1996
Derek had retired by this point. I wasn’t exactly friendless at the Station, but my mentor and best pal had gone. Though, thankfully, we’d still catch up once a month for a meal and a few beers. I needed that contact, because either via coincidence or as a consequence of his mentorship, he was the only one who thought like I did. Anyway, we get into the mid-90s and beyond now. The Farm is in deep decline, and the Scar is such liability given what goes on down there, I’d personally concrete over all of it if I could.
Six 15-year-old kids camping out in the Scar next to the river one Saturday night are threatened and chased at 1am by someone they describe as a tramp-looking-psycho with a knife. They’d taken their 2-man tent (yes 6 of them in a 2-man tent) next to the riverbank in very isolated spot, beyond the remit what you would call casual walkers. 2 of the kids are still awake at 1am and one of them swears there’s a guy just staring right at them in the treeline 30 or so yards away. And not only that, he’d been there for maybe 2 hours. Kid wasn’t sure if his mind had been playing tricks or not, given the amount of weed they’d been smoking, but now he can see him moving and is understandably terrified. He’s signalling to his pal that they need to wake up the other 4 in as clandestine a fashion as possible and get the fuck out of there. Just as he’s reaching into the tent this guy stands up and starts bellowing some religious verse interspersed with Red Indian war cries. The kids wake and shoot out of the tent lightning speed absolutely traumatised. The nasty thing about this is how far he chased them. If his intention was to scare them out of “his” patch, then maybe just pursue them for 20 or 30 yards or so and their fear will do the rest. But this guy chases them at full tilt, wielding a blade, all the way from the river where they camped, up to the railway bridge close to the entrance to the Farm. Probably half a mile – uphill!! Saying all that, by this time the bare facts of the case don’t initially surprise me that much. People being chased through the Scar was a depressingly regular feature.
However, this is where it gets fucking dark – one of the kids is able to give us a very firm description of the psycho in question. The lad is a brilliant artist in school and draws a Da Vinci-level masterpiece of the perp - and my mind is blown! 5 years earlier at the bottom end of the Farm, where derelict houses have become the norm, an entire block is burnt down in an act of clear arson. The fire brigade’s investigator says petrol was used to start the fire and 6 houses are burned to ashes. Fortunately, it’s a very isolated block, none of the houses are officially occupied and the nearest one that is belongs to a 60-year-old lady who lives alone a hundred or so yards away down at the very bottom.
Note how I said none “officially” occupied. Unfortunately, one of the houses was a squat. A drug addict and psychotic loner called Curtis lived in the end one, and it was his body we found the ashes of in the lounge of the property. Dental records matched, and because Curtis had been, among many other things, a firebug, the case was wrapped up as a hugely elaborate suicide or misadventure. Only one problem, I’d lifted Curtis maybe 3 or 4 times when I was in uniform in the 80s, for public intoxication, pissing in public view, possession, etc. And as a result, I knew him well. And this kid’s drawing was clearly as fucking day a picture of Curtis. I mean no doubt whatsoever! Mid-chase the kid had gassed and hid in foliage while the rest of his posse carried on. Curtis stopped right under a lamp on the railway bridge (the only artificial light in the whole Scar). Thankfully he didn’t see the kid hiding but the kid got a perfect look at his distinguished (skinny, heroin-addict, goatee, pony tail, scars in the right places) features under the light from about 12 feet away. It was cast-iron him in the drawing. He was an unmistakable-looking bloke, and the kid nailed it better than our official portrait guys ever could.
This asks an obvious question that you don’t need to be an experienced detective to arrive at – whose smoking remains were in that house and why did our records indicate it was someone who appears to be alive and not exactly well, but still very much breathing? And why is Curtis living vagrant-style hillbilly-psycho lifestyle in the Scar?
At our monthly catch up, both Derek and I believed the kid’s drawing was an authentic dead-match, and Derek himself hypothesised that that our early insistence that the corpse was Curtis when the fire occurred in ’92 led to some incompetent/lazy/expedient/corrupt Coroner’s assistant to give us the answer we wanted on the dentals. Probably at the behest of another detective. Checks and balances weren’t as robust back then. Even if that was the case, it still doesn’t answer who was in that house if it wasn’t him. Everyone knew he’d been squatting in that property for a year. He even gave it as his address when arrested for shoplifting in ‘91. The mind-bending implications of the case still trouble me.
I personally ordered several uniformed officers to comb the whole area for him – they didn’t find him, but they did find evidence of a semi-permanent camp about 200 yards from where the kids left their tent in a terrified hurry, cut off and largely inaccessible by a river clearance.
1997
By 1997, the bottom street mentioned above was all but empty. We’ll call this Street “Hellscape Street” for ease of reference. Of the 70 or houses, only 3 were occupied, a 40s alcoholic semi-vagrant couple at the top, a teenage kid and his Mum more or less in the middle, and a 60-year widow at the very bottom. and the rest were derelict with at least 6 burnt to ruins. It blew my mind that people still lived isolated down there. The authorities were actively trying to move people on, but inertia just take over some people’s lives. I wouldn’t live there for a £Million myself. Detectives shouldn’t use words like creepy and cursed but it did just seem that way. 3 houses out of 70 occupied on an isolated street that backs onto The Scar. No thanks.
It’s a Saturday night, again, and a 16-year-old makes a 999 call from a public phone box a quarter of a mile from his house on Hellscape Street.
“There’s a woman there’s a woman she’s going fucking mad” he screamed at the operator. Get Police here now, my mate’s still with her on his own”.
A car is dispatched – 2 uniforms are en-route. I hear the comms and it piques my interest, so I take it upon myself go down there too.
I arrive just after uniform and the scene is established.
These two 16-year-old kids are sat up playing video games. It’s about 10pm. The first kid, the one who made the call, lives alone with his Mum. Said Mum is out at the pub about 2 miles away. The kids are playing their Nintendo or whatever and a blood curdling scream erupts in the middle of the street, directly out the back of their window as they look. Remember the old woman who lived nearest to the burnt down block, it’s her. Margaret she’s called. She’s run up the street shouting blue-murder. At this point we (me, the 2 kids, and the 2 uniforms) are stood freezing in the desolate road surrounded by haunted houses and I say to the lads, “can we come into your home to sort this out?” At first, they’re worried about my request, I remember where we are and put him at ease “listen kid, I don’t care if you’re having a beer in there or even if you’ve smoked a bit of weed, I aint here for that” much to uniform’s surprise. He relents and we enter the property. After 20 minutes when she’s stopped shaking like a leaf, she starts talking. “He’s in my house, he’s in there tormenting me all the time. He’s the devil”.
Right, I’m a rational person but I’m getting more than my fill of this fucking neighbourhood. I’m sick of this horrible shit, especially down here at the bottom end. I can even see the ruins of the burnt down block out of the window, in the distance. Burnt down by a dead guy who went on to forge a career chasing kids around the Scar.
“What do you mean, Margaret?” I ask with some degree of trepidation.
“Albert, Albert, my Husband”, she responds.
Albert was her abusive, alcoholic husband. And he’s been dead for at least 10 years. I ask uniform to accompany me the 2 hundred yards or so down to the bottom of the street where her house is situated. The very last house on Hellscape. The pitch-black expanse of the Scar immediately beyond it. Ridiculous! No human being should live down here on their own. The front door is wide open, and we venture inside. The house is old fashioned interior-wise, archaic even, but clean and well-maintained. Freezing cold too as you can imagine. I can see the young uniform girl is shaken up but I, perhaps ignorantly, carry on checking rooms for any presence of who knows what. We don’t find anything but yes, the house is a weird shrine type place. All exotic plants and green and terracotta tiles. Noticeably no TV anywhere. Strong drinks (Vodka, Gin, Absinthe) on the side in the kitchen.
As we’re walking back up the street to the lad’s house, the female uniformed officer is shaking and almost in tears talking about how horrible she found it in there and how she was certain she saw, in a flash, a large man with a bald head on the stairs as I was going up, and again looking at her through the lounge window. I didn’t indulge this any further and re-iterated that we’d checked every nook and cranny in our search and cleared the place.
A month later, Margaret was found dead. The postman noticed her body at the bottom of the stairs when he flicked the letterbox while delivering mail. Investigations determined a fall, but those stairs weren’t very conducive to lethal falls – by design. They were 3 sections of 3 stairs each, turning at right-angles. There was no sign of any other person having been in there and all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. She was battered black and blue. After seeing old pictures, the uniform girl swore on her life to a colleague that it was Albert she saw on the stairs and in the window.
Edit 1: clarity