Am I not too old to feel like this, to still surprise myself? To catch myself in the mirror and think: Alice, WTF? All those promises I made myself as a starry-eyed teenager – to never touch drugs, never get in debt, never let anyone down. Life overtakes you. Never imagined I’d get a tattoo and, OK, it’s discreet, but it’s still a tattoo and my parents would go ballistic if they saw it. Vowed never to let myself get messed around by a man, too, but here I am still swapping texts with Ben. He even gatecrashed my twenty-first lunch in Corby.
‘You seeing anyone these days?’ he’d asked uninterestedly after breezing in.
‘No. You?’
‘Nothing serious.’ It all had a certain reassuring familiarity. ‘Remember when we stood on the Pont des Arts?’ The way he pronounced it sounded very French. ‘That was special.’
‘I’m not going to spend the night with you.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘I mean it.’
‘You were quick enough to let me buy you a drink.’
‘Don’t spoil it, Ben. Let’s end today on good terms. Let’s prove we can do that.’
He put his hand on my knee. ‘I’m still mad about you.’
‘You’re not. You’re mad about the idea of me. In practice, you can’t cope with a girlfriend. And take your hand off me, too.’
It was like a game of pontoon where he kept on twisting: that was him all over, keeping on twisting even though he knew he’d bust because he always did. A bit of me felt ashamed that I’d fallen for him; Meg always said he was a dick.
He’d moved his hand up my leg. ‘What have we got here? You like that, don’t you?’
‘Get your hand off me.’
‘You’re a prick-tease, Lissa, that’s what you are.’
I slapped him. Once, quick and hard across the face and it was first time I’d ever slapped anyone and immediately felt compelled to ask if he was all right. A red mark began blooming on his left cheek. ‘She loves me really,’ he laughed to a man on a nearby table. ‘I will sleep with you again,’ he said to me. ‘If not tonight, one day.’
I left him in the bar.
Had a good feeling about this place as soon as I saw it on Gumtree.
‘The room catches the sun – in the evening it shines right in,’ the ad had said and three hours later I was having coffee with Alex and Soph.
‘We’d like someone we can get on with,’ he said.
‘But failing that, we’ll settle for someone who’s not a serial killer,’ she added.
They showed me the room and the sun was shining right in. ‘When can I move in?’ I asked.
It isn’t shining in now.
He’s still out there, that fox. Rusty, I’m going to call him. Little Rusty. I’m going to make him my word of this diary entry. I’d put food out, but Soph reckons he’ll have fleas and could bite, so sorry, little man, you’re on your own; we’ll have to just talk for now.
I look myself up and down in the mirror. Still as alien to myself as when I was a teenager: this thing I carry around, that carries me around, this body. I touch my hair, my face, my hips. Trace the tiny scar line on my wrist. It scares me: what she, that woman I’m looking at, is capable of.
Thing is, it’s not solely in bad ways I surprise myself. Wouldn’t have imagined in a million years I’d have it in me to sit in court when I was in Southampton and watch that animal I helped bring to trial for assaulting the old lady get sentenced and not flinch even when he blew me a kiss. Then there was the course after I’d started work when I had to give the presentation to all the bosses and I didn’t get my words garbled (‘Engage brain before mouth, salmon fry,’ Dad used to tell me), didn’t even need my crib cards, and when I’d finished they’d all clapped; seriously, they all clapped and not piss-taking, either.
I’m probably being a drama queen. That’s what Dad used to call me, and then later when I loved to dance he’d say I was more of a dancing queen than a drama queen and I loved dancing for him and I still love dancing now, I love it, love it, love it!
It’s no big deal. Lots of people don’t sleep – Mum included. I know because she told me once. She said when she was young she had spells when it all felt pointless: too little, too much, too overwhelming. ‘You will talk to me, if you ever feel like that?’ she’d asked. ‘Promise you’ll talk to me, Alice.’
You’ve got to look at your monsters, she always says.
I’m lucky. I don’t have many monsters. One, perhaps, that I’ve never dared properly look at. Old Cookie.
‘I met an old friend of yours,’ I’d said, fishing for information, the next occasion I rang Mum after the anthropology party. ‘A Professor Cooke. What’s he like?’
‘He’s bad news, Alice, that’s what he is,’ she’d replied.
I’d largely managed to avoid him for the next three years, despite his periodic, clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself with me. Once, crazily, buzzing and bold after a night dancing in the Union, I took a detour and walked past his office, curiosity made me – the urge to know what happened gradually growing stronger than the desperation to forget, a propelling impulse to shout the odds at the old bastard. He was at his desk, gawking vacantly out of the window, like how Mr Woof used to at the back door when he was waiting to be taken out for a walk. I almost tapped on the glass to check he hadn’t died. Then I recalled his hands, and ran again …
Twenty to six. The toilet’s just flushed. Alex will leave for work at ten to seven and Soph will go to the gym. Weird how I know their routines: these strangers who a ten-minute walk to a station brought together. They know I block the hall up with my bike and like to eat late, but they don’t know that when the world is asleep Rusty and I are friends. Alex will have toast, Soph a black coffee, our three lives crossing briefly in the kitchen. ‘Have a good one,’ we’ll say. ‘See you tonight.’ I won’t mention I’ve been awake half the night; Soph won’t mention another day’s swung by with her barely eating; Alex won’t mention he’s still crazy about his ex. But I know, because our Venn diagrams overlapped here: Flat 8, 25 Bedlington Road, Balham SW12. The prospect of one day falling out of touch with them gives me a sinking dread.
But tonight it’s drinks and dinner after work with the team. In some warm restaurant on the South Bank, the click of chopsticks, the ebb and flow of conversation about Boris bikes and Heath Ledger, the jokes about Wayne and Coleen or Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross; in that bubble of laughter, this will be a mere memory.
A quick bath, a cup of tea, a glance at the headlines on my phone – they reckon the snow we had was the worst for twenty years – and she’ll be here, the me who’ll be on the South Bank in twelve hours, a mere half a day away, laughing, the life and soul of the party, the me in the mask.
Being single rocks, but it’ll be shit to never have anyone and I sure have a knack for telling men who want to keep it no big deal that I need more, or men who want to get serious that we should take it easy (not that there’s been too many of those: basically only Josh and we were only sixth-formers). Always seem to get relationships the wrong way round, like I’m seeing the world through a mirror.
Were you awake at ten to four this morning? Did you look down at the garden and feel dizzy? Did you whisper to Rusty?
Tell me about those moments you have, you and only you.
Who are you?
Who am I ?
Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
20 June 2012
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.
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