Chapter 16 The Other Shoe

## Ilse I am going to say a thing that will be very unwelcome, and I have spent four days deciding whether to say it, and I am going to say it because the man from a newspaper has now asked me eleven questions in a book and there is a twelfth and it is the one that matters. It is a size seven. That is in the file. It is on the property receipt, and the receipt says one item, and the item is a boot, and the receipt says size seven, and it does not say left or right. In 1998 that did not matter, because in 1998 nobody asked, and because in 1998 the pathologist had said there was a boot and not two, and everybody moved on to the question of why. Here is what I want to say. A woman who leaves a house at half past seven in the morning and does not come back and is found in a drainage cut four hundred metres downstream, and who is found with one boot. The question I did not ask in 1998, and the question nobody asked in 1998, and the question I have now asked eleven people about in the last two years, is the following. Was there a boot on her foot. Not a second boot. I want to be absolutely clear, because I have seen this mangled twice, once in a piece in 1999 and once in a conversation with a man in a car, and both times the second boot was made into a man hiding in the bushes, which is a different story and a worse one and not this one. The question is whether the girl whose body was recovered on the fifteenth of January 1998 was wearing a boot. And here is what I have. The file does not say. In nine pages, with a property receipt, a custody record, a search record and a statement from a foreman, there is not one line that says what the girl was wearing on her feet. There is not one line anywhere in those nine pages about the girl's clothing at all, other than the coat, and the coat came from her sister, and the coat was unworn, and the coat was in a shop bag on a hanger in a wardrobe, and the girl did not collect it. I have gone back and forth about the coat about nine times and I am going to set it down cleanly, because it is the thing everybody grabs. The coat was bought on the Thursday afternoon and was not collected until the Monday. The girl left the house on the Friday morning wearing a green coat. Those are two different coats, or the shop and the girl made an error, or my chronology is wrong, and I have checked my chronology against the receipt and the wage packet and the bus times and I have not moved it. So there were two green coats, or there was a mistake somewhere, and the bootbag police asked about was a green coat, and the coat they were shown was in a bag and was unworn, and therefore the coat they were shown was not the coat she left the house in. I have never written that sentence down until now. I have had it for twenty-eight years and I have never once put it on paper, and I am putting it on paper, and I am aware as I do it that it is the first genuinely new information in this case in a quarter of a century and it has come out of a retired detective's memory of a second visit to a kitchen in Aldergate, and it is not admissible, and it is not testable, and it is the only thing I have got. So let me put the rest of it on the table and let a reader weigh it, because that is what I am going to do for the next four hundred words of this. One. The property receipt records one boot. Not "a boot, one of a pair." One. In 1998, a man in a car with a torch at a drainage cut in the dark wrote down what was in front of him and it was a boot, and the boot had a tape in it, and he wrote down the tape and not the boot, because the tape was the item and the boot was the location. Two. The pathologist's report, of the fifteenth of January 1998, is not in the nine pages. It should be. A postmortem on a person recovered from water is not optional, and I have asked for it four times in twenty-eight years and been told three times that it is not held, and I believe that it was retained at the time and disposed of, and I cannot prove that, and I would not be surprised by it, because that is what happens to postmortems after about thirty years in a county that has stopped using the building. Three. Nobody has ever established, so far as I can find, whether she was wearing shoes. Four. She bought a coat on the Thursday for thirty-one pounds and ninety-nine, in cash, and she did not collect it, and the wage packet in her bag on the Friday was unopened, and the wage packet was for the fortnight ending the second, and the money in it was, I am told, about ninety-four pounds, and it was found. It is in the file. It is on the custody record. It was never opened. Five. A boot, size seven, in a ditch, with a tape in it, and the ditch is a drainage cut and the bank above it was made ground, and the girl was found in the reach above the bridge, and the reach was destroyed on the third day by a rise of one foot eight. I have stopped there, and I want to say why. Because the fifth of those things implies a thing I have spent twenty-eight years refusing to put in a file, and if I put it in a file I am a sixty-eight-year-old retired detective with a bad case and a good memory going into print with a suggestion about a boot, and there are two ways that ends. It ends with me being described, correctly, by every outlet in the country as a man who has spent a quarter of a century on one afternoon and has come up with a theory about a shoe, and the county is done a disservice, and the family is given a piece of newspaper that will be pulled in a week, and Marlie Aldercott goes back to a kitchen in Aldergate with eleven plastic wallets and nothing to put on the table. Or it ends with somebody sitting down and saying, well, what if there were a boot. I am not going to be that person, and here is my reason, and it is not squeamishness and it is not my training, although it is partly my training. Nobody asked. In 1998, in a division where nobody wrote down where the search went, in a file of nine pages with nothing in it about what a dead girl had on her feet, in a case that was closed by nobody and worked on by fewer, the thing that was not asked was the only thing there was to ask, and it was not asked because she was twenty-four and worked at a works and was moved to a gate, and because a girl who gets moved to a gate for being good at her job is a girl whose feet nobody is thinking about, and because by the time anybody was thinking about her feet there was a river in between. That is the sentence. That is what I have. I have written it out and I am not going to take it back, and I would like the record to show that it came from a detective with thirty-one years, and not from a man with a theory. I am going to go and see the coroner on the twenty-fourth. He has already refused once, in writing, and I have the refusal, and I intend to go in person, and I am sixty-eight years old and I am going to take a bus to a building in Derby and ask a man to reopen a death, and there is no legal basis for it, and I know that, and I am going anyway, and I have no idea what I am going to say when I get there. That is where I have got to. I have no idea what I am going to say. I have been a detective for thirty-one years and I have never once not known what to say in a room, and I am going to Derby in eleven days with a size seven and an idea about a boot and nothing else at all.