telling me.

I tell Sorrel I’ve spoken to Wendy Morris, too. That’s something he wasn’t expecting. I hear a sound on the end of the line; a sniff, a snort; almost a hiss.

—Let me tell you something about Alfie. I’ve never told anyone this story. You can have it for free. It’s a world exclusive, or whatever you want to call it…

—Go on…

—That Wendy Morris, I thought we were friends. It just goes to show how people change, how false people are. You think you know someone and a few years go by and poof, suddenly they’re someone else. No one has any real integrity anymore. You just can’t trust other people. But that’s always been my problem. I attracted those sorts of women – needy and with problems. I don’t know why. Yes, she came to help us out on a holiday that didn’t go quite to plan. But it was thanks to Sonia! Sonia was the one who begged and begged me to ask someone to come and help her with Alfie. She wanted a babysitter so she could drink and not have to look after our son. I’m sure that’s not how she told that story though, is it? I bet she said Wendy being there was all down to me. Sonia’s always been an amazing storyteller. I can see she got through to you…

I want to admit something. At this point in the interview, just for a moment, I doubt everything I’ve heard about Sorrel Marsden. I wonder if he is actually not in the wrong. I can feel myself wanting to excuse him, to protect him.

I steady myself. Tell myself to think logically, remember who is the trapper here, who is the prey. I have to remind myself what I know, what I’m carrying with me. I have to feel the weight of it before I can carry on. Like a loaded gun, a sheathed sword.

—Sonia was the one who was drunk. Sonia let Alfie wander off into the forest in the middle of the night. Wendy and Sonia. They were as thick as thieves. Wendy practically throwing herself at me every time Sonia’s back was turned. But it was me was who found Alfie. Right?

—That’s what I’ve heard.

—Exactly. Me. Not Wendy, not Sonia. Alfie was running away into that forest in the middle of the night. He was running away from a mother who didn’t care enough about him. I swear to you.

I have another moment where I want to unleash. What I have can tear apart Sorrel Marsden’s web of lies. The power of it is intoxicating and I wonder if right at this moment the two of us are something alike. Addicted to this feeling. It makes me want to scream my question; to ask Sorrel what it was he was doing in Wentshire Forest that first time. Was this a run-through, a rehearsal? Did he mean to rid his life of his own son and place the blame on his partner that day? Did Wendy Morris waking up at that moment ruin everything?

But I hold off. I can’t prove anything. Not about this. Not yet. All I can say is … All I can say is that if Alfie was running away, there was a good reason why. I ask Sorrel, tentatively, about the story he made up in the woods to discipline Alfie – about the wood-knockers.

—Yes, I made up a stupid story about wood … things. I was trying to keep him from running off. I had to be a parent to all three of them that weekend. But when Alfie came back out of that wood … he was different. Something had changed in him. It was like he’d been replaced. By another child. I couldn’t get close to him after that. No one could. I think the whole experience damaged him. Mentally. It was like he was no longer my son.

—And why do you think Alfie changed?

—I lived with my grandmother for most of my childhood. She always told me that I was bad, that I was different to my brothers and sisters. I didn’t look like any of them. It was genetics; I know that now. My grandmother, though, she told me that I’d been ‘switched’ in the night, when I was a baby. The fairies had the real Sorrel and that’s why I was so bad.

During that holiday to Wentshire Forest I realised that Alfie had maybe hit some kind of point in his life – that he’d changed somehow, and not for the better. I thought that, because I couldn’t be there to help him, he’d changed.

Alfie spent his days with an alcoholic with mental problems. And that’s what changed him! No nonsense about fairies!

After that holiday, his behaviour in school was appalling. I tried everything I could to get him right, but I was too late. There was only one way to get him back to the boy he could have been. I had to take him away from Sonia.

Sorrel is brimming with emotion, his voice hoarse. This is my moment, I have seen a flash of weakness and I strike. Hard and fast.

—Sorrel, I don’t believe any of that. I think you’re lying.

—What? How dare you. What do you want with me?

—I just want to talk.

—Well, I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. I don’t want to do this anymore.

—That’s an interesting choice of words.

—What on earth could you mean by that?

—‘I don’t want to do this’. Do those words sound familiar to you?

—What the hell are you talking about?

As an answer to Sorrel’s outrage, I play one of the recordings you heard at the start of the episode. I play it with the voice clean. Then I play another one, and another. I say each person’s name afterwards.

Sorrel does not react.

Eventually, after a horrible silence, he speaks.

—Prove it.

—What?

—Prove any of it. It’s amazing what people will do to get their name known – for a little bit of fame or money. How much did you pay these women to say those lies about me?

—Nothing. No one was paid.

—Well then, what was the point? What is your point? I thought you were here to help me look for my son, not play me lies.

—I’m here to talk.

—Well, I don’t have to talk to you. You’re here on some character assassination mission.

—You don’t have a choice. Just like those women didn’t have a choice, Sorrel.

—I do and so did they! I never harmed one hair on any of those women’s heads. Slags, the lot of them; whores and slags. All they did was lie and cheat and sleep around. Now they want to tell lies about a father who’s lost his son. Disgraceful. You’re disgraceful.

—Coercive behaviour is an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation, or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim.

—What are you talking about?

—Controlling behaviour is a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape, and regulating their everyday behaviour.

—What are you talking about?

—I’m talking about the law, Mr Marsden. This is how the 2015 offence of coercive or controlling behaviour is described. And I’m talking about Maryanne Manon. I’m talking about Sonia Lewis. You can say what you like, Sorrel, but it’s their words against yours.

—Liars. Both of them!

—Their words and many others. Their words that they kept quiet out of respect, not for you, but for Alfie.

—What?

—You acted quickly. You showed your face on the television, you were at the forefront of every search.

—Of course I was. I’m his father, for fuck’s sake!

—But you didn’t do it for Alfie, did you? You made yourself a hero because that was your way of being able to remain in control. You knew none of these women, especially Sonia, would say a word about who you really are.

—They could have. Of course they could. But they didn’t! Ask yourself why that is. It’s because they’re liars.

—It’s because you chose women like Sonia, like Maryanne – vulnerable women with problems. Who would believe a drug-addict and an alcoholic? Who would believe Sonia after you ‘rescued’ Alfie from her care? After you wrenched from her the only thing she had. You took everything from her because you could.

—Sonia and I … we were special…

—You told her that. And I don’t doubt you told yourself that, too. The thing is, it was only special because it went your way. You had her exactly where you wanted her. You found a young, naïve girl, and you broke her and built her back up until she was fully under your control.

—That’s not true. I never laid one hand on Sonia.

—That now carries a five-year prison sentence, Sorrel. You don’t have to have touched her. And you didn’t need to. You broke her from the inside out. Drip, drip, drip. Like water torture.

It was her love for Alfie that saved her. Ironic, really, seeing as you got her pregnant as just another way to isolate and control her.

—I loved—

—Sorrel, this isn’t about you anymore. This is about Alfie.

There is a sharp intake of breath and the line at Sorrel’s end goes dead. I spend a few moments trying to call back but it doesn’t even ring.

It’s telling that at the mention of Alfie, Sorrel decides he’s had enough.

An admission of guilt, perhaps? That’s not for me to say. What I am able to reveal, however, is the case I have against Sorrel Marsden; the case I would have put to him to answer.

Perhaps we’d better start at the beginning – with the most important person in this story: Alfie himself.

I believe Alfie Marsden was born not as a result of some paternal instinct on the part of Sorrel, but simply as a device, as a cog in a mechanism of coercion and control against Sonia Lewis. Alfie’s life was disposable.

What has brought me to this terrible conclusion? All we have heard. I believe that Sorrel Marsden gaslighted Sonia and encouraged Alfie to do the same. He utilised his son as a weapon against Sonia’s sanity. The strange phenomena that were being reported in Wentshire Forest, at the Great Escapes site, were prominent in the press at the time. The tapping, the suggestion of some sort of hidden folk and of strange, hybrid animals – Sorrel used these to make Sonia’s life a misery, making her believe she was losing her mind. Looking back at Wendy and Delyth’s stories – and even Maryanne’s – we know they all experienced tapping noises and unexplained occurrences when either Sorrel or Alfie were somewhere in the vicinity. And the same is true of Sonia.

We know, too, that Sorrel encouraged Alfie to play the ‘bad mouse’ game on his mother. We also have in Wendy a witness to Sorrel tapping on wood to scare Sonia in Alfie’s presence. All of this would have seemed like fun to the boy, and perhaps it was the only positive attention he had from his father.

Little boys worship their fathers, however awful those fathers are. Alfie was on his way to becoming a mini Sorrel: aping his behaviour, mimicking his sustained assault against Sonia. And sadly, this was Alfie’s only real use his father had for him. Once Sorrel had utterly conquered Sonia, Alfie had served his purpose. How can I be sure? Let’s look at the facts. Sorrel made no effort to be with his son, save for the occasional visit. The family he neglected were simply an irritant.

My belief, based on the evidence I have gathered, is that Sorrel Marsden meant to get rid of his son in Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve, 1988. He had used the seven years of his son’s life to build a story around himself and Sonia – she the bad mother, the alcoholic; himself as the grieving hero. And it worked.

We don’t know how Sorrel became this way, other than a small hint at the upbringing he endured from his grandmother. We can, however, speculate on how he perfected his technique. The ability to manipulate like this takes work. A monster has to practice becoming a monster. And practice gave Sorrel Marsden the ability to identify victims early; he learned that those with low self-esteem, were the easiest to control. He therefore learned how to spot a victim. He preyed on those he thought he could break – using them to hone his craft. We’ve heard from his victims, the people who have been brave enough to speak out about what he did.

But let’s look now at Wendy Morris. She seemed like the perfect candidate, yet Sorrel seemed to hold back when they first met. A part of me wonders if she was the only friend he’s ever had? Perhaps. But Sorrel had another use for Wendy. He brought her to Wentshire Forest as an alibi, as someone who would vouch for him. After all, he knew her intimately; he knew how he could bend her to his will. People like Sorrel do not see love, companionship, friendship, only opportunities to get what they want.

And what about Maryanne Manon? By the time he encountered her, he was almost fully-fledged, nearly a complete monster. Yet Sorrel underestimated Maryanne.

That was his mistake. And I think he knew it. When she followed him from Shrewsbury to Prestatyn, I think that was the moment he realised. So he destroyed her reputation, he told stories and people believed him. Maryanne became ‘Mad Mary’.

Sorrel then found Sonia. Young, naïve, vulnerable, she was the perfect victim. Sorrel got her pregnant before Maryanne could warn her or expose what he was.

Now let’s fast forward to Christmas Eve, 1988, Sorrel Marsden decided he was done with Sonia and Alfie for good. Alfie would disappear; Sorrel would be the figure of sympathy and Sonia would be buried by her reputation. Unlike Maryanne, she would never come after him.

I wish Sorrel was here to answer all this. I wish there was some pushback to this story I’ve put together. But he’s not, so all I can do is present what I see in front of me: that Sorrel Marsden did not care, he did not love, and he thought only about himself. That was the difference between him and Sonia.

Sonia Lewis gave up everything she had; first for Sorrel then for Alfie. She believed that if Sorrel got his way, he would have had full custody. She never imagined Sorrel would go as far as getting rid of their son. So she gave him up so he wouldn’t be raised by someone like Sorrel. So that he wouldn’t grow up with a sly and controlling demon as a role model. Sonia could see Alfie was already on his way to becoming like his father – tapping and manipulating. And his behaviour at school indicated that he was becoming seriously unstable.

From Sorrel’s perspective though, Alfie was just a hindrance. So he doped up his son on Sonia’s medication, put him in the back seat of his car and drove in the middle of the night to Wentshire Forest, where he intended to dispose of the child.

If Sorrel was still here, I would put it all to him directly. I would ask him what he was doing in the forest when he got out of the car and left his son sleeping. He says he was looking at the engine, but Maryanne didn’t see him there. I wonder if we’ll ever know where he went, and what he did during those few minutes.

If Sorrel was still on the end of the phone I would then put it to him that he hampered the search for Alfie. It was him who drove the truck from the Great Escapes site. It was him who tampered with the lights on the building site, not the fairies in the wood.

I would also put it to him that he then employed all of his storytelling and manipulation skills. He knew the press would eat up the story of a missing child and his desperate father, so he gave them everything they wanted. To what end, though? Maybe he couldn’t help himself. Maybe all he ever wanted was to be seen, to be important.

If Sorrel was still on the other end of the line, I would tell him this: More than anything, Sorrel, I feel sorry for you. Whatever made you this way, I’m sorry it happened. And if I could offer you any advice, it would be to seek some help. Find out about yourself. Begin the journey through the forest to face your own monsters.

I could sit here and reflect and speculate. But I won’t. Instead I feel that it’s time to do something I’ve been waiting to do ever since I last saw Maryanne. I reach into my bag and pull out a letter. Looping, spidery handwriting on the front.

‘The End’ it reads.

I sit there and I read.

This series has been unlike my others. I have dropped all the episodes at once. All of them in one fell swoop – before I vanish. Again.

They took me a long time to edit. It’s because I want this series to sound perfect.

There is plenty more I could have said to Sorrel Marsden. It was like any conversation when emotions get heated. No one is as articulate as they could be. There’s always something we wish we could have said.

But I’m sure of one thing: Sorrel genuinely has no knowledge of what happened to his son in 1988.

But I do. Now.

And I wonder if I should have told Sorrel. I wonder if he deserved to know.

Because there is another story I could have told him. A story I’ve discovered since he left. Since I read a letter. A letter from a friend.

It’s a story about a traumatised seven-year-old boy who apparently went ‘missing’ in a forest. Whose father gave up on him.

Should I have told Sorrel about the people who didn’t give up? The people who made sure the boy found a new family – people who would love him, despite what he’d been through. A family who would nurture, who would patiently coax that little boy out of his own darkness and give him the life he would never have had. Should I have told Sorrel that, despite all their efforts, that darkness would always be with that boy, and the man he would become, buried somewhere inside, waiting for him to turn and face it … to walk back in among the trees?

I wonder if Sorrel Marsden would even have cared.

As for stories. Maybe it’s that one that has been our sixth?

And it’s me that has been Scott King.

This episode is dedicated to the King family, who took on a broken boy and made him whole.

And this episode is our last. For now at least.

Epilogue

Dear Scott,

I’m sorry. I know you’ve told me over and over not to say that so much. You’ve told me that I shouldn’t be so harsh on myself; but I do need to apologise to you.

I need to say sorry for keeping you waiting this long. I want to apologise for never knowing when to tell you this story, for never knowing when the time was right.

Sometimes people have to find their own way out of the woods. I want to help you find yours. And, again, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t do this face-to-face. I’m sorry it took a letter.

I started doing this long ago – leading you out of the woods. You don’t remember it, and you may never. I don’t hold that against you. I’m glad you don’t remember. Some memories are best left hidden inside.

You see, I took you from those woods.

Physically.

I found you there, asleep in your seat in the back of your father’s car. You were seven, but you looked like a little baby: head down, eyes closed. I felt my heart break for you.

It was the sight of you that helped me that night, in that dark wood, between those trees. It was you – your face. Where your father had gone, I didn’t know. I also didn’t know for sure what he was doing in those woods, or when he would be coming back. But when I saw the axe, the rubber gloves, the bin bags, I was certain that it was something monstrous. And I was terrified. I had been scared of what you would become if you were brought up by Sorrel. Now I was scared that you wouldn’t survive the night.

So I took you.

I drove you somewhere safe. I felt your mother’s heartbreak with every mile that passed. She thought she was giving you up to save you from a future as Sorrel Marsden’s son. She still does. I know different: we were saving your life. We did save your life.

As I drove and you slept on in the back seat of my car, my tears blurred the rising sun before me. And I decided then that I would keep this part of the secret to myself. Sonia would never know what Sorrel really had planned for you that night.

And I knew it was the right thing to do.

I enclose an address with this letter. You won’t recognise it, because you weren’t there long. It’s the place we drove to on Christmas morning, 1988. It’s the place where I kept you hidden. No one but me knew where it was. Not even Sonia, your mother. But she did know you were safe. I made sure she knew that.

And in those few days you were there, you changed. From being an annoyance, some inconvenience that was to be disposed of in the most heinous of ways, you went to being a gift. A Christmas gift for a couple I knew, two people who deserved something beautiful in their lives.

I’ve followed your life ever since. Keeping my distance, so that our secret – mine and Sonia’s, and now yours – was kept safe, but making sure that you were safe, too. I’ve also made it my business to keep Sonia informed. Did you realise she knew who you were, Alfie – or should I say Scott? I know she wouldn’t have told you, but did she give herself away? I wouldn’t blame her if she did.

Go back to that safe place again. Retrace our journey, and see where you were transformed from Alfie to Scott. And then go home, see your mum and dad, and talk to them.

Tell them six stories.

They’ll tell you one.

It has a happy ending.

All my love,

Maryanne xx

When you get to your destination, you park up. Maryanne’s right. You don’t recall it.

Or do you? Is there some long-lost image of this place in the back of your mind? This modest house set far back from the road. Tall hedges, a locked gate. All to keep whoever lives here safe.

A safe house.

There’s a little sign with the safe house’s name on the front gate: ‘The Court’.

The last part of the jigsaw slots into place. This was where you stayed for those few days before you were taken to the Kings – the people you now call Mum and Dad.

This was Maryanne’s ‘royal court’ – the message she was sending to Sonia, telling her her little Alfie had become a king. A King.

You hear a sound. It’s a familiar one; a rhythm that has flowed through your life, a sound you’ve never really stopped to listen to until now.

A tapping.

You didn’t even know you’re doing it; the pads of your fingers on the underside of the steering wheel. It’s a sound that soothes you. The movement of your fingers brings you peace. You do it all the time; on desks and chairs. In fact, any surface becomes a drum on which you tap your life’s rhythm.

You’ve never understood this habit of yours. Now you do.

You changed after being taken to this house on Christmas morning all those years ago. It took time, but you became a different child. One who didn’t remember. Who wouldn’t remember. And then who couldn’t remember.

The thing is, though, unlike the old cassettes you used to listen to as you grew up with your new family, you couldn’t just record over that darkness; you couldn’t be someone else entirely. Because that darkness is part of you. You know that it’s still there, somewhere deep inside.

You can feel it shift now. And after years of sleep it’s finally woken. And it’s finally time for you to face it.

You’re not scared of it anymore. You can walk between the trees.

You can face your monsters after all.

You turn your car around and head home.

You don’t need to look back.

THE END

Author’s Note

All books are a difficult write; they are all-consuming and they are personal. This one, however, has an added poignancy that added a layer of emotional difficulty to the process of writing it.

Rather than approaching this novel in my usual slapdash style – hacking at an idea with a blunt instrument – the themes in Changeling had to be handled with sensitivity and respect, and I can only hope my clumsy hands managed it.

A lot of the incidents in the book concern domestic abuse and coercive control, and they were based on real events and real people. Reality is, after all, where we find our scariest monsters. Changeling came about after four people close to me related their individual experiences. Each of these people endured, to various degrees, abuse and control from partners in their past relationships. These people were a mix of male and female, as were their abusers. It pained me to discover that these people’s experiences only came to light when they decided to talk about them, long after the abuse was over and their abusers were out of the picture. The character of Sorrel Marsden – superficially charming and utterly incapable of love – is an amalgamation of these abusers.

What astounded me is how, even after years of abuse, these victims, these people who I hold dear, could still find an element of blame in themselves. Unfortunately for victims of people like Sorrel Marsden, this is not uncommon. Monsters like Sorrel Marsden are cowards; they hide in the darkness. One of my motivations for writing Changeling was to thrust these cowards into the light and expose them for what they really are.

I want to leave readers of this book with a message that was put to me by someone who experienced a monster first-hand, someone who put it more eloquently than I ever could:

‘It can happen to you. It can happen to someone close to you. Look out for signs that someone you care about is having a bad time. Asking someone if they’re OK might be all it takes. I wish someone had asked me if I was OK.’

—Matt Wesolowski

Autumn 2018

National Centre for Domestic Violence

http://www.ncdv.org.uk

Free, fast emergency injunction service for survivors of domestic violence, regardless of their financial circumstances, race, gender or sexual orientation.

Helpline: 0800 970 2070 (lines open 24 hours)

Coercive Control

http://rightsofwomen.org.uk/get-information/violence-against-women-and-international-law/coercive-control-and-the-law/

Information on coercive control, which is when a person with whom you are personally connected repeatedly behaves in a way that makes you feel controlled, dependent, isolated or scared.

Disrespect Nobody

https://www.disrespectnobody.co.uk/

For young people who need advice on what is OK behaviour in a relationship.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who has supported the writing of this book:

My family, who have not yet given up on me; and my friends, especially Ben and Bryn – your company at MFA Bowling was an invaluable distraction from the emotional intensity of writing Changeling. Rock Night may be gone, but it will live inside us forever.

My fellow writers, who still have to suffer my company at events and do so with such good grace. A special shout-out goes to you, Luca Veste, for your support and encouragement this year.

Every single person who has stopped me for a chat, asked for a signature, a photo, or just sent a tweet. Your requests mean so much to me and I appreciate every single one.

Anne Cater and the book bloggers, many of whom I’ve now met in person. I cannot even begin to articulate the love I have for you all or how vital your influence and your dedication is to me. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re not important, because you are to me and always will be.

Helen and James at Forum Books in Corbridge; you are amazing people as well as formidable booksellers.

My agent, Sandra Sawicka; your encouragement, kind words and hard work on my behalf are hugely appreciated. I never thought I’d find an agent who gets me like you do.

The Orenda team: Mark Swan, for your formidable and frankly quite terrifying level of skill in creating front covers. West Camel and Karen, for your unending patience and continued belief in me. It means the world and I will never take it for granted. Without you, I’d be nowhere.

Sarah Farmer, your devotion and support means everything to me. To have you by my side is such a privilege.

My boy, Harry; I am so proud to call myself your dad. You are behind everything I do.

This book has one foot in reality so I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who told me their stories. Your bravery after what you went through is more than anyone can ever know.

And lastly you, dear reader, for coming on this strange journey with me and getting this far.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- and US-based anthologies such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and TV rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller.

Follow Matt on Twitter @ConcreteKraken.

Copyright

Orenda Books

16 Carson Road

West Dulwich

London SE21 8HU

www.orendabooks.co.uk

First published in the United Kingdom by Orenda Books, 2019

Copyright © Matt Wesolowski, 2019

Matt Wesolowski has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–1–912374–57–1

eISBN 978–1–912374–58–8

Other titles by Matt Wesolowski, available from Orenda Books

Six Stories

Hydra

Beast