第18章 No Contest

## Gordy I was arrested on the ninth of April 1998 at ten past six in the morning, which is worth mentioning, because a man who is going to be arrested over a girl who went out of a door at half past seven on a Thursday should know that three months is a very long time for a county to hold a file together, and I have thought about that more than about anything else in the whole business. I was arrested on a Tuesday. I was arrested in my own front room at ten past six in the morning because the car came at six. I want to describe the arrest because I have read two accounts of it and I am in neither of them. There were three of them and there was a woman officer and I have never known her name and I have never wanted to. I was in a dressing gown. My mother was in the front room in a chair because she had not been to bed since about eleven the night before, and she had not been to bed because I had been in the chair opposite her since about eleven the night before, and we had been doing that since the middle of January, and neither of us had said anything for three months except the word *tea*. That is the thing about it. That is what I have never been able to explain to anybody. It was not a detective thing and it was not an interrogation. It was a man of fifty-two in a chair in a front room in Carbide Creek who had not spoken to his mother for three months, and the two of them had been sitting in a room together, and had been getting up and making tea, and had been going to bed, and it had been the worst three months of my life and the only thing we had in common was the word *tea* and we were both using it about six times a day. When the woman officer showed me the card I said, "Is this about Nerissa?" And she said, "It is." And I said, "Right." And then my mother said, "Is he going to need a coat?" And the officer said, "I'll get him one." And my mother said, "His own coat's on the hook," she said. "Use his own, he's particular," and then she sat back down, and I have never in my life been able to get past that, and I have had twenty-eight years. I want to say this and I want it to be the second thing anybody reads about me, after the canteen. I have never felt relief. I know that people expect a man who has spent three months in a chair to feel something when the police arrive. I did not. I felt something much smaller and much worse, which was that it was somebody else's turn to look after her, and that is a horrible thing to feel, and I have never said it out loud until about nine o'clock tonight. Now. The charge. I was charged with abduction on the twelfth of April 1998 and I was held for nine days, and I was in an interview suite at a place in Derby for the whole nine days, and I was interviewed eleven times, and I have given statements about three things in my life and one of them is the canteen and one of them is the dog and one of them is the twelfth of January. And then, in about October, the charge changed. Abduction became withholding a prisoner, and then it became something else, and then in about June of 1999 the Crown offered me one charge and I took it. I want to describe what I was convicted of, because nobody in this book has said it, and because it is the single most misunderstood fact in this whole matter, and because a woman from a newspaper has printed it correctly twice and has been called a liar for it in a piece in 1999. I pleaded guilty. I went to a court in Derby in about June of 1999 and I pleaded guilty to a specific offence and I was sentenced, and the sentence was suspended, and I served no time, and I have never had a prison, and I have not been in a cell in my life except for two nights in Derby. I want to say the words, because this is the part that people cannot make fit into the shape they have in their heads. I pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. I did not plead guilty to anything to do with Nerissa Aldercott's death. I have never been charged with anything to do with her death. I have never been charged with killing anybody in my life. I pleaded guilty, and I was convicted, and I was sentenced, and what I pleaded guilty to was a lie, and I knew it was a lie when I said it, and I did it deliberately, and I have not for one second regretted it, and I will not be telling anybody, including a man from a newspaper, that I wish I had done it differently. Here is the whole of it, and it took me nineteen years to be able to write it down, and a woman in a kitchen made me able to write it down, in about 2004, when I said it out loud for the first time in my life, to my wife, in a kitchen, at about eleven at night, and she listened to the whole thing and then said: "You never said." "No." "Not once, in four years, not once." "No." "Why?" And I said, "Because if I had said it in a room in 1999 then a jury would have had to look at the dog, and the dog is about a house, and the house is about somebody else." That is the reason. That is the whole of the reason, and it is the reason I have given to about six people now and it has never once been believed, and I have stopped trying. Here is what everybody actually thinks. Everybody thinks the guilty plea was because I did it. That is the universal reading and it is the reading of the 1999 piece and it is the reading of a man who telephoned me and gave me a woman's name. And I understand the reading and I have a thing to say about it which is this. Perverting the course of justice is a charge that people plead to when the alternative is a conviction for a serious offence, and it is almost always a plea, and it is nearly always to a charge that is not the worst thing that could have happened to you, and I know that, and I have had twenty-seven years in this county knowing that the charge I took was a mercy. I am not saying that it was a mercy. I am saying that the alternative was a trial, and in a trial somebody would have asked about the thirteenth of January, and I would have had to either lie or say it, and I chose to lie in advance, in a court, in a formal way, in front of a judge, and take a conviction, so that I would never once have to say it out loud to a person in a room. It is the only thing I have ever done that I am proud of, and it has cost me the only thing I wanted, and I want it printed that I did it on purpose and I would do it again. And here is the last of it, and then I will let this book alone. The man I did it for is a man called Pease, who is me. And the woman who is still alive and who knows it is a woman who was nine years old on the fourteenth of January 1998, and who is fifty-one now, and who has never been told what I said in a kitchen in 2004 about why I did it, because I have not said it, and because I am not going to. I have never met Marlie Aldercott. I have wanted to, eleven times, since 1998. I have got as far as the outside of a house in Aldergate twice, in about 2011 and about 2019, both times in the afternoon, both times in different clothes, both times with a reason that was about a shop or a garden. And I have stood on the opposite pavement and looked at a window and I have not gone, and I am not going to, and if a man from a newspaper prints this book then she will read it and she will know the whole of it from a book instead of from a man at a door, and that is a great deal better for both of us, and it is the one good thing about a quarter of a century of a machine with a reference number on it. That is all. That is the whole of it. A man on a pavement at a hundred metres, deciding, twice, not to knock. She has never asked me anything. I would have told her.