Day 5: 19 April 2026
This is my favourite training day – open water swimming. It was 12.5°C, lovely and sunny and I managed 600m. No ill effects from yesterday’s ride. Things are going well.
You can sponsor my bike ride here.
Another favourite journalist question involves how I was told that Alice had been murdered. The moment that my life changed forever and of course, not just mine.
Alice was murdered somewhere around 6.20pm on 12th October 2016. We always remember what we were doing at times of crisis and I was helping debug the report printing software at school. This seems such a trivial thing to have been doing, when I could have been supporting Alice.
We didn’t hear until about 3am the following morning. The police hammered on the door, I can’t believe it was easy to wake us, but Clive heard the dog, went down to discover the police and woke me. You know that when the police arrive it will be bad news and we didn’t really need telling, especially after what I’d discussed with Emma just two days ago. But it was still an enormous shock. They told us that Alice had been murdered, who had reported it and that someone (I think they confirmed it was Dhillon) was in custody. They gave us a list of officers from Newcastle. I think it included the detective in charge and a family liaison officer and said that they would be in contact. They said that it would be in the news soon. They said that our eldest daughter (living in Germany) had been told. And then they left.
I think we were paralysed with shock. We had no idea what we should do. Should we ring up the Newcastle officers? Probably not because it was the middle of the night. Should we go to Newcastle? But where would we go, who would we see, what could we do? We had no idea what a family liaison officer was so didn’t think to message them.
Eventually we realised that they’d said it would be in the news soon and we had to let the family know before they saw it in the news. So, we drove to our two son’s houses in Market Harborough and Sheffield to tell them because it was hardly the news you could relay over the phone. And then we drove to Birmingham airport to pick up our daughter. Then we drove back home.
