Changeling

by Matt Wesolowski

  —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 fade
d 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.
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br />   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.