‘This was it. The wreck we’d been searching for’
Richard: Bryn stood under a dripping hedge, waving like we were long-lost cousins reunited at a funeral. “Welcome to paradise!” he shouted as I stepped out of the camper, my raincoat flapping in the wind.
I’d come to view the old stone farmhouse Bryn was selling: Fox Hill in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. The place looked as if someone had packed up in a hurry … in around 1978. The front door jammed halfway and Bryn gave it a confident shoulder-barge, as if this was part of the tour. Inside, ceiling panels had collapsed, wallpaper was peeling in long curls and the stairs looked like a booby trap. The kitchen smelled faintly of badgers and despair.
“You’ve got to see it with your heart, not your eyes,” Bryn said cheerfully, leading me through the wreckage. “It’s all in the bones.”
But then we stepped through the back door. The change was instant. The yard was uneven and overgrown with nettles, but beyond it the land opened up like a secret you weren’t supposed to find. Water meadows rolled out in every direction, white with wood anemones. A narrow river, the Cleddau, wound its way through the fields. The woodland that bordered it stood tall and watchful.
I stopped dead, my breath caught. For the first time in months, maybe years, my mind went still.
“Bloody hell,” I said quietly.
Bryn stood beside me, hands on hips, grinning like a man who’d just witnessed a conversion. “See?”
And I did. I saw it clear as day – my partner, Amanda, here, barefoot in the meadow, laughing. Archie, our bedlington/whippet-cross, running through the long grass. Mornings with birdsong instead of traffic.
This was it. The wreck we’d been searching for.
That evening, sitting in our camper with the rain still tapping at the roof, I phoned Amanda. My voice shook – a mix of excitement, disbelief and exhaustion. “You need to see this place,” I told her. “The house is … indescribable. But the land? It’s like Wales has been saving it for us.”
We moved into Fox Hill in January 2018. Soon, the real work began. Drainage was first – or, rather, the lack of it. The ground around the house was permanently saturated, more bog than garden. So out came the diggers, slicing trenches into the sodden earth as we laid new pipes, gravelled channels and soaked through every pair of socks we owned.
Then came the roof. Or roofs. Slates were missing, chimneys crumbling, flues gummed up with decades of soot and jackdaw debris. Outbuildings were rebuilt, one by one, until the place became less like a haunted relic and more like a real, living home again. Despite everything the Welsh weather threw at us – and it threw plenty – we kept going.
We bought a tired but beautiful 1974 red Leyland Atlantean double-decker bus, and set up camp in it until the house was ready to live in.
Some of the land from the old farm hadn’t been sold with the house, as Bryn had split it into three parcels. It didn’t take long before Amanda had set her heart on the surrounding paddocks. One afternoon, as she and Bryn stood by the gate, she told him how much the land meant to us, how we wanted to restore it and nurture the wildlife there. He gave her a solemn nod and said, “The land is yours, Amanda. As soon as you have the money, I’ll sell it to you.”
‘A sleek blue BMW rolled up the track. A tall man stepped out’
Amanda: It was one of those Welsh summer mornings that made weeks of rain and wind seem like distant rumours. The bus felt like home now, a strange, wheeled sanctuary on the hill. I’d made bread while Richard had gone off to buy a caravan for my grown-up daughter Grace to sleep in when she visited. It was the first time I’d been there on my own.
I was midway through choosing floral duvets and enamel crockery for the caravan when the sound of tyres crunching pulled my attention away. A sleek blue BMW had rolled up the track. A tall man stepped out – slim build, jeans a little too loose, a baseball cap pulled down over his face.
“Hi. I was hoping to look at the land for sale,” he said, his voice quiet and unsure.
Ah. Bryn’s fields. I offered to show him up there. Bryn now lived a fair drive away and this young man didn’t seem like trouble – if anything, he looked a bit lost. He barely glanced at the land. Instead, he peppered me with questions. How long had we been here? Where had we come from? What work had we done before?
Somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned we were interested in buying the field next to us if it hadn’t been sold yet. That seemed to flick a switch. “I’ll put in an offer,” he said, almost too quickly. Then he was off, back to his car, phone glued to his ear.
I messaged Richard and told him a “gentle young man” had been to see the land. “Ex-paratrooper,” I wrote. “Seems harmless enough.”
The next morning, just as I was making coffee after a dog walk, a Land Rover pulled in. Two people stepped out – the same young man, along with a petite woman in a navy cardigan and blue dress, her lipstick perfectly applied and blond hair swept up. Her heels sank slightly in the gravel as they approached.
“My name’s Francis,” he said. “This is my wife, Cassie.” The couple said they were heading to the estate agent to make an offer on the land. Then Cassie turned, almost like an afterthought.
“Would you like to go for dinner sometime? We could chat about which fields you’re interested in.”
Richard was up on the roof, fixing fascia boards. I called out, “We’ve been asked out for dinner. What do you think?” He raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “Why not? Could be nice to actually go somewhere.”
Two days later, Bryn popped by – looking a little sheepish, perhaps. I put the kettle on and made coffee. Then, as casually as anything, he mentioned he’d changed his mind about selling the paddocks to us directly. Instead, he’d agreed to sell all the remaining land to a single buyer, a man who, he said, had funds ready and waiting.
The “nice young man” turned out to be Francis Collins. And, suddenly, Cassie’s suggestion about “chatting over dinner” made sense. Bryn had already accepted their offer.
The meal was … fine. Cassie talked nonstop about dogs, houses and their life before Wales. Francis said very little. I remember thinking he looked tired, brittle and distant. But Cassie had that spark that draws people in. She kept praising Francis, saying how people always warmed to him.
When we got home that night, I said to Richard, “Well, that was a bit odd. But sweet, I suppose.”
Then the messages began rolling in, little things at first – photos of their dogs, questions about the weather, what I was baking. Then came longer ones – musings on life, past pain, stories that never quite added up but were delivered with such emotional weight that I never questioned them.
A week later, Francis set up a WhatsApp group called Hermit Support Society. It made me laugh. “They’re calling us the bus hermits now,” I told Richard.
He chuckled. “Could be worse.”
Francis seemed to gravitate towards Richard, always asking for advice on DIY, plumbing, roofing. “I never had a proper dad,” he told Richard once. “You’re probably the closest I’ve had.”
Francis and Cassie lived in a village nearly four miles away. But by late August, there was hardly a day we didn’t see or hear from them. One evening, I sat down on the bus’s sofa with a glass of red and picked up my phone. A message from Francis pinged through. “Hi guys. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent. Could we have a quick chat? Bit of a financial hiccup.”
A minute later, another. “It’s just that the land sale is so close to completion, everything’s in place, but some of my funds are temporarily frozen. Offshore accounts. Nightmare timing.”
I frowned. “I just need to get the final bit paid so Bryn doesn’t pull out. Would you be willing to help?”
We slept on it, then talked it through the next morning. With some hesitation but no real alarm, we agreed. It was £10,000 – not the full amount – and we’d get a signed agreement from Francis saying it was a deposit against the land we intended to buy from him.
In December, news of the completion on Bryn’s land came through and we arranged to draw down some funds from our investment. A second payment of £15,000 was sent to Francis to cover the two little paddocks.
“Can we get the Land Registry sorted?” Richard asked Francis.
“Sure.”
‘The messages changed. Suddenly, there were images of weapons, crossbows, machetes …’
Richard: It was mid-April 2019 and the deal on the five acres still hadn’t gone through; there hadn’t been a whisper from Francis about the Land Registry since the turn of the year. Every now and again, I’d try to press it gently – just a casual nudge – but I’d either be ignored or deflected with charm.
I told myself to be patient. After all, we’d been friends for the best part of a year now. We understood that Francis and Cassie had paid £190,000 for the land; we’d stood in the field with champagne and laughter when they had completed on it. Francis had assured us everything would be sorted soon. But the silence was starting to stretch and, in the back of my mind, it was tightening like wire.
Francis and Cassie had treated themselves to a small all-terrain vehicle (ATV), a nippy little thing that zipped across fields with Cassie perched up high like a festival queen. Out on the land, I’d sometimes hear the whine of the ATV in the distance, weaving along the boundary lines like a sentry on patrol. Cassie had mentioned something about building a house on the upper fields – a pipe dream, given the planning restrictions – but now they were obsessing over the public footpath that ran through their land. Francis, especially, had been fixated since a recent incident when, incensed by ramblers coming through, he’d removed the council sign and locked the gate.
One day Amanda headed back to the house to make lunch while I carried on working in the meadow. A little later she returned, carrying a couple of rustic sandwiches wrapped in cloth and a bottle of cold squash. But something in her expression was off. She handed me the food, then crouched beside me.
“Their ATV’s parked in our garden,” she said quietly. “Right on the lawn by the back of the house.”
I blinked. “What?”
“It’s weird, isn’t it? It’s like … I don’t know. Like a statement.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I just sat there with the sandwich in my hands, the sun warm on my back and a cold shiver crawling up my spine.
“They’re testing boundaries,” I said at last.
Amanda decided to message Cassie gently, mentioning how she often popped out to hang the washing in her pyjamas and that it might be awkward having the ATV so close. The reply was cool, if not chilly. Polite, but distant. But the shift was undeniable.
After that, the WhatsApp messages began to change. There were suddenly images of weapons, crossbows, machetes and crude shooters they had fashioned from pipework and wire. One photo, seemingly a casual snap of their hallway, revealed a baseball bat propped against a coat rack and an archery bow hanging above a crate of arrows.
“He’s not right,” I muttered one evening, after a particularly disturbing clip. “There’s something going on in his head, and it’s not just stress.”
Another odd message came through one Saturday. Cassie was bringing a friend up to walk the footpath alongside our land, she said. We replied warmly, no issue there. But that evening, Amanda spotted something strange. Cassie’s WhatsApp profile photo had changed. It was now an image of our water meadow.
Amanda raised an eyebrow. “That’s our riverbank. She must have gone over the fence.”
She messaged Cassie: had the footpath gate been locked? Cassie replied that yes, it had been tied shut, so she took her friend to our water meadow instead. That was it. No apology. No thanks. Just a calm admission of trespass, as if our boundaries didn’t matter. That evening, we sat on the steps of the bus, silence thick between us.
“She wants us to react,” Amanda said. “They both do.”
Soon after this came the message. “We’re not selling you the land any more. We’ll return your money.”
It quickly became clear they had no intention of doing that. Months later, my stomach lurched when I noticed Francis’s WhatsApp profile picture had changed. There it was: a gleaming Harley-Davidson, polished to perfection, chrome glinting in the light. Beneath it, a caption in his casual, mocking tone: “Just bought a new bike, cheers bus wankers.”
Within seconds, I’d Googled the model: £25,000. Our money. I’d trusted Francis. We both had. We believed in their story, two misfits looking for peace, for community. What we hadn’t seen was that their need ran deeper than friendship. They needed control. They needed attention.
At night, I could still hear the ATV in the distance, circling their land, the engine whining like a warning. And then there were the dogs. Freya and Odin, their two sleek dobermans, had once been just part of the backdrop, racing across the fields, playful and carefree. But, lately, their presence felt different – less like pets and more like part of the armoury. In some of the videos Francis sent, the dogs were filmed barking aggressively towards the hedgerows, straining against his command.
At 9.51pm, Amanda squeezed toothpaste on to her brush, turned the tap, and then … nothing – dry silence. “Babe, there’s no water!” she called, her voice taut with panic.
I felt a grim certainty settle. “I thought he might. He’s cut the pipe.”
By then, we were well beyond the point of hoping things would settle down. The police were already involved, and every fresh act of harassment was being added to an increasingly disturbing record. We followed protocol, dialling 101. Twenty minutes later, a figure appeared, uniformed and steady.
“PC Rory Pearce, at your service,” he said, voice calm. “What seems to be the problem?”
“You can’t be without water,” he told us after a quick explanation. “I’ll escort you to find the fault.”
The last light of day hung in the sky as we traced the pipe across Francis’s land, scanning for puddles or bursts. “Maybe he hasn’t vandalised it,” I offered, clinging to hope.
“Here we go,” Rory called, pointing. A small fountain bubbled from the grass. We returned to the bus and I scrambled for connectors and pipe.
The next night, I was jolted awake by the growl of an engine. Peering out, I saw Cassie and Francis driving across the field, straight towards the section where we had made our repairs the night before. Moments later, I heard Amanda’s voice.
“No water. They’ve done it again.”
Amanda dialled 101 with trembling fingers. Police officers arrived swiftly and I gathered tools once more.
The water pipe had become Francis’s new target. Before he bought the fields, and before we bought the farmhouse and paddocks, the land had been one holding. Bryn, thinking he’d get a better price, split it, which left our main water supply buried beneath what was now Francis’s ground.
Even on a Sunday, I found the parts. I patched the pipe again, sweat and anger dripping in equal measure. The effort drained us all, officers included.
Amanda returned home one afternoon, her step heavy. Francis was putting up a fence. Not a hedge, not post and wire, not the kind of weathered timber that belongs in the landscape. This was palisade security fencing: two metres high, stretching the length of the boundary where his land pressed against ours. It was a continuous wall of galvanised steel, each section topped with jagged spikes that glinted in the sun like rows of bayonets. It was the kind of fencing you’d expect around an industrial estate or a scrapyard. To countryside eyes, it was an obscenity, a scar across open farmland. This wasn’t just fencing. It was a message: You are trapped.
Soon Francis and Cassie fixed metal hoops around the steel uprights and strung up a long sheet of black silage plastic. It was designed to be a noise machine. With the lightest gust of wind, the sheet thundered and rattled like a drumskin, a constant, grating backdrop designed to fray nerves.
As the noise and fear mounted, the civil case we had begun over the land we had paid for progressed at a snail’s pace. Francis lied at every opportunity, denying the land deal then claiming repayment had already been made, despite our proof to the contrary. The solicitor’s bills were climbing far beyond his first estimate.
And still Francis found ways to tighten the screws. One morning, an email arrived. Amanda opened it, trembling as she read aloud: “Did you see my visitor today? He was there to check out the fields. He passed you in the silver Audi. I got approval for a campsite. It will overlook your special glade. Enjoy your privacy for the next month or few 🙂 I never stop, I never lose.”
The words were a knife twist.
‘“Stay inside,” the police handler said. “Officers are en route”’
Amanda: One morning, Francis was at the huge fence bashing a piece of steel against the uprights as if he was playing some obscene percussion instrument. He tossed the bar aside, slid into his BMW and roared off down the lane. The silence that followed wasn’t relief; it was heavier than the noise itself.
The Collinses returned a short time later in the ATV and climbed out as if they were arriving at a fete. Francis set a hessian sack against the ATV’s wheel. Cassie stood a pace back, glancing up and down the line of fence as if she was checking whether we were watching.
We were. I didn’t understand what I was looking at until he reached into the vehicle and lifted out a crossbow. Then another. For a few seconds, everything in me refused to accept the image – crossbows here, in this quiet field where the loudest sound should be a rook’s complaint or a gate latch knocking in the wind. Then the first thunk landed in the sack.
They reloaded from their pockets with practised, twitchy movements, like they’d done it a hundred times in private and were ready now for the performance. A second thunk. Then a third. They weren’t firing bolts, but something smaller, maybe bullets or balls.
“It’s not normal,” I said when they finally drove away. “It’s not normal to play with weapons at your neighbours’ fence.”
Richard nodded, slowly. “He wanted us to see.”
After dinner in the bus, I wanted nothing more than to pretend, just for a little while, that we were living a normal life. Richard had set up the old television in the front of the house, in what we jokingly called the “lounge”, although it was really a room half-stripped of wallpaper with bare floorboards and draughts sneaking under the door. When the credits rolled, I let out a small sigh and stepped back into the bus. I climbed the narrow staircase, and I could feel a rush of air down the stairwell. I flicked the switch at the top – and froze.
The windows – two of them – shattered. Spiderweb cracks spread across the glass like veins and, on the duvet on the floor, tiny shards glittered in the light. Scattered among them were small, round 10mm ball bearings – cold, heavy, deliberate.
Richard came running up behind me, but I barely noticed. My whole body was shaking, my knees buckled. All I could think was, What if he’d been in bed? What if I had come up here sooner? We would have been hit.
“I thought they’d gone,” I whispered, voice cracking. “I thought it was safe.” But it wasn’t safe. It was never safe. And in that moment, I realised our last illusion had shattered along with the glass.
Richard grabbed the phone and his voice cracked as he gave the address – there was no need; they knew exactly where we were. I could hear the calm efficiency of the handler on the other end, but her steady tone only made my panic feel sharper. “Stay inside. Officers are en route.”
Suddenly the drive filled with blue strobes that turned the valley into a theatre of flickering shadows. For what felt like an eternity, the armed officers prowled the perimeter, their radios crackling in clipped bursts. And then, as quickly as they’d come, they were gone, leaving us alone, nerves shredded.
The next morning, the police came back. They collected the two ball bearings from the bus floor upstairs and began combing the gravel outside. We realised then that several must have struck the bodywork, too.
The ball bearings were sent for DNA testing. Weeks later, the answer came: nothing. No prints, no DNA. It was another attack that he had slipped away with, unscathed. Our hearts sank. Frustration burned hot in the pit of my stomach and the police looked just as defeated.
‘You’ve no idea what they’re capable of’
Richard: The rhythm of our days narrowed into survival. We did what we could to keep things normal – feeding the dogs, fixing fences, cooking dinner – while the Collinses carried on circling like vultures that had forgotten how to leave. Any quiet never lasted long.
When the smell hit, it was sharp, chemical, wrong. Fuel, thick in the air. For a split second, I thought maybe the generator had leaked, or the bus’s old fuel tank had split in the cold. I stepped outside, the morning still pale and misted.
“Christ,” I muttered, crouching down to check beneath the bus. No leak. No wet patch. Just that acrid smell clinging to everything. I stood, walked around the front and stopped dead.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “What’s he done?”
The gravel was blackened and there was a scorched patch of ground near the bus door. And, lying a few feet away, were three petrol bombs: one had exploded, one had smashed and not ignited, and one was intact.
For a moment, I just stood there, heart thudding in my ears, trying to take in what I was seeing. This wasn’t vandalism. It was an attack. The bus, our beautiful bus, was scarred. The red paint had blistered and bubbled where the heat had licked at her sides. The panels that used to gleam were now pockmarked, dented and blackened. The plywood windows, rough replacements for the glass Francis had shot out months earlier, were streaked with soot.
I looked at where the petrol bombs had landed, just feet from the fuel tank and the bottled gas pipe that ran under the chassis. A few inches closer and she’d have gone up like a fireball. Francis didn’t know but a few days earlier we’d moved into the house. He hadn’t been trying to scare us. He’d been trying to kill us.
My brain was flicking through some kind of survival manual: preserve the scene, don’t touch evidence, do something – anything – to stop shaking. Then I forced myself to dial 999. The operator knew before I even said my name.
It was strange how hope could arrive dressed in the uniform of a police email. I read the message twice before I let myself believe it. At last, the police had them. The email from DC Jason Thomas spelled it all out, their bail conditions in bullet points that felt both cold and glorious:
Not to enter Pembrokeshire
Not to contact you directly or indirectly
Curfew between 21:00 and 06:00
I wanted to believe this was the turning point, that maybe, finally, the worst was behind us. But I also knew the Collinses. I’d seen what they were capable of when cornered.
Then, on 3 June 2020, came the news that we had been waiting for: Francis had been charged. Over the phone, DC Matt Briggs read out the list:
Arson
Possession of a firearm without a certificate
Possession of ammunition without a certificate
Sending electronic communications with intent to cause distress or anxiety
Stalking involving fear of violence or serious alarm or distress
Sending a threatening message
Possession of a controlled drug – Class B (amphetamine).
The guns and drugs had been found when the Collinses’ property was raided. They had sent thousands of threatening messages – even horrific references to Amanda’s daughter Grace.I couldn’t speak. Amanda was standing beside me, hand over her mouth.
“Is he remanded?” I finally asked.
“Yes,” Briggs said. “He’s behind bars.”
I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a complex wave of emotion – relief, disbelief, grief and exhaustion all mixed into one.
The night before the court hearing felt heavier than any we’d known. Neither of us slept much. In the waiting room the minutes dragged. Amanda sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap, staring at the clock. Finally Mr Scrivens, the CPS prosecutor, swept in, robes billowing, expression tight. He dropped into the chair opposite us.
“Well,” he said, “you won’t be giving evidence today.” He exhaled sharply. “The jury have been sent away,” he said. “A deal’s been struck between myself and the defence. Collins has entered a plea. The judge has agreed to his immediate release.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand. Then Amanda spoke, voice cracking. “Wait – what? Released? How?”
Scrivens didn’t meet our eyes. “He’s pleaded guilty to the malicious communications and the petrol bomb incidents. The judge considers the seven months he’s already served on remand sufficient.”
I felt my throat close. Two years of evidence, thousands of messages, all the fear, the threats, the nights we slept with one eye open – gone in a blink. No jury. No testimony. No voice.
“He’s pleaded guilty,” Scrivens said. “The restraining order will remain in place.”
“That’s not justice,” I said. “That’s paperwork.” He didn’t argue. He just looked tired.
“The court believes they’re moving to Devon,” he added. “They no longer pose a threat.”
I laughed, a sharp, hollow sound. “You’ve no idea what they’re capable of.”
Amanda’s voice broke again. “Can we apply for compensation? For what he’s done to us – to our lives, our business …”
He cut her off. “Were you physically injured?”
She blinked. “No, but we’re mentally destroyed. He stole from us. He threatened to kill us. All these weeks of waiting for our time have been wasted …”
“Then I’m afraid,” he said, “you’re entitled to nothing.”
Saturday 11 September 2021. Autumn was quietly pushing at the edges of summer, the air cooler, the light softer. The phone rattled against the counter, the sound oddly sharp in the calm.
“It’s Dyfed-Powys police. We’re just checking that you and Amanda are both all right.”
Something inside me went cold. The voice was polite, almost routine, but underneath it was a note I recognised too well, the kind reserved for bad news.
“Yes, we’re fine,” I said slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“There’s been an incident at the Collinses’ house in Devon.”
For a heartbeat, all I heard was the faint buzz of the radio, the dogs shifting in their sleep and the kettle beginning to tick as it cooled.
“Local police have recovered the bodies of three animals and two humans.”
“Francis and Cassie?”
“Yes, sir.”
I sat down. The floor seemed to tilt slightly.
“What … what happened?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say more at this time,” the voice continued gently. “We just needed to check that you’re both safe.”
I should have felt relief. Instead what came was confusion, disbelief and then, underneath it all, grief. Not for what they’d done, but for what we had lost of ourselves.
We never did learn what truly drove them into such darkness, what pressure was being placed on them and from whom. At the time of their deaths, we were aware that the serious and organised crime department had been investigating Francis, but any answers that investigation may have held died with him. What remained were questions that, to this day, have never been fully resolved.
They were poorly, not just in mind, but in spirit, caught in something none of us could see or understand. Whatever it was, it consumed them, and in the end, it claimed them. Their deaths were ruled a double suicide. In the quiet that followed, we tried to make sense of it all. Sometimes we’d talk about it softly over breakfast, sometimes we’d sit outside in silence, letting the wind and birdsong fill the gaps that words couldn’t reach. We were changed, both of us. Scarred, yes, but also sharpened, more awake to the fragility of things – the land, the sky, the small mercies we’d once taken for granted. As the autumn light faded over the hills, Amanda stood beside me on the field we’d once fought so hard for, her hand in mine. The grass shimmered gold and a red kite wheeled lazily overhead.
“Maybe now,” she said, her voice soft but sure, “the land can heal.”
I looked out over the valley, at the place that had nearly broken us and yet somehow saved us, and nodded.
“Maybe we all can,” I said. And for the first time in years, I believed it.
