Another thing we know is that Brian Mings, who held a torch for Anyu Kekkonen, was the victim of occasional bullying by Tom and Charlie. The night that Tom Jeffries disappeared from the Woodlands Centre, the teenagers had all been smoking cannabis and drinking. None of them left the immediate surroundings of the Woodlands Centre, save for Charlie, who claims he ‘stormed off’ in a huff at some point in the night, before returning shortly afterward.
All of them awoke at around six a.m. to find Tom Jeffries was missing.
Welcome to Six Stories. This is story number five.
According to accounts we’ve heard so far, Anyu Kekkonen is a bit of a passenger in the Tom Jeffries story. It is evident that she was thought highly of by the rest of the group, and was seen as a ‘sensible head’. We also know that Brian Mings was attracted to her. However, her part in this story has still not really been established.
When I finally manage to track her down, Anyu is calm and unassuming; it’s almost as if she knew that one day, this would happen. That I would track her down. Because of the descriptions the others have given of her, I am not surprised either by her manner, or that she is completely unfazed by my request to talk to her about the summer of 1996. She is polite and friendly when we talk over Skype.
Anyu is proud of her heritage and always has been. She feels grateful for the chance to have joined Rangers, a community that both she and her mother were accepted by when times were hard. I don’t think Anyu’s heritage is particularly relevant to what happened in 1996, but I do feel it is important to get a feel for how Anyu comes across.
—There’s so much I want to ask you, Anyu. I know loads about what happened in 1996 from the others, yet there’s still so much I feel I don’t know. So, if I’m completely honest, I’m having trouble working out where best to start.
—Well, August 1996 is something that, personally, I haven’t thought about too much since.
There’s something intriguing about Anyu – the way she holds herself, perhaps? She has this ethereal quality to her – an other-worldly serenity. She is certainly striking to look at, and I can understand why Brian Mings fell so hard for her. That ‘otherness’ is also evident in the way she speaks, too. It takes a little getting used to. Anyu doesn’t err or umm or nod; she just watches you and waits for you to finish. At first, it’s disconcerting. But when she smiles, her whole countenance ignites, betraying her years.
—When I’ve talked to the others, so far we’ve kind of started at the start – when they first joined Rangers – and then gone all the way up to that last night. And … well, that last night has always been the shortest part…
—I can understand that. Because maybe it was the least eventful part of everything that happened. It was the least exciting yet the most tragic. We drank, we smoked, we went to sleep, and in the morning, when we awoke, he had just … gone.
—That’s exactly what both Eva and Charlie have said. Charlie said to say hi, by the way.
—Oh. OK. Hi, Charlie.
—You’re blushing.
—I know. I’ve never hidden it. Even after all this time. I guess I should probably say something else: ‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’
—I’m not sure I follow…
—Didn’t he say? Bless him. It’s nice if he didn’t.
—Anyu, I’m sorry, I’m almost completely lost here.
—It’s nothing. Nothing really. I liked him, that was all. I would have thought it was obvious to everyone.
—No one’s said a thing. Honestly
—Oh. OK, then. Fine. Maybe he didn’t know.
—That you liked him?
—That I liked him. All these years I’ve been blushing thinking of it, chastising myself for what a desperate little girl I must have seemed to him, and all this time he didn’t even know. How disappointing.
As we talk, I find myself captivated, almost hypnotised by Anyu. Whatever she says, I can’t help feeling that it is going to be seeped with some sort of exquisite wisdom. I’m not the first, Anyu tells me, when I admit this to her. It used to ‘do her head in’, or at least it used to when she lived in England. She says people either thought she was aloof or else some sort of queen. Back in Labrador, Anyu says that life moves slower, that people don’t ‘chatter’. I wonder if this is in some ways easier – more soothing for her.
—People at school thought I was rude or stuck-up. The teachers thought I was some sort of child prodigy. They used to call me ‘Eskimo’ – the kids, not the teachers.
—Yes, I…
—You know what that word means? It translates roughly as ‘flesheater’ or ‘raw-meat eater’. When I was in year six, year seven, I used to come home crying about it to my mum. She was so calm about it, so serene. She used to say to me, what’s wrong with that? We all eat flesh, don’t we? Tuna, from a tin – that’s raw, you know. Our ancestors no doubt ate raw seal flesh, to get vitamins. The word never bothered me after that. I know there’s some who see it as an insult, a slight, but not me. I’m sort of proud. I’m proud of my heritage. They used to ask me if I lived in an igloo. I would ask them how I would make an igloo when there was no snow. After a while they just gave up. It stopped being funny to them.
I’ve talked to a few people who knew Anyu – teachers, family friends, other parents. They all speak of her in the same, almost awed tones: she’s a quiet enigma. Anyu seems bemused when I tell her this. She shakes her head and flashes that smile at me.
—I think if we’d have stayed there, I probably would have changed, maybe become more adaptable. When I was younger I thought I was being a bit rebellious – drinking and smoking with the others. My mum, she never told me not to, you see; she told me to make my own choices, but that I could come to her if I wanted to know anything. I liked that way of doing it. More parents should be open with their children, especially in the West.
—Doing this, Anyu, I’ve found out a lot about everyone – the people who were close to you and your friends; the people who were close to Tom Jeffries. I’d be really interested to hear your opinions of that trip to Scarclaw Fell, the dynamic in the group.
—I’ll tell you what I remember, although it was a long time ago now and my life is very different.
—I appreciate that, Anyu.
—So where do you want to start?
—You were a friend of Eva Bickers?
—That’s right. Eva and I were good friends. She was a companion. We always felt older somehow than the others. It sounds a bit stuck up, but I think we felt superior to a lot of the other girls when we were growing up.
—Why do you think that was?
—Well, I think it was because we were under the assumption that all the other children just went home and watched TV, did homework, whereas we had those excursions, those weekends in the country.
—It seems that Rangers felt like that for most of the group, or else a sort of escape.
—I think it was that, too, for me anyway. After my father passed away, my mum, she sort of retracted back into her shell. We had come to England to start this new life and she just could never settle; her roots could never take to the soil.
—She didn’t mind you joining Rangers?
—On the contrary, she was very much for it. She liked that they embraced the outside, the country, nature, that sort of thing.
—But she never took part?
—No. I think she did once, when I had just joined. She came for a walk; maybe it was to Scarclaw, maybe not, I don’t remember. But I do remember her staring out over the land, just staring, and I could hear her clucking away to herself in Inuktitut, and I knew that she longed for home.
—That can’t have been easy for you.
—How do you mean?
—I mean that it seems you always knew you would be leaving.
— Maybe. You know, I’ve never even thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense.
—Would that explain why it never happened with you and Charlie, perhaps? Like, it was a subconscious thing
; maybe you didn’t push that extra inch to really … I dunno… make it happen?
—That’s interesting and probably true. In a way. I did a lot of listening when I was with Charlie; I sat with him, shared things with him – well, it was more like he shared things with me. I drank with him, though; smoked with him. But maybe it was not enough? Maybe I should have been more bold about how I felt; more confident.
It’s easy to say that when you’re not a teenager anymore, though, isn’t it? When you’re fifteen, you’re just a bag of insecurities, terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing.
—You and Charlie were undoubtedly close though, right? Do you think he would have judged you like that?
—We were friends. I don’t think he would have judged me, but that doesn’t make it any easier – like I say, when you’re young you’re just so … I don’t know. But, yeah, Charlie and I were close. We were close enough that he felt like he could tell me all that stuff about his sister. That was hard for him, I think.
—His sister?
—You know – his little sister?
—I didn’t even know he had a sister.
—But surely, what with the inquest and the time it’s been since then, people know? Doesn’t everyone know?
—I don’t know about Charlie’s sister. When did he mention it?
—It was the time we went and did the insulating at Scarclaw; there were only a few of us: Eva and Charlie and Brian. We were helping Eva’s dad – crawling under the centre and nailing polystyrene to the bottom of the floorboards to keep the place warm. We were excited because it meant we could come visit in the winter; without the insulation, the Woodlands Centre was an icebox. It also meant we were giving something back to a place that gave us all so much pleasure, you know? We were part of it somehow.
—That makes sense.
—Anyhow, Charlie. Charlie would sometimes just sort of go off – usually when he was drunk, and more when he was stoned. He’d just sort of slip away, just go and stand and stare. It reminded me of my mother – the way she used to do that. I always wanted to ask him what it was. I knew that there was something wrong and I also knew that telling someone else, it always lightens a burden; always.
—And he told you something on that trip in 1995.
—Was that when it was? Yeah, we were smoking at that special place – the entrance to one of the old mineshafts. No one else seemed to know about it but us and—
—Haris Novak. We’ll talk about him later on; just keep going for now.
—So we were there; it was just me and Charlie. He was so full of anger and sadness, it was like he had this great cloud engulfing him, swirling around him. I was telling him a story and he just lost it.
—What was the story you told him?
—It’s an old story my Aanak told my mother when she was a girl. It’s about two boys – cousins – naughty boys who don’t listen to the elders of the camp. They don’t obey their parents; they go running off to the shore, where they’re not allowed to go. Going beside the shore is naughty, it is forbidden. There’s something in the water that waits for children who don’t listen to their elders. Children like that make an easy target for Qalupalik.
—Quaa-loo-pah-lick?
—That’s right. She lives underwater. She’s a bit like a woman with long, tangled black hair and sharp fingernails. Her skin is rough like a shark’s. You can sometimes hear her knocking beneath you on the ice.
That’s right. I too have noticed the similarity between Anyu’s grandmother’s story and Nanna Wrack. And I’ve discovered another local legend – about a creature that lives in Lake Blother, not far from Scarclaw: a witch-like entity with green skin that pulls children into the water if they get too close. It is interesting how these warnings transcend cultures. But back to Anyu’s story.
—They say Qalupalik takes children in her hood. She takes them to live with her, to keep her young, to keep her skin green. So, in the story, she snatches one of the cousins – a boy called Angutii – and takes him away. The other cousin, he runs home and tells Angutii’s father, who sails in his kayak for days and days and miles and miles until he finds his son.
Eventually they make the long journey home. When they get back everything returns to normal, but they all know Qalupalik is still waiting beneath the waters for children who do not obey their parents.
—You say Charlie ‘lost it’ when he heard this story.
—That’s right: he began crying and shaking. I didn’t know what to do. So I put my arm around him to comfort him and just listened. That was when he told me about his little sister, Lydia – how, when she was two and he was five, his parents had gone on an errand to the shop or something and left him to look after her. And she just wandered off. He couldn’t remember what happened. He said it was a sunny day, that they were in a park. That one minute she was there and the next she wasn’t.
—Jesus Christ…
—It was a terrible thing; a terrible thing. They never found her.
—Poor kid…
—Charlie says it broke his family, cleaved them into pieces. His parents stayed together for his sake, but there were whole days and nights of silence, no one speaking, just him playing on his own with his toys. He wished they had just broken up, that he always blamed himself for what happened; that he always felt they blamed him as well, but no one could say it.
What a horrible weight to carry for your whole life. What a terrible responsibility.
—It sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? The way he was. The way he acted.
—I thought so. I always understood after that; understood why he did the things he did – the smoking, the drinking, the way he behaved, everything. He just wanted to be numb, I guess.
—Charlie told your story, didn’t he? He told it for everyone – changed Qalupalik to Nanna Wrack.
—I didn’t understand why at the time, but now it makes sense. In a strange way, Charlie was trying to come to terms with what happened, to almost take ownership of it. For me, every time he told that Nanna Wrack story, he was trying to heal himself, heal that scar in his life.
What Anyu is saying about Charlie fits. If the others knew about what happened to little Lydia Armstrong, they didn’t mention it to me, nor did Charlie himself. I can understand that: it’s a personal story. But now I know, I feel all of us have fresh insight into Charlie Armstrong’s personality. But to what end? Are we building a case for Charlie to be involved somehow in Tom Jeffries’ disappearance? If so, we still don’t have a motive. Also, is it fair to do this? Charlie Armstrong was clearly the least stable of the group; but implicating him in a murder because of a lasting trauma in his life is a little presumptuous.
I ask Anyu about Tom Jeffries.
—Oh, I couldn’t stand Tom; never could. As soon as he joined, my heart just sort of sank.
—Eva felt much the same, initially.
—Yeah, we talked about it – about him – but not much; just in the way that girls do. We both thought he was an idiot. A bully. He tried it on with me once, you know?
—Really?
—When he first joined – round the back of the church hall at one of the meetings. I was waiting for Eva and he gave me one of his cigarettes: Regals; he always smoked Regals, I thought they were horrible, but there was something about Tom – you couldn’t show him weakness. If you did, he’d pounce. So we were stood there, smoking, and we weren’t talking because, well, we didn’t have anything in common. And he just came out with some innuendo about smoking and blow jobs – sucking off, that sort of thing. We were only about fourteen. I don’t think I even knew what a blow job was then!
—He tried it on?
—He sort of leaned in to me, brushing up against my chest, said something about how no one was here, if I wanted to try it out, something like that. I wanted to be sick.
—What did you do?
—I just kept utterly po-faced, just raised my eyebrows. It’s funny, because I think if someone said something lik
e that to me now, I’d scream!
—What was Tom’s reaction?
—It was weird because he looked really confused at first, as if he simply couldn’t comprehend that I didn’t want him. Then, when it dawned on him, he was really angry; for a few seconds I actually thought he was going to punch me or something.
—Wow, really?
—I think it was that no one had ever stood up to him like that before; especially not a girl.
—That’s…
—It’s pretty horrible, isn’t it? After then we never spoke, I don’t think; not a word to each other. I hated him.
—What do you think happened to Tom, that night at Scarclaw?
—I don’t know. I have no idea, and in some terrible way, I feel he sort of deserved it.
—That’s a strong way of thinking, Anyu. Some might say harsh.
—When he went missing and the appeals went out and everything, it made me so angry.
—Really?
—There was all this false sentiment flying around, about how he was a nice, well-liked young man who’d had his problems but at heart was a good guy. He wasn’t at all a good guy. OK, so maybe I don’t think he deserved to die, but he certainly didn’t warrant the sentiment that was trotted out at the time.
—Was he really that bad? The others don’t seem to share the extremes of your hatred for Tom.
—I understand that. But look where they are; look where I am. My position allows me to be a little removed. I’m guessing you heard about the incident with the homeless guy?
For clarity, this was the incident in 1993 when Tom and a couple of older boys were arrested for throwing coins at a homeless man. As far as I know, no charges were brought and Tom’s young age was taken into consideration.
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