第6章 Mile Marker Nine

## Ilse There is a number nine on a small concrete marker at the side of the north bank road at Carbide Creek and it is not a milepost, and I have never seen anybody use it as one, and the only reason I know what it is for is that I wrote one. It is a drainage marker. The scheme was built in 1961 and there are markers at intervals along the cut and each one carries a letter and a number, and the letter says which reach and the number says which hundred metres, and the number nine is at six hundred and forty metres downstream of the Kellard Bridge. In 1998 I walked out to the nine with two officers and a dog handler and a young constable called Nevin who was on his second year and who is now a superintendent in a different division, and we wrote down where we were standing, and what I wrote was: *Item recovered at drainage marker 9, north bank, approx. 6 hundred m downstream of Kellard Bridge.* That is the sentence. That is the sentence that has been the whole of this for twenty-eight years, and I am going to sit here as a retired detective of thirty-one years and take that sentence apart, and I have never done it, and I did it on the eleventh of April 2026 in a car with a man from a newspaper. Here is the first part. Six hundred and forty metres downstream of the Kellard Bridge. I did not walk that distance. Nobody in 1998 wrote down how the distance was established. It is on the plan of the scheme, which is a rolled drawing, and the drawing has the reaches marked, and the number nine is on the drawing at a chainage, and I — or somebody — matched the marker on the bank to a chainage on a drawing and wrote down the distance from the bridge by subtracting. And the marker is a concrete block. It is about eighteen inches square. It is set into the bank at the top, above the flood line, and it has a steel plate on it with the letter and the number, and the steel plate is eighteen inches by six, bolted at four corners. And here is what I did not write down in 1998, and what I have thought about every day since the March. Somebody moved the block. Not far. Two feet, three feet — there is a tidemark on the bank face and a line of old fence posts, and the fence line and the marker are about thirty centimetres out of true with each other in a way that says nothing, because a drainage scheme marker is set at the time of construction and the bank erodes and the fence is replaced. But the block is a block, and the block has four bolt holes, and the bolt holes are rusted to a colour, and if a block is lifted out and put back then the bolt holes will show it, because the rust will have gone round and been broken in one place and reformed differently. I did not think about that in 1998. I did not think about it in nineteen ninety-nine, and I did not think about it in 2004 when I drove past and saw the reinforcement, and I did not think about it in 2019 when I retired and put the papers in a box file in a garage, and it is a two-inch observation and it is the observation that has kept me awake since the March. Here is the second part, and it is worse. Tobias Lind asked me, in the car, on a road between Carbide Creek and the village, whether the original search had gone downstream. And I said yes. And he said, how far. And I said, the whole reach. And he said, and I am writing this down because I want to see it in my own hand in a document that is not a police document, "Which reach is this?" And I could not answer him. Not could not remember. Could not answer. Because I know the reach number, and I know the two ends of it, and I know that the search covered it, and I do not know where the team started, and I do not know where it stopped, and I do not know whether the item at marker nine was found before the reach was searched or after it had been walked, and if it was found before, then the reach was not searched in the sense that anybody means, it was walked twice by tired men in the dark on the fourteenth of January in a fourteen-degree drizzle. That is a completely different sentence from the one in the file. I have thought about this for eleven weeks and here is where I have got, and I am aware that a retired detective at sixty-eight with a garage full of paper and no jurisdiction is exactly the sort of person who is wrong about this. I have got to this. The file says the item was found at approximately two in the afternoon on the fourteenth. The file says the missing person report was made at ten past six in the evening on the fourteenth. That is the whole chronology and it fits, and it is tidy, and the tidiness of it is the first thing I have never liked. But a search that finds a boot with a tape in it at two in the afternoon on the fourteenth cannot have been a search for Nerissa Aldercott, because nobody was looking for Nerissa Aldercott at two in the afternoon on the fourteenth. Nobody knew she was missing. Her sister had not made the report. The report was made at ten past six. So what was the search at two in the afternoon on the fourteenth? Either it was a routine patrol, which is a thing that happened, and which is a completely innocent explanation, and which I would give to anybody else without hesitating. Or it was not a search of the reach at all, and the item at marker nine was found by somebody who already knew where to look, and then the search — the actual search, the one with the dogs and the two hundred and eleven man-hours — was organised afterwards, and was written up afterwards, and was given a start and an end by a person who was in a hurry in the dark on the fifteenth, and the reach boundaries that I cannot give to a journalist in a car are the reach boundaries that I chose in a room with a plan on a wall at about ten o'clock at night on the fifteenth of January 1998. I am not saying that anybody did anything. I am saying that the geography of this case was never written down, and I am the person who failed to write it down, and I did not fail to write it down out of anything except being twenty-nine years old in a division where nobody wrote anything down, and where the person who had the plan on the wall was a man called Quillan who has been dead for ten years, and who I have not been able to speak to, and whom I cannot now ask. What I asked the man in the car, instead, was whether the two of us could go and look at the nine. He said, "Is that a wise idea?" I said, "No." He said, "Right," and he took the next turn, and did not say anything else about it for eleven miles, which for him is the longest silence of any man I have ever met in a car. We went at half past ten in the morning on a Thursday, in April, in a hired car, and there is nothing in that field, and I want to describe it properly because I have imagined it for twenty-eight years and the reality is far duller and worse than the imagining. There is a fence. The fence is wire on posts, the posts are new, the wire is new, and the wire has a strainer at the corner and the strainer is a modern one, and the fence is about ten feet from the water on the bank side. There is a bank. The bank is about four feet high and it is concrete-faced, in panels of about twelve feet, and the panels have a date stamped on them in a moulded plate, and the date is 2005. There is a ditch at the bottom of the bank about two feet wide and about six inches deep and it is full of brown water and it is full of leaves and it is, in April, full of a green slime on the surface which is not algae in the ordinary sense and which I have not been able to look at for longer than about a minute at a time. And there is marker nine. It is a concrete block, eighteen inches square, set into the top of the bank, with a steel plate on it. And I got down on my knees on the wet grass in front of it, in a hired car park's worth of rain, and I put my hand on the plate. The plate says REACH D and it says 9. The bolt holes: two of the four are rusted round in a continuous ring. Two of the four have been moved. And when the ground was dug out for the bank in 2005, that is when the work was done, and that is nine years after a boot with a cassette in it was found six feet away at the bottom of a ditch at the foot of a bank that was then made of earth, and there is a note on page six of a nine-page file that the earth bank was not retained, and the earth from it was used to make the flood bank two hundred metres upstream. I stood in a field in Carbide Creek for about four minutes. It was a mild day. There were wagtails on the wire. And what I felt was not what I had prepared for. I had prepared for grief, or for the thing that people in films feel when they go back to the place. What I felt was a small, entirely physical, adult anxiety, of the specific kind that you get when you realise that you have written a document, and that the document is wrong, and that you are sixty-eight years old, and that the person who put the wrong thing in the document is dead, and that the only person still alive who could say why is a man who spent thirty-three years not asking a question.