What She Left: Enhanced Edition (16 page)

My dear Larry,

You’ll never guess where I found myself last night. A police station! The chap on the front desk, who was about fourteen, quickly concluded the voicemail messages were a hoax. The whole situation was evidently a source of amusement to him. ‘What are you requesting, sir, round-the-clock protection?’

‘They could be relevant to the Alice Salmon case,’ I said.

‘Right, yes, that. Is that what this is to do with, your
research
?’

There’d been another piece on my work in a local paper; this one had got off to a promising start dubbing it an ‘interesting insight into our collective modern memory’, but then lost the thread and intimated it was me who’d discovered her body. I took out the photo of Alice I kept in my wallet, brandished it in front of him. ‘What if something bad
did
happen to Alice? Ask more questions, ask different ones. Re-piece her last moments back together.’

‘As I’ve explained, the investigation team would have done that, sir.’

‘But what if they missed something? They didn’t know her.’

‘Let’s not get carried away here, Mr Cooke.’

‘It’s
professor
.’

‘We tend not to reopen black-and-white cases on the basis of a couple of rude voicemail messages.’

‘It wasn’t a couple, it was three and they weren’t rude, Kidson, they were threatening.’

‘It’s
Inspector
Kidson,’ he corrected me. ‘If I had a pound
for every time someone stood where you are claiming there’d been a miscarriage of justice, I could have retired by now.’

‘You wouldn’t be here if bad things never happened.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Bad things keep me in a living, mate, but I can assure you the incident in question would have been thoroughly investigated.’

It struck me that my downgrading from ‘sir’ to ‘mate’ signified the end of his patience. A couple of policemen shepherded an inebriated teenager through reception, hauling him along, his feet dragging behind him like a brush. It used to appal me, youngsters drinking themselves insensible, but now I can discern an uplifting quality in it. Bless them, they’re convinced they invented the practice when the ancient Macedonians were at it in the fourth century BC. So raw and visceral, that display of vitality, that unashamed pursuit of gratification. I’ve never been averse to a tipple myself, but Elizabeth positively adored the stuff. She went at it with a primal need and it cut through her, made her ragged and uninhibited and terrifying. I’d try to contextualize it to her: explaining about Silenus and Dionysus or the Native American Indians fighting for firewater on the plains of Dakota, but she’d just drink and laugh and tell me to shut the fuck up – I adored that coarse streak in her – and drink more. She tells me she’s quit now, which is no surprise. That was only going to end one of two ways.

‘It makes me feel bigger,’ she once said. ‘It stops me feeling scared.’

‘We all need to feel a bit scared,’ I replied. Classic me: advocating inertia.

Wish I could stop feeling scared, Larry.

The fourteen-year-old policeman had a whispered
exchange with a colleague, then said: ‘Why don’t you go home to bed and get some rest, sir.’

‘I’m not ill,’ I said and the irony of that proclamation hit me.

‘Wasn’t Miss Salmon drunk?’ Kidson asked.

She’d been sitting with a stranger apparently; one chap I’d interviewed told me he saw the pair of them arguing, a real scorcher of a bust-up. Another claimed they’d been kissing. She knocked drinks over. At one point she’d fallen over. She’d hugged everyone, cried. ‘Yes she was drunk, but that’s not a crime.’

‘It is if you’re like him,’ the policeman said, nodding at the spectacle unfolding before us.

It wasn’t an implausible scenario. Luke Addison had told me he’d seen Alice drink herself unconscious on a few occasions. He’d got quite the shock when he’d come home from work and found me on his doorstep. ‘I’m looking for Alice Salmon,’ I said.

‘She’s dead,’ he fired back.

‘I’m well aware of that, but I’m still interested in her. I’m interested in you, too.’

‘If only I’d been there, I could have protected her,’ he told me.

‘You appear to have got your life back on track remarkably quickly,’ I’d said.

He gave me a long stare.
A temper
, I thought.

Outside the pub, rumour has it, Alice’s group had gone in a chip shop, assuming she’d stay propped against the wall, but she must have got enough of a second wind to wander off unnoticed, with the speed and purpose drunks can muster, lurching, zigzagging, away from the city centre and down towards the river. Frustratingly, they’re staying steadfastly silent, the three girls she was supposedly with.

‘Isn’t it time to let this go, professor?’ the policeman asked. There was a new look of pity on his face and it occurred to me it was one I’d see increasingly frequently from now on.

‘There’s more than one way to die drunk,’ I informed him. ‘No wonder she had more success locking up the bad guys than you!’ I’d read all about her campaigns to bring criminals to justice. Talk about a woman on a mission. ‘If Cameron’s Big Society means anything,’ she’d argued in one editorial, ‘it’s that justice is no longer exclusively the preserve of our police.’

‘I presume you are aware how many people hated her?’ I asked Kidson.

‘You said in the paper she was universally loved,’ he replied sarcastically.

‘I said lots of things to them – they chose not to print them.’ There was a long wail from along the corridor, the drunk teenager presumably. ‘My point was that everyone who knew her loved her, but her job brought her into contact with plenty of people who didn’t.’

‘I know the feeling,’ he said, glancing at his watch.

‘There’s more,’ I blurted. ‘When I got home yesterday, someone had been in my house.’

‘Was anything stolen?’

‘No, but things had moved, someone had switched on my computer.’

‘Was the computer actually taken?’

‘No, but someone had used it. I could feel their presence.’

Hard to tell whether his expression now was one of pity or if he was close to laughter. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘and was
anything
taken?’

‘No, but someone had definitely been in the house. I’m very precise; things weren’t as I’d left them. I keep getting
this sense I’m being followed as well.’ I stopped short of full disclosure; what I didn’t share was that I’d definitely seen the lad with tattoos around the campus, even in the hospital car park yesterday. He keeps appearing at my office, too, bearing items from his ‘Alice collection’, like a cat bringing in a fresh kill. The last thing I needed was for the police to haul him in and have him blab about my letter (God, what if he knows about other stuff?), but I did need to inject some renewed urgency into their investigation. Alice may be enduring fodder for headline writers, but the police appear to be merely going through the motions.

‘That Ben Finch, he was a twat,’ the little oik proclaimed today. ‘Thought he was better than the rest of us. Banging on about his old school and the masters – why can’t he have had
teachers
like the rest of us?’

‘That’s one of her former boyfriends, isn’t it?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Right psycho he was, gave me a proper pasting once. Wouldn’t stop booting me even when I was on the floor face down clinging to the leg of the desk.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was a cruel bastard. Because them posh schools give you an evil streak. It’s survival of the fittest in them places, kill or be killed.’

‘They can indeed engender some less than auspicious traits, but surely one wouldn’t resort to such violence unprompted.’

‘Ask Alice. Or maybe not! The next morning, the smarmy bastard grinned at the mess my face was in and said, “You ought to get that checked out, mate. Looks serious.” Then when the girls were around, he took the piss more, said there’d obviously been a dispute in the gaming community!’

Clearly still fuming about the incident, the lad banged the desk agitatedly, and declared: ‘I saw your wife in Waitrose.’

‘Stay away from her,’ I warned him.

‘Five hundred quid,’ was all he responded.

Maybe my imagination is playing tricks on me, Larry. I haven’t been sleeping. Fliss has been urging me to ease back on the old work a bit. She’d be rather less supportive if she realized that my muse’s mother, the Elizabeth Salmon in the news, is the Elizabeth Mullens of old.

‘Aren’t some things better left unsaid?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps some secrets are
meant
to go to the grave, Jeremy.’

I didn’t contest the point, but I disagree. I don’t want secrets in my grave with me. I don’t want things left unsaid. When it comes to Alice – Fliss, too – I want to replicate
our
relationship, yours and mine: the simple, salving clarity of it. Do you recall how we used to test our honesty pact, Larry? Pushing the boundaries in those letters. My spots, your eczema. My loathing of my father, your parents’ poverty. My masturbation fantasies, you losing your virginity. It was like a game of cards: liberating, exhilarating. Except it wasn’t cards we were playing with, it was ourselves (frequently literally at the time, grubby little savages that we were!). I looked forward to those letters with a charged sense of anticipation: reading them
and
writing them. I came to view moments of portent in my life – exam results, new digs, my marriage – almost not for themselves but for how I’d share them with you. You never called me Jeremy Cock like the other boys; never dubbed me beak face or the mock jock or four eyes. All those leisure pursuits we shared, it was like we’d been separated at birth: philately and autograph collecting (signatures are very passé these days; it’s pictures of celebrities on phones the youngsters collect) and obscure episodes of history like when the Dutch sailed up the Medway and sacked our ships in Chatham in 1667. I remember thinking: Finally
, another boy like me
. It
was the first time I hadn’t felt completely alone on this planet.

CCTV had shown Alice moving a few yards then stopping. Moving then stopping, moving then stopping. She was like a darted animal, lurching. Then, as the landlord of the last pub she’d been in told the media, she went ‘off radar’ (he was also quick to point out she was well over the legal age to consume alcohol). She had bruises and scratches on her elbows and knees – consistent, according to the coroner, with ‘falling repeatedly to the ground in an advanced state of intoxication’. UDIs – that’s all they would have been, according to one of the students I’d interviewed. He’d had to explain. UDIs.
Unidentified drinking injuries
.

‘I’m a taxpayer, do your damn job,’ I snapped at Kidson.

‘Right, I’ve tried to be patient, but this conversation’s over. If you feel like you’re not being taken seriously, then you’re at liberty to make a complaint.’

‘I demand that you write down what I’ve told you,’ I shouted and heard myself as others must: pompous, patronizing, superior. Old Cookie. ‘At least, make a record of it in your book.’ I leant across, seized his hand and pen and forced it down on to his pad. There was a little crack and he snatched it away.

‘If you weren’t a sad old man, I’d nick you for assaulting a police officer. Now piss off back to whichever stone it was you crawled out from under.’

All I want to do now is put my house in order and with that in mind I have a confession: I may have neglected to give you full disclosure on one aspect of this. I’ve explained to you about my penchant for walking at night, haven’t I? How it’s a diversion and supplies the gentle exercise my consultant advocated. Well, I was taking one such constitutional in Southampton city centre on February 4. Let’s just
say it had come to my knowledge that Alice was in the city that evening.

Probably just as well Kidson and his cohorts hadn’t done their job brilliantly or I might have some explaining to do.

When I’d eventually arrived home, Fliss – it was late but she’d stayed up, she was beside herself with worry – had enquired about my flushed, spooked demeanour; she was fearful it was some hitherto invisible symptom of my condition.

‘If I give you this, will you stop following my wife?’ I said this morning, handing over yet another envelope to the boy with tattoos. It’s not the money, Larry, that’s not important, but I have to protect Fliss.

‘Ironic, isn’t it, Iceman, how you’re so determined to look after her when you’re the one who’s done stuff that could destroy her? Alice only had to share a house with me for a year, but your missus has had to do it with you since 1976.’

It caught me off guard, him mentioning that year.

‘It’s written on the back,’ he said, winking. ‘The wedding photo on your bedside table.’

I appear to have got myself into rather a pickle, Larry.

Yours as ever,

Jeremy