Chapter 14 Playback

## Tobias The tape was played on the sixteenth of October 2025 at about four in the afternoon in a solicitor's office in a converted house in Derby, and there were four people in the room, and I have decided to describe it, and I have been unable to write this section four times. Let me get the room right first, because the room is part of it. It is a ground-floor room in a building that was a solicitor's office in about 1911 and became a solicitors' office again in 1997, and the room they used is at the back and it has no windows that open, and there is a bookshelf, and there is a table with four chairs at it, and the walls are plaster and one of them has been repaired at some point and is a slightly different colour. The people: Alan Verrow, seventy-one. Hester Dole, the family's solicitor, who is a defence solicitor and who is not acting for anybody in this matter and who came anyway. A man from the county's own archives, who was invited because Alan Verrow insisted that a third party be present and because he has never trusted anybody, including me. And me. The machine: Alan Verrow's younger brother bought it. It is a mains-powered dictation unit, not a cassette deck, and it is a model about twelve years old, and it cost eighty-nine pounds, and Alan Verrow has the receipt, and he read the receipt out loud to a room of three people when he put it on the table. Before the tape was played, the man from the archives asked, and this is a transcript of what he asked, because he has been very careful about it and he wrote it down afterwards: "Before we start. Do you want to stop?" And Alan Verrow said, "No." "Are you sure?" "I've been sure for twenty-eight years and I've had twenty-eight years to change my mind and I haven't, so no." "Would you like me to start it, or would you like to?" "You start it," said Alan Verrow. "I've not been in the room when it's played. I wasn't in the room when it was recorded and I'm not going to be in the room now, and I mean that about my face as much as about anything else, because in October 2025 it is going to be published, and I don't want anybody in this story to be able to say I cried at it." Then the man from the archives pressed play, and I would like to describe what happened, and I am going to do it in a way that is not the way a piece in a newspaper would do it. The first thing that happened is that nobody heard anything, because the machine needed a level and the man from the archives had not set it, and for about eleven seconds of recorded time there was a noise like a river. The second thing that happened is that Alan Verrow was not in the room, and I want to describe this properly because it is the detail I have returned to. The door was open. He was in the corridor, and the corridor is about four feet from the room, and the machine was not loud, and it was turned up to about half. He was standing in the corridor with his back to the doorway. And he was not moving at all. I want to say that accurately: he was not moving, and I have watched a lot of people react to things and I have never seen anybody not move, and he did not move, and the woman from the archives has said the same thing, and she did not know what she was looking at and I did. Third thing: the pencil. At about ninety seconds there is a sound, and it is a sound like somebody tapping a pencil twice on a hard surface, and it happens about twenty-two times in twenty-two minutes, and the woman from the archives asked Hester Dole about it afterwards, in a corridor, and Hester Dole said, "I don't know," and then said, "I'd guess she's drumming on something because she's bored, and I have listened to it about nine times now and it's always in roughly the same place, which is where she'd have a hand if she's got a hand on a table and a pencil in it." And I thought: she's marking time. And then I thought: no. If you're dictating you don't need to mark time, because the machine is a machine. And if you're talking to a machine for twenty-two minutes and you're not talking to a person, then you are rehearsing. You are saying it to the machine because the machine is the only thing in the building that is not going to interrupt you or worry about you or need you to stop. And that is the reading, and I think it is correct, and I have not been able to prove it, and it does not matter, because it is the same either way. Fourth thing, and this is the part I cannot get past. At seven minutes and twenty seconds she says, "I'm not going to. I've thought about it and here is what I've decided. I'm going to do the Wednesday." And at nineteen minutes, Hester Dole — who had never met this woman, who is fifty-four years old and has defended four people in this position and was retained by nobody and came anyway — leaned forward in her chair and put her hand over her mouth. And I did not think anything about that at the time, because I was writing, and I have thought about it about forty times since. Hester Dole has told me, and has asked me not to print this and I am printing it because I am not going to have a decision like that made for me, that her first thought was not about the case. Her first thought was that a twenty-four-year-old woman had recorded, in a boiler room, on a Tuesday in January, the specific decision not to tell the police something, and had then, seven minutes later, gone back to negotiating with herself about a shift. And what Hester Dole said to me in a corridor in Derby in April 2026, and I am writing this exactly as she said it, is: "I've sat in a room with a woman for two hours. She has kept eleven plastic wallets. She has four hundred and eleven pencil crosses in a bank statement. And she is the most prepared witness I have ever met in my life, and I have had to explain to her that the best prepared witness in the world cannot testify about anything, and she said, 'Yes, I know that, I've known that since 1998.' And then she asked me if I would have a cup of tea, and it was a small one, and it was made in about 1990 and it was the best cup of tea I have ever had in a client's house, and I sat on a kitchen table in Carbide Creek and drank it and thought: I have spent twenty-two years in rooms where people want something from me, and that woman wanted nothing, and she had known for twenty-eight years that she would get nothing, and she got the tea ready anyway, because that is what her mother did, and what her sister did, and what she has done every day of her adult life in a house in Aldergate with a coat in a wardrobe."