Chapter 19 The Long Read

## Tobias Here is the piece, or the beginning of it, and I want to print it in the order I actually wrote it, which is not the order it should run in, because the order it should run in is a lie and I have spent six weeks constructing that lie and I have decided not to. The piece runs to about nine thousand words. I have written it four times. This is an extract from the third, and the third is the one I threw away, and I am printing the version I abandoned, and the reason I am printing the abandoned version is that a woman who kept eleven plastic wallets read the second one in a kitchen in April and said, "You've written the wrong book," and she was right, and it took me nine weeks to work out what she meant. What she meant was this. I had written it as a story about a police force. That is the first version, and the second version, and the third version. Nine thousand words about a division in a county in the middle of England, in January 1998, where a file of nine pages was made about a twenty-four-year-old woman, and where nothing was written down, and where the dogs were declined on the fourth day after the ground went on the third. And it is a good piece. My editor likes it. It has everything a piece needs. And it is a story about a police force, and Marlie Aldercott read it, and she did not object to a single fact in it, and she said, "That's all true. You've checked all of that. And you've made it about them." And I said, "What is it about, then?" And she said, "It's about me and a coat." And I did not understand for about nine weeks, and then I did, and I have thrown away the third version and I have started again, and I want to describe the difference, because the difference is the entire education of six months and it may be the only thing in this career I am actually able to write about. The third version opens with a date and a temperature. The fourth version opens with a shop in Ardwick on a Thursday afternoon in January 1998, where a woman of twenty-four is choosing a coat, and she pays thirty-one pounds and ninety-nine in cash, and it is a new coat, and she does not collect it, and it is the only thing she ever bought for herself. That is the difference. It is not a stylistic difference. In the third version, the coat is a piece of evidence that contradicts a police account, and I put it in at paragraph eleven hundred, and it did the work. In the fourth version, the coat is the first thing anybody reads, and it is not evidence of anything, and that is why it is the first thing. Because here is what I have learned in six months, and it is the only thing I have learned, and I have got it from a woman who keeps receipts. An article about a cold case is not about the cold case. It never has been. It is about the people who are still in the room. And the police force is in the room, and the county is in the room, and the man from 1999 who gave a man a woman's name is in the room, and I am in the room, and Marlie Aldercott is in the room, and the reader is in the room. And the reader is not a detective and will never be one, and does not want to be, and cannot be, and the single thing a reader can be, which no one in this story is currently being, is a person who decides whether to keep asking. So the fourth version is about a woman with a coat in a wardrobe, and a woman with four hundred and eleven pencil crosses in a bank statement, and a man who pleaded guilty to something that was not the thing so that he would never have to say one sentence in a room, and a detective who went to a bus stop in Derbyshire on the twenty-fourth of April with a size seven and no idea what he was going to say. And the police force is in it. And the file is in it. And the nine pages are in it, in full, printed, because I have a family solicitor who has told me in writing that I may print them, which is a sentence I did not expect to read in my career. Here is what I am actually going to print, and I have decided, and it is the hardest decision I have made in twenty-six years of doing this, and I would like a lawyer in Derby to know about it. I am going to print the transcript. All twenty-two minutes and forty seconds of it, in a newspaper, with the pencil marks off Marlie Aldercott's copy removed, because she has not given me permission for those and they are hers. And I am going to print the nine pages, in full, as a facsimile, with the redactions the family has agreed, and I am going to print the refusal from the coroner, in full, which is four hundred words, and which is the most reasonable document produced by anybody in this story, including me. And I am going to print a piece of about two thousand words in which I do not appear at all except as a line saying that the reporter has spoken to the people in this story eleven times, has had eleven plastic wallets put on a kitchen table in front of him, and has been asked nothing. And then the piece ends. It does not end with a question. It does not end with "the family continues to seek answers." It ends with the address of the custody review unit of the county police, and the reference number, and the words: *if you hold an item booked as property in your area and you have never had a review, you can ask for one.* That is the last thing. That is what I want a reader to do. Not to be angry at a county. Not to believe a police officer. Not to think that a man in a kitchen in Carbide Creek is a murderer or is not a murderer, because I do not know, and because after six months I have understood that not knowing is the position, and that the position is respectable, and that the thing on the internet in about two weeks that says *I KNEW IT* is the enemy of this entire story. I want to be honest with myself about why, because I have been honest in print about everything else in this book and I am not going to start now. Because I pitched this in January as a story about a tape that would turn out to be everything, and I have spent six months finding out that it is not everything, it is twenty-two minutes of a woman saying she did not want to be late, and that is a worse story and a smaller story, and it has taken all of it to work out that the small story is the true one, and that I pitched the large one because the large one would have been easier and would have made me a better career. And on the ninth of November 2025 I sat in a gallery in a family court in Derby and watched a man of seventy-one stand up and say four words about a cassette, and the woman withdrawing her application that afternoon because there was nothing to divide, and the entire financial estate of a marriage of thirty-four years being four thousand one hundred pounds and a tape. And I understood, sitting there, that the story was never about a tape. The story is that a family spent thirty-four years of a marriage and it reduced, in a court, to a piece of plastic in a drawer, and the person holding it was not the person who made the argument.