第11章 What the Rain Took

## Ilse There is a date in the middle of this case that nobody in this story has ever mentioned, and I am going to mention it, and it is the sixteenth of January 1998, and it is the day after she disappeared, and it is the day the river came up. Here is the state of the river on the Alburn at Carbide Creek, and these are the figures off the gauge board, and I have them because I took them off the board myself on the evening of the sixteenth with a torch and a notebook, which is the only piece of original work I have ever done on this case that is worth anything. On the twelfth: one foot one at the gauge. On the thirteenth: one foot four. On the fourteenth, at ten in the morning: one foot seven. On the fifteenth, at ten in the morning: two foot one. On the sixteenth, at ten in the morning: three foot nine. Three foot nine. That is a rise of one foot eight in twenty-four hours on a catchment that had had fourteen degrees on the Wednesday and nineteen on the Thursday, and there was rain on the night of the fifteenth that I have since seen described in a printed report as moderate, and moderate is a word used by people who were not standing in it. And here is what that means, and I want it set down plainly because it is the thing that has been in my chest for twenty-eight years. A rise of one foot eight in the drainage cut on the north bank changes the ground. That cut is four feet deep at the shallow end at normal flow, in front of marker nine, and the earth bank behind it is a slope of about one in four, and it is a bank made of what is called made ground, which is the stuff they dug out of a canal and put on a bank and expect to hold for a hundred years. On the sixteenth of January 1998, at some point in the day, probably in the small hours, that bank let go somewhere above marker nine, and about four feet of mud and gravel went into the cut, and the cut filled up to the top of the mud, and the marker went under. And when a bank of made ground goes into a four-foot cut at one in the top and the water rises, what happens is that the cut fills, and the bank above it goes, and then the line of the cut changes, and everything within about forty metres of the failure is in moving water and moving mud and no longer where it was. If she went into the water on the night of the fourteenth in the reach above the bridge, then on the fifteenth she was somewhere in that reach, and on the sixteenth the reach did not exist any more in any sense that a person could be said to be in it. I have never said that out loud. I have never said it to Quillan, and I did not say it to Nevin, and I did not say it to the man from the newspaper in a car in April, and I have carried it since about the eighteenth of January 1998, which is a Saturday, when I stood in a room with a river diagram on the wall and worked it out with a pencil and then rubbed the pencil out with my thumb and then went home to my own house and made my own tea. I want to be extremely clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that she got into the water deliberately. I have never believed that and I have never had anything to support it, and I have read every word of the eleven wallets and I am not aware of anything in them that points that way, and I am aware of one thing on the tape that points the other way, which is that she did not want to be late, and I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence in my working life. I am not saying she died that night. I am saying that the search as organised, on the fifteenth, in the dark, in the rain, with eleven men and a dog team, was searching a reach that was about to be destroyed, and that the item in the boot was found at two o'clock in the afternoon on the fourteenth, which is more than thirty hours before the bank went, and which means the boot was on a bank that was still standing, and which means that whatever put a boot with a dictaphone cassette in it into that ditch on the fourteenth of January 1998 did it while the ditch was in a condition that permitted a person to reach it on foot. And that is the whole of it. That is twenty-eight years. A man could reach it. On foot, in the dark, in a drizzle, in waders, at about two in the afternoon, or at about two in the morning, or at about eleven at night the night before. Now. The dogs team. It was requested on the nineteenth of January and it was declined on the twenty-second. It was declined by a person whose name I am not going to give in this book, and the reason given was that the ground was not suitable, which in my judgement is a false statement, because on the twentieth of January the reach was not suitable and on the twenty-second the reach did not exist, and the reach was not going to become suitable again. What I want to say about the twenty-second is this, and I have been working on it for a year and I have got it down to about a sentence. The dogs were declined on the fourth day. The bank went on the third. And then on the fourth day a young constable called Nevin, on his second year, who had been standing at marker nine with me on the fourteenth putting things in bags, asked me the question I have thought about every day since, and he asked it in a car outside a house in Aldergate where we had both been and been given tea by a woman who was nine years old, and he asked it in these words: "Do you think she'll have come down?" And I said, "Come down where?" And he said, "Into the water. Obviously. But I mean — will it have come down to her, or will she have had to go and find it." And I said, "Nevin, has anybody ever been in this reach after the rain?" And he said, "No." And I said, "Then we do not know whether there is anything in it." And he said, "Right." And he wrote it down. I know he wrote it down because I saw him do it, and it is not in the file, and I have thought about that for twenty-eight years, and it is a one-line observation made by a twenty-four-year-old police constable in the back of a car in January 1998, and it did not go into a nine-page file, and that is the single fact on which this whole thing turns, and it is going to be in this book, and I would like the young man, who is a superintendent now and who did not ask for any of this, to be left alone.