Chapter 8 The Car, the Girl, the Dog

## Gordy I am not going to be asked about the dog. I know that. I have worked out by now what a journalist does, because I have read them for twenty-eight years and I have got a bit careful. A journalist works like this. He has a thing he has found, and he wants to put it in a place where it does the most work. He will come to you and he will ask you a question and the question is not the question he is interested in. The question he is interested in is the one that makes it a bigger story than a girl who got into a river, and everything else is road. I have had two of them. The man in 2026 was decent. The one in 1999 was not, and he is the reason I do not talk, and I am not going to say his name, and I have read his article, and it is in a box somewhere, and it is wrong in two places and right in one, and the one it is right in is the only reason I have never written a letter. Here is the thing, then, and I will put it where it belongs, at the front, before anything else, because if you are going to use me you will use it out of order anyway and I would rather it was at the front. There was a dog barking. On the night of the thirteenth of January 1998, and the morning of the fourteenth. At a house on the Aldergate road that nobody lived in. I have never told that to a woman from a newspaper and I have never told it to a woman from a police and I have never told it to my wife, and I have thought about it every day since, and I am telling it here, and if it goes in a newspaper I would like it to be in a newspaper and I would like it to be in the fourth paragraph and not the first. Now. The facts, and I am careful because I have been wrong about this for twenty-eight years and I am no longer certain I have it right. The house is on the Aldergate road, about four hundred metres from the works gate, on the side away from the river. It is number nineteen. It is a two-up two-down stone house. It was empty from about 1995, when the Mellor family went to somewhere else, and it was sold in 1997 to a man from Ardwick whose name I do not know and who never moved in. The agent's, the Grassmans of Carbide Creek, had it on a book for eighteen months. The keys went in a tin in a drawer at the Grassmans and there were two of them and a third one that had not worked since about 1988. The windows were boarded. All of them, with plywood, in 1996, after the Grassmans got a report about kids. The front door had a padlock on it and the padlock was a good one, because the padlock went on in 1997, after a report about kids, and it was put on by the agent, and I know that because the Grassmans' book has it in it and I have seen the book, and I know the padlock was a 50mm laminated brass because that is what they used in 1997 and you could not shift them. So. January 1998. There is a house at nineteen with the windows boarded and a good padlock on the door and nobody in it. The dog barked there for about two days, and the night of the thirteenth is the night of the thirteenth, and I know the dates because the works' calendar is in my head and I have never been able to shift it. I do not know whose dog. That is the honest position and it is the one I have held for twenty-eight years against everybody, including a man who telephoned me in 2001 and told me what I wanted to hear, which was a name, and I did not use the name, and he printed a name. I know this. It was not a big dog. That is the other thing, and it is the thing that finally came apart for me, and it took me twenty-six years to be able to say it and it is this: it was not a big dog, and it was not barking like a dog that wants in. It was a small dog and it was barking at something. There is a difference and every person who has owned a dog knows the difference, and I have owned a dog, and I have had a dog, and you cannot mistake it. I was on nights in the week of the twelfth, which I have never said out loud before tonight, and I was on the bank at the end of a shift at about one in the morning on the fourteenth, and I came off the C door and the whole yard goes quiet when a shift comes off, and I stood in the yard and I heard it, off to the left, over by the Aldergate road. Two dogs. One of them was saying something and the other one was saying something back, and they were about four hundred metres apart, and one of them was at number nineteen. And I thought: there is nobody in that house. That is the whole thing. That is the entire content of twenty-eight years. A man stood in a works yard at one in the morning and thought, there is nobody in that house, and then thought, that's nothing, and then thought, and did not think it, and went home to his mother and slept. And then on the afternoon of the fourteenth a dog handler's dog found a boot in the drainage cut six hundred metres the other way with a tape in it. And I was arrested in April. And I was in a room with no window in January 1998 with a man called Quillan who was decent, and who asked me, and who asked me again, and who asked me a third time about the thirteenth of January, and who did not ask me about the dog, and I did not say about the dog, and he did not ask about the dog because he had not been told about the dog, because I had not told anybody about the dog, not him, not the men in the canteen, not the police, not the works, not the family, not anybody, for twenty-six years. I want to be exact about why, because I have had a lot of time and because the man from the newspaper is going to ask and I would rather he did not have to. Here is the reason. If I had said it in that room in 1998, then in about April of 1998 there would have been a search of number nineteen on the Aldergate road. And if they had opened number nineteen, then whatever was in number nineteen would be in the file, in a nine-page file, on paper, for ever. And whatever was in number nineteen would not have been Nerissa. And I have spent twenty-eight years being the man who did not kill her, and I have got very good at it, and it is the only thing I have got, and I was not going to walk into a police station in 1998 and hand them a house so that the last thing anybody could say about me was that I hid a thing in a house. I have not said that out loud to anybody before, including my wife, including the man in 2026, including the two people I have sworn to in the kitchen in about 2004, and I have said it here at about nine in the evening on a Tuesday, in a book, and I would like it noted that I have said it to a man from a newspaper and to a retired detective from a car and to a family solicitor in a hall in Derby, and to nobody else, ever, and that the reason is that all three of them are going to print it and my wife is not.