There is a man who was the most cooperative person I ever interviewed.

He arrived early. Voluntarily. No solicitor. He brought a folder.

A folder. Printed pages inside. Dates. Times. A timeline he'd constructed himself, cross-referenced with receipts and a phone bill. He slid it across the table before I'd finished setting up the recording equipment and said: I thought this might help.

He was lying.

Not about everything. Not even about most things. But about the thing that mattered, he was lying with such thoroughness, such apparent goodwill, such structural confidence, that it took me two hours and three separate conversations with a colleague before I understood what I was actually looking at.

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The folder was the tell. Not the contents of it.

The folder itself.

This episode is about what happens when the most cooperative person in the room is also the least trustworthy one. And what that teaches you about cooperation as a language.

There is a moment that happens before the story begins.

Before the account is constructed. Before the solicitor arrives. Before the person has decided what they are going to say and how they are going to say it.

It lasts about ten seconds.

In those ten seconds the brain has not caught up yet. The machinery of managed language is not running. What comes out is produced by a system that is reacting, not planning.

And reacting language, in my experience, is the closest thing to unfiltered truth that an investigator is ever likely to hear.

This episode is about those ten seconds. What falls out of the mouth before the door has fully opened. What it tells you about everything that follows.

And why it is almost impossible to take back.

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There is a script for grief.

We all know it. We have seen it enough times to know what loss is supposed to look like.

The problem is that grief does not look one way. It looks like everything. And one of the things it looks like is also what guilt looks like.

Calm, in a room where you would expect devastation, is information. It is just not the information most people assume it is.

This episode is about the absence of expected emotion. What flat affect actually means, what causes it, and why reaching for it too quickly as an explanation is one of the most dangerous things an investigator can do.

It is also about a woman called Margaret. And six words she said, about forty minutes in, that told me everything I needed to know.

Not about the case.

About forty years of a person.

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There is a difference between someone telling the truth and someone managing it.

It lives in the words they choose. The qualifications that create wiggle room. The sentences where the person disappears from their own account. The cooperative witness who knows too much about what you need before you have asked for it.

Thirteen years of operational policing teaches you to hear that difference. A linguistics degree gives you the language to explain it.

This is episode one.

What deceptive language actually sounds like. Why the brain produces it without the person deciding to. And what it means once you can hear it everywhere.

Which you will.

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Some phrases sound careful.

As far as I can recall. To the best of my knowledge. I believe that's correct.

What they actually sound like, to someone trained to listen, is a door being quietly locked from the inside.

As Far As I Can Recall is a podcast about language, truth, and deception. Thirteen years of operational policing across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and British Transport Police. Time in CID. Rehabilitation work with men serving custodial sentences. A linguistics degree.

What all of that gives you, eventually, is the ability to hear the gap between what someone says and what they mean.

This podcast is about what lives in that gap.

New episodes from 28 May 2026. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.

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