The Gaps (Episode 2 of 4) - "Evidence"

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Gaps. Episode 2, Evidence. The system was not designed for this. I want to be fair to the system. It was designed for a specific problem, the problem of living with hours you cannot account for, of being a person with gaps in your continuity, of functioning reliably in a world that expects consistency. For that problem, it worked. Eleven years of working. I held jobs and maintained friendships and managed my mother's worry about me and built a life that was, by most observable measures, a successful one. The system deserved credit for that. But the system was designed on the assumption that the gaps were empty, that whatever happened in them was not nothing exactly, but

1:14 nothing organized, nothing purposeful, a kind of fugue, a standby mode, a system hibernating until it could return to its primary function. I had built everything on that assumption, and the assumption was wrong. and now I had to think about what else might be wrong along with it. I started with the journal. Not the current journal, the full archive. I have kept every journal since I started, eleven years of composition notebooks stored in a box under the bed in my Walthamstow flat, which I had brought to Ashwell in the boot of my car without quite knowing why. Perhaps on some level I had known, returning here, that I might need them, Or perhaps I simply always bring them when I travel, by habit, the way I bring certain

2:05 other things without examining the impulse. I went through them systematically, not the gap entries. Those were uniformly sparse, just times and locations, and the occasional note about physical state on return. I read the surrounding days, the days before gaps and the days after, looking for patterns I hadn't seen because I hadn't been looking for them, The gaps cluster in autumn, October especially. I had noticed this before and attributed it to seasonal mood shifts, to the way certain times of year are harder than others for reasons that don't require examination.

2:46 But reading across 11 years with the new question in mind, the pattern was sharper than I'd acknowledged. Almost every significant gap, the longer ones, the ones where I'd lost most of a day, happened in October. In Derbyshire, before I moved away, the leaves turn in October. The Thornfield Road runs through a long corridor of ash and oak. In October, it would be amber and rust and the particular low gold of late afternoon. Deborah died on the 14th of October.

3:22 I closed the journal I was holding and sat with that for a moment. Then I opened it again and kept reading. The other pattern was harder to name. because it required me to notice absences, things that hadn't happened rather than things that had. In the days following longer gaps, I sometimes noted that I felt clearer, not rested, not quite, but lighter in some way I'd attributed to the gaps acting as a pressure valve. I had written in a journal from three years ago, long gap yesterday, nearly four hours, but feel oddly better this week. less of the background noise.

4:03 I had not wondered what the background noise was or why four absent hours had relieved it. I had simply noted it and moved on. I wondered about it now. My mother had her physio session mid-morning, which gave me two hours alone in the house. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and I searched for Martin Hale.

4:28 He wasn't difficult to find, He still lived in Ashwell, same house, the one the family had always been in, off the Bakewell Road. He'd done an apprenticeship after school, worked in construction, was listed on the website of a local firm as a site supervisor. There were photographs. He was 36 now, two years younger than me. And he looked like himself in the photographs, which sounds obvious but isn't.

4:56 Some people look so different grown up that they become strangers. Martin looked like Martin with years on him, the same straight-set jaw, the same slight wariness in the eyes, as though he was always deciding how much to trust the moment. I stared at his photograph for longer than I needed to. Then I picked up my phone and I called him.

5:19 He answered on the second ring. And the warmth in his voice, immediate, unguarded, the warmth of someone hearing from a person they see regularly, He said, He said, He said, and I wrote this down as he spoke, that I'd been focused on the repair records, on finding out whether the garage had kept documentation, and that I'd seemed hopeful about the witness. I asked which witness. He paused. He said, the one you found last month. The man who was driving back from Matlock that night and saw the cars on the Thornfield Road, the one who never came forward.

6:26 I wrote, two cars, Thornfield Road, Witness. I told him I wanted to make sure I had everything straight and asked if he could walk me through what I'd told him so far. There was a brief silence. I think he heard something slightly off in my phrasing, the clinical quality of it. But he was generous and he went through it. Over the course of ten minutes, he told me what I had apparently been investigating for the better part of three months. I will tell you what I learned in the order I learned it, rather than all at once, because that is how it arrived. Not as a revelation, but as an accumulation. The accident report listed the cause of death as loss of vehicle control, resulting in collision with a dry stone wall. Single vehicle. No

7:17 other parties identified. Deborah's blood alcohol was zero. The road was straight, the weather was clear, and no mechanical fault was found with the car. These facts had always been available. I had never read the accident report. I had deliberately not read it. In the weeks before she died, Deborah had been frightened of someone. Martin knew this. He had known it at the time and had told the police.

7:46 But the police had not found it relevant, given the verdict of accident. The someone had a name. Martin said the name. I will not say it yet. the way I did not let myself say it then. I wrote it on the paper in front of me and looked at it and kept writing. The man was still in Ashwell. He had never left. Martin said, you'd found a witness, someone who was on that road that night and saw something but never came forward. You said you were going to talk to him. I asked if he knew the witness's name. He said, you didn't tell me his name.

8:26 You said you were being careful. After I rang off, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time. My tea went cold. Outside, a car passed slowly on the lane, radio on, someone singing along. The other Nora had been conducting an investigation for three months carefully during the hours I couldn't monitor. She had been reading accident reports and finding witnesses and visiting Deborah's grave and driving north on the Tissington Road for reasons I still didn't fully understand. She had a lead I didn't have, a name I hadn't said aloud, a witness who had seen something on the Thornfield Road on the night of the 14th of October, 12 years ago, and had never come forward.

9:26 I opened my laptop, and I checked my browser history, cleared as I'd expected. But I found the cloud backup cache, my work setup syncs automatically, a process I'd established years ago for document version control. And in it, there was a folder I hadn't created. The folder name was a date. The 14th of October, 12 years ago. Inside were documents, accident reports, requested through a freedom of information process that I had apparently initiated two months ago under my own name, using my own solicitor's letter template, which I now saw had been accessed and edited during three separate gaps. Newspaper archives from the local paper. A scanned photograph of a section of the Thornfield Road with a handwritten note indicating sightlines.

10:19 If you were parked in the lay-by, it said, you would see oncoming vehicles 200 metres before the bend. A hand-drawn map. My handwriting. Immediately recognisable. The same handwriting I'd been looking at in my journals all morning. A lay-by marked with an X. An arrow indicating direction of travel. A note. He knew which road she'd take. I stared at that sentence for a long time. I looked at the list of documents. At the bottom, most recently added, there was a voice memo. The file name was today's date.

10:56 I want to tell you, I hesitated. That I weighed the options, considered the implications, took a moment before pressing play. But I didn't hesitate. I pressed play immediately, with the feeling of someone reaching for something they have needed for a long time without knowing they needed it. my voice came out of the phone's speaker. Slightly different, lower in register, more deliberate in its pacing, the way you speak when you are recording something you need to be understood, but unmistakably mine. The same vowels, the same slight Derbyshire flatness I've never entirely lost under the years of London. It said, Nora, I know you won't remember this, I need you to listen carefully because I'm not going to be able to

11:48 say it all at once and you are going to want to close this before I've finished. Please don't close it. I did not close it. It said, The accident wasn't an accident. Deborah didn't lose control of the car. I've found a witness and I've found the repair records and I've found enough to take to someone who can act on it. But I can't do it without you. I've been trying to get through to you for 12 years.

12:13 and you keep shutting me out. I understand why. I know what we did that night. I know what we said. But Nora, I need you to stop managing, and I need you to let me show you what I've found. A pause. Wind on the recording as though it had been made outside. Then, I'm going to leave you the folder. Read the documents. Call Martin back. There's a man called Jeffrey Peel and he was on that road that night and I know where to find him. I need you with me for what comes next. I can't do the last part alone. The recording ended. I sat in my mother's kitchen with my phone in my hand and the folder open on my laptop and outside the window the garden was going amber with the season. The ash tree my father had planted losing its first leaves and I

13:09 thought about a straight road in clear weather and a girl I had last seen angry driving away into the dark, and a man whose name I had written on a piece of paper and not yet looked at. I looked at it. Then I opened the folder and I began to read.