The Man Made of Smoke

by Alex North

I didn’t know the term liminal spaces back then, but a part of me was already drawn to them: places that weren’t starting points or destinations, but stopgaps a step sideways from reality, like the crossing points between worlds in a fairy tale. And a part of me recognized that I was in one right then. A place where magic could happen.

It is interesting to note how an event that becomes formative for a patient might appear utterly inconsequential to an observer. We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.

While people who went through extremely traumatic experiences in childhood would almost certainly carry issues into adulthood, the vast majority became decent, well-adjusted adults. We are shaped by our pasts, not defined by them. It was important to remember that.

I had been detached; I had been calm. They had become watchwords for me over the years, because I knew that emotions could be dangerous, and that it was safer to keep the world at arm’s length.

When you’re young, there’s so much time left ahead of you. You can still achieve something. But then suddenly you realize that time is mostly behind you now, and there’s only the fact that you didn’t.

Burning the victim might have personal meaning to the killer. It might have been an attempt at hiding her identity. Or perhaps it had seemed like the most straightforward method of destroying evidence. Or a combination of all three, along with any number of other possible motivations.

My father had found the body of a murdered woman, and a photograph had been taken of him at the scene, seemingly designed to point him in the direction of Darren Field. He had gone to Field’s house and spoken to him. And then Darren Field had disappeared.

People can hide things away from you in the spaces between seconds, never mind weeks and months.

The photograph (R) of this little boy was found by 12-year-old Daniel Garvie and his father, John. The image was left in the bathroom at Rampton rest area and the boy has been identified as Robbie Garforth, the final victim of the Pied Piper.

I stared at it for a long time. There was a superficial resemblance there, but the boy’s face was still seared into my mind at that point. No, I told them. It wasn’t Robbie I saw.

Our lives had diverged and gone in different directions, and we hadn’t seen each other for so long. Perhaps we would lose touch again soon. It was possible that this moment was its own kind of liminal space, and the thought made me feel sad. The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that we just intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.

When something horrible happens, it’s natural to look for answers, and to try to make connections and figure out a way to make things right. Because we want everything to make sense.

Oliver Hunter killed; Graham Lloyd forced to watch. Graham Lloyd killed; Rose Saunders forced to watch. Rose Saunders killed; Darren Field forced to watch. And now Field was missing. If he had been murdered—presumably as a result of talking to my father—then that implied someone else had been abducted and forced to watch him die.

You could have saved us, he thinks. But you didn’t. And after a moment’s hesitation, he takes the photograph out of his pocket and places it on the floor. So that’s yours now.

“No, I’m going to forget it ever happened. Because I think that’s what he wants. He wants to punish the people who were there. He wants someone to take on the suffering and live with it. Because we could have helped him, and we didn’t. And now he wants at least one of us to wallow in the guilt from that.”

Craig Aspinall has today admitted his role in the murders of five people. The local handyman, well known in the community, pleaded guilty to the murders of Oliver Hunter, Graham Lloyd, Rose Saunders, Darren Field, and Michael Johnson. All five killings occurred between June and September this year.