第17章 The Name He Used

## Marlie There is a man from a newspaper who has been extremely careful with me and who has asked me eleven questions, and I have answered nine of them, and I want to say here, in my own words, because he has printed nine of them in his own words and I would like one thing in this to be mine. The question was: on the tape, she says "he" eleven times, and your sister was recorded in a boiler room at the works, and the men she was talking about are a foreman and a man called Pease and a man called Collard, and which of them is the "he." And I said: I don't know. And he wrote that down and wrote it accurately, and he is a decent man and I want to say that before I say the rest of it. The rest of it is this. He asked me the wrong question and I have known that for about eleven weeks and I have been waiting for somebody to put it in a book. She was not talking about a man. I want to set that out as clearly as I possibly can, because I am aware that I am a woman of fifty-one who kept eleven plastic wallets and who is not a lawyer and who has no standing of any kind, and I am going to state a conclusion about a twenty-two minute recording that I have listened to four times. Here is my evidence and it is all I have. She says "he" eleven times. I have counted, because I have the transcript and I have marked them, and the marks are in pencil, and there are eleven, and I have not shown the marks to anybody because I did not think anybody would want them. Of those eleven, four are about a roster. Two are about a car park. One is about a woman called someone whose name I am not going to print in this book, and it is not a man, it is a woman who does the canteen, and the "he" in that one is her husband, and I know that because I used to work in that canteen on a Saturday in 1996. That is seven. Of the other four, one is about her father, and I will come to that, and it is the one that matters, and it is the reason this chapter exists. The remaining three are in a passage where she is talking about the gate. And I have listened to that passage four times and I have had it transcribed twice, independently, by two different people, and the two transcripts agree, and what she says is: "—he's had it in the book since November. He puts it in the book and then he doesn't do it. That's not a threat, that's a habit. He's got a habit." And then: "—so you go on the cold one. He hasn't got anything else to give you." And then, at about nineteen minutes, and this is the one I have marked with a bigger cross than the other ten, she says: "—and he's not a bad man. That's the thing people won't have. He's not a bad man and he's done all of it and he'd do it again and if you made him stand in a room and read it back he'd say it was a misprint." And I want to say the next thing carefully, because it is the whole of this chapter. My sister's father is called Albert Aldercott. He worked at the Alburn Alloys from 1971 to 1994 and then he was a caretaker at a school on the Aldergate road and he had a leg that went bad about 1993 and he was on a stick from about November 1996. And he did not go to work in 1997. He had no reason to go to the works. He was not on a roster. He was not a foreman, a shift leader, a setter, or anything at all in that plant, and there is no possible reading of a boiler-room conversation in which the man putting a name in a book in November is a man who does not have a book. I have known this since 1998. I have never said it out loud to a journalist, and I said it out loud to a woman solicitor in a kitchen in April 2026, and she wrote it down, and then she asked me a question which I want printed because it is the best question anybody has asked anybody in this whole business, and it was: "Marlie, if the 'he' on the tape is not one of the two men in the works, who is he?" And I said: "Somebody who has a book." And she said: "Everybody who works has a book." And I said, "No. Not a roster. A book. A list. The sort of thing you keep." And I did not say the rest, because it was eleven o'clock at night and she had a long drive, and I have been carrying the rest since. Here it is. The book my father had in 1996 and 1997 was a school caretaker's book. It is a hardback with columns and it is a record of the building. Lights, boilers, doors, gutters, alarms, inspections, faults, sign-off, and every fault gets a number and a date and gets crossed off when it is done. And I have thought about this for eleven weeks and I have got to the only thing I can stand behind, which is this. I do not know who that book was. I have no evidence that a book was used. I have a tape in which a woman of twenty-four, in a bad week, in a boiler room, says "he's got a habit," and a boot in a ditch, and a coat in a wardrobe that I bought. And I know that a man with a stick, on a day in January, could have come down Aldergate road on foot, because it is four hundred metres from the school to the works gate and the works gate was not locked in January 1998 because of a fault in the alarm that was in the caretaker's book for six weeks and never got signed off. I have not got that from the tape. I have got it from a book, which I have never seen, and which is a school caretaker's book, and which is not in the police file, and which is not in the file of the works, and which nobody has ever asked anybody for. So here is my position, and I am fifty-one, and I am not a lawyer, and I have eleven plastic wallets and four hundred and eleven pencil crosses and a coat on a hanger. I do not think my sister is dead because of a roster or a gate or a car park. I think she died because she would not tell anybody anything, and that is a thing I have thought about every day since I was nine years old, and that is why I have never said her name in a room, and that is why I know exactly what the twenty-two minutes is, and that it is not evidence of anything, and that it is a woman rehearsing how to be alone with a problem, in a room, by herself, for twenty-two minutes, at work, on a Tuesday, because there was nowhere else in the building to do it and nobody in her life she could have done it in front of. I have never been able to say that to the man from a newspaper and I do not think I am going to be able to. I have never been able to say it to my husband and I have been married for twenty-six years.