Back to the challenge. I wonder if the frivolity of it – its ridiculousness – was what appealed to the young people of Ergarth. These were not school children embroiled in a craze, but adults in their twenties. Amirah said it was almost self-perpetuating. If there really was no figure behind it, was it in fact symptomatic of a place with little hope? I wonder if such a thing would have been such a big deal in a more affluent location.
—What about your father? Did he know who had orchestrated the challenge?
—No and I begged him, I pleaded with him not to report it. I was literally on my knees, I swear. Somehow I convinced him it was all just a joke, a laugh. It wasn’t as if Elizabeth did it to be horrible. She did it because that was the challenge: she’d been set it, so she had to do it. And I’d have been destroyed if I’d spoken up.
I understand why Amirah’s been quiet about everything. Elizabeth died not long after ‘Snowball Fight at Choudhury’s’ was released on Elizabeth’s channel. Amirah tells me she’s still scared people think she or her family had something to do with the murder, that they were retaliating. Elizabeth may be dead and her killers in prison, but according to Amirah, the ‘flying monkeys’ are still a force to be reckoned with online. Elizabeth Barton’s death has turned her into something of a touchstone and anything bad said against her is met with a huge amount of online resistance. That was how popular she was. That was how much everyone loved her.
—Did you ever see someone getting destroyed like that?
—It happened all the time. Like, mainly online. Someone literally had to move away from Ergarth. But that was a long time ago. A couple of years before Lizzie died.
Gemma Hines she was called. She is called. Everyone talks about her like she’s dead, but she’s not, she just went away – her family moved down south. Bristol? Brighton? I don’t blame her. Not after what happened to her here. She would never be able to show her face in Ergarth again.
Gemma Hines. There’s very little about her in the archived press articles, and what there is makes for rather unsavoury reading. I won’t repeat what I’ve read yet, I’ll let Amirah tell the story in her own words first.
—Gemma was in year eight or nine when she joined our school. She was year eleven when it all happened. My year – Elizabeth’s year – were gone by then. Gemma was … I don’t know how to put it without sounding nasty, without sounding proper shan on her. She didn’t have a very stable home, let’s say.
—She lacked guidance?
—You could say that, yeah. She did daft things. Look, I’ll just say it: Gemma slept around. Older lads and that. That’s what everyone said. That doesn’t make what happened to her OK though.
It is these assertions that the newspapers made; one particularly unpleasant article in the Daily Mail online shows a blurry still of a crowd of youngsters on the porch of a dilapidated house, bathed in the light of two police cars beside a looming selfie of Gemma, resplendent in a layer of fake tan, mascara and lip gloss. ‘What Have Today’s Children Become?’ bellows the headline. Gemma Hines was around sixteen at the time.
—She was one of them who had a party cos her mam wasn’t there and she put it on Facebook and, like, a thousand people turned up. You know what I mean?
I do know what she means. There have been several high-profile news stories with the same theme: naïve young person advertises a house party on Facebook, thousands turn up, house is trashed. Strangely, for me anyway, these stories are reported with a jaunty, almost comedic tone. I express this to Amirah.
—Can you imagine how scary it would be, having all those people show up to your house: it’s just you on your own, and there’s lads from all over in their twenties? It was like what happened at the shop. All those bad ’uns from the Prim.
—What did this have to do with Elizabeth Barton?
—I don’t know for sure, but apparently Elizabeth was, like, the only girl who didn’t get invited to Gemma’s party. So her flying monkeys made Gemma Hines pay.
—Wow.
—Half the school showed up to the house plus everyone else and their mates, and Gemma ended up locked in the bathroom – three lads did it. The thing is though, and I have to say this: it wasn’t Elizabeth; she didn’t do this. It was … it was the lads that killed her who did it.
—What? Solomon Meer, George Meldby and Marin Flynn? They were fans of Elizabeth?
—I doubt it. They were there though. They were at the party. Everyone was, even Elizabeth’s weird little brother. It was them who started smashing the place up, getting everyone to steal stuff. I think they just turned up because they always did when there was trouble. They locked Gemma Hines in her own bathroom while everyone went feral. Me included. It was like Gemma didn’t matter.
Poignant words. The few news reports on the incident roundly condemn Gemma Hines for throwing the party and putting it online. There’s no mention of the three killers, nor Elizabeth Barton.
—It seems to me that there was a side of Elizabeth that was … dangerous perhaps? Like she had a lot of power in Ergarth?
—That’s the thing. It wasn’t her; she didn’t lock Gemma Hines in the bathroom, she didn’t trash her house. Elizabeth wasn’t even there.
—Do you think she orchestrated it though? Behind the scenes?
—No way. Elizabeth was lovely. She wouldn’t have done something like that. And anyway, she was like, a grown-up – she was in her twenties. Why would she care about some little girl’s party? It was her followers. They’d do anything for her.
It could be coincidence, but does this show us that Meer, Meldby and Flynn had previous? Does this incident foreshadow what they did to Elizabeth Barton – imprisoning a young female? It’s unclear whether Amirah was present at the party herself – despite my attempts, she won’t confirm whether she was there or not.
We come now to Meer, Meldby and Flynn. I want to know how they were regarded in Ergarth, which brings me back to what you heard at the start of the episode: Amirah’s account of Elizabeth’s first task – ‘Play Lurky in the Dene’. I ask Amirah to recount what happened from when Elizabeth was given the challenge.
—‘Play Lurky in the Dene’. That’s all it said. Her channel was getting, like, so much attention. Like I said, people were doing anything to be a part of it.
Similar to the snowball fight, Elizabeth’s followers had to like and comment on her video and she would pick some people to join in. Amirah was one of those people.
Amirah then tells the story you heard at the beginning of the episode. She went into Ergarth Dene at night with some friends, all wearing horse masks, and encountered the figure on the echo bridge.
—I thought it was one of my mates. That’s why no one said anything. It wasn’t what we’d agreed to do, go up on there.
—Was Elizabeth with you when you saw it?
—No. She was … I don’t know. I was on my own. Everyone was hiding. Elizabeth told us all where to go, what to do, how to film it, all the shots and different camera angles. Everything. We trusted her. We knew that if we did what she said, the video would do well. I thought that it might get me, well … famous.
—So there you were, looking up at the figure on the bridge. Did you have any idea who it was?
—It was really dark. The bridge is quite high up and I didn’t want to spoil anything by shouting, so I just went with it. I filmed them for a bit, just standing there with the horse’s head on. It looked pretty cool. Then they turned around. It was her. I swear to God. I swear on my mam and dad’s life. On my little cousin’s life. I swear down it was her.
—Elizabeth?
—No! The vampire! The Ergarth Vampire. Under that mask she had pale skin, like she was dead; black eyes and she opened her mouth. This sounds so stupid – it’s all going to sound so childish, but I swear to you, she looked dead, her skin was like a corpse. I was scrabbling on the ground for my phone and I could hear her coming. I could hear her running along the bridge and down the stairs on the other side; she was ma
king this horrible whistling noise, and I managed to pick up my phone and run. I swear I’ve never been so scared. I knew she was behind me, I could sense her. But you know when you’re so panicked, you forget how to run? That’s what happened, my feet just sort of got tangled up in themselves and I fell. The path was like an ice rink, and I could feel sticks and gravel poking me through my clothes. I remember curling up into a ball with my hands over my head, and I was crying like a baby. I lay there for a few moments but there was just nothing. I swear I thought I was going to die.
Then somehow, I like, just opened my eyes and that sense of her was gone. Like, I just knew she had gone, so I got up.
—Was there anyone there?
—Just me. Just me lying there on the path. In the dark. In the Dene. On my own.
—What about the others in the horse masks?
—That’s what I thought, right? I had all this stuff going through my head: what if it was a set-up, what if this was the prank? I thought that, despite everything, maybe this was the prank.
—That Elizabeth had created?
—Precisely. As soon as I thought that, I was angry, but only, like, for a second because it suddenly made sense. This was genius. She’d obviously got one of them to dress up as the vampire and … well, then I got angry again, cos, like, I’d be all over the Internet, screaming and falling in the mud. I didn’t know if that would be a good thing or not. All this stuff was going through my head, and I just wanted out of there. I just wanted to go home and sit with my mam on the sofa and watch TV, you know? I just wanted it to be over with. But I didn’t want to ruin the video. I thought the rest of them were hiding in the bushes, filming me. So I just started walking down the path, head down, just hoping that it would all finish soon.
—And what happened then?
—I was cold, really cold and jumpy, just full of nerves, so maybe that was why I was so scared, But something just came shooting out of the sky and flew right at my head. I swear, I’ve never screamed like that since I was a kid.
—What was it?
—I dunno; it must’ve been a bird or something. But the thing is, I sort of felt it, I smelled it, it came that close; it was all musty. Then it was gone; back up into the sky, silent. It was horrible. That’s when the figures came out of the bushes up ahead. That’s when I really thought I was going to die of fright. It was too much.
—Figures?
—Those three: Solomon, Martin and George. They all just stepped out of the bushes up ahead of me. I thought they were going to rape me, I swear. I thought they were going to rape me, or kill me and leave me for dead.
—I’m sorry if I sound insensitive, but what was it about them? What made you so scared of those three that you thought they would do that?
—They were horrible people, all three of them. George Meldby was an arsonist – he burned down that factory when he was in school. Everyone knew Martin Flynn was a thug, and Solomon Meer was a Satanist or whatever, wasn’t he? We all knew what they were. We all know now. We’re all still in shock. Sometimes I can’t get it out of my head, what they did to her. Sometimes it keeps me up at night.
—What did they do that night in Ergarth Dene?
—They stood there, just staring at me. I could see my friends all up ahead in a little group. They were scared too, but, of course, they had their phones out, and I knew they would be filming – in case those three did anything. Cowards. Solomon Meer was all filthy as usual and the other two were stood round him like his guards or something. He leaned right down into my face, so close I could smell him, and he opened his mouth. I remember it being scary at the time but he was wearing these stupid ‘fangs’ – just trying to be a vampire edge-lord or whatever. What a sad twat!
—Edge-lord?
—Like, he was trying to look dangerous, edgy, when he was really just pathetic.
It was only when Elizabeth died that I realised what they were doing. It sort of made sense of why we were down in the Dene.
—How do you mean?
—It was them that had tried to get Elizabeth out there; they’d been trying to get her to come out to the Dene by herself. I dunno, maybe they were going to film it; do a prank on her, try and scare her? Something worse…
—What about immediately after the event? I’m not quite sure I’m following what happened. You were in the Dene, it was dark, you thought you saw the vampire. If it wasn’t the vampire, what … I mean who was it? Did you ever find out?
—Maybe it was a dream or a hallucination or something? I dunno. I thought it was real at the time. I was shitting myself.
—Did you tell anyone else? Your friends?
—No. Not about the vampire. They would have been so judgey about it. It deffo wasn’t one of them though. I’m sure.
—Do you think it had anything to do with the three lads?
—Well yeah, that’s the other option. George and Martin were too stupid to have thought up something as elaborate as that, so I imagine it was one of Solomon Meer’s friends. Maybe it was some druggie, one of the spice zombies … one of the homeless or the … the people who hung round the Dene? The mentally … you know …
—I guess I’m interested in why Solomon and the other two actually wanted to kill Elizabeth. They said it was a prank gone wrong. Certainly, Solomon Meer’s video – the ‘What have we done?’ clip – suggests that could be true. It also contradicts the idea that Solomon believed Elizabeth truly was a vampire.
—I know, right? They were obviously trying to lure her into the Dene to do something to her. Maybe they were going to say that was a prank. It’s what they did at the tower, wasn’t it? I don’t know why they wanted to hurt her. Probably because she was popular and they weren’t; because she was beautiful and they weren’t … because she was everything they weren’t? I don’t know.
What does this vampire sighting have to do with our case? Is it unconnected, or was the target of this ‘prank’ actually Elizabeth Barton? I want to keep Amirah chatting for a little longer, so I offer her another drink. I think she welcomes the break as I stand in the queue to be served – the hiss of the coffee machines, the clank of metal on metal, the spatter of chatter from the gradually filling shop. I have to admit I look over my shoulder a couple of times to make sure Amirah hasn’t done a runner. Thankfully, she hasn’t and she seems a bit less fraught when I sit back down.
—I want to ask you about the three lads and your experiences of them, if that’s OK? So far I don’t know much about them.
—That’s fine. It’s just, like I say, you have to be careful around here. You don’t know who’s listening in, who’s filming or recording.
—Judging by the graffiti on the wall of Elizabeth’s parents’ house that summoned me here, it seems there are some in Ergarth who think this case needs to be looked at further.
—Yeah. Maybe. I dunno. Maybe someone knew it would bring you here? People are funny when it comes to fame.
I’ve been avoiding this but I just want to make a brief note, as it’s relevant. Since the last series of Six Stories, people see me differently. I work differently. Where I used to hide and preferred using Skype or making phone calls, I am now much more comfortable with meeting my interviewees face-to-face. Using my real face. I don’t want to say I am a ‘celebrity’, because I don’t think I am. Some people, however, do. Maybe this is what Amirah is getting at.
—Can we start with George Meldby? He was responsible for a few arson attacks in Ergarth, wasn’t he? Was that well known among people your age?
—We all knew it and all sort of just accepted it. It was just … normal I guess, to us. Here’s the thing, right: I went all through nursery and school with two of them – George and Martin. Solomon Meer didn’t come to Ergarth till halfway through year nine of high school. Everyone knows everyone round here, unless you’re rich and you can go to the boys’ or girls’ grammars. So, yeah, they were all in my year. So was Elizabeth. We all knew each other.
—There are other people i
n Ergarth who say that George didn’t seem the type of person who could commit such a horrible crime – what he did to Elizabeth, I mean.
—I’d agree with that. In school, even in primary school, George was just a little weirdo – harmless though. A quiet little weirdo. Not in that sort of broody serial-killer way – that was Solomon. George was actually quite popular.
—George was kicked out of Ergarth High, though, wasn’t he?
—Yeah, the back end of year ten. He set a fire in a sink in the art room. But he’d been in and out of trouble pretty much all his time in school. I was amazed they’d kept him in normal school for as long as they did.
—Why do you think that was?
—Like I say, George wasn’t nasty; and he had something about him. It’s hard to say what – some people are just naturally sort of charismatic, I suppose. And he was friends with the girls, even in primary school. He was actually quite feminine.
—Were you his friend at any point?
—No. Not me. OK, so here’s something that no one really made a deal of at the time – no one really knew, in fact. But it’s the whole reason why George doing what he did was so weird. George and Elizabeth were actually kind of friends. Like, she let him hang around her quite a lot. She even let him help out with some of her videos. Filming her and stuff.
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