SR: What makes you so certain?
ES: It wasn’t an accident and my Alice certainly wouldn’t have, you know, done this herself – it came to me in a dream, too.
JW: This might be a good point to break for a few minutes.
ES: Poor boy, he’s bereaved and you haul him over the coals.
SR: With respect, my job is to reveal patterns.
ES: Patterns. Patterns? There’s one: rain on the window behind you. Alice would have liked that. Animal paw prints in snow, bubbles in lemonade, the stripes on the tabby cat she had as a kid … she called that cat Gandalf. She was into Lord of the Rings long before any of these films came along.
JW: Mrs Salmon, I can see you’re finding things difficult and that’s understandable. Are you seeing your doctor?
ES: Was … he can’t help.
SR: Are you taking any medication we should be aware of, Mrs Salmon?
ES: They call it self-medicating!
JW: Presumably you’ll go home after you leave here today?
ES: Home? Home? That’s one option.
JW: Will your husband be there?
ES: He’s away …
Interviewee cries.
ES: Be sure your sins will find you out.
SR: Mrs Salmon?
ES: I’ve done something terrible. Alice saw an email that Jem – I mean Cooke – sent me on the day she died.
SR: Why did he send you an email?
ES: He’s trying to put his house in order before he snuffs it and we’d once been an item.
SR: What did the email say? How did Alice react to it?
ES: We didn’t speak … She sent plenty of texts, mind … said I was disgusting, a hypocrite, a liar, two-faced … She’s so like me, that girl, flying off the handle. Do you believe in karma, Superintendent? Because I must have done some pretty awful stuff in a former life.
JW: Are you OK? Do you need to take a breather here?
ES: I’m anything but OK. I’m about as far from OK as I have been since 1982. What if he comes after me? He’s got nothing to lose.
JW: Perhaps we should get in contact with your husband – where might we be able to get hold of him?
ES: Your guess is as good as mine. Hope this wretched book bankrupts him, Cooke. What is a book, Superintendent? It’s nothing. Paper, ink, vanity. A million pages aren’t worth a single person’s happiness.
SR: Your son – it’s Robert, isn’t it? – could we have him pick you up?
ES: He wouldn’t. Guess what he called me last week? A lush! His own mother, charming. Can I stay here a bit?
SR: Of course you can stay as long as you need to, but will there be someone to collect you later?
ES: Will the liaison officer be able to come to the house? Not sure I trust myself to be alone today.
Blog post by Megan Parker,
3 August 2012, 20.24 p.m.
What Cooke’s doing is sick. He promised me it was a tribute, but it’s turned into a character assassination. I can’t believe I ever cooperated with his grave-robbing. I’m supposed to be a communications expert FFS. I had the best intentions, but grief clouded my vision. This is it, though – I’m having no more to do with him and am urging all my and Alice’s friends to do likewise.
He’s worse than the gutter press – as if delving into her past wasn’t enough, now he’s picking over the remains of her last few hours.
He’s even gone on record as backing Luke, piously asserting that we have to have confidence in the authorities, but how can you trust them when you hear about these miscarriages of justice?
I’ll be honest, Cooke’s not normal. I liked him at first, but he wants to talk about me more than Alice, keeps rattling on about how I should follow my dream of returning to full-time study. ‘You’d definitely get a place, especially if I put a word in with the powers that be,’ he said.
‘Thank you, but it wouldn’t be Southampton,’ I explained. ‘Too many ghosts.’
‘I wasn’t necessarily referring to this august establishment. My reputation may not be what it was, but I’m not atrociously connected in academic circles. Not that you’d need a reference from me. You’re intelligent, you’re sensitive, you’ve got experience of industry so institutions would be positively falling over themselves to get their hands on you – and if they weren’t they jolly well should be!’
Then the other night – surprise, surprise, his wife just happened to be out – he took a call so I had a snoop around (Alice used to say inquisitiveness was a good trait!) and in one of his drawers he’s got this file of pictures. Not like what we’d been amassing, these were extra, and stashed in the middle of them – it was all grainy, like a print-off of a digital scan of an old-fashioned print – her as a KID on a beach. I was totally weirded out and then, because I was terrified of arousing his suspicion, had to sit in the dining room with him, the image of Alice in a pink polka dot bikini, water wings on her arms, burnt bright into my mind, while he slavered on about the ‘stages of grief’ like he was reciting a text. It’s as if there’s a bit of that man missing. Every fibre in my body was screaming: Run …
He talked about guilt but where can I begin with that? The guilt at not being with her that weekend to take care of her, the guilt at not picking up her texts, her voicemails, the guilt at not being a better friend? And then (we always used to argue about whether you could begin a sentence with ‘and’, but she was unmovable on it being fine … it even reminds me of her when I use brackets because she did that a lot) there’s the anger. Anger at how old men get to stockpile pictures of her as a child in a cossie and philanderers like Luke get to go out drinking again when he’s lied to the police. Chloe and Lauren reckon I shouldn’t be so horrid to him, but why shouldn’t I be horrid? If I let this anger go, it’s like I’m letting her go.
I’m going to quit blogging. I figured speaking out was being true to Alice’s memory, but it’s not. We might need to fill in the gaps, but attaining closure for ourselves won’t bring her back. This prurient preoccupation with detail, this compulsion to clasp logic when it doesn’t necessarily exist, that’s not how you show respect. The specifics of her final few moments, they’re hers not ours … they’re the only secret she will be left with at this rate, especially if Cooke publishes his godawful book.
Public opinion seems to be uniting around the theory that she was on her own at the end, so beyond that I suppose the precise details are irrelevant. Ignore Cooke, he’s a sad, discredited deviant who’s fixated with intrigue and scandal where it doesn’t exist. Hasn’t got enough excitement or drama in his own life, that man, so he’s seeking it vicariously. Whether she slipped on a muddy bank or tripped over a tree root or paused to gaze out in wonder at the shimmering blackness and crumpled. Even if she decided in her drunken state that it was, you know, time to go to sleep, let’s let her keep that private at least. Her final mystery. Fitting, in a way.
She had a romantic streak, our Alice, a weakness for red roses, doomed heroines, tear-smudged ink on love letters. (Alice Palace, right now my tears are falling on to the keyboard.) So you, Alice, getting lashed and toppling into a river … If you hadn’t died, it would be hysterical, a story we’d wheel out at get-togethers – Francesca’s birthday is only four weeks away; you’re going to miss that now, aren’t you? So very you, missus.
Death is random and if you fight that, the questions drive you mad.
‘There’ll be enough unanswered questions to fill a book,’ Alice’s mum said to me during one of our many late-night hours-long tearful conversations.
Drunk girls do fall in rivers and drown.
Before I leave the best friend I’ll ever have to sleep in peace, I need to set the record straight on one final thing. Our feted, lauded academic, who hoards pictures of children in swimming costumes – you mustn’t believe a word of what he says in his book. Because he’s got an agenda; there’s more to him than meets the eye: he’s a pervert and he assaulted me. When I made my excuses and stood up from the dining
-room table, his hand, it gripped like a vice.
Publish and be damned, hey Lissa?
Comments on the above blog post:
I’ve tried emailing and ringing you to no avail, so I’m left with no choice but to leave a comment here. I can appreciate you’re upset, but what you are making are extremely serious – and unfounded – allegations. If you don’t delete them within twelve hours, I will take legal advice. I’m very disappointed in you, Megan.
Jeremy ‘Silver Surfer’ Cooke
‘Take legal advice’ – you don’t scare me, Professor Cooke. I won’t be intimidated by a bully like you; Alice wouldn’t have wanted that. I’m allowed an opinion. I’m quitting blogging, but not because it would suit you and what’s already here stays live out of respect for Alice, which in case you haven’t noticed – you and Luke and the rest of the vultures – is a privilege my best friend never had.
Megan Parker
Megan, you’re totally losing it. Can’t believe you’d write this about Jeremy. He’s a sound bloke and that stuff you’ve been posting about me, it’s shite – yes, I did get taken to the station but I was let go, i.e. NOT charged. The police wouldn’t have done that if they’d had the slightest suspicion about me. Alice would hate us fighting over her memory so don’t get all holier than thou – yes, you were her best mate but you hadn’t visited her for ages. One mention in a shitty PR mag as ‘one of the thirty under thirty to watch’ and you turned your back on your old friends. Besides, Alice told me the last time she’d rung you, you’d had a right go at her.
Luke A
Why were the police so keen to talk to you then, Luke, if you’re innocent? They must have had a reason or they wouldn’t have dragged you to Southampton, and they might have let you go, but that doesn’t mean they can’t subsequently charge you. I’m sick of people dissing me because in one stupid interview I dared to mention she wasn’t perfect. With real friends you don’t need to pretend they’re perfect. I was her oldest friend, not some temporary boyfriend! Actually it’s disrespectful to make out she was a nun – she liked a few glasses of vino, she liked to get pissed; it’s not a crime. You of all people should know that, though I bet she didn’t share the story about the weekend she was here in December, did she? When she got so drunk she fell down the stairs and knocked me flying in the process! Suppose I imagined that, did I?!
Megan Parker
Yeah and I bet you were just as bad.
Luke A
Actually, I wasn’t, so there. For the record, I wasn’t drinking and it was your fault, if anyone’s, she was so hammered, because it was the day after she discovered you’d been putting it around in Prague and she was upset and needed some company, so don’t preach to me!
Megan Parker
Extract from transcript of interview with Jessica Barnes conducted at Southampton Central police station by Detective Superintendent Simon Ranger,
5 April 2012, 17.20 p.m.
SR: Just so I’m clear, your view is that after the man in the black shirt, to reiterate your phrase, ‘put his arms round her, but not in a good way’, she ran off. Is that correct?
JB: Yes. I explained. She got away. She legged it.
SR: This is really important Jessica – are you a hundred per cent on that?
JB: Yes, she went one way and he went the other.
SR: Could either of them have been aware of you?
Interviewee shrugs her shoulders.
JB: Suppose he could have come back but I went home. This happening, it’s the crappest thing ever.
SR: How drunk was she?
JB: She wasn’t like properly mortal, but she weren’t sober. Wobbly but walking.
SR: ‘Wobbly but walking’ in which direction?
JB: Down towards that sluice thing. It’s horrible there. You hear about dogs getting sucked in. It’s well dangerous, everyone knows that.
SR: Possibly not Alice Salmon.
JB: So it was her! I knew it was.
SR: But you’re claiming the man in the black shirt, the man she’d referred to as Luke, was nowhere to be seen at this point?
JB: Yes. I mean, no.
SR: Which was it?
JB: He was gone in the other direction, headed towards the main road.
SR: You must have long since finished your cigarette by this point?
JB: I had, but that was when I got worried.
SR: Why did you get worried, Jessica?
JB: Because she started to climb on to the weir.
SR: Why might she have done that?
JB: Kids do it in the summer to swim.
SR: But this wasn’t the summer, was it? It was February.
JB: That’s why it was so nuts. Was like when it’s hard to make out if videos on YouTube are real or made up.
SR: I can assure you this isn’t YouTube, Jessica. Someone’s dead.
JB: I didn’t do nothing wrong. Am I being arrested?
SR: No, you’re free to go at any point, but climbing on to the weir seems a curious thing to do. Maybe you called out?
JB: I did, yes that’s what I did, on my life I yelled, but she was miles away now and in her own world. I kind of froze, too, like when you have a dream and you’re bricking yourself so much you can’t speak.
SR: What happened next?
JB: She stood on the grid thing, so the water must have been going under her, and then climbed over the fence, and I was like, whoooah, why’s she doing that? Was it true? Was she pregnant?
SR: What did she do then?
JB: There’s this platform thing that’s like the top level, and she climbed up there. She must have been twenty feet above the river and I was, like, well freaked. Dunno why it’s not properly fenced off; kids could get on to it. It reminded me of that advert on the telly where the geezer climbs the scaffolding because he’s pissed and thinks he can fly, except she was kind of careful.
SR: Careful?
JB: Yes, sort of deliberate. When some people are mortal they go all manic and run around shouting the odds. Well, she was the opposite – she was all precise. It was as if she was doing stuff in slow motion. I never thought, she’s about to fall. What I thought was, she’s doing something very deliberate. That was when it first occurred to me.
SR: What did? What occurred to you, Jessica?
JB: That she was about to jump.
Part V
* * *
NOT SIGNING OFF WITH AN X
Extract from Alice Salmon’s diary,
9 December 2011, age 25
I pretended I hadn’t heard in the restaurant earlier. If I hadn’t done that, I’d have exploded – seriously, I’d have lost it, burst into tears or screamed or thrown Luke’s food into his fat, smug face. Plus – idiot that I am – I was still giving him the benefit of the doubt. Mum always said I flew off the handle too easily so I was waiting for him to pipe up with a ‘Don’t get the wrong end of the stick about that conversation between me and Adam’ or ‘Don’t pay any attention to Adam; he can be a right freak’. But he didn’t and I didn’t mishear or misunderstand, because I might be stupid but I’m not that stupid.
No wonder he’d been so desperate to come over here after he’d got back from Prague. Talk about a guilty conscience. He’d called me the minute he got off the plane in Heathrow.
‘It’s Sunday,’ I protested, conscious I had a big day at work the next day.
‘Please,’ he begged.
‘Go on then, twist my arm,’ I said and an hour later he breezed in with his rucksack and a bouquet of flowers and one eyebrow missing (shaved off, so the story went, in some stupid bet). ‘What did you get up to then? Or shouldn’t I ask?!’
‘What goes on tour, stays on tour,’ he’d laughed.
Clearly.
He collapsed in front of the telly: he’d managed fewer than four hours’ sleep on both nights.
The two-faced liar had been on the same side of the table as me in the restaurant, three along; it had been boy-girl, boy-girl. It was his work cro
wd, but I wasn’t going to be antisocial and bail out, even though I had Christmas shopping to do tomorrow. A guy from the bar at the front bowled past heading to the loos and, spotting Luke, slapped him on the shoulder, crouched beside him and started gassing. I didn’t get the impression they were close-close; the handshake Luke gave him was the one he gave my work colleagues. I got snippets of the conversation. He was a friend of Charlie’s from home, in London for the weekend; they’d met on the Prague weekend.
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 24