Changeling

by Matt Wesolowski

  So it was tough telling Anne about the beautiful house of my childhood, with its garden and the pond. She kept asking though; she wanted to know more and more.

  While Anne was abandoned to the wrath of Catholic nuns, I had things: my little plot of land in the garden where I grew potatoes and radishes; the tree house my father constructed; my bedroom with its thick carpets and bookshelves. I have very few memories of playing with other children, however. I must have been quite a solitary child.

  Anne at least had other children around. Anne told me that her friends were the one thing of value she took from the home.

  We were educated in completely different ways too – Anne at a local comprehensive; me privately at home. She said she and her friends used to deliberately get into trouble so they could receive after-school detentions. She said writing lines in a freezing classroom was better than being back at the home.

  I told her about Marty and Susan – the private tutors who would come to our house and teach me. Anne was amazed! She was giddy with what looked like happiness and kept clapping. I suppose that, for Anne, it was like reading Malory Towers or Harry Potter. I felt my privilege and was embarrassed by it. But Anne loved it. She lapped up all of my memories and kept asking for more.

  Being with her is like having a gran. That’s how it felt today, like I had a gran.

  I never knew my real grandparents.

  Maybe what I’ve found in Anne is something I’ve lacked in my life?

  Maybe I should remind myself why I’m really here.

  So somehow I got us back on to Alfie Marsden. I told Anne that I feel like I’ve reached an impasse. There’s too much that isn’t known. All I have is the official story of what happened. The car, the vanished child. What else is there? I don’t feel like I’ll ever find an end, I said.

  It was then that Anne asked me what made this case different from all the others in the series. I didn’t know what she meant. Then she said something that had never occurred to me.

  ‘Why are you trying to solve this one?’

  And I realised she was right.

  Anne’s binged all my past series over the space of a couple of weeks, so she’s pretty qualified to ask me a question like that.

  It made sense. It made total sense. Maybe I have been trying to solve this one rather than just presenting it?

  It took Anne to tell me that.

  I began to thank her, but she stopped me – held up her hand and told me to wait. I watched. Anne picked up a pen and a pencil and began to write, her near-blindness making her slow and careful, spacing out each letter with a crooked finger.

  As she wrote Anne said something along the lines of, ‘You’ve always just sat back and let people tell their stories, Scott. You’ve let people make up their own minds. Here’s a story that’s never been told.’ It was something cryptic like that.

  It’s probably the psychic in her talking.

  All she’d written down was a name and a phone number. Anne told me to introduce myself, to explain what I was doing. And to mention Anne’s name.

  She said she couldn’t guarantee anything, but it might help.

  I’m going to call the number as soon as I get home.

  Episode 4: The Wood-Knockers

  —When I went to work at Dayton’s, I was just reeling from everything. I thought it was impossible I could get any lower. But I did – afterwards. Back then, at Dayton’s, I was just floating through life. It was like I was only half a person. I don’t even remember how I got the job. I was just on autopilot, just going through the motions. Before I know it I’m living on the site and I’m in the kitchens.

  I think that’s what helped me out at first. In a job like that you didn’t have to think too hard. It was like being back at the big hotels, working there, ’cept the food weren’t as good. The kitchen was huge, a load of fryers and a big range where all the meat went. I could have done that job with my eyes closed. Suited me just fine.

  And there wasn’t a proper hierarchy, like head chef, sous-chef, chef de partie, all that. There was the head chef and there was the rest of us.

  And that’s where I met Sorrel Marsden. And we became mates.

  Well, I thought so. You see in the kitchens, all you really have is each other. You’re all from different places, different walks of life, but you all have something in common – kitchen people are a bit, well, messed up. We’re all wastrels, misfits … addicts.

  Welcome to Six Stories. I’m Scott King.

  This is episode four.

  In the last few weeks we’ve been looking back at the case of Alfie Marsden, the child who vanished into Wentshire Forest in 1988. We’ve been building up some context to the story, trying to understand how a seven-year-old boy could disappear and never be seen again.

  The Alfie Marsden case, for most, is resolved. The boy is officially deceased. The name is synonymous with a family’s sorrow. Despite that, I want to look again – from six different perspectives – to unearth anything that may change this well-worn narrative.

  Wendy Morris took some convincing to talk to me. She is a resident in a ‘sober living home’ in rural Cheshire – a group facility for addicts and sex workers, owned by a charity. The home, which I will not name, is beautifully kept. There are well-tended flower beds in the front and a small allotment in the back. There is even room for a small menagerie of animals; chickens scratch and burble in a wooden pen, and a goat sleeps in the shade of a small shed. Wendy’s link to Alfie Marsden has never before come to light. Wendy has never told her story. This is, I think, because she believes it does not matter, because she believes she does not matter. Whether she’s right is up to us to decide – the Six Stories ‘book group’ who meet at the edge of an old crime scene.

  I chat with Wendy over a pot of tea at a wooden picnic table at the back of the home. The smell of honeysuckle and the languid buzz of bees is all around us.

  —So yeah, I knew Sorrel. He was alright, he was. He looked after me a bit, when I first started.

  —Looked after you?

  —He was one of those blokes who’s good at seeing if someone’s in a mess, not doing well. I think he saw that about me the moment I walked in the door. He was straight over, looking after me. He stood out from the others.

  —What makes you say that?

  —Cos he was different. I know the sort of blokes that work in kitchens, and Sorrel wasn’t like any of them. I remember when I came into the kitchen for the first time and one of the other chefs made some smart-arse comment. Sorrel was on him straightaway, sent him off to go and peel some spuds or something. That’s what he was like at first. He was nice, you know? He saw I was in a bad place and stopped the other lads having a dig. And he told me I was a decent cook – which is a massive compliment.

  —Did you ever think Sorrel had any romantic interest in you?

  —I dunno about that. I knew Sorrel had just come out of a messy one with someone else.

  —Mad Mary … I mean, Maryanne?

  —Yeah, her. Anyway. It wasn’t long after I started that Sonia Lewis walked into the place and that was it for him.

  —Sorrel fell in love?

  —In love? He was obsessed with her! We used to take the piss out of him no end. We used to call her his little dolly bird and he’d get all red in the face and start swearing. It was funny!

  —Did you get to know Sonia at all?

  —We all knew each other, but she wasn’t a mate. All I knew of her was that she was more my age than Sorrel’s but she was a kid inside. She’d hardly lived – never even been out of Wales. Sorrel was much more my type of person. He’d lived a life as well.

  —I don’t know a lot about Sorrel before this point in his life.

  —You know I said before that all kitchen people are weird, fucked up? He was no different.

  —Did he confide in you?

  —Sometimes. When we was drunk. Before Sonia came on the scene. He was brought up by his grandmother. She was one of those horrible,
old-fashioned ‘children should be seen and not heard’ types. She sounded like a witch, filling his head with scary stories when he was a boy.

  —Really?

  —She told him a whole load of nonsense, told him if he didn’t behave that ‘things’ would come and get him. She scared the life out of Sorrel when he was a boy. He said she told him he was different from the rest of his family, that he was the black sheep. I think he’d spent most of his life trying to please the old fucker.

  My mum was a piece of shit, and Sorrel’s grandmother was, too. Maybe that’s why we became friends.

  This is interesting, but how significant to the story it is, I’m not sure. Wendy explains that she saw the way Sorrel behaved in the kitchen and, thinking about the drunken snippets he’d reveal about his grandmother, wondered how she’d influenced him.

  —He was a bloody control freak. Everything had to be done his way or he’d lose it. Ninety-nine percent of chefs are the same, but still…

  —Did you feel sorry for him?

  —If I’m honest, no. But back then I didn’t feel much of anything for anyone. But since I’ve been here, since I got sober, I can see where all that came from. People try and make up for the lack of power in their lives by focussing on what they can control. Sorrel couldn’t control how his grandmother felt towards him, but he could control what went on in the kitchen.

  It’s an interesting observation from Wendy. But she tells me that’s the only real insight she ever got into Sorrel.

  —He was a hard bloke. Not physically, but emotionally. He was like me: didn’t let much in or out. I guess that’s why we became mates. Maybe we saw each other as safe…

  Wendy and Sorrel became better friends when he began dating Sonia. Wendy says she was the only one who could get away with ribbing him about how protective he was. Sorrel would often confide in her about Sonia, how worried he was about her. Wendy, in turn, told Sorrel about her life, about her brother Sam who’d died, something she had never opened up to anyone about.

  I ask Wendy about the early days of Sorrel and Sonia’s relationship. She remembers Sorrel always checking his watch during service and, no matter what he was doing, downing tools at a certain time and going to the payphone in the back corridor. This sent the other chefs mad. His explanation was that he worried about Sonia when she was out, that her friends – the other younger waitresses and front-of-house staff – were, as he put it, ‘idiots’ and he didn’t trust them with her.

  In turn, Sonia, wherever she was, would then call the number on the payphone to tell Sorrel she was safe. Wendy corroborates what Darren Morgan told me: how, when they had days off, they would spend them drinking in the Dayton’s staff bar. Again like Darren, she also says that the few times she saw Sorrel lose his temper were when he thought someone was looking at Sonia wrongly. He would square up to them, so enraged, that whoever was the subject of his ire would immediately back down and apologise.

  Thus far, then, we’ve learned nothing that we don’t already know about the early days of Sorrel and Sonia’s relationship. I feel like we’re going over old ground, albeit from a different perspective. Wendy, however, tells me that we’re only halfway done.

  —I just needed to tell you that bit first, because otherwise the next bit won’t make sense. You see when Sorrel and Sonia were together, I was low. But Sorrel … I really thought I had a friend in him. I really did.

  —Did something happen between the two of you?

  —He left. He and Sonia just upped sticks and left. Maybe I’m selfish, thinking that he should have stayed for me. It’s just that one day he was there and one day he’d handed his notice in; him and Sonia were getting a place together.

  —How did that make you feel?

  —Like I didn’t matter. It’s not like we were best mates or anything, but I thought we were close! As close as either of us could get to having a proper friend. I mean, I told him about Sam, he told me about Sonia. It just seemed cold.

  When Sorrel and Sonia moved, all contact between Sorrel and Wendy ceased. Wendy, who was already unstable after her brother’s death, began to sink into lower realms of addiction. Without her friend to look after her, she began drinking more and was introduced to drugs. After her seasonal contract at Dayton’s was over, she didn’t look for another job and instead spent her time with other addicts. By the time Sorrel got back in touch with Wendy, she was taking cocaine and living in a squat with dealers and heroin addicts, somewhere in Prestatyn.

  —When he called, I didn’t even recognise him. This would have been, what, eighty-six, eighty-seven? He’d been gone for a few years.

  —What did he want? To catch up?

  —You won’t believe it, it was that strange. I guess it showed who and where I was back then that I agreed to do it. It was almost like he knew I was low enough to do anything anyone asked me to.

  —And what was it, Wendy? What did Sorrel want you to do?

  —He wanted me to come on holiday with him and Sonia and their little boy. I didn’t even know that he was a father.

  This is quite the revelation. Based on what we already know about the family, Alfie would have been about five or six years old at the time and Sonia already deep into addiction. Sorrel was the fabric holding the family together at this point, so it’s no wonder he needed someone to help out.

  For those unfamiliar with Sorrel Marsden, it might be a mystery why he chose Wendy for this job, so I want to take you back to a throwaway remark Darren Morgan made in episode one.

  —You were Sorrel’s only real friend?

  —There was someone else, now I come to think of it; another chef. I think she might have been the only woman Sorrel didn’t try and put the moves on. I forget her name – Winnie. Wendy maybe? She never tried to mess him about. I think that’s why they were mates. Like him and me, they were equals.

  It’s quite sad that the only person deemed ‘equal’ to Sorrel was Wendy; and it’s also sad that Sorrel had not been in touch with her for a number of years.

  Or is that strictly true? I ask Wendy about whether she’d had any word from Sorrel since he got together with Sonia.

  —I thought that at the time: Why me? Why now? Then I remembered something…

  —What was it?

  —It’s daft really. I was probably mistaken. I was off my head – drugs, drink, everything…

  —It’s ok to say what you think. Even if you were mistaken.

  —OK. It’s just that there were times back in those days when I could have sworn I saw him.

  —Sorrel Marsden?

  —It was probably just someone who looked like him. Like I say, it was nothing. But there were a few times I was sure. I thought I would see him at the back table in a pub; a face on a dance floor or crowded into the kitchen at a house party.

  —And did you ever approach him, or the person you thought was Sorrel?

  —I remember once, at this party, I was completely out of it. But I was talking to a bloke. And I was sure the next day that it had been him. Like I say I’d been so out of it, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

  —Did he recognise you? Did you remember that?

  —He didn’t say anything that I remembered. I did know that he kept giving me drinks, and kept rolling joints and lighting them for me. Then he was gone. Or I was gone – passed out, you know. I did used to think about him after that, though. Sometimes picked up the phone and wondered if I could track him down somehow. I never did.

  —Why not?

  —I think he would have been disappointed to see how far I’d fallen. He was that sort of bloke; I couldn’t bear to have disappointed him. That’s why when he did get in touch, I was so eager to go – to do it. I wanted to impress him.

  —That was why you agreed?

  —I thought it would be good for me…

  —Did you agree?

  —I thought it would be good for me. They were going camping, he said; taking Alfie to Wentshire Forest. They wanted me to help out with him c
os Sonia was finding it hard. He said something like, ‘Sonia needs you’.

  I’d never been needed before in my whole life. I think he knew that and that’s why he said it.

  The next thing Wendy knew was that Sorrel Marsden, someone who had abruptly walked out of her life, and who hadn’t been in touch for years, was on his way to pick her up.

  —I hate to ask, Wendy, but was there any … gain for you from this arrangement?

  —How do you mean?

  —Aside from what I presume was a free holiday, was there any money offered?

  —I don’t think there was. I mean, I had no job. I was beginning to get a habit and I was in a dark place, so I could have done with the money.

  —What was it made you to agree to go, then?

  —I guess … I have to say it was Sorrel.

  —He convinced you?

  —You see, Sorrel had this thing about him, he had this way about him that was hard to resist.

  —He was charismatic?

  —Yes and no. I mean, he wasn’t particularly attractive. But he had this … this charm. This is going to sound stupid, but it was like he had this light shining out of him.

  This charm has been mentioned by others who knew Sorrel. A notable example is Darren Morgan in episode two. It’s clear that there was something about the man that drew people to him. However, I think the fact that Wendy agreed to Sorrel’s strange proposal says more about where she was at this point.

  Sorrel drove the three adults and the toddler along the Wentshire Forest Pass in his car loaded with camping equipment.

  —So how was it, seeing Sorrel and Sonia again?

  —Oh it was OK. Sonia was a bit quiet. She was always like that though – timid and shy. She looked rough. I suppose giving birth and that does it to you. She was a pretty little thing when she worked at Dayton’s but that prettiness had almost gone. Sorrel was just as I remembered him, though – chattering away, making jokes.