—But the kids knew him, didn’t they?
—That’s correct. The kids knew him. He was a secret that none of them should have kept from us. None of them.
—Do you think that, if they had told you about Haris Novak, what happened to Tom may have worked out differently?
—Possibly. I don’t know. Maybe if plenty of things had been done differently, Tom Jeffries would still be alive. But that’s something we’ll never know, so there’s no point speculating, is there?
Isn’t there? Personally I think yes, it is worth speculating about the case of Tom Jeffries. As we’ll see in next week’s episode, there were certain things that, if Tom had disappeared today, would definitely have been done differently.
There are other things about Tom Jeffries’ death that need contextualising in order that we can make sense of them. But the most pressing questions raised so far in our tentative review of the case are these:
Why did Tom wander away onto the fell by himself?
Why was Tom’s body not discovered for nearly a year after he vanished?
We will attempt to answer these questions – along with several others – during this series.
Derek Bickers was consistently polite and helpful during his interview with me for this week’s episode, and for that I would like to thank him. Derek and Sally were both deemed completely innocent in what happened that day in 1996; and while some might speculate that both of them should have done more, I certainly believe that they were both sensible and responsible adults who were looking out for the children in their care.
In the next episode, we will talk with the man that Derek and I alluded to at the end of this interview: Haris Novak. As we will find, it was not easy securing an interview with him, but he did, eventually, agree to talk to me.
Today, we have only touched upon the mystery of what happened to Tom Jeffries. But, trust me, it will deepen and branch out, like those ancient mine veins beneath Scarclaw Fell, and you will be able to begin making your own judgements about what happened.
This has been Six Stories.
This has been our first.
Until next time…
Scarclaw Fell 2017
I wasn’t there the day they knocked down Scarclaw Fell Woodlands Centre. Dad was, though. He said he wanted to see it happen; see the first bite that the machines took from that place. I think he thought that, by knocking it down and building The Hunting Lodge, he could lay what happened to rest. Scatter the memories to the wind.
My boots are pinching at my ankles but I keep going. I can feel the base of Scarclaw Fell calling to me through the trees – its marshes, those rotted fence posts and trailing wires sticking out of them like the carrion-picked ribs of some long-dead beast.
Up there, that’s where things get dangerous.
Up there, nature has obscured the danger signs, creeping brambles pulling down the posts; nettles displaying their own barbs to the wire. Up there, past the green-fingered spread of the trees and the constant stone tongue of the river.
But I’m not ready to go that way, not just yet. Here’s a wooden sign, poking up from a patch of perpetual shade. Its lower half is green with moss and it points the way I am going. ‘Belkeld’.
I put my head down and plough on.
Tomo had all the gear in the boot of his Jag but no one had suggested doing anything with it, not even Tomo. We were all waiting for someone else to take charge.
What in god’s name Tomo was doing with all that stuff – the lights, the guns – was a mystery. On reflection, I think he was perhaps trying to impress us. Jus’s father used to ride in the Heythrop Hunt; my father had just bought Scarclaw Fell. Tomo lived in Pimlico, his father was the director of some online search engine New money. His real name was ‘Jazz’, his surname something-Russian. Hardly see the guy these days. Save for when I did the interview, and he came as … well, I suppose you’d call it ‘backup’…
I was glad, if I’m honest, that no one really wanted to do it: the idea of killing deer by shining lights at them just seemed … well … like cheating, I suppose. ‘Lamping’, Tomo called it. That just sounded like something you said when you were going to have a fight. I don’t think Tomo even knew what he was supposed to be doing. He’d brought these two lurchers and we’d locked them in one of the dormitories. Great noisy things, they were; panting and whining and scratching at the doors. What a bloody mess.
What were we going to do with the body if we caught a deer, anyway? Feed it to the dogs? None of us knew the first thing about butchery. I don’t think any of us had ever killed anything bigger than a fish. It would look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre if we brought some creature back down from the fell. And what if someone came by? It was all Dad’s land by then, but that doesn’t stop people. Ramblers’ rights or something. What if some journalist, or one of the parents came poking about, saw blood on the walls? Even back then my family’s name would have been dragged through the mud.
Jus said he’d seen one kill and he never went again – not even to the hunt ball. Dad once laid out poison for a rat at the Mayberry Estate when I was little. I stayed up all night, tears wet on my cheeks.
So the whole deer-hunting thing was something we just went along with, I suppose; it was what people expected from us: city boys out in the country to kill things.
But whatever we tell ourselves, it wasn’t deer that we were hunting that summer night in 1996.
I push on, along where the track widens; a carpet of leaves – autumn scales beneath my feet. The call of the marshlands becomes fainter the further I walk. The trees thin; that dead boy just a will-o-the-wisp. A dream. I can’t start thinking of things like that. Not while I’m here on my own.
I’ve learned an awful lot on my visits to The Hunting Lodge. This isn’t my comfort zone, the countryside. I don’t think it ever will be. I spent the afternoon yesterday up a ladder, nailing a nesting box to one of the silver birches that you can see from the kitchen window. I’ll get one of those cameras in there and link it to the television. Bill blooming Oddie eat your heart out. There’s not many twitchers who can afford to stay at ‘The Hunting Lodge’, but some of the rich kids who do like to see their wildlife alive. It might broaden their horizons a bit, you never know.
Not far now and the woods end. Not far and I’ll be on the other side of Scarclaw Fell. Where the woods stop, the fences begin. Pale wood and grey barbed wire, looking stark and self-conscious beside the swells of gorse and grey plains of scree beneath the fell’s summit.
‘What’s all this chuff?’
Tomo was poking about through a big folder of all the Scouts’ and Guides’ stuff on one of the bookshelves. A few dead leaves fluttered out.
‘Leave it,’ I said.
I didn’t like to look at it. The posters and pictures on the walls; the leaf-rubbings and animal pictures – looking at them folded a crease of guilt in my belly. I drank beer to block the feeling out.
‘Come and play, Tomo, mate.’
‘Fuck that, you always fucking get Mayfair. It’s not fair.’
Tomo’s face was red with booze. He opened up the folder and my heart sank as paper spilled onto the floor.
‘Come on, mate, leave it.’
Tomo poked at the papers with the toe of his brogue. He’d cleaned the mud off his shoes with blue-roll as soon as we got inside the Woodlands Centre.
Mine and Justin’s boat shoes still stood sopping on the windowsill.
Suddenly Tomo was on his knees, leafing through the drawings. Most of them had leaves glued to them, whirling green and brown crayon patterns.
Jus looked at me and I saw worry in his eyes.
‘What’s he doing?’ Jus mouthed.
I shrugged.
The lurchers were making a hell of a racket, howling and scratching on the other side of the dormitory door. Jus’s eyes flicked over in that direction then back to me.
I realised then that we were out of our depth; that these woods in the shadow of Scarcl
aw Fell had swallowed us without our noticing.
I’m out of breath when I reach it. All the gorse and trees have long since been uprooted, leaving this place like an old, open wound. The fences are now topped with coils of barbed wire – too much for me to climb over. I’ve managed to get as close as I can, though. I stare into the darkness from behind the fence, uncomprehending. A child behind the bars of a predator’s enclosure.
An email has driven me here.
The email that drove me from home. From safety, where there’s Wi-Fi, concrete and chrome, filled with faces, beating hearts, the pulse of cars and life 24–7.
Re: Scarclaw Fell blazed my trail back to The Hunting Lodge – the place I swore I’d never return to. But it wasn’t the subject line that drew my eye. Believe me, after what we found out there that weekend, emails regarding Scarclaw Fell go straight to spam.
Not this one, though.
Twenty years since that night and requests for interviews are still not as rare as you might think. I’ve had them all: the tabloids, the broadsheets, radio show researchers; they all want me to talk. But the only people I’ve talked to so far are the ones who matter: the police.
‘Dear Mr Saint Clement-Ramsay. I am not a journalist, nor am I a researcher, an aide, an editor or an author.
‘Nor am I a fan.’
Maybe it was that word that struck home: fan
It’s what Dad and I call them: the ghouls and goblins that used to hammer my inbox with questions. I still get them out of the blue sometimes. They fill in the online booking forms for The Hunting Lodge with requests to hold séances and vigils there. Even reality TV shows ask to use it as a location.
‘More fan emails,’ I tell Dad, and his eyes twinkle, head sunk so far into the pillow, it looks like a great, white boa is devouring him.
‘All I am interested in is your voice. Your story. Your point of view.’
There was another word in amongst this cloak-and-dagger proposal that hooked me in and sent me here to contemplate one of the biggest decisions of my life: podcast.
Call me a toff, a snob; make jokes about ivory backscratchers, but don’t call me ignorant. I know what a podcast is. There was that one that everyone went crazy over a while back. Serial, it’s called. About some bloke in the States that’s in prison for allegedly killing his girlfriend.
Jus texted me a link at the time, but I didn’t listen to it. I did after I got that email.
A scratchy phone line from inside a US jail.
People listened.
Millions of people heard a ‘guilty’ man’s voice.
If he was guilty in the first place.
‘All I am interested in is your voice.’
I let Scott King email me again. And again.
I let him keep trying for three months – to see if my voice was really what he wanted.
In those three months I listened to his podcasts in the car on my way through the London traffic. Scott King and Six Stories. I listened to them all until I felt I understood. About him, about his mask, about how he gives everyone a voice.
I talked to Dad.
Then I replied.
‘Look at this guys…’
It was as if Tomo had finally found what he was looking for. He stood up, flushed face now shiny with a film of sweat, and held up one of the crayon pictures. More leaves floated down. I saw Jus wince.
‘Stop it Tomo, mate. That’s just old kids’ stuff. Leave it alone.’
Jus’s last word trailed off. The Woodlands Centre suddenly seemed very old and very empty – like we were a troop of those urban explorer types; or else Carter and Herbert standing in front of the tomb of King Tut.
The lurchers were still grizzling with hunger and the noise of them was like a swarm of angry bees inside my head. I stared at the picture Tomo held aloft in trembling victory.
Later on, when the approaching darkness left daylight whimpering at his feet, he would tell us a story he’d heard about Scarclaw Fell. In hushed tones, his tongue bloated with booze, he would tell us why he’d brought the dogs, the guns.
‘Just in case, boys; just in case.’
Episode 2: The Beast
—It lives on the fell. Behind the fences. I’ve seen it.
And sometimes it goes in the woods. That was where I first saw the beast – in the woods. When I was just a young boy. I don’t know how old I was – maybe seven, maybe twelve?
We were in the woods, Mum and me. She had her blue coat on and I was wearing new trainers: Transformers ones from the shoe shop in Belkeld. Sheena fitted them for me. We were walking in the woods and I turned around, looked behind me and I saw it.
And it saw me.
—Oh yeah, everyone knew him round ’ere; friendly as owt, that lad. A bit … you know … I dunno what you call it these days; but he were nice with it, no harm in him. Like I say, everyone knew him and yet none of them lot had the decency to come and ask any of us about him. They all thought he’d done it. But we knew. We knew…
The first voice you heard was that of Haris Novak. The second was the landlord of the Hare and Hounds pub in Belkeld.
Today, Haris is forty-seven years old. He was born and spent most of his life in the village of Belkeld, on the other side of Scarclaw Fell from the Woodlands Centre.
Haris and his mother relocated after the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Tom Jeffries in 1996, and the subsequent trial of Haris by the UK tabloid media. Haris, like the others present at Scarclaw Fell, was questioned extensively by the police. And, like the others, he was never charged with anything.
These days, Haris lives alone, in a location I have been asked not to divulge. There are some who will always see Haris as the guilty party in the case of Tom Jeffries.
Welcome to Six Stories. I’m Scott King.
In the next six weeks, we will be looking back at the Scarclaw Fell tragedy of 1996 from six different perspectives; seeing the events that unfolded through six pairs of eyes.
This is episode two, in which we will talk to someone many would say is still the prime suspect in the case of the death of Tom Jeffries. Many others also say that Haris Novak was an easy scapegoat.
—I was … thirty years old when I first met them. It was a Saturday, a bright and lovely day in May, and I was walking along the street to the pub for lunch. I used to go to the pub for lunch on a Saturday. The Hare and Hounds, it’s called. I used to go there and read my book. My favourite lunch was gammon – gammon with gravy and turnips. I met them in the street. There was only four of them that day: two boys and two girls. They were nice people; I liked them.
Haris Novak, as you will have already noticed, has a distinctive way of talking. His voice is high; it has the innocent sincerity of a pre-pubescent, and coming from his rugged, bearded face, is a little disconcerting. He meets me in the back bar of a pub, accompanied by his cousin, who sits close enough to hear us, but does not intrude. Haris’ cousin, who does not want to be named in Six Stories, was the one who rallied to Haris’ cause after his trial by media back in 1996. The cousin is the one who got in touch with me when I found Haris. Initially, she was very sceptical about what I wanted to do, but over time, we have built up a level of trust and we have both agreed on my line of questions. Haris’ cousin has also told me that she will stop this interview at any time, without warning, should she feel that Haris is being exploited or misrepresented. I have agreed to this. I think it’s only right after what happened to him back then.
—So, can you remember if you approached them first, or did they approach you? The very first time you met them.
—I approached them. I am a friendly person and I like making new friends. I hadn’t seen them before in Belkeld. They were young as well. Most people who come here are old people; they come to Belkeld to do canoeing and things. Climbing and things. I don’t like doing those things. I like watching the animals in the woods. I wondered if they knew about all the different species of animals in the woods.
As was reported to gr
otesquely sensationalised effect in the press, Haris Novak was a veteran of Scarclaw Fell. He knew the place like the back of his hand: the woods, the hillside and even what lay beyond some of the fences.
The Sun printed a particularly unpleasant story, referring to Novak as a ‘local oddball’, alongside a gloomy photograph of the outside of his mother’s house: a dilapidated cottage that perches wonkily on the side of the fell, a mile or so outside of Belkeld. It was easy for the papers to present him as unhinged, a loner, a Norman Bates or an Ed Gein. Back in 1996, there was far less understanding of someone like Haris.
—They were outside the pub, the Hare and Hounds, four of them: two boys and two girls.
—Did you…?
—The boys were wearing similar clothes. The bigger one with the long hair, he was wearing big boots and a black coat – a long one, like one mum used to have; a raincoat. He had a hat on, a black one, a beanie one. The other boy, he was smaller; he had big boots, too, but not a hat. His hair was the same colour as yours. I thought they were brothers, because they looked a bit the same. Brothers sometimes look the same; they’re called identical twins.
—And the girls?
—Oh, I didn’t think they were sisters or anything. They were very different. There was a taller one; she was … err … she was … she had dark eyes, chestnut-coloured hair, hair the colour of chestnuts, all in little … what do you call them, plaits? Little coloured elastic bands on the ends of them. The other one, she was … she had a really round face, a circular face, red lips and dark hair, too. They had big green army coats on, with the little German flag on the sleeves. Furry hoods.
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