Chapter 1 The Tape

## Ilse The file is nine pages. I know because I have counted it four times, in two decades, on two occasions that had nothing to do with each other, which is the sort of thing a person does when they are trying to work out whether they were thorough. It opens on a form. Carbide Creek Constabulary, C Division, since the county reorganised in 1974 and gave everything a letter. Then a sheet with a name typed in the box marked SURNAME, and the name is ALDERCOTT, N, and there is nothing else in the box because the form is designed for a first name and whoever filled it in had a first name and did not think it worth writing. Nerissa. That is not on the form. Nerissa is what her sister used, and what her mother used, and it is what three people at the works used, and it is not what anybody official used, and by the time anybody official used anything at all she had been gone for four days. Here is what is on the nine pages. Page one: the report of her going missing, made by her sister, aged nine, at ten past six in the evening on the fourteenth of January 1998, in language that I am not going to reproduce because it would be unkind, and that I have thought about for a long time. Page two: a custody record, listing what was taken from the flat on Station Road on the fifteenth. Nine items, of which six are clothes, one is a purse, one is a Talisman, and the ninth is a wage packet from the Alburn Alloys works for the fortnight ending the second, unopened, retained. Page three: a statement from a foreman named Collard about a dispute on the morning of the twelfth, which is three pages long, and which in my judgement contains everything anybody was ever going to find. Page four: a statement from a man named Pease, four hours long, taken in a room with no window, in the terminology of 1998 which was different and worse. Page five: a search record. Two hundred and eleven man-hours. Eleven volunteers. A request for a dogs team, granted on the nineteenth, declined on the twenty-second. Page six: weather. Three days of it, typed off a sheet, because somebody had a ruler in their office and the answer to why a girl walked into a river in January in a town with one bridge was, in nineteen ninety-eight, partly about the temperature. Page seven: a property receipt. One item, E-9114, a dictaphone cassette, twenty-two minutes, found on the fourteenth at approximately two in the afternoon, in a ditch, at Mile Marker Nine, on the north bank, six hundred metres downstream of the Kellard Bridge. It is described as being inside a boot. Page eight: an endorsement in a different hand, in blue ink, dated the sixteenth of January, which says the item is booked as property and not as evidence, and is signed by a person whose rank I have never been told and who is, I am fairly sure, no longer in the service. Page nine is blank except for a reference and a date, and the reference is the same reference as the property receipt, and the date is the eleventh of February 1998, and there is nothing written on it. I have the nine pages. I have had them in a box file in a garage in a village eleven miles from Carbide Creek for six years, since the service disposed of the paper and I declined to dispose of the paper, which caused a small amount of interest at the time and none at all since. The item is not in the box file. The item is in a place I am not going to name, because naming it would be a rule breach, and because I would like to be in a position to keep not naming it for as long as I live. I retired in 2019. I am sixty-eight. I have been a detective for thirty-one years and a sergeant for nine of them, and I worked in C Division from 1994 to 2002, and the Aldercott file was mine from the fourteenth of January 1998 until the twenty-second of April of the same year, at which point it was reclassified and given to a man called Quillan who I have not spoken to since about 2001 and who I understand has been dead since 2016. I want to say three things about that, and then I am going to stop, because three is the most I have ever said about it in public and it is more than I said at the time. The first is that I did not play the tape. The second is that the decision not to play it was not mine, was properly made, was recorded, and was correct. The third is that I have never been able to make those two facts sit next to each other in my head, and that after twenty-eight years they are still not next to each other, and that the not being next to each other is the entire architecture of my life. There is a piece of a thing that is well known among people who do this work, and I have never said it out loud to a journalist and I am not going to now, which is: sometimes the file is the answer and there is nothing behind the file, and you spend thirty years being ashamed of how much you wanted there to be. I want to be fair to the girl. She was twenty-four. She left the flat on the fourteenth with a wage packet in her bag and she was not in the water until the fifteenth, which the pathologist gave as a window of fourteen to thirty hours after immersion, and the fourteen is the one that has kept me awake since 1998, because it puts her in the water on the fourteenth, and the fourteenth is the day her sister says she saw her go. I have never gone back to the ditch. I have driven past it. It is a drainage cut on the north bank and there is a fence and a gate and about forty metres of it is above the water at low flow, and in 1998 the bank was not reinforced, and it is now. I saw the reinforcement in about 2004. I did not go into the yard. I have not been in the yard.