What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  That picture of flowers on yr bedroom wall new?

  Like to party, pretty girl?

  Coming to get you.

  Extract from transcript of interview with Luke Addison conducted at Southampton Central police station led by Detective Superintendent Simon Ranger,

  6 April 2012, 13.25 p.m.

  LA: This is a joke; I was her boyfriend.

  SR: Were you? Because we’ve been informed that the pair of you weren’t actually an item at the time of her death.

  LA: It’s complicated.

  SR: Explain to us how it was complicated. I gather yourself and Alice had separated.

  LA: We were working through some issues, yes.

  SR: Issues?

  LA: I slept with someone else and Alice needed space to get her head round that.

  SR: So she dumped you?

  LA: No, we were having a break. But we were going to get back together – she was well up for that.

  SR: I’m presuming she was the instigator of this break, rather than you? Must have hit you pretty hard?

  LA: I was gutted.

  SR: How would you respond to the suggestion that you’re a bit of a ladies’ man?

  LA: I loved Alice.

  SR: Be that as it may, you’re someone who likes to get his own way, are you not? Would you describe yourself as controlling?

  LA: No, of course not.

  SR: But you’re a physically big man. What are you, six one, thirteen plus stone? Loud, a handful, one of the boys, a man who likes a drink, never knew how a night out would end when Luke was around – these are ways you’ve been described. One of your colleagues dubbed you a bully.

  LA: I was mad about her.

  SR: Mad enough to push her in a river?

  LA: Go screw yourself.

  SR: Let’s keep calm, shall we, sir?

  LA: Would you be calm if you were me? My girlfriend’s dead and you’re treating me like I’m the one who pushed her off the bridge.

  SR: Interesting choice of words. Unless I’m mistaken no one’s proved she was ‘pushed off the bridge’ so why did you choose to phrase it like that?

  LA: A figure of speech. I want to know what happened to Alice as much as anyone. There’s a bridge, Alice ended up in the water: it’s not rocket science to conclude there’s a fair probability she fell off it.

  SR: But you said ‘pushed’ not fell.

  LA: You lot need to pull your heads out of the sand – do stop-and-searches or house-to-house enquiries. Widen the net, look further afield.

  SR: Suit you, would it, if we focused further afield?

  LA: This is fucking ridiculous.

  SR: Please don’t swear at me, Luke. Or are you prone to lashing out when you’re provoked?

  LA: Aren’t we all?

  SR: No, I’m a calm person. But I’m also a perplexed one because twenty-four hours after Alice died you led us to believe you were alone in your flat on the night in question, and now it comes to light you were in Southampton.

  LA: I’ve explained about that. I shouldn’t have lied, but I was worried you wouldn’t believe me. I knew you’d jump to the wrong conclusion.

  SR: What conclusion should we have jumped to, Luke? See, there’s another inconsistency. After you’d changed your story once and admitted you were in Southampton, you claimed your exchange with Alice by the river was – and I quote – ‘good natured’. Well, a witness has told us that you made serious threats against Alice.

  LA: Witness … what witness?

  SR: One who observed your little contretemps. She purports you had Alice – and again, I quote – ‘round her neck’.

  At this point, the interviewee laughs.

  LA: This is farcical. Have you never heard of the concept ‘innocent until proven guilty’?

  SR: I wasn’t aware I’d used the word ‘guilty’. Interesting you choose to put that on the table. If you were me how would you interpret these contradictions?

  LA: I loved her.

  SR: I’d rather you accounted for these inconsistencies. We also have it on reliable authority that you’re a man with a temper and it’s not difficult to envisage how that temper might have been put under strain – emotions running high, throw some booze in the mix, the woman you were devoted to giving you the heave-ho. Make even me furious, that would.

  LA: Find who did this, please.

  SR: When we spoke to you forty-eight hours after Alice died, you had a black eye and when I enquired how you came by it you informed me it was playing squash. Do you wish to reconsider that?

  LA: I don’t remember.

  SR: Let’s try that answer again, shall we?

  LA: Some bloke hit me in a bar.

  SR: That’s better, we’re getting somewhere now. Did this ‘some bloke’ hit you before or after Alice died?

  LA: It was the next day; I was drunk. I’d just been informed Alice was dead.

  SR: So you do drink a lot?

  LA: I like to go out on Friday and Saturday nights.

  SR: A binge-drinker then?

  LA: No – a normal twenty-seven-year-old.

  SR: Had you been drinking prior to confronting Alice by the river?

  LA: No.

  SR: That also intrigues me, because we’ve got a landlord prepared to go on record as serving you at least two pints of cider.

  LA: It’s none of your business, none of this is.

  SR: The moment Alice died, it became my business. The night porter at the Premier Inn on Queen Street maintains you came in at ten to four. His word: legless. Luke, I’ve been doing this job a long time and there’s an easy way and a hard way of us doing it, but we get to the same conclusion either way. I had a quick search back through our records – you were arrested for assault in 2002.

  LA: I want a solicitor.

  SR: Assault in a public house in Nantwich.

  LA: No charges were ever brought.

  SR: Scant consolation to the individual you gave a pasting to.

  LA: I was seventeen – if you’re going to dredge up that far back we’d all have stuff we’d prefer to hide.

  SR: Like Prague? Is that something you’d prefer to hide?

  LA: Fuck you.

  SR: Careful. That temper of yours could be a dangerous thing.

  LA: I’ve got nothing more to say.

  SR: Luke Addison, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Alice Salmon …

  Voicemail message left by Alice Salmon for David Salmon, 4 February 2012, 17.09 p.m.

  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.

  Post on Truth Speakers web forum by Lone Wolf,

  6 July 2012, 22.50 p.m.

  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 i
n 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!!!

  Column in the Evening Echo,

  17 March 2012

  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

  Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  19 July 2012

  Dear Larry,

  For the record, I persevered with Dr Richard Carter.

  ‘You clearly enjoy the company of women,’ was his opener to one session, ‘but let’s explore how she, Liz, made you feel.’

  I’d felt myself crabbing from exclusively blocking and baiting this chap – we were like two out-of-condition short-sighted bantam weights – to a state that might have arguably been described as candour. ‘Alive,’ I said. ‘Transcendent, primal, glorious. Like a bastard. Like a man.’

  ‘What do they feel like, Jeremy?’

  In our early exchanges, I might have responded with a snide ‘You’ll never find out’, but I offered up: ‘Like someone else.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Richard, I’m an upper middle class, virtually middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon academic. My existence is predicated on convention, my job demands rationality and diligence. “Meticulous” was how masters would describe me at school. The “someone else” didn’t have to abide by normal rules; he got to tear a near stranger’s clothes off.’

  I’d lost a stone after Fliss left and I’d never had weight to spare. She’d gone back to her parents in Lincoln. Everyone’s at it now, a practice that took root in the noughties, returning to the nest like thundering cuckoo chicks because their student loans have consumed them or property prices have escalated away from them, but
it had the unmistakeable ring of failure then: it was an inversion of the natural order to return to one’s parental home. Inevitably, eyebrows were raised on campus. Not that my wife’s absence topped the gossip list for long: relegated by the altogether more seismic revelation that Elizabeth Mullens had tried to kill herself. I rang the in-laws’ house every day, but they refused to let me converse with my wife. I also contacted Liz’s lodgings in a bid to establish her condition, but all I got was an uncooperative landlady who didn’t appreciate calls after 9 p.m. and complained about overdue rent.