Those clay pits were notorious. Ringed with chain-link fences and peppered with NO TRESPASSERS signs, they had been a traditional place for boys to misbehave since Eric and I, in caps and St. Oswald’s blazers, had used it as our combat ground, more years ago than seems possible. What they really were, of course, was dark and lonely water: a series of abandoned pits not quite large enough to count as quarries, now mostly flooded and commonly used as a dumping ground for household waste and junk of all kinds.

Any boy from St. Oswald’s would have been wary of that place. Charlie Nutter certainly was. Thanks to that old TV campaign, shown to all our feeder schools, Charlie Nutter knew the risks of dark and lonely water. And he’d been missing for nearly a week before they searched the clay pits. Everything else had already been tried. A sign saying PRAY FOR CHARLIE had been put up by the Church. Flowers and candles had been left by well-wishers at St. Oswald’s gates. Mr. Speight and the Chaplain had organized a vigil and Stephen Nutter, MP, had appealed to the public on Look North.

The response had been eager, though fruitless. Sightings of Charlie had been reported in Manchester, Sheffield, and even Hull, but none of these turned out to be anything more than false alarms. Malbry and St. Oswald’s began to prepare themselves for the worst. The media too now upped their game as the national press picked up the story. That pallid, twitching, colourless boy had become gilded by tragedy. The boys who had ignored him at School made tearful declarations of friendship. Even the Malbry Examiner (never a friend to St. Oswald’s) described the missing boy as popular, which, as everyone knows, is only a step away from the tragic loss of a young life.

No one wanted to believe that the boy was dead, of course. But what else could have happened to him? Nutter was a quiet boy, shy to the point of sullenness. His pastimes were quiet; his friends were few. He never misbehaved at School. His family was affluent. He had whatever he wanted. For Christmas, his father had bought him a BMX bicycle. Why would he have run away?

Besides, it was winter. In July, boys can run away from home and live like outlaws in the woods, but at Christmas 1981 it snowed. No boy would have survived sleeping rough, and a number of sinister theories were beginning to gain popularity—theories ventured by Mr. Speight, a firm believer in sacrifice rings, black magic, and Satanic covens, whose actual knowledge of the occult was mostly taken from the novels of Dennis Wheatley.