Chapter 15 Forty Years of Persistence

## Hester I am going to describe a family asking the same question nine times, because I have never seen it done before and because I have come to think that it is the only thing in this entire matter that has actually worked. Here is the list. I have it in a spreadsheet, which I do not normally do, and which I made on the twenty-second of April 2026 at about eleven at night at my kitchen table, and which I have called, and I want it known that I called it, something rude. One: 1998. Two visits by Derbyshire Constabulary to a house in Aldergate, a missing person report, and a statement taken from a nine-year-old about a coat and a ten-minute interval. Two: 1999. A written enquiry from Alan Verrow, who was twenty-three, to the officer then in the case, asking whether the file remained open. The reply, in the officer's own hand, in about forty words, says that the case remains open and that there is nothing further to report at that time. Three: 2004. A second written enquiry from Alan Verrow, now twenty-eight, following the closure of the works, in which he asks — and I am going to quote this because it is the sentence I have returned to most — "whether any member of the family of Nerissa Aldercott has ever been told the name of the person the file names as a suspect." The reply, again forty words, says that no person has been charged and that the file does not name a suspect as such. Four: 2011. A telephone call. Not a letter. Alan Verrow telephoned, and the officer who answered was a different officer, and was, by the sound of him, about twenty-six, and he said, quite kindly, "Sir, I can only tell you what I can see, and what I can see is a file with a reference number and a property receipt, and I am not going to tell you what I think about it." Five: 2016. A letter from Marlie Aldercott to the county, which I have read, and which is nine pages, and which is the best piece of writing produced by anybody in this story, and which I have had to read twice for a completely professional reason and once for a personal one. Six: 2019. A formal request under the Freedom of Information Act for the whole file. This was the one that produced something, and I want to be exact about what it produced: the nine pages, plus a property schedule, plus a note that a dog team had been requested and declined, and a note that the two bolt holes on the property item's location had been — no. Nothing. The bolt holes are in the file of the drainage scheme, and the scheme is a drainage authority, and nobody in 1998 asked a drainage authority about a ditch. Seven: 2019, eleven weeks after the request. A coroner's officer telephoned Marlie Aldercott to say the file had been reviewed, in the ordinary way, and there was nothing to reopen. Eight: 2026, the nineteenth of March. A written application to the coroner, from this firm, on behalf of the family, relying on the coming to light of the transcript of the recording. Refused in writing, in about four hundred words, unimpeachable. Nine: 2026, the twenty-second of April. A letter to the custody review unit, from this firm, on behalf of the family, asking that the item be scheduled for review, and stating — and I wrote this sentence and I would like it recorded that I wrote it and that I would write it again — that the family reserves the right to be notified of the outcome of that review, and asks for the file to be made available to the family at the point of review, and does not ask for the item to be released, and does not suggest that anybody has done anything wrong. That is the list. Nine approaches across twenty-eight years, by two people and one firm, and I want to set out precisely why I believe it has worked, because I have thought about it and I do not think the reason is the reason anybody would expect. It has not worked because of the law. The law has refused in every single instance, correctly, and I have been the one refusing in two of them, and the reasons were good reasons, and I would give the same reasons again. It has worked because of the fourth one. The telephone call in 2011, to a twenty-six-year-old officer who said, "I can only tell you what I can see." Because that officer exists. Because in 2011 there was a young man in a room in a division in Derbyshire who had a thin file open on a screen and had never heard of Carbide Creek, and a seventy-year-old man telephoned him, and was not abusive, and did not shout, and had a surname and a reference number, and the young man gave him a straight answer. And then, eleven years later, in 2022, the reference number is on a piece of paper in the file, and the young man is a detective inspector, and he is not in that division any more, and the number is a route, and the route is walked, and somebody answers it. That is the whole mechanism. It is not a trick and it is not a campaign. It is a reference number in a county system and a family that has kept it, and a young man who told the truth to a stranger in 2011 and has no idea yet that the truth is the load-bearing wall. I have sat in a hundred of these cases. I will tell you what happens in the other ninety-nine. The file goes cold and the family is told the file is closed, and the family accepts that the file is closed, because the word *closed* sounds like the end of a thing, and people cannot tell the difference between a file that is closed because there is nothing in it and a file that is closed because nobody has opened it for a while. And a file that nobody opens is a file that is one telephone call away from being open, and the only thing standing between the two states is whether anybody in the family still knows the number. That is what Marlie Aldercott has. Not a lawyer, not a tape, not a coat in a wardrobe. A reference number, written out about four hundred times in a hardback notebook since 1998, and eleven plastic wallets, and four hundred and eleven pencil crosses in a bank statement, and a habit of asking a stranger a straight question in a corridor. I have told her once, and I will tell her once more, and I have written it here so that it exists in a form she can hand to anybody she likes: the review is going to come. It comes, on average, at intervals of between three and seven years, by a custody officer, as a matter of routine, because that is what reviews are, and because the item is booked as property and property is reviewed and reviewed and reviewed. And when it comes, the file will be nine pages, and the officer will be a stranger, and the officer will have about twenty minutes. And the whole of the twenty minutes turns on one thing, which is that the officer's desk will already have on it a file of about sixty pages that begins with a reference number and goes on for twenty-eight years, and that file will be in the hand of a woman who kept a receipt for a coat because it was the only thing her sister bought for herself. I have been doing this for twenty-two years and I have no idea whether it will work. I have written to the family and told them so. I have written to them and told them that there is no legal basis for any of it and that the mechanism is a reference number and a person who will not stop, and that both of those things can be destroyed by one thing, which is if anybody in that family ever stops answering the telephone. Which is why I did not come here to represent anybody, and why I have not billed a penny, and why I have told Alan Verrow on the telephone in April that this firm does not act for him in any matter connected with Carbide Creek and that if he tries to instruct me he will get a letter declining.