Chapter 4 The Cold File

## Tobias Here is the pitch, and I am putting it in the book because I have learned that a pitch is a thing you abandon publicly, and if you abandon it privately then you are a coward, and if you abandon it publicly then it is journalism, and I would like this to be journalism. PITCH, first version, 14 January 2026: A woman vanished from a mill town in the deep winter of 1998. The police were slow. The suspect was innocent. The one physical thing in the case has never been played by anybody, for twenty-eight years, including me. I am going to play it, and I am going to find out what is on it, and it is going to be a small thing, because it is a dictaphone tape, and a small thing after twenty-eight years is either everything or nothing, and there is no third possibility, and if it is nothing then the story is that the police sat on it for a month, which is a story, and a small one, and I will take it. That was the pitch. I want it here in full, dated, because I am going to spend the next three months dismantling it in public and I want the original in the record so that nobody can say I only ever had one thought about it. The first thing I want to say is about the file, because everybody assumes a cold case file is thick. It is nine pages. I have read all nine. I have the nine pages, because Ines Calloway, who was the detective, retired and kept them, and she kept them properly, and she gave them to me in a car park in a village eleven miles from Carbide Creek in the second week of February with a condition, which was that if I used them I had to use them with the corrections in. Here is what is in the nine pages, and I have read them eleven times, and here is what I have made of it, and I am going to be honest about the "made of it" part because that is the bit that journalism is. The dispute. There was a dispute. Nerissa Aldercott had a dispute with a foreman called Collard on the morning of the twelfth. It is three pages of statement and it is the only document in the entire file that is not about what happened afterwards. It is about a shift roster. She was moved off a shift, or she was not, or he did it to her for something, and it is stated four times in three different ways and the four ways do not agree with each other. I have now spoken to six people about that roster. Six. And I have six versions, and the versions agree on the following: the roster existed, it was changed on or about the twelfth, it was changed by Collard, and no two of the six people I have spoken to agree on whether the change was in her favour or against it. Six people, four incompatible accounts, about a piece of paper with a grid on it. That is not unusual. That is what happens when you ask people about a Tuesday in 1998 and they are all remembering the argument rather than the paper. The weather. Three days of it, typed off a sheet, on page six. I have the actual figures. It went to fourteen degrees on the twelfth. It went to nineteen on the fourteenth, which was the day she disappeared, and that is the highest figure in the whole of that month, and on the night of the fourteenth there was a mild drizzle, and the river did not rise until the sixteenth. Nineteen degrees and a drizzle is not a drowning. A person does not drown in nineteen degrees and a drizzle unless they go deliberately into a river six feet deep, and if they do that, they do not do it at Mile Marker Nine, which is a drainage cut, four feet at the shallow end, with a fence and a lock, and which is not the place anybody would choose. So either she did not drown. Or she was in the water somewhere else and moved. Or she was in the water at the Mile Marker Nine and it is not a drowning. I wrote the third one down in week three and I have been carrying it about like a man carrying a stone, and I have to write the rest of this honestly, because the rest of this is the actual story and it is not what I pitched. Here is what is actually the story. I have been in a court in November and I have seen an application, and it is an application for a divorce, and it is an application by a woman called Tamsin Verrow, and her husband is called Alan Verrow, and in the schedules of assets there is a list, and on the list at item fourteen there is a line that says: *one dictaphone cassette, recorded item, no commercial value, held by the Derbyshire Constabulary as item E-9114.* A cassette. In a divorce asset schedule. Because he has it in a drawer, or in a bank, or in a box, and he has had it since 1998, and his wife found it, or her solicitor found it, and it went on a list, and a man in chambers read the list out in a room and said the words "no commercial value" out loud, and Alan Verrow, who is seventy-one, stood up in that room and said, "That's my sister's." I was in the gallery and I was not supposed to be and a woman gave me a copy of the order because she liked me, which is how a great deal of journalism actually happens, and I want that recorded because it is embarrassing and it is true. Alan Verrow is the brother. There is a younger sister. She was seven. And a missing child in 1998 with a sibling in court in 2025 is a door, and I have been through it. And what is behind the door is this. The tape is hers. The tape was recorded by her. The tape was in a boot in a ditch because she put it in a boot and put the boot in a ditch, and the police found the boot on the fourteenth and booked the tape as property on the sixteenth and did not play it, and it has been in a locker for twenty-eight years. And the tape was played, in a solicitor's office in Derby, in October of 2025, by a seventy-one-year-old man from Carbide Creek, on a machine that one of them had to borrow, because the thing that plays tapes is not a thing anybody owns any more. And I know that it was played, and I know roughly what was on it, because Alan Verrow has spoken to me for four hours across two afternoons in a kitchen in Derby, and he is a careful man of seventy-one who checks what he says, and he has told me what he can and he has told me what he cannot, and he was very clear about the difference both times. Here is what I have after four hours and two afternoons and twenty-eight days of being wrong about my own story. I do not know who killed Nerissa Aldercott. It is entirely possible that nobody did. It is possible that she walked to a drainage cut on a mild, mild evening and got into the water and did not get out, and that the nine pages are the whole of it. The tape is not a confession. Nobody in this story has suggested it is. I suggested it, in a pitch, in the first week, and I was wrong, and I have withdrawn it in writing, and the withdrawal is the piece of this that I would defend hardest if anybody came at the whole thing. The tape is a person talking to a machine for twenty-two minutes about a working day, in a boiler room, in the January of 1998, and it names nine people, and it does not use a name for one of them, and it uses "he" eleven times in a way that the man I have spent the most time with in the last three years says is not about him. I am going to go and find out whose "he" it is. And I have to write the next bit and I have been putting it off for a fortnight, which is a journalist's disease and not a character flaw, and it is this: It might not be a murder at all, and the best thing I can possibly do with this story is print twenty-two minutes of a twenty-four-year-old woman saying what happened to her on a Friday, and let a court decide what it is, and then spend a year on the only question anybody actually asked in 1998, which was never "who did it." It was: "why did she go."