Chapter 5 The Interview Room

## Hester I am a defence solicitor. I want to be clear at the outset that I am not anybody's friend, I have not taken an instruction in this matter, and I have not been paid, because nobody has offered, and because I would not have taken it if they had. I went to see Marlie Aldercott on the ninth of April at about eleven in the morning, at a house in Aldergate in Carbide Creek, because I have represented four people over twenty-two years who had been sitting in a room like that and had been told for decades that the papers in their hands were worth nothing, and I wanted to see a fifth. The arrangement was made by a woman from the newspaper, who telephoned me in February and said, "There's a person in Carbide Creek who has kept every receipt she ever had and the police have told her four times they're of no evidential value, and she'd like somebody to sit in her kitchen and look at them." And I said, "I don't do cold cases for free," and she said, "I know you don't, and I wasn't going to ask you to." I have never met a journalist that I liked and this one was no different, and I went because the proposition was interesting, and I want to record that it was the proposition and not the person, because in about ninety minutes I would have gone for the person and that is not a thing I let happen. The house is stone. It was a shop and then a house and there is still a hatch in the wall at the back that goes nowhere, and Marlie Aldercott is fifty-one and has a kitchen with a table down the middle of it, and on the table there were, when I arrived, eleven plastic wallets, and a cardboard box, and a tea towel, and a biscuit tin. Eleven plastic wallets. I am a solicitor and I handle files, and I know what a properly kept file looks like, and this was not that, and it was also not a mess, and I want to describe it for the bar because it is a thing that no court in this country has ever had to look at and should have to look at. Each wallet contained a single category of paper, and each category was in date order, and there was a label on the front of each wallet in biro, in a hand that had not changed since about 1974. The wallets were: national insurance correspondence; the works' wage and holiday correspondence, which is nine items; rent receipts and a tenancy agreement; her own bank statements, twenty-two years of them, in date order, in three bundles; and seven bundles of loose paper of no apparent category which turned out to be the taxi receipts, bus tickets, petrol receipts and one cinema ticket from a Saturday in March 2001. The cinema ticket is in a bundle with a bus ticket and it is from a Saturday in March 2001 and it is the Aldergate Picture House and it cost four pounds and I asked her about it and she told me, without any difficulty at all, that it was an obituary for a man called Prentice. Prentice. The man who was on the barrow ramp with Gordy Pease on the twelfth of January 1998 and who is dead, and whose funeral she went to, alone, having taken a day off work, and whose obituary she had kept because he had been on the ramp that day, and because he had once given her a lift in a van in about 1994 and had stopped in a lay-by on purpose to let her vomit out of the car door when she was seventeen, and because he had then said nothing about it, and because he had said "no problem, I've a flask" and it was a flask of tea. She kept the ticket for twenty-five years and she did not know why, and when I asked her why she said: "Because he stopped the van." I sat in that kitchen for ninety minutes and I looked at eleven wallets and I did not look at one item of evidence in the correct sense, because there is not one, and every one of those items has been through a court and been given a value of nothing. Here is the professional position and I am putting it in the book because a journalist printed two hundred words of it and got it wrong, and he got it wrong in the way that everybody gets it wrong. Marlie Aldercott has no case. She has never had a case. There is no proceeding in which these eleven wallets could be used, and there is no proceeding that anybody could bring, because the limitation period for the offences that might be alleged expired in about 2003 and was not extended and cannot now be extended, and because there is no person alive whom any court could try. I said that to her, in plain words, in the first twenty minutes, because she has been told something different by four different people over twenty-eight years and I am not going to be the fifth person to be vague. She did not argue. That is what I want to record. She did not argue and she did not cry and she did not ask me to fight. She said, "Right," and then she said, "I know that. A man from the police in 2001 said a version of that to me and I asked him what would happen if the paperwork were different, and he said, 'It would not matter, because we would not look at it,' and I have never forgotten that, because it was not a lie, and he was not being cruel, and he was telling me the truth about the only thing that was actually going to happen, which was nothing." And then she said the thing I came to the county for. She said, "Nobody has ever asked me what she said to me that morning." And I said, "I am asking you." And Marlie Aldercott, who is fifty-one, and who kept eleven wallets and a cinema ticket, and who was nine years old on the fourteenth of January 1998, and who has told this to four people and not one of them wrote it down, said: "She said, don't tell Dad. And she said, you'll be all right. And then she asked me if I was all right, and I said no, what, and she said, nothing, move the milk." I wrote it down. I wrote it down on a pad, in a kitchen, in about eleven seconds, and then I stopped, because my hand had gone, and I am fifty-four years old and I have been in courtrooms for twenty-two years and my hand has never once gone. And I asked her the next question, which is the question I should have asked in 1998 and did not ask in 2026 until the fourth person who ever had this conversation thought of it, and which is: "Did you tell anybody what she said?" And Marlie Aldercott said, "No." And I said, "In twenty-eight years?" And she said, "No. Not to my husband, because he wasn't my husband then. Not to my mother, because my mother was the kind of woman who would have taken it to the police and I was nine and I knew that. Not to the police, because there was nobody to tell. And not in 1998, because they came to the house twice and they asked me about the coat and the ten minutes and they were very kind, and they did not ask me what she said, and I have known since about eleven o'clock on the fifteenth of January 1998 that they were not going to ask me what she said." I said, "Marlie—" "Don't," she said. "I know what you're about to say. Everyone says it. You can go back twenty-eight years. Somebody says it. Every single person in twenty-eight years has said some version of it and not one of them has meant it, because it is not the kind of thing you can go back for." I said, "That is the law." "It is not the law," said Marlie Aldercott. "The law was out of a book. I kept the book. That," she said, and put her hand flat on the eleven wallets, "is the evidence, and it is of no value, and I have known that for twenty-eight years, and I have never once been tempted to throw it out, and you want to know why, and I am going to tell you why, and then I am going to make you tea, and then you are going to go away and do whatever it is you came to do." She said: "Because if I throw it out then she went out of that door and got into a river and there is nothing, and if I keep it then she went out of that door and said two things to a nine-year-old and there is one person left alive who heard them, and if that person dies then it's gone, and there is nothing in the whole of the world that anybody can do about it."