Chapter 9 A Divorce and a Cassette

## Tobias The hearing was on the ninth of November 2025 and it was a financial remedy hearing, which is a thing nobody outside a family court has ever heard of and which is the least dramatic room in the English legal system. It took forty minutes. There was a man of seventy-one called Alan Verrow and a woman of sixty-eight called Tamsin Verrow and a recorder and a woman from the court service who was extremely kind and extremely quick. I was not in the court. I was in the public gallery, which is not a thing you are supposed to be, and which on the ninth of November had four men and a woman with a laptop in it, and I was the woman with the laptop, and I had got in because a woman I have never named and who works in a court office in Derby let me in at ten past one on the understanding that I would not write anything that was not in the public record. The whole of the financial disclosure was read out. It took nineteen minutes. A house in a village, sold in 2021. Two cars, one of them nine years old. A pension. A savings account of four thousand one hundred and something pounds, and I wrote four thousand one hundred and something pounds in my notebook, because it was that kind of hearing and the number was that kind of number. And then item fourteen. Solicitor: "Item fourteen. The respondent's schedule lists one item under assets held. One dictaphone cassette, a recorded item. The respondent's counsel describes it as having no commercial value. Is that correct?" Counsel: "It is a dictaphone cassette, my Lord. It is recorded. It has no resale value. It is not listed with any valuation because it is not an asset in any sense that the court would recognise. It is, in my client's words, his late sister's." And Alan Verrow stood up. He is seventy-one. He stood up on his own, in a suit he had clearly not bought for this, and he said, "That's my sister's." And the recorder said, "You are not, at this stage, to be addressed, Mr Verrow." And he said, "I'm sorry." And the judge — and I want to say this properly, because I was in that room and I have been in about four hundred of them — the judge did something I have not seen before. She said: "Let counsel and the parties take ten minutes, please." And everybody went out into a corridor, and I sat in the gallery with my laptop shut, and I am not going to describe what I did in that room because it is mine and I would like to keep it. The application was withdrawn that afternoon. Both parties, by consent, with costs. There was nothing to divide. I have looked at the consent order; it is two paragraphs and it says the respondent shall not make any further claim upon the matrimonial assets and the applicant shall not make any further claim for costs, and the only asset in dispute was four thousand one hundred pounds of savings and a cassette. So. The tape. I want to describe the thing itself, because I have now read the transcript of the October listening, because Alan Verrow made a transcript, because he is that kind of man, and because I have read the words on the paper and I have not heard the sound, and I have decided that I am not going to hear the sound, and I want to be honest about why. Here is what is on it. Twenty-two minutes and forty seconds, recorded on a dictaphone, and the machine makes a noise every ninety seconds or so like somebody tapping a pencil, and I have been told about that noise by four people separately, which means it is the kind of thing that gets into your head. She starts mid-sentence. That is the first thing. No hello, no testing the machine, no "is it on." She is already talking when it starts, and she is talking to nobody, and she is talking about a shift roster. This is the transcript. It is abridged, and I have abridged it, and I have kept the abridging honest, and where I have cut something I have said so. [00:00] "...roster's been done and it's not right and he knows it's not right, because I looked at the wall one. I looked at it on my break. I don't want to be difficult about it, I want to be accurate about it, and the Wednesday's got my name on it twice and the Thursday's got me on the gate and the gate's a different job, and the gate's cold, and the gate's not what I'm paid for, and he did it in about four minutes and he didn't ask anybody." [c. 03:20] "—and I've not said anything to him about it and I'm not going to. I've thought about it and here is what I've decided. I'm going to do the Wednesday. I'll do the Wednesday and I'll do it well, because the moment I stop being useful is the moment somebody finds out that I know. And that is exactly how it works and I have watched it happen to two people." [c. 07:00] "—the thing about the gate is it's cold and it's dark and it's four hours of standing in a doorway and it's the sort of job they give you when they've decided about you. That's all it is. It's not even a punishment. It's a note." Then there is a gap of about ninety seconds, which is the sound of the machine, and then: [c. 08:50] "—Dad's leg is worse. I saw him go down the yard on Sunday on the stick and I pretended not to see him. I have pretended not to see my father for two years and he has never once mentioned it, and I would like that recorded somewhere that he has never mentioned it." [c. 11:30] "—he is not going to be told. Mare is not going to be told, because she's nine and she does everything I'm told and she will go to the police, she will absolutely go to the police, she is the most honest child I have ever in my life been in a room with. And if she goes to the police about a roster then it becomes a thing I said a thing about, and I will be the woman who made a complaint about a roster, and I will be moved, and Mare will spend the rest of her life knowing that I told somebody to put me on a cold gate, and I would rather be on the cold gate." [c. 14:00] "—so he'll not know. He'll walk me to the bus on Friday and he'll say nothing, and I'll say nothing, and that's how we work." And then a longer gap. And then this, which is the only time she says the word, and it is at [17:20], and I have read the transcript eleven times and I want to give it to you exactly: [c. 17:20] "You're going to say I'm dramatic. I'm not dramatic, I'm a realist with a bad week, that's all this is. I've had a bad week. In March somebody said a thing to me in a car park and I've been angry for nine months and I've not been able to put it anywhere. That's all it is. It's not him. It's not anything. It's a car park." And then about four minutes in which she talks about a wage packet, and about a bus, and about whether it is worth the money to take the bus or to walk, and about a woman calledITH who does the canteen, and then: [c. 21:55] "—going to be late, and I don't want to be late, that's all. That's all I want. Not to be late. That's the whole thing, if anybody's listening. That's the whole of it, I don't want to be late." [c. 22:40] End of tape. That is what is on it. There is no confession. There is no name. There is no second person. There is a woman, on a Tuesday in January, in a boiler room, deciding to say nothing to her for her own good, and being angry about a car park, and not wanting to be late. That is twenty-two minutes and forty seconds of a person being alive, and it is the only recording in the world of Nerissa Aldercott, and it has been in a locker in Derbyshire for twenty-eight years. I have written the first four hundred words of this article four times and thrown all four away. Here is the problem with all four. If the tape is a nothing, then this is a story about a police force that sat on an item for four days and then on a file for twenty-eight years, and that is a legitimate story, and it can be told without anybody being ruined, and the tape should be published and the police should be asked why. If the tape is evidence, then there is a person in this county who has been wrongfully the subject of suspicion for twenty-eight years, and that man is sixty-one years old and lives in Carbide Creek and has not told his wife anything, and printing that sentence properly changes the rest of his life. And both of those things are true, and I have not found a way to write them both, and I have been sitting on this for eleven weeks, and I have not printed a word of it, and the woman from the syndicate has started to use the phrase "the piece that's late" in a way I do not like. There is a third thing. I will put it last because I have been avoiding it since January. On the twenty-second of April 1998 this file was reclassified. It went to a man called Quillan. I got a call in about 2001 from a man who had been his sergeant, and the man was not on the record, and he told me one thing, and he said it in a car, and I wrote it down at the time because I thought it was a quote. He said: "Nobody in that division ever wrote down where the search went. I was there. We did the whole reach. I know we did the whole reach because we were there for it. And I've been through the file twice and there's not one line in it that says where we started and where we stopped, and it isn't because anybody was hiding anything, it's because we were twenty-nine and it was dark and it was raining and there were eleven of us and none of us had a radio that worked, and we did the right thing, and we didn't write it down, and that is the whole of the institutional failure, and it is not a conspiracy, it's an ordinary Tuesday in a mill town in the dark."