What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  Larry, it’s all so complicated. We know it’s complicated, but it’s even more complicated than it otherwise might have been. This little yob’s theory about suicide, I’ve been testing it, as I have all the others. My task is to assemble intelligence from the madness, shape order from chaos. It’s a calling in which I’ve been rather immersed; hence, incidentally, the disgracefully long gap since my last communication. You will make allowances for me, won’t you? Because I’ll endeavour to paint out the patterns, but my cognitive abilities aren’t what they were. A fresh day and new details filter to the crown of my mind, take precedence, chunks of past illuminated in the alternately faithful and foggy terrain of recall. But I’ll endeavour to demonstrate fidelity to the facts, however gory and salacious. It’s all there, locked away in the heads and hearts of a handful of us, primed for the extraction. My job is to dive into detail, verify, authenticate, substantiate, separate fact from fable: lies, love, grudges, adultery, betrayal, murder.

  I sat there trying to breathe. Trying to breathe life back into more than one corpse.

  There it was, conspicuous and incontrovertible, the billet-doux and the revelations therein: trumpeting a bitter cocktail of protectiveness and, well, something much more unchaste.

  Jesus, what have I done?

  Yours as ever,

  Jeremy

  Article on Southern Eye website,

  7 December 2012

  First cop on scene of Salmon death quits force after ‘beyond the grave’ calls

  The ex-cop who was first on the scene after Alice Salmon died has spoken for the first time of his harrowing experience.

  Brave Mike Barclay has told Southern Eye how the episode, which refuses to leave the headlines nearly a year on, contributed to him quitting the force after nearly three decades’ service.

  The official investigation remains open, but the former law-enforcer said his first reaction was that the incident could have been ‘sexually motivated’ because ‘her top was torn and hitched up’.

  It was immediately apparent to the dad-of-three that he was dealing with a corpse, so he made no attempt to fish her out of the River Dane – instead calling for back-up. ‘I was prepared to walk alongside her if she floated downstream, but she was tangled in reeds,’ he said. ‘The guy who’d called 999 was sitting on the ground in shock, repeating over and over how he’d found her like this.

  ‘My sergeant arrived and took charge, then the whole world and his dog was there – CID, CSI, the bronze inspector, the boys with their scuba kit, the works. What was vital was sealing the area – the footpath, the steps, the bridge, basically the priority was scene preservation and stopping members of the public contaminating evidence.’

  The post-mortem concluded the cause of death was drowning, with the coroner subsequently reporting Salmon to have alcohol and cocaine in her bloodstream. Returning an ‘open’ verdict, he also recorded ‘abrasions and cuts on her face, grazes on her knees and a large recently sustained bruise on her right shoulder’.

  ‘Even in the poor light and at a distance, I could make out injuries on her face,’ Barclay said. ‘I’d have hazarded a guess at blunt-force trauma – it was like she’d been punched.’

  He was particularly distressed by hearing Salmon’s mobile. ‘It was in the mud beside the water and it kept ringing. Whoever was calling was entirely in the dark about the news that was on its way to them,’ he said.

  ‘If you do thirty years in this job you get desensitized, but my youngest daughter is in her twenties so it got to me.’

  Barclay admitted to still having flashbacks, often triggered by the ‘sonar’ ringtone that had been on Salmon’s phone.

  He concluded: ‘You have to deal with all sorts in the police service, but that case affected me in a way others haven’t. It was my granddaughter’s birthday party the next day and when she blew out the candles on the cake, I made a wish, too.’

  Review by Alice Salmon in Southampton music magazine, Stunt, 2005

  The Dynamite Men are a band to watch.

  They burst on to the stage at the Pump House, full of swagger and style and performed a sixty-minute set of hugely entertaining songs to a packed student audience.

  Always a popular venue, it was standing room only, with the 200-strong audience having flocked to see this local trio.

  First a confession, your reviewer has a vested interest. I once met the lead singer in a bar on East Street and was as awe-struck as a fourteen-year-old groupie. His real name, STUNT can reveal, is Jack Symonds and he’s nineteen and comes from the Hampton and is a modern-day Lord Byron, dishevelled and dishy with his curly dark locks, skinny jeans and brooding stage presence.

  For an hour, the world slowed down. Money worries, exam stress and fascist landlords all receded as the world was stripped down to music that filled the room and filled our hearts. They sang of relationships, with the wistful and profound ‘Morning, Morning’, which laments ‘waking up with a strange woman. I rolled over and saw her face. She wasn’t smiling.’ Then there was the melancholy ‘Away’, which speaks of the trials and tribulations of leaving home – that instant when ‘we see what’s over our shoulder as smaller, but we’re taller, so we stand up proud and walk on.’ But the lyrics aren’t without humour. They explore what it is like to be penniless with the hilarious and clearly autobiographical ‘67p’. Another of my favourites was ‘You Kill Me’, a hymn to an unnamed first love (lucky girl!), someone who ‘broke my heart and didn’t as much as blink’.

  There were lots of influences at work here. The Libertines, Oasis, even a bit of Amy. But they’ve merged all these influences into a unique sound. The sound of the Dynamite Men.

  My favourite song was ‘Hit’, a searing analysis of addiction, which saw a tortured Jack alone on the stage, describing with pitch-perfect accuracy the clarifying, soothing and emboldening sensation drugs can bring. ‘My turn in the toilet, my turn for a tablet, like breathing in pollen or swallowing a sparkling fish …’

  Course, he wasn’t entirely alone – he had bandmates Callum Jones (19) and Eddy Cox (20). They’re school friends, so he said at one point, drawn together by the power of music to change the world. ‘We thought we had something to say,’ he shouted.

  We’re listening, Jack. We’re very much listening.

  Music sources tell me there’s a lot of luck in this business and right now that’s all that’s between the Dynamite Men and the big time. One nineteen-year-old maths student described it as the best gig he’d ever been to and while I wouldn’t necessarily agree – Pulp’s at the Apollo in Manchester takes that accolade as far as this reviewer’s concerned – it came a close second.

  It’s easy to see why the Dynamite Men have already got a loyal following on the university circuit. Jack hung out with gig-goers in the bar afterwards. (You’ll be pleased to hear your reviewer stayed with him until it closed – all in the name of research for STUNT naturally!)

  I felt privileged to have seen this band. It felt like watching music history. Like how it must have been the first time the Arctics performed. The sort of moment people are still talking about in years to come. The night the Dynamite Men first played the Pump House. They will continue to make explosions. They will continue to make noise. This is one band destined to make a very big bang.

  I’ll definitely be going to every one of their gigs from now on (student loan, what student loan?). Uni work can wait. Music like this can’t. Besides as Babyshambles put it, Fuck Forever.

  Blog post by Megan Parker,

  12 February 2012, 21.30 p.m.

  I’ve checked Alice’s direct messages on Twitter. Glad to see you never took my advice and changed your password, Salmonette … you must have used the same one for every single site you ever registered for! I found this exchange on January 15. Obviously I’ve mentioned it to the police, but a fat lot of good that’s done. Publish and be damned, hey, Alice?

  From @FreemanisFree: Haven’t forgotten about you my little freedom fighter.
r />   From @AliceSalmon1: Who is this?

  From @FreemanisFree: Patience patience little Miss Criminal Catcher. All in good time.

  From @AliceSalmon1: You don’t scare me.

  From @FreemanisFree: Feeling’s mutual.

  From @AliceSalmon1: Who are you or haven’t you got the balls to tell me?

  From @FreemanisFree: Oh I got balls enough, wanna see them?

  From @AliceSalmon1: You’re pathetic.

  From @FreemanisFree: Your dead.

  From @AliceSalmon1: Stop tweeting me or I’ll report it to the police.

  From @FreemanisFree: Like your new purpel hat. Would like to fuck you.

  From @AliceSalmon1: Go to hell. And learn to spell while you’re there.

  Texts exchanged between Gemma Rayner and Alice Salmon,

  14 December 2011

  GR: Soz to hear re you and Luke – fancy a run to take yr mind off it?

  AS: Can’t, ankle knackered.

  GR: Sports injury?

  AS: UDI!

  GR: Sustained?

  AS: At Meg’s the other day. Disagreement between me and the stairs! I blame wonky banister!

  GR: Lightweight x

  AS: Will ring u, be lovely to catch up. Need to hear about your flat hunting. Maybe could manage a gentle run in Battersea Park at w/e? x

  Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  10 June 2012

  My dear Larry,

  That lad with the tattoos came back today. I stopped by my office to wade perfunctorily through some funding documents I’d been neglecting and there he was, sitting inside, bold as brass, as if envisaging my arrival. ‘You,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Iceman,’ he replied. ‘I figured you’d like to see your letter again.’

  He retrieved it from his rucksack. ‘Not sure why I kept it. Maybe it struck a chord with me. Discovering someone else had a thing about Alice too was well weird. It prompted a pretty full-on spell of nicking her stuff. A psychologist would have a field day with that, wouldn’t they? Probably reckon I was upping my game to see off the competition!’

  I should have anticipated the document making a reappearance, Larry, but I’d assumed it wouldn’t have survived – lost or become indecipherable or mouldered to zero: it was only paper, after all.

  ‘Love this city, love being at uni here – even if some freakoid did shove a note under my door in freshers’ week professing their love for me,’ she’d confided in me once, when she joined me in my office for a soupçon of alcohol after our annual departmental bash.

  ‘How unsettling,’ I’d replied, feigning ignorance. ‘Moths attracted to your bright light?’

  ‘Flies round shit, more like,’ she’d said.

  The boy in my office said: ‘You’d have to be a right screw-up to write this.’

  The loop of a ‘B’. The high, sharp point of a capital ‘A’. Mine, all mine.

  ‘She decided it was a practical joke, but I can spot a sicko when I see one. What do you reckon, Iceman, what’s your sicko radar like? Practical joke or nutter? My money’s on the latter – where’s yours? Come on, where’s your money?’

  He was toying with me. ‘I need your name,’ I said.

  ‘They call me Mocksy.’ He fondled my note; he’d no right to dredge it up. Another word I recognized, a turn of phrase, the construction of a sentence. In the right hands, linguistics is like a mini-DNA profile, as reliable as any identity parade. I looked around. My degree certificate, a faded photograph of me with a minor minister, a cutting from a magazine headlined ‘Cooke closes on breakthrough’ referring to some ultimately futile strand of research.

  ‘Instead of a signature, there’s a question mark. What a wack job! A question mark and a kiss – it’s the sort of thing a kid would do.’

  I stared down at the ‘X’. Those two crossed strokes. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet, a signifier of ten, an unknown variable, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. A kiss. ‘You stay away from me and you stay away from Alice Salmon’s memory, you hear.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You’re not.’

  We both gazed down at the single sheet of paper. A previous piece of me, toxic, precious. Sweet Alice, don’t be afraid, it began.

  ‘Five hundred quid,’ he said.

  I’ve lost track of the number of occasions upon which I’ve unburdened on you, Larry. But I had – I have – so very few confidants. All those pages we devoted to Descartes and Thomas Aquinas must have paled into insignificance against the space I filled ruminating on Alice in 2004 and prior to that, back in the early 1980s, my marital indiscretion. Remember how I begged you to visit? To make a mercy mission, like some lumbering Saint Bernard bearing brandy and sage advice? We could have gone to the Crown; could have holed up in the back bar and other patrons wouldn’t have been able to work out whether we were perfect strangers or the most intimate of friends, and swapped stories over a pint of the awful, nutty frothy mouthwash they call beer.

  ‘Five hundred quid,’ the boy with tattoos repeated. ‘Or Mr and Mrs Salmon get to see a copy of this.’

  He held it back out and the faintest of smiles broke on the corner of his mouth. I saw another word and it gave me a pinch of melancholy for when I’d been learning to spell: the sense of infinite possibility, the first occasion upon which I’d grasped the concept that our understanding of the world – the world itself, therefore – was dependent on the words we had to explain it.

  It’s as vivid now as ever how I’d crept into Bates Hall: its cold stairwells, echoey corridors and frayed carpets. It reminded me of Warwick. The smell of stale food, chilli con carne; the Proustian section of my brain was in overdrive. You’re not an undistinguished, inconsequential scholar, I thought as I’d hunted for her room. She had one of those name tags on her door, the sort children do. If she’d opened it, who knows what I’d have done. Said hello? Enquired how she was settling in? Pushed my way in? I’d stridden along the corridor, my brain spinning: Don’t open the door, open the door, don’t open the door, open the door. It seemed critical that it didn’t go unsaid, how exquisite she was. Her having absolutely no idea, of course, merely made her more so. She was a carbon copy of her mother.

  God, how I adore women. I’ve worshipped the shape of their necks, the colour of their lips, the smell of their hair. I want to fuck them all, each and every last damn one of them, I recall once writing to you. It hasn’t, as you know, been exclusively women I’ve found myself drawn towards – many is the occasion I’ve recounted my handful of encounters with fellow male undergraduates at Warwick. Why is it, Larry, that when I recall those quick and largely unsatisfactory trysts, it’s with a sense of shame? Hundreds of species of animals have been shown to be homosexual, yet only one – us – displays homophobia. I guess any one of those men could have set me on a different course. Instead I buried it away, that part of me, if indeed it was a part of me, the portion that had taken me to public parks and strangers’ rooms festooned with the memorabilia of public schools, mostly slightly less minor than mine. It’s irrelevant now. I’ve made my choices.

  I’d phrased the letter in a way that I’d hoped wouldn’t scare Alice. Astounding how it’s possible to say so much and so little in nine sentences. I cogitated, as I wrote it: Am I having a breakdown? I’ve often grappled with what that would feel like. It’s probably not as dramatic as one imagines: a series of tiny imperceptible and individually invisible steps. But I didn’t care. I’d have been noticed, been heard, been felt. Me. Old Cookie. Even if she went public, they’d never twig it was me and, besides, it wasn’t as if my career was going anywhere. Shortly before, I’d been passed over for the departmental headship in favour of a boy from Imperial. ‘It’s not that we don’t recognize your contribution,’ I was informed patronizingly. ‘Rather that the role requires a different skill set to yours.’

  Fliss could tell something was amiss. ‘You seem preoccupied,’ she said the night I wrote my epistle. I’d stumbled on an Attenborough documentary tha
t temporarily satiated us, then we went up and she read a South Downs flora and fauna book and I flicked absent-mindedly through mine on the last days of the Iroquoian, and within a few minutes she was snoring and I crept down to my study and dug out my fountain pen.

  Fliss reckoned my affair – sorry to keep bouncing around in history, old boy, but that’s how our memories work – made us stronger, but it tore chunks out of us. Trouble is, it’s human nature to look after Number One. We all need to be convinced we’re the most important being on earth; it’s a prerequisite of evolution. Is that a very pessimistic prognosis – a symptom possibly of never having children, as you did? They say having them teaches you to put someone else before yourself. Sure, I’ve made sacrifices. Jesus, watching one’s mother slowly die involves plenty of those – my father and I had severed all contact long before that vicious old bastard snuffed it – but if you’d have said, ‘Her life or yours?’ how would I have responded? How would any of us?

  Yes, I have been drinking, but only a little winter warmer. The Balvenie single malt Fliss and I have been saving for a special occasion. Trouble is, I never seemed to have one. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, Larry. Waiting.