—There was more to it than just trying to impress an older lad. I suppose I hoped that if I could get in with him, maybe Elizabeth might lay off me a bit…
—Her bullying of you was still going on?
—I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I stand up for myself, protect myself? Or tell someone for fuck’s sake? I was old enough by then. But I was scared of her. I know how that sounds but I was. She’d had power over me ever since we were little, and I thought that if she saw me with Martin Flynn, that she might be scared. How stupid I was though.
—What do you mean?
—Elizabeth was always one step ahead. Even back then she had Martin Flynn wrapped round her little finger.
This takes us back to Amirah’s account of her days at Ergarth High. Elizabeth had more or less everyone in her thrall. Martin Flynn was another of her hangers-on. Jason tells me that Martin Flynn’s reputation meant that no one dared mess with Elizabeth.
—And you know why he was always in after-school detention? For fighting. Beating people up. And we all knew who he was beating up and why.
—Who?
—Elizabeth was … popular with the lads, shall we say. But no one was good enough for her. She’d break up with anyone she dated really quickly. No one lasted long. Then she’d lie about them, blame them for everything. Then they’d get a hiding from Martin Flynn.
—On Elizabeth’s command?
—Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he did it of his own accord, because he was another orbiter.
—I’ve heard that term used before about him. He thought he had a chance with her?
—Yeah. That was her power, see? Martin Flynn, since I started knocking about with him in school, was forever asking me if he could come round, if I could put a good word in to Elizabeth about him. It was pathetic. Then there was the thing with the bat and I realised he was just as bad as her.
—The thing with the bat?
—Yeah. Sorry, so I found this bat on the way to school; this little pipistrelle. I dunno what had happened to it; maybe it got hit by a car or a bird got at it, I dunno. I had it in a matchbox. I guess I thought I could nurse it back to health. Anyway, I dunno how Martin Flynn found out about it, but he did. I’m guessing Elizabeth told him. He comes up to me one day at break and just says, ‘Empty your pockets, Barton. Now.’ So I do and he takes the matchbox. Holds it out in his great meaty hand like a troll and just says to me, ‘When am I coming round your place?’
—What did he want?
—Elizabeth. Simple as that. If he was in our house, then he was closer to her. I don’t think it was more complex than that.
—What did you say?
—Stupidly, I told him to fuck off. I guess I thought he might back down. He just looked at me though with this hate. Like I was nothing to him. Like I was one of those animals at the abattoir. ‘Give us back that box, Flynn,’ I said, ‘or you’ll not be coming round, ever.’ That was stupid as well. He just shrugs and crushes the box in his fucking massive hand. Then he chucks it up in the air and shoves me backward, and I go arse over tit in the mud. He just walks off. I remember swearing I’d get him for that. Him and his whole fucking shitty family.
While this was a cruel and callous act, Jason’s reaction seems a little extreme to me. Perhaps it says more about Jason than Martin Flynn. But Jason tells me that this is how we’ve been trained to feel about animals, that they don’t matter as much as humans.
—If he’d killed a fucking human baby, no one would have a problem with revenge.
I don’t want to get into a moral debate so instead I suggest that Martin Flynn was one of Elizabeth’s first ‘flying monkeys’. Jason gives a wry smile.
—I saw first-hand how she carried on around him: shrieking loudly when Martin Flynn did something stupid, giggling and flicking her hair and letting her skirt ride up whenever he talked to her. What was in it for her, to behave like that? I have no idea. She was always just too close to him, sitting just out of reach; turning round, smirking, giggling. He was putty in her hands.
—Why do you think she was doing this?
—Well at first you know, it was just protection. There was this new lad who started a few weeks after me in year seven. Angry little thing called Sam Roper, thought he was the big man because he came from some estate up in Sunderland. Martin Flynn heard him call my sister a slag and broke his nose with one punch. I was told that Sam’s a PT in the gym in Ergarth now. Ripped to fuck, but his nose still has a kink in it.
But there were other things that Martin Flynn became useful for. Years later.
—Such as?
—Elizabeth always had to be better than everyone else at everything, and she was, usually. Then the Dead in Six Days challenge came along. And of course, Elizabeth had to be the best at it.
One of her challenges was something to do with animals. ‘Free the meat’ or something like that. Anyone else would have just chucked a load of bacon into a river, but Elizabeth had to be one step better.
—I’m guessing this had something to do with Flynn’s Meats?
—Yeah. So they’d had the investigation in 2017 thanks to Justice for the Voiceless, so by 2018, when everyone was doing those challenges, Flynn’s Meats was like Fort Knox, not like when I was younger. You couldn’t get near it. No one dared.
—Did you encourage your organisation to go after Flynn’s Meats specifically?
—Let’s just say I knew what we’d find there.
—Was this the revenge you swore you’d have on Martin because of the incident with the bat?
—Put it this way; no one can tell me that the world’s not a better place with him in prison. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. We were talking about Flynn’s Meats. They were paranoid after the investigation and were as difficult to get into as Willy Wonka’s fucking factory. But Elizabeth, of course, managed to get around that. She got Martin Flynn to ‘liberate’ a lamb and then made out like she’d saved it from slaughter and was keeping it in the garden as a pet.
—And how did you know she wasn’t telling the truth?
—Because I knew her, maybe better than anyone else. Like I say, I’ve still got mates in Ergarth. They told me one of the trucks delivering some sheep got stuck in the snow. The road up to Flynn’s on Skelton is a nightmare anyway but back during the cold snap it was impossible. They just left those sheep to die in the cold. There’s photos of it; just these huge drifts of snow and that truck half in and half out of a ditch. After a few hours the whole thing was pretty much covered and the animals had stopped crying out. That’s when he did it. The day after that, Martin Flynn’s family beat him so badly, he had to stay a few nights in Ergarth Hospital. It made the papers! I saw it because I thought karma had come back on one of the slaughter workers.
I’ve looked up this story myself and I see why it drew Jason’s attention; ‘Slaughter House Worker Hospitalised After Accident’. The Ergarth Examiner online article states that ‘Martin Flynn (24), son of the owner of Flynn’s Meats who were investigated for animal cruelty in 2017, suffered severe bruising, lacerations to the face and two broken ribs after falling into machinery at the abattoir’. There is little else in the story save for a rehash of the investigation and how the abattoir has now been deemed ‘adequate’ on its last inspection.
—I heard that his family gave him a beating; told him to go and get that lamb back from my sister.
—And did he?
—I don’t know what happened to it to be honest. Last I heard of it was in Elizabeth’s video where it was trotting through the snow in my parents’ garden. She said she made a home for it in the shed. I don’t know what happened to it after that. Another disposable life.
It got me thinking though; if it was that easy for Elizabeth to get Martin Flynn to just bust out a fucking lamb like that, what else was he doing for her that we didn’t know about? I’m telling you, it’s good that he’s been put away.
Let’s move on to George Meldby.
—Oh, OK. That li
ttle shit.
—You hated him too?
—If you’d had someone try to set your hair on fire, your coat, your bag, as many times as he tried to mine when we were in school, you’d have a problem with him too.
—Why did George have a problem with you?
—Probably cos I caught him trying to burn down Myrmirth stables, when we were in year nine. I popped the little prick’s nose for that. There were horses inside.
—There was an incident wasn’t there, back in school with George and a boy named Fellman?
—Oh yeah. Everyone knew what happened there. Tommy Fellman from the grammar school. Elizabeth brought him home a few times for tea. Mam and Dad fucking loved him cos he did rowing or some bullshit like that. Him and Elizabeth did some videos together; their relationship was all over Instagram. People loved them. There were people, strangers, actually crying when they broke up. It was fucking tragic.
Jason tells me about the pictures Elizabeth uploaded of her and Tommy Fellman, now all deleted from her Instagram account. Grandiose shots of the two holding hands over a waterfall in Ergarth Dene; sipping from dual straws in fancy restaurants; days out at Christmas markets, the beach – Newcastle, York, never in Ergarth. All of them perfectly posed and filtered.
—Tommy wasn’t at our school; he lived out in the sticks, which meant Martin Flynn couldn’t easily get at him when they broke up.
—Someone else did though, didn’t they?
—Yeah, they did. Who got the blame? George Meldby. He never denied it either. No one in Ergarth could understand that part.
Jason’s choice of words is strange here. If George Meldby voluntarily admitted to burning down the Fellman’s factory, ‘blame’ wasn’t an issue. Jason shrugs when I put this to him and I get the feeling, not for the first time, that he’s building to something. Again it’s like he’s deciding the direction our interview takes, like he wants me to ask a particular question, go down a particular path.
—Tommy Fellman had been all over Facebook, calling Elizabeth a slag and a cheat, and all that. You’ve seen Elizabeth’s YouTube, right? It’s all this nicey-nicey stuff. She’d only just started it back then and she couldn’t have Tommy Fellman fucking it all up for her. She was supposed to be a fucking inspiration for anyone in Ergarth. Pretty and successful. Tommy Fellman was ruining it by daring to question all that. Then his family’s factory burned down. Worked out pretty well for ‘Lizzie B’ don’t you think?
—I think it definitely shows a pattern of behaviour surrounding your late sister.
—Exactly. It shows what people were willing to do for her. Even then. Everyone wanted to be like her, to be in with her. They’d do literally anything. I bet if Elizabeth had told people to kill their own nannas to be in her bloody shopping videos, they would have done it.
I saw all this happen from the bottom, from where Martin Flynn and George Meldby were. I saw all of this unfold, all this huge clusterfuck of events. I was there for most of it.
—So, in your eyes, what was it that Solomon Meer and the other two had against her? Was it this power that they resented?
—I don’t think it’s that simple. I think they all just got totally carried away.
—How so?
—People like Martin Flynn and George Meldby – I think they loved her, they were obsessed, but knew they never had a chance with her. And she played on that, kept stringing them along until it finally broke them.
—It sounds like you’re saying she brought it on herself.
—I suppose in a way I am. Honestly, at school, everyone thought the sun shone out of her arse. So everyone started subscribing to her YouTube channel; everyone started following her on Instagram.
—What was it that everyone was following?
—I dunno. I don’t even get it. All she did was videos of shopping, opening boxes of make-up and clothes. Tours of her bedroom, for fuck’s sake. Who watches that shit? I’m younger than her and I don’t get it. I know that Martin Flynn and George Meldby weren’t interested in what she’d bought from Primark, that’s for sure!
Why didn’t she use this popularity to show something that mattered?
—Like an exposé of Flynn’s Meats?
—That would be better than looking at the colour of some lipstick, for fuck’s sake.
—What about Solomon Meer? He doesn’t sound like he was the same as the other two.
—I didn’t know him at all. All I know was that he wasn’t particularly well liked when he first came to Ergarth High. By anyone. Teachers didn’t like him because he was always mouthing off. Kids thought he was a scruff and a weirdo. He got kicked out of school didn’t he? For starting on Mr Threlfall in assembly. That was pretty funny to be fair.
He was smart though, but cocky. And teachers hate that. Other people didn’t like him cos … well, he didn’t really fit in anywhere. He was a troublemaker, but he was clever. He got in fights but he wasn’t really a bully. Everyone has him down as a vampire-obsessed cult leader. But really, the guy just didn’t care for personal hygiene and liked to read about vampires, that was all. For some people, though, that was almost fucking criminal.
I want to move away from the years at Ergarth High and closer to the time that Elizabeth was killed. Jason’s told me that he visited friends in Ergarth not long before her death. I wonder if Jason had any experience of his sister’s killers during this and his other occasional visits to his home town.
—Did you ever run into any of the three when you were here? Did you see them around?
—I might have passed them in the street, I don’t know. I had better things to do than look for scum like George and Martin.
—What about Solomon Meer? He worked in a bookshop, didn’t he?
—Yep. I never saw him either, but then I was told no one did really. He was either hanging round Ergarth Dene or up in the Vampire Tower. No one really saw much of him until the Dead in Six Days challenge started.
—‘Shopping Trolley Sledge’?
—Yes! That video! That was everywhere. I got sent it a few times and I suppose it was pretty good. I mean, until Elizabeth hijacked it and made it all about her.
Solomon Meer has been presented, by everyone I’ve talked to, as a bit of a dark soul and an outsider. However, there’s been no one who can offer any real insight into him. The closest we have come is our account from Amirah in episode two, who has described him as an attention-seeker and as ‘OK’ at times. I have gleaned that Solomon Meer may have already had some underlying problems when he arrived in Ergarth and being an outsider only exacerbated them.
—I’m thinking that Solomon Meer took exception to this, as you call it, ‘hijacking’ of his video.
—Solomon and the other two killed Elizabeth because of it. That’s the story, isn’t it? They locked her in the tower and chopped off her head because she was popular on YouTube and they weren’t. She was one of life’s winners and they were losers. I should hate them and should see them as savages, animals – especially Solomon, because he instigated it all didn’t he? He called her to the tower that night.
—That’s what the story is.
—That’s what it is so far. Yes.
‘So far’. I wish Jason would give me more of a clue here. He doesn’t though, and I feel like I’m still scratching around for the right question.
Then I remember something else, something that Amirah told me in episode two, concerning the three killers. It may be nothing. It may be something. It’s better than silence, anyway.
—Do you remember anything about a party? When you were back in school? A girl whose house got destroyed. People blamed Solomon Meer, George Meldby and Martin Flynn for that too.
Jason is very still for a few moments and I wonder what he’s thinking. He finally nods his head.
—Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. It was a few years after they’d all left school. Look, I was at that party too.
—It’s been alleged that Solomon, George and Martin locked a girl in the b
athroom. Possibly a precedent for what happened to Elizabeth?
—Yeah. That’s the thing that comes out of that entire story. Like they were practising. Of course there’s more to that than most people know.
—Can you tell me?
—Yes I can. I can also tell you that the girl who it happened to, Gemma Hines, she’s been forgotten in all of this. I guess my question would be: what if she deserved it?
—What? Deserved her house to be smashed up? A sixteen-year-old girl?
—I’m not saying she did. The press did though, didn’t they? According to them, Gemma Hines was a narcissistic brat who’d deliberately made sure that her party got out of hand so she could go sadfishing on social media?
—Was that the case?
—Maybe. Maybe it wasn’t. This is the thing about stories. As you well know. So Gemma Hines was actually a bit like Solomon in that she joined Ergarth High from somewhere else; somewhere down south. She had that accent: Essex or Kent or whatever, they all sound the same. But she was totally different to Solomon when she joined.
—How so?
—Gemma Hines knew how to play the game; she just fitted straight in; it was like she’d always been there. You had to be though, if you wanted to be OK in school. You had to look good and you had to fit in. You couldn’t stand out. That’s where she got it right and Solomon got it wrong. Gemma Hines, by year eleven, was just another thoroughly unpleasant creature at the top end of the school food chain. That’s what she had to become to survive.
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