The Gaps (Episode 3 of 4) - "The Other Side"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Gaps. Episode 3, The Other Side.

0:27 There were 11 voice memos in total. I found them all that same evening, after my mother had gone to bed, and the house had settled into its particular night quiet. The creak of the old joists, the boiler cycling, the occasional car passing on the lane outside. I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and my laptop and a glass of water I kept forgetting to drink, and I listened to myself. I am going to tell you what I learned. I am going to tell it in order, the way the memos told it, because that is the only way I know how to hold it now. As a sequence of disclosures, each one opening onto the next.

1:08 The way a series of rooms opens when you finally allow yourself to walk through a house you've been avoiding for years. The first memo was from eight months ago. February, a Sunday evening, recorded in what I recognised as the spare room of my Walthamstow flat. I could hear the specific acoustic of it the slight resonance off the bare plaster walls I'd always meant to do something about. The other Nora's voice was careful and deliberate, the voice of someone who has been refused before and is trying a different approach. It said, I've started writing things down. I know you'll find this and I know you'll close it before the end, the way you always do, so I'm going to make this one short. Deborah was frightened of

1:58 someone in the weeks before she died, Martin knows. He told the police at the time, and they didn't follow it up. I need to find out who it was. I'm going to need access to the accident report. I'm going to need you not to block me. I had blocked it. I knew this immediately, with the certainty of recognising something you have done so many times it has become invisible. The particular motion of not following a thought, of letting a door click shut before you've properly looked through it. I had been doing this for 12 years, doing it so fluently, I'd stopped knowing I was doing it.

2:37 The second memo was from three weeks later. She'd found the accident report. She read from it, carefully, precisely, in the tone of someone presenting evidence to someone they don't entirely trust to receive it. I listened to facts I had never allowed myself to know. The road was the B6001 between Ashwell and Hathersidge, a stretch I had driven a hundred times growing up, straight for nearly a mile before it bends left past the Thornfield farm. The wall Deborah's car struck was on the right side of the road.

3:15 The right side. If you are travelling from Ashwell toward Hathersidge, the right side of the road is the side a vehicle coming from the opposite direction would be on. The accident report noted no evidence of another vehicle. It noted no skid marks. It listed the cause as loss of control. The other Nora's voice said, a straight road, dry tarmac, no alcohol, no mechanical fault, no reason to leave the road unless something came at her. The third memo was from April. She'd been to see Martin. This was the memo I had most difficulty listening to not because of what it contained, though what it contained was difficult enough, but because of how well I could hear her in it, how present she was. She had been to Ashwell in April,

4:08 during a gap I had recorded as three hours, location unknown on return, slight tiredness. I had been in London, bewildered, making tea. She had been in a front room in Ashwell, sitting across from Martin Hale, and Martin had told her things he had been waiting 12 years to tell someone who would listen. Deborah had been involved in the summer before she died with a man named Geoffrey Peel. He was in his mid-forties, locally established, well-regarded, the kind of man whose standing in a small town functions as a kind of armour. He had ended it badly. In the months afterward, Deborah had told her mother and Martin... that she was frightened of him, that he had said things, done things, that had made her understand the ending wasn't

5:02 entirely over. She hadn't gone to the police. She had told her family, and she had told one friend. The other Nora's voice paused here. She said, she told you, in September. Two months before she died, she told you what Geoffrey Peel had done, and what she was afraid of, and you didn't know what to do with it. You were 25. You were frightened of getting it wrong. You told her she was probably reading too much into it, that he was unlikely to do anything, that these things usually blew over. I stopped the recording. I sat in the quiet kitchen for some time. The boiler cycled. Outside, something moved in the garden. A fox, probably. or the wind in the ash tree. I started it again. She said, I'm not telling you this to hurt you. I'm telling

6:01 you because you've been carrying it wrong. You think what you did was the thing that killed her. That if you'd believed her, said something different, she'd have stayed that night instead of leaving, and she'd be alive. And maybe that's true. I can't tell you it isn't. But Nora... The thing that killed her was Geoffrey Peel, and he is still in Ashwell, and nobody has ever made him answer for it. I let myself cry then, not loudly.

6:32 I am not a loud crier, I never have been, but properly, in a way I hadn't allowed since the funeral. Since before the funeral, actually. Since the night Deborah left and I sat in my flat and told myself that people argued and it meant nothing and she would be fine. I let myself feel the specific weight of it, the thing I had said to her, the look on her face when she understood I wasn't going to help her.

6:59 The way she'd picked up her bag with a particular controlled quietness that I'd known even then was worse than anger. I let myself hold it, properly, for the first time in twelve years. Then I pressed play again. The fourth and fifth memos were procedural. The other... Nora documenting her research, the freedom of information request for the full accident file, the process of locating garage records from workshops in the Hathasage area that might have handled repairs in October of that year. She was methodical, reading repair records through the relevant period, cross-referencing dates and damage descriptions. Her voice in these memos was focused and specific, the voice of someone who had found a task that gave shape to a

7:50 grief that had previously had none. The sixth memo was the one that changed the texture of everything. She said, I found the car. Not Deborah's car. A second car. A vehicle that had been brought to a workshop in Hathersidge, eleven days after the accident with damage to the front offside, consistent with a sideswipe collision. Paint transfer. a buckled wing, a cracked headlight housing. The owner had paid in cash, had given a name that didn't match any electoral register in the county. The workshop had kept the records because they were meticulous, not because they'd suspected anything. She said, the paint transfer. They kept a sample because they weren't sure about the insurance implications. I found the sample. I've

8:44 had it looked at. It matches the colour of Deborah's car. I paused the recording. I stood up and walked to the kitchen window and looked out at the dark garden and thought about a man who had driven back from the Thornfield Road with a damaged car and paid cash at a workshop in the next town and gone home and continued being well regarded. Memo 7. Geoffrey Peel She had found him without difficulty. He still lived in Ashwell.

9:14 He had a house on the Bakewell Road, half a mile from where Martin still lived, from where Deborah's mother still lived. He was 61 now, semi-retired, walked his dog on the same path every morning, past the market square and up through the churchyard, reliable as a schedule. The other Nora had watched him do this. I understood, hearing her describe it, the particular flatness in her voice, the control that had something else underneath it. that she had stood somewhere in that churchyard and watched him walk past and had made a decision about what she was and wasn't going to do with what she'd found. Memo 8.

9:57 The Witness. She had found him through the local papers archive a letter to the editor published the previous spring from a man complaining about road safety on the b6001 the letter mentioned the bend past thornfield farm it mentioned in passing that he drove that road regularly had done for 30 years, knew every inch of it. The name on the letter was a local name. She had found his address without difficulty. His name was Alan Birch. He was 73. He had been driving back from a snooker night in Matlock on the 14th of October 12 years ago and had seen, on the straight stretch before the Thornfield Bend, two sets of headlights where there should only be one. He had seen, in his own headlights as he approached, a car on the wrong side of the road.

10:51 He had seen the impact. He had not come forward because he had not trusted himself. He had been 61. It had been dark. He had wondered in the weeks afterward whether he had misread what he'd seen, whether distance and dark and shock had rearranged the scene in his memory. He had told his wife. He had not told the police.

11:15 The other Nora had sat with him for two hours, He had told her everything. Memo 9 was short. She said, I have what we need. Birch will give a statement. The paint sample is documented. The repair record exists. The accident report has anomalies any competent investigator would find if they were told to look. This is enough. But I need you to take it in. I need you to actually know what I know before we go any further.

11:47 Because what comes next requires both of us. I almost understood then what she meant by both of us. I filed the thought and kept listening. Memo 10 was recorded outside. I could hear Ashwell around her. The specific ambient sounds of the market square on a weekday morning. A lorry reversing somewhere. Pigeons. She was keeping her voice low. She said, I've been standing outside his house I want you to know I'm not going to do anything stupid I know what stupid would look like and I know what it would cost and I am not going to do it but I needed to see it I needed to stand outside the house and know that he's in there and that he has been in there for 12 years while Deborah's mother goes to her daughter's grave and Martin carries

12:41 it and you and I have been falling apart in our different ways I needed to see the house and feel how ordinary it is and understand that this is what it looks like when something goes unanswered. An ordinary house. A man walking his dog. A pause. Then, I have felt very angry for a long time. I think you know this. I think it's part of why you keep shutting me out. Because you can feel the anger from wherever you are and it frightens you. but I need you to understand that the anger isn't at you it hasn't been at you for a long time I was angry at you at first the way you were angry at yourself but Nora you were 25 and you were frightened and you made a mistake that a great many 25 year olds would have made the man in that

13:36 house made a choice that's different I pressed pause I sat with that distinction for a while the difference between a failure of courage and a choice, the difference between being insufficient and being the cause. I had conflated them for 12 years. I could see that now, with a clarity that was not comfortable, but was, underneath the discomfort, a very great relief. The 11th memo was the most recent.

14:08 Recorded two days ago, in the early morning, the Derbyshire birds going in the background, a blackbird, I thought, the specific territorial descant of it. She said, the part that stayed on that road when everything else moved on. I have been doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was to keep working the problem in the hours I could get, and now I've worked it as far as I can alone. Her voice was steady, more than steady.

15:03 It was the voice of someone who has been waiting a long time and has learned to wait without fraying. She said, Geoffrey Peel killed Deborah. I can prove it well enough to be taken seriously. But Nora, I need you to be the one who walks into the police station. I need you conscious and present and willing to hold this.

15:25 Because I can't give a statement in my own right. I can only find things. You have to be the one who does something with what I've found. A pause, she said. There's one more thing I haven't been able to do alone. I need us to go back to the Thornfield Road. I need us to stand where it happened. And I need you to say her name out loud.

15:47 And I need us to do that together. Not because it changes anything. Because we owe her the acknowledgement of having been there. The recording ended. I sat in my mother's kitchen for a long time after that. The night was very quiet. I thought about Deborah leaving my flat for the last time, coat on, bag over her shoulder, the look on her face that I had spent twelve years not looking at directly. I let myself look at it now. The hurt in it. The specific hurt of someone who has asked for help and been found wanting.

16:33 I said her name out loud, in the empty kitchen with no one to hear. I had not said it aloud, I realised, in twelve years. not since the eulogy. I had referred to her, in my own mind, only as she or her or the pronoun you use when you can't bear the specificity of the name. Deborah. The kitchen was very still. I closed my laptop. I put my phone in my pocket. I got my coat from the hook by the back door and I walked out into the dark garden and stood under the ash tree for a while and looked up through its branches at the sky.

17:10 which was clear and cold and full of stars, in the way that Derbyshire skies are on October nights, a depth of stars that London never shows you. Then I went back inside and I wrote in my journal for a long time. Not a gap entry, not times and locations and physical state on return. I wrote what I knew.

17:30 I wrote the full shape of it. Deborah and Geoffrey Peel and the Thornfield Road and Alan Birch in his car and a workshop in Hathersidge. and 11 voice memos from the part of me that had refused to let this be filed and forgotten. I wrote until my hand ached. When I finished, I read back what I'd written.

17:52 All of it.

17:54 Then I picked up my phone and I texted Martin. I've listened to everything. I'm ready. Tell me when you can meet. His reply came back within two minutes, as though he'd been waiting. He said, Tomorrow, I'll come to you I put the phone down. I sat in the kitchen with the journal open in front of me and the window showing the first grey beginning of morning, the garden resolving out of the dark, the ash tree still and frost-edged in the early light. For the first time in twelve years, I did not dread the day ahead.

18:32 Whatever came next, I was not going to be managing around it. I was going to walk into it, both of us together, and see what we could do,