My client, Dennis was laid out on the chaise longue in my office staring up blankly at the ceiling.

For some background, Dennis was a client who’d been brought in from a maximum security prison, though he had no past criminal record. We were trying to get to the bottom of what had happened to the mysterious ‘man on Brighton beach’ as they were calling him. Even though the incident in question happened close to another famous monument.

The man had his head stoved completely in during a fight which happened in the midst of a terrible storm. His face was unrecognisable, and his teeth were all so broken that no dental records could be taken. We did find a whole lot of Dennis’ DNA under his fingernails.

The man’s own DNA came back as various admixtures of Northern European, but despite the abundance of DNA testing he’d never had any kind of near relative in the police, or in any commercial DNA company databases.

He also had no fingerprints. They hadn’t been filed off, the unidentified man had Adermatoglyphia. A rare condition that prevents the formation of finger prints.

So far, so implausible.

This was the fifth time I’d seen Dennis. A very normal man, a bus driver who’d lived the most banal life. Only to now be caught up in one of the crimes of the decade.

This poor man swears blind he doesent know what happened. His story today is as consistent as the last time, and the time before, and the time before that.

He’d started to have these strange dreams. Or perhaps they were verging on nightmares.

Some dark figure, who was obviously a man, but with a face he couldn’t make out. It’s always like that in dreams.

All he remembers is this man was hostile, he followed him around and it’s as if wherever this person was, it felt very far away but he was going to find him.

He was following Dennis around the dreamworld. Stalking him, and popping up in his dreams. Sometimes in the distance and sometimes ominously, smotheringly close.

It was a strong presence that never quite seemed to touch him.

As time drew on though this presence in dreams got strong enough to the point that Dennis wasn’t sleeping.

That ominous and terrifying dream world was beginning to overlap into his waking hours. The darkness seemed to follow him. The aura of the man was being felt as he went about his daily life.

One day about six or seven weeks ago he’d been driving during a storm, and this is all corroborated by CCTV. He said he saw a man in the distance across the park as he drove by Brighton Pavillion.

‘It was Dusk and the sky was a very dark grey. The odd lightning bolt came down and the thunder was deafening, it really went through me’ he said.

‘And then what happened?’

He looked up at the ceiling and his eyes glistened, welled up, then tears started to roll down his face.

He let out a smaller pained squeal and started sobbing as he always did when having to recall the moment he saw the man.

‘He must have been 100 metres away, maybe more, but I felt him. He was staring directly at me with these big wide eyes and he looked ANGRY. He growled, or he made the face like when he let out those low pitched growls in my dreams.’

‘And then what?’

Dennis sniffed and snivelled through his sobs

‘He ran towards me, he ran so fast and then I don’t, I, I just don’t remember what happened’.

The local CCTV cameras and the CCTV cameras on the bus tell a very different story.

None of the cameras can explain why the face of the unknown man can never be caught clearly in frame, or why he ran so supernaturally fast towards the bus. He covered 150 metres in six seconds.

When he and our sobbing bus driver engaged one another in a blurry battle royale, anything they hit was either smashed or dented.

Dennis says the fight felt like a dream, like a fight they should have had in a dream. Except it was real. A real nightmare for this poor man who had swapped 8 hours a day in his little bus driver’s box for a cell that was scarcely 12 times larger. 24 hours a day.