The Haddow Mystery.

“Do you believe him?” asked Doctor Armitage, a stout, gregarious man in his mid fifties. This was his first question to me and I could tell from his stare that my answer was of utmost importance.

“No, it's absurd.” I replied as if even the question was a mild insult. That seemed to be what he was looking for and Armitage gave a small contented smile along with his satisfied nod.

“Good. We've had trouble in the past with, what would you call them? Fanatics, I suppose.” Armitage explained. I knew about that, deranged fans looking for attention or affirmation had set back James Kelvin's recovery. It was him I was here to see.

“Who?” I can almost hear you all ask.

I'll let his mother describe him.

“James was my youngest, there's nine years between him and his sister Emily, so we had experience in raising kids, as such James turned out a happy and popular boy. Everything was going great until he came back from college. It was in the summer that he disappeared with his friends.”

Moira Kelvin is also in her fifties, though cagey about talking to me. I understand, she's spoken to enough press jackals who spun what happened to her son and his friends into some lurid murderous sex orgy. She doesn't want to talk about that, what he was accused of, she wants to tell me about her son, the real James, the boy who won a cherished bicycle in a competition when he was twelve, the kid that got straight A's in all his exams without ever seemingly having the time to study. She wants me to know, right off, that this is a real person, not some monster for public consumption. It takes me a while to let her trust me and I assure her I will reprint none of the scandal, none of the out of context quotations that the press did. I explain that at the centre of all this is the mystery of James and his friends vanishing that night, it isn't the aftermath that concerns me, and I promise that I will let him tell me what happened in his own words, she insists upon that. Which is why, six months later I am in Doctor Armitage's office.

The place is as ostentatious as he, a large wooden panelled room with several glass display cases filled with all manner of curious objects, from animal skulls to old surgical items. His desk is expansive and behind it a large arched window faces the grounds below, mostly trees and parked cars. His bookcases are filled with a strange mix of psychology books, many in foreign tongues and some, clearly antiques. As he passes me the forms to sign, I ask “So what do you think happened to him when he disappeared, for all that time?”

Armitage shrugged. “I've never given it much thought, if I'm honest.”

He leaves me in the room while he goes off to process the forms and prints out my I.D. I browse the literature, some I recognise in passing, “The Divided Self” by Laing, Hofstadter and Dennett's “The Mind's I”, others I had no idea what they were, one was an old leather bound book with some symbols in gold ink on the spine, another called “Attyl's Chronicle” looked like it was several hundred years old. There were books about languages, and poetry. A “Brewer's”, a “Rituals of the Golden Dawn” and, tucked in right at the end, one of mine. Well a book I had written something for. “Real Ghosts: A Compendium of Fear.”

It's been years since I've seen a copy and I smile as he comes back in the room. He's holding my I.D. card, I can finally speak to James Kelvin. He warns me James is often vague and seems to float off into worlds of his own, which was something confirmed much earlier by Moira Kelvin.

“He always had a very vivid imagination, loved to draw and write stories, spies were his thing, he'd always been a fan of James Bond and then when he was about fourteen he started to write his own stories. Sometimes he'd sit there lost to the world scribbling on a pad or tapping away on his laptop. The way some kids practice the guitar, James practised his writing, he got quite good, though I'm probably biased.”

He did get quite good, won two awards for his short story “The Filter” which he wrote when he was seventeen. He was also working on a novel, “Indigo Line” which remains sadly unfinished. Moira let me read some of it and I was impressed by his noir style of writing.

“I don't care what they say about him, he vanished off the face of the earth for eighteen months and only he can say what happened.”

This is true, though many would claim James suffers from serious and violent delusions and as such his claims cannot be believed. Nevertheless something that everyone agrees on is that on the night of the seventh of July 2015, James Kelvin and his friends Gail Connor, Andy Watson, Yasi Jacobs and Patrick Chambers decided to go camping in the Haddow Woods, near James's home.

“Andy and Gail were local, so they knew the woods as well as James did, all the kids around here play and camp in the woods.” Moira tells me as we sit in her kitchen facing out to those great deep green pines outside her window. “No one ever had a kid go missing, sure there were plenty of scrapes and broken bones, but the woods were safe. So we thought.”

This is echoed by Gail Connor's sister Andrea.

“We used to play there all the time, the place isn't that big, really. The trees make it look as if it's a vast area but you can walk out from the centre in any direction and you'll be out on one of the roads in ten minutes. I don't know how Gail could have vanished from there, I mean I know what James says but James is mad.” She says sadly, as she sits across from me, Moira plants her hand on Andrea's shoulder, it's a grief they share. She says as much.

“I lost my sister, but Moira lost her son. In some ways knowing he's the way he is doesn't seem any better than not knowing what happened to her. To him, to any of them,”

“I think it was worse at the beginning,” Moira explains. “After they'd not come back the following day there was that worry, you know? But they were teenagers, we all thought they'd probably got drunk and then continued the party the next night, it wasn't after the next day, after the torrential rain storm that we started to worry they hadn't come home.”

Andrea nods. She's looking tired, her dyed blonde hair showing several weeks worth of dark roots. “It was Yasi's mum that first called the police but only by a few minutes.”

“I knew something was wrong when she didn't call home. She never forgot to call me, every night, even when she was half way across the world,” Rachael Jacob tells me later that day. Rachel is in her early forties, has jet black hair with the occasional streak of grey that glint and vanish like shooting stars. “It was shortly after that we started the search.”

As she tells me this Rachael browses through photographs of clothes. She owns a boutique in Glasgow, one she started when Yasi was nine. “All the parents turned up and along with the police and dozens of other people we searched the woods. They weren't there.”

“But you searched again several more times, anyway?” I ask.

“What would you do Mr Weaver? We had no idea where they had gone, the police were looking for clues to that end. We knew they weren't there though, it's almost impossible to get lost in those woods.” She explains.

She’s right, I’ve been through them myself, the trees are densely packed, so it’s easy to lose one’s bearings but aim in a straight line and you’re back in civilisation before long. So what did happen? Only James Kelvin knows, but it’s a question I ask everyone.

Rachael doesn’t like the answer she gives me, it’s painful for her even to utter the words. “I think he killed them, I think he killed my little girl, just like he said he did.”

When I ask her about the interval of eighteen months and his own explanation for that she shakes her head in dismay. “He ran away, hid the bodies somewhere and concocted this elaborate lie, you can’t trust a word that boy says.”

I’m not crass enough to tell her she’s just contradicted herself. She’s lost her kid, she’s entitled to a bit of incoherent rage.

Andrea is of a similar view only seems more sympathetic. “He said it himself, they all took magic mushrooms. He had a psychotic episode and killed them all. That’s it.”

I ask her about the missing months, why it took so long for him to turn up. “I think he ran, he was out of his mind, who knows where he went?”

Only James knew. His mother said as much when I asked her. “I don’t like to think about it, any of it. Only James knows what really happened, everything else is just conjecture. My son isn’t like they say, he’s a smart boy, if he says what happened happened, then that’s what happened no matter how strange it sounds to others.”

And it does sound strange. That’s what lured me in. Eighteen months and four days after James and his friends left to camp out for the night in the Haddow woods, after all hope had been lost that they’d ever be found alive, after long painful months of worry, James Kelvin staggered out of the woods and collapsed on the Glengoyle Road that leads to the west of the town of Haddow. He was found by William Ash at five past seven on the morning of the eleventh of January 2017.

Ash was tired that morning. He and his wife Denise had, just three weeks before, become parents for the first time; a daughter, Jane. He left his home in Wraithlin around half past six, about an hour drive from Glasgow where he worked as a claims clerk for a large Insurance company. It was a bright, cold spring morning and he travelled north west along the A712 which was not the widest road but cut 20 minutes off his journey as it passed through the little town of Haddow on the left and the wide expanse of the Haddow Woods, that predated the town.

About three miles from Haddow, William noticed something large on the road. As he got closer he felt his stomach drop as he realised he was looking at a body, a human body, lying in the middle of the road. Worse the body seemed to be caked with blood.

He slowed down, picked up his phone and exited the car, to check if the person was still alive. At the time he suspected it was a victim of a hit and run, so he was already dialling the emergency services as he approached.

“Right away I could see the kid’s eyes were open and he was breathing, which was a relief, but the lad’s face was caked in blood. I asked him if he was okay and his eyes looked up at me. They were wide and he looked terrified. He laughed and said, and I’ll never forget this, “isn’t it a beautiful morning”. I thought he was in shock and told him to stay still, then I called the ambulance,” Ash told me when I interviewed him.

To William it was just an accident, a freak incident that somehow he ended up involved in, once the emergency services turned up, he gave the police his statement and, as he says, “I thought that was it, I thought I’d done a good turn. I had no idea that all that blood belonged to his friends or that he was a murderer.”

I ask him if James said anything to him, anything that stood out as strange, but William said the boy was silent, stunned, wide-eyed and confused. “He would mutter but nothing I could hear or understand. I’ve never seen anyone in the state of shock he was in, it was like he was barely here. There was something creepy about that but otherwise he just looked like he’d been in a bad accident.”

William tells me he doesn’t wish to speculate on what happened to James or his friends. It became clear to me at that point that I was circling around the obvious. I was going to have to speak to James.

2.

Armitage finally leads me downstairs through open wards filled with tired looking people, both patients and staff. Armitage assures me that James is not prone to violence and is quite civil, though sometimes his ideation goes a bit awry. He also says that apart from that problem James is, by all measure, quite sane and so once again, despite myself, I find myself sitting down across the table from a deranged murderer.

James is young looking, but tired, just like everyone here. His brown eyes seem dull inside dark ringed sockets but he nods and gives me a smile as I approach. “Jim, is it?” he asks.

“Yeah. You prefer James, right?”

“You don’t?” He asks, perfectly civilly.

“No, I had an aunt who always called me Shamus so Jim it was.” I answered.

His laugh was polite, measured and genuine. I seemed to have started off on a good footing and wanted to maintain that. “I wouldn’t have minded so much but Shamus was also the name of her dog.”

He chuckled. “So, my mother tells me your genuine, that you let her read everything you wrote so far?”

“I’m not interested in sensationalism James, it’s cheap, mean-spirited and it hurts people. I know it has hurt you and your mother, probably everyone involved.”

“And so you’re here to let me put the record straight?” James said, lightly mocking me. “Have you heard what I’ve said?”

“Bits of it. That’s the point, isn’t it? You’ve said that people don’t understand, that what was printed wasn’t the full story, was out of context. I’m giving you the opportunity to give your side of that story, unedited and without excessive comment, no matter how strange you or others think it is. What’s more I’ll write it up and if you are not comfortable with it, it goes in the bin.”

“Seriously? You’d do that? If I were to say right now, just stop, you would?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know whether you’re really good or really bad at your job.” James answered playfully.

“Nor do I, it’s a sign of the times.” I replied.

He wipes a long lock of his dark brown hair from his face and around his ear and smiles. “I find myself liking you, Jim. Let’s do this. Ask your questions.”

I pull out my dictaphone -yes I still use one- and place it on the table. Armitage smiles pats James on his shoulder and leaves the two of us to it. James looks ready and so I got right to it.

“So what happened to you the night you disappeared?” I ask.

James gives a weak smile. “Nothing, at first. That was just it, everything was going pretty much as normal. We set down our tents, made a small fire, cooked up some sausages and beans in a little pot that Patrick had brought with him. We drank a few beers but we weren’t out to party, just to relax. Our exams had been tough. Gail had brought a little battery operated speaker and we were singing along with some favourite songs. It was a lovely evening, still sunny at ten o’clock. Andy and Yasi had went off into the woods. She had a crush on him and he’d only found out earlier that day, so we thought they were off being romantic, you know? About half an hour later they came back. Andy looked befuddled and I remember he asked me how often had I been in the woods? I told him I didn’t know, countless times, we spent entire summers in those woods. He nodded emphatically. “Exactly.” He said, before repeating himself and then asking me had I ever in all that time come across a house. I hadn’t. There was no house in the woods. He agreed, yet, there was a house in the woods. He and Yasi had found it.” He stops, shaking his head. “You have to understand that we all knew that was impossible. Hence this was some elaborate joke on Andy’s part. So we played along and followed him and Yasi, through the woods and after about half an hour’s walk we were in front of an old dilapidated bungalow. The roof had collapsed in over on the left and the windows were dirty but there it was.”

The bungalow that didn’t exist. I’d heard mention of his claims of this but never in much context. The public version of James had to make him sound insane. Perhaps he is, but what if he’s not? That was my own thinking, which led me in turn to ask him. “How do you reconcile that? You had never seen any house before, no one since during all their searches for you had found any house.”

James shrugs as he looks right at me and gives me a hopeless smile. “Fucked if I know, Jim, but it was there. It was as real as this room, this table,” he insists, knocking on the wood.

“It smelt damp inside, the hall had an old stained picture of some Spanish guy playing a guitar. There was a broken clock on the wall of the main room, which was still in a liveable state. The furniture was old, dusty, a blue canvas covered a display cabinet full of old figurines. There was a real fire, and coal. We decided to settle in for a while. I mean we all knew it was weird, but it was also fun. We’d taken enough food and some beer so we reckoned that would do us until morning. After that we just talked about stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Concerts we’d been too, movies, stuff, nothing important. We were on holiday, relaxing. It was the start of the summer, we were just glad to be away from studies. Patrick was restless and went outside for a wander. He came back about five minutes later with his shirt off, he’d used it as a carrier for all these little mushrooms he’d collected. He was quite excited and told us that these were magic mushrooms. We were sceptical given it was the beginning of summer, but according to Patrick, these were Teppa mushrooms, which were not indigenous to Scotland. We were unconvinced. I mean I knew that some fungus was seriously poisonous and told him it was a risk but he wasn’t having it. As if to prove his point he gobbled down about ten of them. After about half an hour, he was sick, but it was his body reacting to them. He was fine a few minutes later and said he was buzzing so we all greedily took some.”

“Patrick was out of it, while we waited for the mushrooms to kick in, so he went to explore the other part of the house, which we’d peeked in and saw a kitchen and bedroom which were in a bad state, given the roof had caved in. He found a door to the cellar, a trap door. It even had one of those old brass ring handles.”

“Underneath was a small, cramped basement filled with junk, boxes of old clothes, the frame of a broken mirror, radio equipment. There was a tool table covered with shoes and at the back, something covered in a black tarpaulin. It took us a while to get to it but when we uncovered it it was just a bookcase. The books all looked like medical journals, that sort of thing so we went back upstairs, disappointed. I don’t know what we were expecting. Treasure perhaps?” He explains, laughing at the end.

He’s trying his best to put a brave face on it, to keep it light, but we both know where this is going. James is our only guide for what happened, unreliable or not, we can only follow where he leads.

“Treasure’s always good,” I respond.

“Patrick wasn’t so easily bored. He kept browsing through the books until he settled on one in particular. While we all sang and talked rubbish and laughed he sat reading. He was deep into it, oblivious to our jokes and nonsense. We let him be until suddenly he jumped to his feet and said ‘Holy Christ!’ which killed the mood dead. Yasi asked him what the matter was and Patrick kept tapping on the page. ‘This is it,” he said. “This is the doorway.”

“None of us knew what he was talking about but he was insistent. He kept going on about this doorway and how he thought he could open it. Gail asked him to explain himself and so he took a deep breath and tried to do so. He told us the book was a set of instructions encoded in a story about a man who was trying to find a ritual he could use to open a doorway to another world.” Upon saying those last words I notice how James can’t even seem to bring himself to believe the words he’s saying, not because he’s lying but because they are so ludicrous and he knows it.

“This sounded absurd and I stated as much but Patrick insisted that the book wasn’t bullshit and said he could prove it. I thought we should indulge him. The girls were not so keen but went along with it. It turned out to be some kind of magic spell, with chanting and Patrick leading a call round some candles we’d brought with us. He kept trying to be serious which made it all the more funny. I say this because Gail was still giggling when she suddenly flew up in the air, screamed and then slammed onto the ground.” He pauses, his eyes wide as he cups his hand over his mouth. Is this a fantasy, or an uncomfortable recollection?

“I say slammed because that’s what it was like, she didn’t just fall, but was projected with force onto the ground. We were all panicking but Patrick for some reason didn’t get the message and kept calling out these stupid words in that pompous voice. Andy ran at him and grabbed the book, throwing it into the fire we’d made. Patrick flew into a rage, something inhuman was inside him, speaking in this weird, rotten-sounding voice. He punched Andy so hard that Andy’s nose just burst like a tomato. Gail was groaning, Yasi was screaming for me to do something and through that I could hear that horrible voice saying ‘We’re here to take you home now.” James shivers as he says this. It doesn’t look like an act.

“What do you think it was?” I ask.

“Patrick,” he answers without hesitation. “Something had taken hold of him certainly, but at that point I had no idea, I just thought he’d gone mad. He was the sweetest guy in the world, but standing there, he terrified me. It was like looking into the eyes of a vicious predator, not an old friend. I shouted his name and he turned to look at me, snarling, chewing on his bottom lip so badly it was bleeding. He raced towards me and I panicked and grabbed the lamp right next to me and smacked him with it. It stunned him long enough for Andy to subdue him, with some help from Yasi. He was grunting and gibbering nonsense, but we used some belts to bind him to a chair. His eyes had changed, they were just clouds of blood. Yasi walked over to check on Gail as Andy and I kept an eye on Patrick. He was speaking to us, but it wasn’t in any language I’d ever heard and he was clearly furious. Yasi was screaming, we turned to see Gail, her face was twisted, distorted horribly and she was tearing at Yasi’s face with her hand, her other was grabbed deep into Yasi’s hair. Yasi was punching her, kicking but Gail was just laughing with this foul gurgling chuckle.” At this James stops, his eyes watery. He sit breathing in deeply for a while.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “If this is too much...”

“I’m fine. I’d known Gail since we were both four years old, she was like a sister to me. That thing wasn’t Gail, not really, something had taken over her body. It was like she was possessed, literally. Her skin had gone pale, grey and blotchy and she was just insane, wild and vicious, poor Yasi was a mess by the time Andy had pulled Gail off of her. I was shouting at her, trying to get some sense into her but she just attacked me. She took a chunk of of my arm with her teeth.” He shows me a wide almost circular scar on the outside of his right forearm. It has ragged, deeper edges. I’m no expert but it doesn’t look like a clean cut. That doesn’t mean I believe him. It doesn’t looked much like a bite either, but again, I’m no expert.

As if he senses my scepticism, he nods and says, “That’s not the worst one.”

He pulls down the front of his collar exposing four long running scars, deep scratches from his neck to below the collar. “She clawed at me too, they got infected. It was like she was an animal, a monster rather than a girl. I tell you this because of what happened next. Patrick managed to get loose and as I was still trying to fight Gail off, he had somehow found a rusty old spade and had decided to swing it directly at my head. I saw him but I pushed Gail around to receive the blow. I could have easily detached but I knew if I aimed her towards it she’d stop hurting me. So… then she stopped. I hoped she was unconscious, I doubted it, but I had other things on my mind. Patrick was still coming towards me with the now bloody spade. Yasi and Andy were both trying to move in behind and flank him Andy now had the leg of a chair as a weapon. I dropped as Patrick swung the spade over my head, then I grabbed the pole and tried to get it off him as Andy smacked him in the back of the skull. That gave me enough time to grab the spade and I… uh-”

He pauses again, winces and looking down, says, “I didn’t mean to, I only wanted him knocked out, I hit him with the flat part of the blade and he staggered towards the door, then he stumbled and hit his head on the door, he screamed then, it was like nothing I’d ever heard, like it came from all around me. He’d hit the side of his head hard, against a small coat-hook on the doorframe, somehow it had went right in his skull. He hung from it, motionless, blood was pouring down the door. After that, I don’t remember much. I remember bludgeoning Yasi to death with the spade, I still hear her terrified yelps. Andy was laughing at me as I did it so we fought. I remember taking his head off with the spade, forcing it through his neck with my foot, like I was digging a hole through him. I remember seeing this, but don’t recall actually doing any of it. I think, whatever possessed the others, possessed me. The thing is, when the dawn came, it vanished, all of it, and I was left just looking at the mess. My friends, all of them, just a bloodbath. I panicked and ran.”

“And where did you run to?” I ask, it was a question I was hoping for another answer to than the unsatisfactory one he’d given several times before.

“Out of the forest, I collapsed on the street and was picked up and taken to the hospital. I mean I was out of my mind but not so much I’d wandered for eighteen months without knowing about it.”

“You were gone for well over a year, and you still think you were only gone for the night?” I ask. Of everything he’s said throughout his elaborate and unbelievable tale, it is this one that irritates me most. Missing time, a year and a half of it.

“I don’t know what else to tell you, I’m as puzzled by it as anyone. Same as I am about all of it. I know they never found any house or anyone’s remains, I know that it all sounds far fetched and maybe it is, I don’t know, all I can tell you is what happened to the best of my ability.” James says, ending with a shrug and a sigh. I have to say, from what I’ve read, his story has remained remarkably consistent. Do I believe it? No. Something strange happened, likely it was just some wild psychotic break that neither James or we will ever understand, that is the most likely explanation and the most comfortable, yes?

After all, if any of what James has told us is true, then we might have to re-evaluate a whole host of things. However such speculation is neither healthy or relevant.

I thank James for his time, promise I will send him this paper for approval before publishing and then make to leave for the door. Then I stop, something occurs to me. “The book that Patrick found, do you remember the name of it?”

James scowls, looks up at me and says “Hmmm. It wasn’t a book it was someone’s diary. Some guy called Henry… Yeah Henry Atyll. That was it, I remember laughing at that, he’d called it his “Chronicle”, which seemed pretty pretentious. Glad I burned the thing though.”

I leave him to his day.

Some things are never solved. We are no closer to finding out who Jack the Ripper is, and the further we get from strange events the less likely we will know the truth of them. James Kelvin claims he and his friends were overtaken by some violent force, while in a house that does not exist, before everyone was killled. He vanished for a year and a half, without having any recollection of any time. No evidence has been found to refute or substantiate his claim. We only have his word to go on.

And remember, that is never enough.