第20章 Sentenced Again

## Hester I have sat in a court in Derby this month and listened to a man of sixty-one plead guilty, and I want to describe it, because it is the only thing in this entire matter that I have been professionally involved in, and because it is the thing I did not expect. Here is what happened. On the twentieth of April 2026, at the County Court in Derby, in an open court, with about nine people in the public gallery, a man called Gordy Pease pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. I want to be very clear about the plea and about why I am there, because the two are routinely confused and I have corrected it twice this week. I do not act for him. He has never instructed me, or this firm, or anybody. He is represented by a duty solicitor whom I have spoken to on the telephone twice and who has done everything properly and who deserves the credit. I am there because Marlie Aldercott asked me to be, and because the court lists a hearing-support worker and there was nobody, and because a woman of fifty-one with eleven plastic wallets asked a defence solicitor of twenty-two years' standing to sit in a public gallery in Derby and say nothing. So I said nothing. I want to record that I said nothing, because in a piece in about 1999 and in two conversations this month, people have assumed that I am the lawyer who got this man his plea, and that is not what happened, and I would like it printed accurately by somebody, and I am printing it here. Here is what happened, in the order it happened. On the eleventh of March 2026, a man of sixty-one walked into a police station in a market town in Derbyshire and asked to make a statement. That is the thing. He walked in. Nobody asked him. He walked in on a Wednesday morning. I know this because I asked, and because the officer who took the statement has spoken to me on condition that he is not named, and because he is a young man and he was, by his own account, quite shaken. The statement is nine pages. I have read it. It is about the thirteenth of January 1998, a house on the Aldergate road, a dog, and a padlock, and it is written in about two hundred words per page of something that I would describe, as a lawyer, as a man setting out a matter on which he might be prosecuted, and doing it in the plainest English I have ever read in a police statement. Here is the sentence, and I have it in front of me, and I am going to print it, and I have cleared it, and I want to say that I cleared it myself and not his solicitor and that his solicitor was extremely relaxed about it, which says something good about him. The sentence is: "I have not said this before and I want it written down that the reason I have not said this before is not that I was frightened of saying it." There is no time limit on a perjury offence as it applies to a witness giving evidence, and I have checked, and I have had it checked by a silk, and the position is that the limitation period for an offence of perverting the course of justice is six years from the date of the offence, and that where the offence is a continuing one the period runs from its conclusion. The plea was accepted on the twentieth of April. The sentence was suspended. He will have a conviction for the rest of his life. Here is what I have spent three weeks thinking about, and it is not the law. He gave a statement on the eleventh of March about a dog in January 1998. That statement goes into a file. That file is now attached to a live file, and the live file has a review date, and the review will be conducted by a custody officer, and the custody officer will read, in order: a nine-page file from 1998, a statement from a man in 2026 about a dog, and possibly a referral to a coroner. And that is how it happens. Not by a campaign, and not by a lawyer, and not by the family. By a man of sixty-one walking into a police station on a Wednesday morning and saying the true thing about a dog. I want to be careful here, because I have spent twenty-two years telling people that the law will not do this, and I have spent twenty-two years being right, and I am not going to be careless with the one exception I have found. The law will not do it. The coroner will refuse again and be entitled to. The custody review will be a formality and will produce a piece of paper. There is no proceeding, there is no claim, there is no charge that will ever be brought, and I said all of that in a corridor in Derby in November and I say it now without any qualification at all. What the law did was nothing. What happened in a market town in Derbyshire on the eleventh of March 2026 is that a person who had never been asked a question about a dog answered one, unprompted, in writing, in his own name, knowing exactly what it would cost him, and then pleaded guilty to a separate offence in open court nineteen days later so that the statement could not be explained away. And I have been asked by two journalists this month whether the tape can be used. My answer is no. My answer has not changed and it is not going to change. And I have been asked by a woman from a newspaper whether the family is entitled to anything, and my answer is: they were not entitled to anything in 1998, they are not entitled to anything now, they have not been entitled to anything at any point in twenty-eight years, and they have a man of sixty-one who has just given them the only new information anybody has produced in this case since the sixteenth of January 1998, and he did not do it for them, and it was not owed to them, and there was no mechanism. Here is the last thing I am going to write in this book, and I want it to be the right last thing, and I have been trying for four days. In April I sat in a kitchen in Aldergate in Carbide Creek and I looked at eleven plastic wallets, and a tea towel, and a biscuit tin, and I told a woman of fifty-one that she had the best-prepared witness in the world and no forum to use her in. And in May a man of sixty-one walked into a police station and gave a statement nobody asked for. And in between, in a court in Derby, a man of seventy-one stood up and said four words. And in November of the year before, in another court, a woman of sixty-eight withdrew an application because there was nothing to divide except four thousand one hundred pounds and a cassette. And that is the whole of what happened in this case in twenty-eight years, and I have been the lawyer in three of those five rooms, and I have never once in my career felt so thoroughly and so specifically unnecessary. I would like that printed. I would like it printed with my name on it, because I have spent twenty-two years being a person who is necessary, and I have come out of this a person who is a woman who was in a room at the right end of a corridor, and I would like that on the record in my own words, because nobody is going to put it there. She made me a cup of tea that afternoon. It was made in about 1990 and it was the best cup of tea I have ever had in a client's house.