Stories from the Front Line: The Man Who Wasn't There

A little pre-Halloween true story for you!

Many years ago, when I was still a special constable, I was out on foot patrol, alone, on a housing estate. I was walking down a long, straight road of houses, all in darkness. Parked cars lined the right-hand side of the road; an open field ran along the left. It was a clear, crisp night with a proper chill in it — I could see my own breath — but I was warm in the uniform and wide awake, enjoying my own company in the quiet night.

Then a movement ahead caught my eye. I saw, quite clearly, a stooped figure half-run across the road and drop down behind a parked car. There was nowhere for them to go without me seeing, so I carried on at the same unhurried pace, eyes fixed on the spot, and as I arrived, I gave it the full cinema treatment: the approach, the pause, the look down between the cars.

To see… nothing. Nobody there.

I searched that patch of tarmac and grass for a good fifteen minutes, and found no one, no footsteps in the damp grass, no sign at all that anybody had been there except I knew there had been - I’d seen them.

That's the part nobody warns you about. I'd love to give you a tidy ending — a teenager with a bag of weed, a drunk who'd crawled under a van, an urban fox after dustbin scraps — because that's how it goes nine times out of ten. But not this time. This thing was upright and stooped, moving like a man in a hurry.

I didn’t tell anyone. What would I say? What would they think? There was nothing to do but walk on and leave it where it belonged, in the small file of things I saw and can't explain - even now, 30 years later.

Writers ask me to help them build in realism, and the truthful answer is that a copper's night is mostly unremarkable — but every so often the unexplained creeps in.