The Gaps (Episode 4 of 4) - "One Person"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Gaps. Episode 4. One Person.

0:27 Martin came at nine in the morning. I had been awake since five. Not anxiously. or not only anxiously. Partly because the light was doing something particular with the frost on the garden, the way early October light does in Derbyshire, low and lateral, turning everything briefly gold before it gets on with the business of the day. I stood at the kitchen window and watched it, and drank my tea and thought about Deborah, which was different from the thinking I'd been doing for twelve years. That thinking had been a kind of flinching, Approaching and retreating, never landing. This was something else.

1:07 Steadier.

1:09 The difference between looking at something directly and looking at its reflection. My mother was up early too. She knew something was happening. She is not a woman who misses much, stroke notwithstanding. And she sat at the kitchen table with her own tea and didn't ask me anything, which is one of the things I have always most valued about her.

1:31 She has a quality of available silence. She makes room without requiring you to fill it. When Martin knocked, she gave my hand a brief press and went to sit in the front room. I had not seen Martin in 12 years. I want to tell you it was strange, opening the door to him. But it wasn't. Or it was strange in the way that things are strange when they are also completely right. He looked like himself. He looked like a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had learned to carry it without letting it show, which I recognized because I had been doing the same thing, badly, in a different way. He came in. I made more tea. We sat at the kitchen table. He said, You've listened to everything. I said,

2:25 All of it. He looked at me for a moment, not assessing exactly, but attending. The way you look at someone when you're checking whether the person you've been talking to in the dark is the same person sitting in front of you now. Then he nodded once and opened his bag and put a folder on the table between us.

2:45 Inside was everything the other Nora had assembled. The accident report, annotated. The repair records. The paint sample documentation. A laboratory analysis obtained through a contact group. I had apparently spent two months cultivating during GAPS, a forensic specialist in Sheffield, semi-retired, who had examined the sample as a personal favour. The analysis was four pages long and its conclusion was unambiguous.

3:16 The paint transfer on the workshop sample matched the colour, composition and age profile of the make and model of Deborah's car. There was a signed statement from Alan Birch, four pages long, Witnessed by a solicitor, detailing what he had seen on the Thornfield Road on the 14th of October 12 years ago. Two sets of headlights on the straight stretch. A car on the wrong side. The impact.

3:43 His reasons for not coming forward at the time. Set out plainly and without excuse. Martin said, There's a detective inspector in Chesterfield. She was a constable here 12 years ago. one of the ones who took my statement about Geoffrey Peel and Deborah being frightened. She's the one who told me she'd flagged it to her sergeant and her sergeant had decided it wasn't relevant to an accidental death. She's carried that for 12 years too. I've spoken to her.

4:11 She's expecting us. I said, Us, he said, if you're ready. I thought about the other Nora standing outside Geoffrey Peel's house, keeping her voice low, making the decision about what she was and wasn't going to do. I thought about eleven voice memos and eight months of work conducted in the margins of my own life. I thought about a girl leaving my flat for the last time, with her bag over her shoulder, and a look on her face I had spent twelve years trying not to see. I said, I'm ready. We drove to Chesterfield. Martin drove. I sat in the passenger seat, and watch the Derbyshire landscape do what it does in early October. The dry stone walls and the long moorland views, and the ash trees losing

5:02 their leaves in the specific elegant way ash trees have, like they've thought about it. I didn't talk much. Martin didn't require me to. The detective inspector was a woman in her mid-forties called Sharma. She had a quality of focused attention that I immediately trusted. She listened to everything without interruption. asked precise questions, and handled the folder with the care of someone who understood what they were holding.

5:29 When we finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, This is enough to reopen the investigation. That's what I can tell you today. I can't tell you where it goes from there, or how long it takes, or what the outcome will be. What I can tell you is that this is enough. I said, I know. I understand. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't entirely read and said, you did good work. I thought about telling her it wasn't entirely me.

6:01 I didn't.

6:02 It was, in all the ways that matter, entirely me. I'm going to be honest with you about what happened next, because I think the honest version is more useful than the version where things move cleanly to resolution. The investigation took 14 months. 14 months of phone calls from D.I. Sharma, of additional statements, of a process that required patience of a kind I had not previously been asked for. Geoffrey Peel was interviewed. He denied everything. His solicitor was very good.

6:46 There were months when I did not know whether the evidence would hold, whether the paint sample would survive challenge, whether Alan Birch's statement would be sufficient to given the years and the dark and the limitations of human memory. I am not going to make you wait through all of it. Here is what I can tell you. The paint sample held. The forensic analysis was peer-reviewed at the prosecution's request and confirmed. Alan Birch gave his statement in person, with a steadiness that the barrister later told Martin was one of the most credible witnesses she had encountered in 20 years of practice. A second witness emerged during the investigation, a woman who had been on a footpath above the

7:30 road that night, walking her dog late, who had seen a car travelling fast on the wrong side of the road and had assumed, in the absence of any investigation that invited her to think otherwise, that she had been mistaken. She had not been mistaken. Geoffrey Peel was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. He was 62 by the time the jury came back. He sat very still when the verdict was read, and I watched his face and found that I had nothing particular to feel about it.

8:03 Not triumph, not relief, not the catharsis I had perhaps expected. Just the plain fact of it, arriving after twelve years like a letter that had been lost in the post. The thing had happened. The thing was now known. Deborah's mother was in the courtroom. She is a small woman in her seventies. with Deborah's eyes and a quality of dignified composure that I think must have cost her enormously.

8:31 She did not look at Geoffrey Peel when the verdict was read. She looked at her hands, which were folded in her lap, and then she looked up and across the room and found Martin. And something passed between them that I didn't have the language for and didn't try to name. Afterward, outside, she took my hand She held it for a long moment without saying anything. Then she said, she loved you, you know, even when you made her angry.

9:02 She always said you were the most honest person she'd ever known. I did not tell her about the argument. That is mine to carry, and I will carry it, and I have made my peace with the carrying of it. What I can tell you is that the weight of it is different now, not gone, but different now. the difference between a thing you carry in secret and a thing you carry in the open, where at least the air can get to it. I want to tell you about the gaps. They are smaller. I noticed it first in November of that year, a month after we'd given our statements in Chesterfield, a gap that lasted 40 minutes, where I would previously have expected two hours, then another short one, then a week with none at all, which

9:48 had not happened since I was 25. I am careful not to over-claim this. My psychiatrist, I went back to see someone, a man in Leeds this time. careful and precise in the same way the Islington woman had been tells me that dissociation is complex and its patterns don't always follow the logic we want to impose on them He tells me the reduction may or may not be permanent He tells me to keep the journal which I do But the journal is different now. I notice this every day. It is not only gap entries and times and locations and physical state on return. It is the actual contents of my days. Specific, particular, irreducible. What I saw from the kitchen window. What my mother said at breakfast that made me laugh. The conversation I had with

10:45 Martin when we walked through the churchyard on the anniversary. the things we said about Deborah that were true and fond and particular to her, her laugh, her stubbornness, the way she'd argued about everything, until she was certain and then argued some more. I go back to Ashwell more often now. This surprises me still, every time I notice myself wanting to. For so long, the place was something to be managed, approached cautiously, stayed in briefly, and left before it could ask too much of me. Now it is just the place where my mother lives, and where Martin lives, and where the churchyard is, and where the light in October is unlike anywhere else I have ever been.

11:30 I stood on the Thornfield Road in November of last year, just stood there in the early morning, before the traffic started. The road was frost white and very quiet, the ash trees bare on both sides, the wall on the right still standing, repaired years ago. no visible trace. I stood there for a long time. I didn't feel the presence of anything unresolved. I didn't feel haunted. I felt the cold and the specific quality of the silence and the knowledge that this was a place where something real had happened to someone I had loved and that the something was now known and that knowing it had not fixed anything but had changed the shape of everything. I said her name, The frost took the sound of it and

12:20 gave nothing back, the way places do, the way they are supposed to. I drove back to my mother's house. I made breakfast. My mother came downstairs and told me the physio had said her grip strength was almost back to normal and she was very pleased about it. Not too pleased, the appropriate amount. And I agreed that it was good news and poured her tea and sat with her while the morning came in through the kitchen window.

12:47 The gaps are smaller now I am trying to be one person. It turns out that when you stop using your own hours against yourself, when you stop dividing into the part that manages and the part that's being managed, there is more room than you expected. More room for the ordinary texture of things, for the frost on the garden and the ash tree and the particular way my mother holds her cup. I still keep the journal. I probably always will. but I am no longer afraid of what I might find written in it. What I find, most days, is just the day, just the specific, unrepeatable, imperfectly held contents of a single ordinary life. It's enough, it's more than enough.