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Murder, They Said

Where I grew up, there were any number of places we children would explore, finding adventure and excitement as only children can. One of those places was the railway cutting.

In those days, our street dead-ended at a stretch of woods, where another street turned off at right angles and wandered up a hill. At this junction there was a path, dark, overgrown and scrubby, that led down through the woods to the railway tracks. They ran through a steep-sided gorge, cut out of the solid rock on which Halifax was built, and overlooked by the woods.

Of course, we were forbidden to go down the path to the cutting or, in fact, anywhere close to the railway tracks or even the woods. Trains still ran through the cutting, with what frequency I don’t now remember, nor do I know where they came from or where they were going. But I do remember the woods and the cutting and the path to it. That path was steep and rocky and narrow, the trees dense on either side. When you went down it, pebbles and rocks skittered beneath your feet, and you risked a tumble straight down onto the tracks. This made being on the path more exciting, naturally. Not only were we forbidden to be there, but we risked a nasty fall, and hence discovery, every time we disobeyed – until the murder.

How and where did we hear about the murder? Probably at school, or at home, as children always hear things they aren’t supposed to. Parents talked in shocked whispers, teachers had anxious expressions, neighbours whispered. We knew, of course we did.

The police had found the body of a young boy along those tracks, very near where our path came out into the cutting. He had been murdered, that was all we knew. But the mystery was evident in the way that the adults in our lives talked about it. This was BAD.

Gradually, the story faded from the news and from our minds. The story simply went away, in the way sensational, salacious and sad things often do. But the railway cutting remained, imbued now with danger and mystery and horror, and we stopped going there. The murder had the effect that all the admonitions of our parents did not: we never went back to the railway cutting.

Years later, I was told the story of the young boy called Jimmy who had died in the cutting. He had been picking blueberries with his mother, along the edges of the railway tracks where they grew wild. The murderer, only a young boy himself, had already killed two other boys, travelling by bicycle until he reached our cutting. Jimmy was shot in the head and died instantly. Why Jimmy’s mother was unharmed, where the murderer got the gun, who or what he was – those details are lost now in the past. But the memory of murder remains.