Day 10 5 May 2026
I think I must be getting fitter. Instead of my standard ten-mile mid-week ride today, I did 15 miles. There is this lovely stretch of track that leads from Billesdon to Rolleston. It’s quite uneven and the stones are loose, so it feels quite dangerous if you go too fast. And its so bouncy that you need to hold the handlebars really tightly. Its also downhill, with a frustrating number of gates, but I just love it. Definitely worth extending my route for.
Please sponsor my bike ride here
Family liaison officers are amazing people. They are absolutely essential if your daughter has been murdered, because you need someone to ask all those unimaginable questions. We were in frequent contact with them right up to and beyond Trimaan Dhillon’s trial and we asked them all sorts of things. They contacted us on the day following Alice’s murder, and after that we weren’t floundering around wondering what to do quite so much. But we had suddenly been thrown into a completely unfamiliar world.
We drove to Newcastle and they introduced us to some of the police team. I remember them giving us very full details of all the injuries that had been inflicted on Alice and how difficult this was to hear. But thinking about it, it did mean that we grasped the full reality of what had happened and were not surprised by it at a later date such as in court or from the newspapers. We were also given details of how the investigation was progressing. I remember feeling utterly stunned and totally helpless. For the first time in my life there seemed to be nothing that I could do to make the situation any better.
I can remember much of what happened in the next few days, but I can’t really be sure of the order of events. I had to give a statement to the police about my contact with Alice and with Trimaan Dhillon. I expected this to be reasonably brief, but the whole process was very drawn out. Presumably both to ensure that the statement was correct and so as not to be too distressing for me. We seemed to spend ages ferrying around between different police stations in Newcastle, but I can’t really remember why!
We went to the mortuary to see Alice. We visited Alice’s flat, where she had been murdered and saw all the floral tributes outside. We talked to her housemate, who was unbelievably brave and kind-hearted. Taking all Alice’s belongings home was heartbreaking. We ended up storing them for months and ten years later, they still need to be finally sorted out. A task I still don’t feel up to nor want to entrust to someone else.
There were endless things to sort out. The date that the postmortems would be finished. The date Alice’s body would be released. The funeral. The life insurance. The phone contract. The bank accounts. To name but a few. There was no time to brood, there was too much to do. Four weeks later, I went back to work full time and then there really was no time for anything.
On one of our later meetings with the family liaison officers, they asked for feedback on how they could make things easier. Apart from the difficulties caused by us living so far from Newcastle, they genuinely were brilliant, but we jokingly said that there should be a manual for the families of murder victims to get us through that first traumatic day.
