Teresa Cannon | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 5, 1996

Teresa Cannon has sent us a photocopy of a three page comic strip called “The strange story: The one who got away”, which appeared in Tammy Girls Annual 1982, published by PIC Magazines Ltd.

A truck has a puncture on a bleak moor. AS the driver and hs daughter are repairing it, a prison warder approaches with an escaped convict in his custody. Their dress is old-fashioned and the warder demands they drive to Fleetwood, a prison that had been pulled down several years before.

The passengers’ destination turns out not to be the prison but a fancy dress party being hosted by the chief constable. When the truck driver’s daughter tells the chief constable that she had thought the two men were ghosts, he replies:

“Ghosts, eh? Now that’s strange. Well about fifty years ago – almost to the day, in fact – a prisoner escaped from Fleetwood. He was the only one who was never recaught… A year after he escaped someone else admitted committing the crime our escapee was put inside for. If he’d really got away, he’d have shown up for his pardon, but he never did, so I reckon he lost his life trying to cross the moors.”

He goes on to say that he started by hitching a lift in a truck, but was seen by a young girl and ra away when the truck was stopped.

“Crikey” says the driver’s daughter. She remembers that she saw a second person in convict uniform get in the back of the truck. Looking out of the window, she sees the second “convict” get out of the back of the truck. When she mentions this friend to the other two passengers, they deny all knowledge of him. Only the two of them had set out for the party.

“B-but who did I see then?”

The girl’s question is answered in the final frame of the strip by the narrator, a man in evening dress holding a glass of wine. Addressing the reader, he says:

“Perhaps it was simply someone gatecrashing the party. But I don’t think so – and neither do you, do you?”