What She Left: Enhanced Edition (27 page)

At this point, the interviewee laughs.

Dad, it’s me. Where’s Mum? Why isn’t she answering her phone? Get her to ring me; it’s urgent. How’s she been today? Has she been on her laptop? How you doing? I’m a bit squiffy. I’m in the Hampton for this reunion and been reminiscing about you blubbing when you drove me here for freshers’ week, you old sop bag! When are we going to have
one of your Sunday lunches then go out with the dog? Miss you, Daddy. Sorry I haven’t always been a brilliant daughter. You probably deserved better than me. For what it’s worth, you’re the best dad a girl could ever have. What was it you used to call me – your angel? I liked that. I best go, my battery’s running low. Love you always.

If you could only expose something seriously bad by doing something a bit bad, would you? If it was the only way of uncovering a scandal in a drugs company or MI5? Or if you had to commit a burglary or a minor assault to expose a bigger crime like a murder or a rape? Most of us would because powerful people shouldn’t be allowed to get away with doing bad things.

Professor Cooke.

No one can touch me for sharing his name.

Professor Jeremy Frederick Harry Cooke. THE ICEMAN.

He wears a jacket and cords and me pointing out he’s evil is not illegal. It’s called freedom of speech and I didn’t learn that from a shitty media studies degree – no, it was Sports, Media and Culture I wasted three years on, well, not quite three because I saw the light and jacked it in early. He can’t touch me, no one can, which is ironic because that’s what he did to someone else!

Trust me, I might have been wrong about other stuff, but I’m right on this one and he needs to be EXPOSED. When I wield the sword of truth you won’t say I’m a joke and a nutter then, will you?

Now he’s even putting his spin on it via a book. They say history gets written by the winners. Well, not any more, we all write it. I said he
couldn’t use any of the stuff I’d shared because of copyright, but he said nothing’s ever off the record, so here’s a taste of your own medicine, smart-arse.

I’ll be honest, I did have a financial ‘arrangement’ with the Iceman. I even had a new tattoo to celebrate it, but he reneged on our deal. I wasn’t being greedy, it just would have been nice not to have to worry about cash like Ben Finch doesn’t have to – it’s all right for him, living the life of Riley and convinced he got away with trying to MURDER me because of them pictures he found.

Nearly showed my favourite picture of Alice to her one night when we were sat in the lounge in the second year talking about photography, the one of her in the park on a run stretching against a tree. Them nights, they were special, but plenty of Sunday afternoons we chatted, too. She’d be proper hungover then and on that battered sofa with the red rug over it, sipping tea out of her elephant mug. Her phone would be on the arm, messages flashing up on it, and I’d ask if she’d had a big night and she’d say how did you guess and I’d tell her I’d heard her stumbling in and she’d apologize and go all guilty and hesitate as if she was waiting for me to explain what she’d done.

We so had a connection until the PSYCHO Ben Finch turned her against me. I love how I’m free to say stuff like that here. I’ve posted 181 postings in the last three months. Two of the nationals have blocked me, but that’s because they can’t handle my comments and because they’re controlled – they’re as bad as North Korea. This is a world of citizen journalism, when the man in the street gets heard because the Internet’s David’s friend not Goliath’s.

The press keeps people like me down and lets people like Ben Finch and Alice Salmon and the Iceman prosper. But not any more, justice is coming – Alice is dead, Ben Finch has gone off the rails and the Iceman is about to cop it because of what he did.

Have you guessed by now who he abused? WATCH THIS SPACE!!!

Greg Aston: The hard-hitting voice of reason

 

It’s a cliché to say you could leave your front door open in the old days, but we did care for each other more then. Mates, family, neighbours – they mattered when I was a lad. If there was a cold snap, we checked the old lady next door was fed and fine, rather than leaving her to freeze or starve. A posher paper than this might dub it a ‘moral compass’, but it’s simply recognizing what is and what isn’t acceptable behaviour.

Three women who don’t have it are Holly Dickens, Sarah Hoskings and Lauren Nugent. They’re the trio who embarked on a drinking spree with Alice Salmon the night she drowned. Half-cut, they allowed themselves to get separated from Alice and she ended up in the river.

One of them, Dickens, appealed for sympathy in an article yesterday in which she suggested they ‘lost’ Alice – like she’d been a piece of luggage in an airport. The journalist merely endorsed her position by suggesting it could have happened to anyone.

Had this trio not been behaving in a socially irresponsible manner, it’s unlikely they’d have let a friend wander off (‘abandoned’ is the word I’d use) and Alice Salmon would still be alive today.

‘A bit tipsy,’ Dickens described their level of intoxication as.

Pie-eyed, more likely.

The three of them should be held to account for their behaviour.

Their silence, meanwhile, has only served to create a vacuum into which misinformation has poured. Many turned to social
media for answers, where Alice’s final tweet simply said: ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, which has been interpreted as a reference to lyrics in The Hoosiers’ recent cover of the classic 1980s Soft Cell song.

Were I a cynical bloke, I could conclude that their motive for this silence is borne not so much out of sensitivity for the Salmon family, but from chagrin about their own behaviour. No wonder they’ve dodged the spotlight. I’d be ashamed if I was them.

These women (I’ve seen them referred to as ‘girls’, but they’re not, my better half had had two kids by the time she was their age) are the products of the responsibility-dodging, gratification-seeking, binge-drinking ‘me generation’. Indeed, Alice was a victim of it. We all have some responsibility for that.

We made drink-driving socially unacceptable. We made football hooliganism socially unacceptable. Now let’s make binge-drinking socially unacceptable. Let’s end the culture that turns a blind eye to yobs – male and female – rolling and rampaging through our streets, fighting, spewing and lurching from one discount drinks emporium to another.

If any good can come out of this awful tragedy, it’s that we might become less willing to let our cities be used as lethal weekend playgrounds.

 

Comments left on the above article:

 

True, buddy, how can you ‘lose’ someone? She wasn’t a set of keys or a mobile phone. What they did, it’s like turning your back on a toddler – it’s a definite no-no.

Monkey Blues

 

This vow of silence’s a bit odd. If I’d been them I’d have spoken up sharpish to make doubly sure no one was pointing the finger at me.

Onlyme

 

Which bit of the word ‘grieving’ do you bloodsuckers not comprehend?

Made in Bridlington

 

Hoosiers my arse, the David Gray version is the best cover of the song by a mile.

Mighty Mike

 

Talk about life imitating art … I read a piece that said Alice’s favourite book was
The Secret History.
Well, in that a group of students at a prestigious American college go to ground after a death.

Hazel

 

Wouldn’t you keep it zipped if your best mate had carked it? It’s the only way they can honour her memory. We’d be quick enough to diss them if they were throwing themselves in front of a camera, plus it’s so easy to inadvertently implicate yourself. This isn’t a friggin’ circus!!!

Junk collector

 

I was moved by their statement. They got it in the neck for it being too slick and for getting their solicitor to read it out, but I wouldn’t have been able to face the cameras if it was only twenty-four hours since my BFF had died.

EmF