Before we can explain what happened to Angela Retford, we have to first examine the sequence of events that preceded it.
Our story begins at the secure psychiatric facility in the sleepy town of Brinecliff, England. On the 28th March, 2014, Dr. Jennings met with Dr. Pelham to discuss the release of a patient held there, the patient having been admitted long before either of their tenures. The patient’s name was Samuel Bower.
Dr. Pelham was a recent addition to the facility and much less familiar with Sam’s case than Jennings.
“I’ll explain his history briefly.” said Dr. Jennings, as they sat together in Jenning’s office. “You should know that Samuel was grotesquely mistreated as a child. His parents used to lock him in a cellar for weeks at a time in an effort to, in his father’s words, ‘make him behave normallly’, and his father often beat him brutally after these punishments.
“They were eventually convicted of abuse and neglect and both served prison sentences. The father has since committed suicide. I don’t know what happened to the mother but she has never visited Sam.
“I believe this explains his fascination with doors. If left to himself, he will happily stand at a locked door for hours on end, fiddling with the lock and the handle. Actually we don’t know how long he would stand there for if we didn’t intervene.
“He’s nonverbal, but has acquired some basic skills in his time here. He washes and dresses himself and he can prepare simple food, such as sandwiches, even using a microwave to heat things up.”
“Has he ever displayed any violent tendencies?” asked Dr. Pelham.
“Never.” Jennings replied. “This is why I’m in favour of releasing him, into supervised accommodation of course. Frankly he doesn’t belong here. This place is primarily for the criminally violent, not for people who are merely unsettling.”
“He is unsettling.” said Pelham. “I’m not sure how the public will react to him.”
“That’s not a reason for keeping him in here.”
“True.” said Pelham.
“He’s lived here since the age of 19,” Jennings continued, “when he wandered off or somehow managed to get free from his parents. This is all he’s known. In that time he’s shown significant progress in acquiring basic living skills.”
“Where do we think he is in terms of IQ?”
“Dr. Thorpe estimated him at 85, but I’ve seen him display a degree of cunning on occasion. I would put him at average, or even above average. I think he’s just not very interested in cooperating when we try to test him. Heck, for all I know he could be a genius. He has strong atypical autistic traits which make him very hard to assess.”
Pelham sighed.
“I’m concerned that if I countersign his release, the reality is that he may end up living unsupervised. Maybe they’ll send in carers once a day to do his shopping, and that’ll be it.”
“We can’t guarantee it won’t happen.” said Jennings. “But I come back to my original point. We have no real grounds for continuing to hold him here. He’s not a danger to himself, nor to others.”
“As far as we’ve been able to determine.”
“As far as we’ve been able to determine.”
Pelham placed his hands together and tapped the tips of his fingers against each other.
He sighed again.
“OK, I’ll sign, but I want it understood that I have severe reservations about this. I’d like to attach a note to the release form, in case I end up explaining my decision to the police.”
Jennings laughed.
“That’s not going to happen.”
The first killing occurred three weeks after Sam’s release. A elderly man was murdered in one of the blocks of flats that lined the north shore, overlooking the caravan park. He had been tied to a chair and suffocated. The flat had been stripped of anything small and portable of value. The police were not able to determine why he had been targeted, or whether, for instance, he had been in the habit of keeping large amounts of cash in his flat.
Dr. Pelham’s fears had in fact been realised. Sam had been released into a tiny self-contained apartment and given minimal supervision. A carer called in twice a week to check on him. Arrangements were made to pay his bills for him. He had only to feed and wash himself, and washing was of course dispensable at a pinch.
On his first day of freedom, once the nurse had left, Sam spent five hours standing silently at the window, a faint contented smile on his face. Then he ate some slices of bread from a packet and went to stand at his own door, peering through the security peephole, watching. The sight of a couple of people going up and down the stairs thrilled him.
Soon he began to play with the lock, and when the door opened, it caught him by surprise.
At first he was too scared to go out, and he retreated into the flat, breathing heavily. The nurse had left a tin of sweets for him; toffees covered in gold and blue wrappers, and he nervously ate three of them. Then he stuffed a handful of them into his pocket and went back to the door, gazing at the enticing space beyond.
He stepped through the door and spent an hour staring up through the stairwell, astonished. Two more people traversed the stairwell, one after the other, both hurrying past when they saw the blank half-smiling expression on Sam’s face.
Sam walked slowly, oh so very slowly, down the stairs and outside, wandering into the street, blinking in the sunlight.
Angela Retford had recently split up with her boyfriend and was relaxing at home one evening, watching TV, when she first noticed something out of the ordinary. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what bothered her, but she felt as though she was not alone. Perhaps, subconsciously, she sensed some unfamiliar odour.
She phoned a friend and they talked for nearly two hours. She didn’t mention the odd feeling that had swept over her; the feeling of being watched.
Before retiring to bed she looked around the flat, even checking wardrobes in an effort to assuage her steadily-creeping paranoia. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and goosebumps appeared on her arms.
She checked the door was locked, and as an afterthought, peered through the peephole. Seeing nothing unusual out there, she unlocked the door and looked down the corridor. Then she noticed the sweet wrapper; a gold and blue toffee wrapper. She picked it up, stared at it curiously, then hurriedly locked the door and threw the wrapper in the bin.
The second major incident in the Brinecliff area happened two weeks later.
This time it didn’t quite escalate to murder. A man broke into the apartment of a young woman by the name of Sarah Smith, who, like Angela, lived by herself. She hadn’t locked the door, and it seems he was able to slide a credit card or some other thin object between the lock and the doorframe, gaining access.
She awoke to find a figure looming over her wearing a black woollen balaclava.
He cleaned the apartment of everything small and valuable, terrorising her for an hour, tying her to a chair and pulling a plastic shopping bag over her head, until he was unnerved by someone pressing the bell. This later turned out to be the woman who lived next door wanting to ask if Sarah could look after her cat for a week. Following that he left as soon as the coast was clear, and Sarah was eventually able to attract attention by throwing herself onto the floor and banging the chair, to which she was still tied, against the wall.
She was lucky not to have suffocated.
A particularly curious aspect of the case was that Sarah’s assailant, throughout the entire ordeal, hadn’t said a word, relying purely on brute strength to terrorise her into submission.
No connection was made between Sam and this incident, nor the murder. The police did consider it likely, however, that the person who terrorised Sarah Smith was the same man who had murdered the elderly gentleman. It seemed likely that the perpetrator would have progressed to murder on this second occasion also, had he not been interrupted.
Dr. Jennings took an acute interest in these two cases. Even though he didn’t believe Sam to be dangerous, his reputation was somewhat on the line and his conscience troubled him. He was disturbed by Sam’s lack of supervision. He decided to do everything he could to determine whether or not Sam could possibly be responsible for the incidents.
Accordingly, he turned up unannounced one afternoon at Sam’s flat.
Dr. Jennings was taken by surprise when, after walking up the two flights of stairs to the flat, the door immediately opened.
“Hello Sam.” he said, warmly.
Sam said nothing, but stared blankly at him, a faint smile on his face.
“Were you standing at the door?” he asked.
Sam made no reply, but raised his arm slowly and pointed at the peephole in the door.
“Yes, I thought so.” said Jennings. “May I come in?”
Sam turned and walked into the flat, and Jennings followed.
As Jennings entered, he began to carefully scan his surroundings for signs of objects that Sam might have stolen.
He pulled out a chair from the table in the flat’s only room, aside from the bathroom, sat down, and motioned Sam to sit too. Sam dutifully sat down.
“How’ve you been?” he asked. “Are you eating enough?”
Sam nodded slowly. His substantial frame (surprisingly substantial given his long sojourn in the hospital) showed no sign of having diminished. Sam could have physically performed the job of a farm labourer with ease.
“Do you go outside much, Sam?” he asked.
Sam nodded.
“Do you go out a lot in the evenings, or at night?”
Sam nodded, his face impassive.
“You know, it’s dangerous out there.” said Jennings. “You should take care. It’s better if you only go out during the day.”
Yet again Sam nodded. It was impossible to tell what he meant, and Jennings had long noticed that Sam’s gestures were quite often meaningless.
Then something caught his eye: a piece of fabric sticking out of a sliding cupboard drawer next to the cooking hob.
Jennings jumped to his feet and opened the cupboard, taking out an insubstantial women’s scarf, consisting of a filmy embroidered fabric.
He held it up.
“Where did you get this, Sam?”
Sam stared blankly at him, the faint smile still on his lips.
“Did you get it from a shop?”
No reaction.
“Did you take it from someone?”
No reaction.
“Did someone give it to you?”
But Sam only continued to stare blankly. His facial expressions, Jennings had sometimes thought, were similar to those of a dog, except even a dog might have shown signs of attempting to understand the question. Whether Sam understood or not, was very hard to divine.
“Sam, when you first saw this scarf, was it inside a building somewhere?”
Sam rose slowly and ponderously to his feet, then stepped over to the window. Then he slowly raised his arm and pointed out through the window, downwards.
Jennings got behind him and tried to follow the line of his arm and finger. In the direction Sam was pointing were both streets and buildings.
“Did you find it in the street?” Dr. Jennings asked, but Sam only continued to half-smile enigmatically.
“Do you mind if I keep it?” asked Jennings.
Sam made no reply of any kind, and it was only later, as Jennings made to leave, that Sam caught hold of his wrist and took the scarf from his hand, making it clear that the scarf was staying.
Meanwhile the police had been busy analysing DNA. For a while they thought they’d identified the culprit, but it was soon realised that the real murderer was salting the scene with various human substances collected in the streets and possibly toilets. His identity remained a mystery.
Angela became repeatedly plagued by the sensation of being watched. This sensation grew on her only after darkness had fallen, and began to occur almost every other night.
She returned home one evening somewhat inebriated, having been out celebrating the birthday of a friend of hers, and feeling too stimulated to sleep, switched on the television and flopped onto the sofa.
The TV was showing an obscure film in which a woman was pursued through a dark forest by a deranged lunatic. The film made her nervous, but she quickly became engrossed by the woman’s fate, and rather than switch it off, she took out a bottle of wine from the fridge, poured a large glass and covered herself with a blanket.
She had always felt there to be something comforting about television, even when the subject was disturbing. The television might scare her, but it would never hurt her.
When the eerie sensation of a silently-observing human presence began to manifest itself again, at first she attributed it to the film. Then she started to feel as though someone absolutely must be present close by, perhaps in the bedroom. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why, exactly. The feeling became so strong that she went to the bedroom to look, swaying slightly from the alcohol.
The room was obviously empty, but she checked in the wardrobe and under the bed, just to be sure. Then she returned to the sofa.
At a certain point the woman in the film took refuge in an abandoned house and stood there in semi-darkness, breathing heavily. Thoroughly absorbed, Angela almost jumped out of her skin when she heard a noise coming from the direction of the door of her flat.
She immediately switched the TV on mute and sat listening. A minute passed, then two minutes. Then she heard it again. A scratching sound, almost as if a cat was scratching at the door. Perhaps, she thought, it actually was a cat.
Taking the bottle in her hand as a weapon, she padded slowly and silently towards the door. Inwardly she cursed herself for switching off the television’s sound; now if there was someone at the door, perhaps he would realise she had heard him.
A metre from the door she froze, listening intently.
She thought of a friend of hers who had been hospitalised with schizophrenia. Georgie had begun hearing sounds that weren’t there, and the illness had progressed into severe paranoia, until finally the police had collected her, screaming incontinently, and deposited her at a hospital. She had mostly recovered but had never quite seemed like her former self again.
Could she, Angela, be having some kind of similar breakdown? How could she know if the sounds were real or not? Perhaps, she thought, she could try to record them.
Then another scratching, scrabbling sound made her jump. Her heart began to thump crazily.
She moved gradually closer and closer to the door.
Stupidly, she had left the chain off. Was the door even properly locked? She couldn’t remember actually locking it. She reached towards the chain and delicately, silently, slid the bolt into the latch.
Then she heard the sound of the lock turning. She suppressed the urge to scream. There could be no doubt about it; someone had inserted something into the lock, perhaps a key, and was trying to open the door.
She put her eye to the peephole and saw, standing there, a tall thickly-set man, wearing a blank expression with a faint suggestion of a smile on his lips. He seemed to be staring directly at her.
She jumped back from the peephole, startled, and ran back into the living room, where she phoned the police.
When the police arrived half-an-hour later, a policeman and a policewoman, they were nice enough but seemed to think her paranoid. They had found no-one at the door, and they advised her simply to ensure that it was locked.
After moving into his new place, Sam had rapidly become intrigued by the lock on his own door. He spent hours fiddling with it, sticking things into it, trying different keys in it. When he heard anyone approaching, he calmly retreated into his flat, shutting the door. He developed this habit only after a woman caught him waggling a straightened paperclip around in the lock of his own door, and gave him a verbal battering, demanding to know why he was doing that.
He didn’t enjoy noise of any kind, and he didn’t want any further such confrontations, so he became suitably furtive in his approach.
What was it about doors that fascinated him? He didn’t even know himself. A door represented a semi-permeable boundary between the public and the private; an admonishment to stay out, but also a kind of portal to an unseen realm. But it wasn’t primarily fascination with what might lie beyond a locked door that drove him. The doors themselves were the real object of his interest. He found all aspects of them utterly intriguing.
Most of all he liked to simply stand at his own door, inside the flat, his eye a few inches from the peephole, watching to see if anyone would go up or down the stairs.
However, for Sam, there was another whole level of excitement that went far beyond any pleasure he could derive from his own door, which was already considerable.
The ultimate thrill, for him, was to stand silently at someone else’s door.
A pivotal moment for Sam had occurred when he had lingered outside the front door of a locked apartment block, in the rain, watching people go in and out. He had refrained from actually standing at the door since he had realised that would attract negative attention.
A man sheltering under a folded magazine had run up to the door and opened it using the keypad outside, and had held the door open for Sam, asking if he wanted to come in. Naturally the man had assumed Sam to be either a resident of the building, or else a visitor to one of its residents. Sam had gratefully accepted the offer and had almost glided inside, following which the man ran into the lift, impatiently beckoning Sam in too.
“What floor do you want, mate?” the man had asked, and Sam had imitated the man’s gesture and randomly pressed a button.
The man had got out on floor three. The door closed, a fact which Sam had enjoyed immensely, and then it opened again on the fifth floor.
There, Sam had found himself in a kind of paradise. Endless closed doors met his gaze, and there was no-one around to get annoyed with him. He had stood at one of them for three hours, until a woman emerged from the lift and Sam had walked past her and into the other side of the building, where he had stood at a door for four hours without interruption, peering into the wrong side of a peephole, through which he could see nothing, or almost nothing, except a faint glimmer of light that seemed to suggest any number of intriguing possibilities to Sam’s mind.
As he stood there, he imagined that, on the other side of the door, he might find more corridors. An endless maze of corridors, perhaps, lined on both sides with doors of all shapes and colours.
A month later, an elderly couple were found dead, suffocated in their own flat.
It was now clear that a serial killer was on the prowl in Brinecliff; a killer capable of multiple simultaneous murders and a killer who quite possibly revelled in sadism.
A police profiler by the name of Robert Enfield was assigned to the case, and he disagreed with the public’s assessment of the situation.
The killer, he argued, was likely not a sadist, but simply considered suffocating his victims to be expedient. Rather, he was a species of psychopath, uncaring for the suffering of others. He was powerfully built and able to easily subdue his victims. If the second incident was indeed linked to the first and third, as seemed likely, the killer was probably entirely mute, and wore a balaclava. The build of the man Sarah had described was indeed suggestive of considerable physical strength.
Enfield believed the man to be motivated primarily by curiosity. He had made no verbal or written demands of his victims, but had only rooted through their cupboards, taking anything that caught his eye.
The killer, according to Enfield, possessed a psychology that was not so much evil, as grossly abnormal; amoral rather than immoral. Unable to comprehend people as sentient beings, he saw them only as objects, and he broke into their homes, stole their things and murdered them for the same kinds of reasons that a normal person might read a book.
Still, due primarily to a lack of communication in various places and at various levels, the police did not fasten onto Sam as a possible suspect.
Angela called the police twice more in the following weeks. On the second occasion they seemed distinctly annoyed, and on the third occasion they flatly told her there was nothing they could do unless a crime had been committed, and she should consider phoning a friend if she needed reassurance.
Only on the third occasion had she actually seen the man again. He was there, just as before, peering in at the peephole. After phoning the police she had screamed at him to go away from the other side of her locked door, and he had quietly gone away.
The stress of the situation began to affect her sleep.
Less than a week after her third call to the police, she awoke at three in the morning, from the middle of a nightmare.
In her nightmare, which had seemed to go on for hours, she had been sitting in her living room and the man had appeared at her door. He had stood there for hour after hour, a half-smile on his mask-like face, silently awaiting the right moment.
She had phoned the police repeatedly in this dream, and they had become positively rude, threatening to have her sent to a mental hospital.
Somehow she had been able to see the man in full, standing there at her door, in the darkness of the corridor outside her flat. At certain points he had seemed in possession of a lock-picking kit, and at other points a collection of keys. Sometimes he played with a knife, and sometimes he had a wound on his neck that was infested with insects and maggots.
Finally she had flung the door open and screamed at him to go away, but he had advanced menacingly towards her. She had smashed a bottle on his head to no effect whatsoever, and he had pushed her to the ground, bearing down on her, opening his mouth to reveal the teeth of a wolf or a bear.
At that moment she awakened, covered in fine sweat.
She shivered and switched on the light.
It was one of those oddly persistent nightmares that didn’t feel as though it had entirely resolved upon waking. She went through to her kitchen to fetch a glass of wine, which she hoped would calm her nerves.
She was about to switch on the TV and attempt to find something lighthearted to sweep away the unnerving mood that stuck to her like flypaper when she heard it: a scratching sound, coming from the door.
Taking fright, she ran to her phone, but then the words of the police rang in her ears, combined strangely with the words of the imaginary police of her nightmare. Instead of the police, she tried to think of a friend or acquaintance she might phone, but at three in the morning, no-one she knew was at all likely to be awake.
He can’t get in, she thought, in an attempt to reassure herself. Probably he’s even harmless, just a weirdo.
She went back to the fridge and decanted the remaining wine into another glass, so she could use the empty bottle as a weapon. Then she took out a chopping knife from the kitchen drawer.
Faint noises continued to emerge from the direction of the door.
She went to the door and looked out through the peephole.
There he was, this time wearing a balaclava and seemingly focused on doing something to the lock.
Her heart beat wildly in her chest and her mouth became completely dry.
The chain’s on, she thought. Even if he can somehow unlock the door, the chain’s on.
Spontaneously, without even thinking about it, she screamed “Go away!” at the top of her voice.
The man looked up and seemed to stare into the peephole. But he didn’t go away. Instead, the scratching and scrabbling seemed to redouble, and to her horror, she heard the sound of the door slowly unlocking.
In a panic, she looked around for the key. She couldn’t remember what she had done with it. Was it in the pocket of her jacket? Which jacket had she worn earlier? She began to feverishly search the jacket pockets, putting the bottle and the knife temporarily down on the floor.
Suddenly the door burst open, stopped only from opening fully by the chain. She watched in horror as the business end of a pair of wire cutters appeared and snipped the chain holding the door with ease.
She rushed to pick up the knife but the man was upon her before she could grasp it. He slammed the door shut and proceeded to manhandle her into the living room.
She began to scream for help and he punched her roughly in the solar plexus, knocking the air out of her.
He pulled a chair out from under the little table where she ate breakfast and began to tie her to it.
Once she was fully restrained she began to scream again. The man produced a plastic shopping bag and made as if to place it over her head. She began to plead with him, begging him not to kill her. He put his finger to his lips to indicate that she must remain silent if she wanted to live, and once she had fallen to a quiet sobbing, he began to explore the flat, and rummage through her possessions.
The man gradually assembled a collection of small valuables on the table next to her, including her jewellery, most of which was in fact worth very little, some money, her phone and a camera.
Finally he swept these items into a bag.
Then he took the plastic bag in his hands again.
He was about to place the bag on her head when a noise caught his attention: a scratching, scrabbling sound at the door.
He froze, again putting his finger to his lips to indicate that Angela should remain silent.
Instead, she screamed: “Help! Help me! In here!”
The man pulled the bag over her head, then there was a thump at the door. Before tying the bag around her neck as he intended, he went to the door to see who was there, picking up the chopping knife from where Angela had dropped it.
Suddenly the door burst open and there stood a blank-faced thickly-set man wearing a slight smile. Sam. The man stabbed at Sam with the knife, but Sam caught his wrist with cat-like reflexes. The man tried to free his wrist and Sam’s other hand found his throat and began to squeeze. The man gasped. Sam’s strength was positively inhuman.
The man began to see stars first, and then blackness.
Sam lumbered over to Angela, who whimpered, paralysed with fear. Sam removed the bag from her head and methodically untied her.
“Who are you?” she said, reassured by the sight of the unmoving body of the man on the floor, but Sam made no reply. Instead, he took the chair in his hands and raised it above the man.
The man awakened, gasping for air, only to see Sam bring the chair down on his legs, breaking them.
Angela grabbed the bag where the man had put her things, pulled out her phone and called the police.
Sam began to quietly amble off.
“Wait!” Angela shouted, but instead he disappeared silently out of her door.
The man turned out of be a Steven Peterson of 25 Bellside Close, Brinecliff. He was soon convicted of the three murders, and police were in no doubt that he was also responsible for the second incident, in which he certainly would have murdered Sarah Smith had he not been interrupted.
Sam was hailed as a hero, but he was an unsettling hero. It was hard for people to understand that his obsession was with doors, not with anything more nefarious. For a while public opinion briefly turned against him, then a TV channel interviewed Dr. Jennings, and his explanation drew public opinion, which is always intensely fickle, sharply and strongly back on Sam’s side.
Sam still lives in Brinecliff but now with considerably more support from carers and psychiatrists, including Dr. Jennings himself. During the day he can often be seen wandering the streets, sometimes standing still, observing closed doors, other times picking up random items in the street and perusing them at length. He eats and drinks in local cafes at no charge, and to this day locals will stop and talk with him, often thanking him for keeping them safe, at other times insisting on being photographed with him.
Some refer to him as “the Door Man”.
It is unclear whether Sam’s habit of roaming about and standing in front of doors at night has continued. The police and Dr. Jennings insist it has been curbed, but from time to time, when the locals imagine they hear faint scratchings at their doors, they will say to each other, “It’s the Door Man. Bless ‘im!”
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