‘I needed some forgiving.’
‘That’s beyond my remit,’ he said, inclining his head to the heavens.
I remembered my school motto, dulcius ex asperis. ‘I wanted to be better,’ I said. ‘I wanted to stop hurting people.’
‘See,’ he said, with the faintest trace of smugness. ‘Altruism! It’s not as if you’re even referring to your kin, either.’
Larry, I’d often grappled with whom ‘kin’ constituted in my case. Both parents in the ground: one service attended, the other boycotted. No siblings; a cousin in Edinburgh I hadn’t encountered in a blue moon. Fliss was the nearest I had, the woman I’d married in a small flint church in Wiltshire, the sunshine spearing through the stained-glass windows.
‘How would you love, if you had an artificial heart?’ she’d asked once, fascinated.
‘One hasn’t performed overly proficiently with a real one,’ I’d replied.
‘Same time, same place next week?’ Richard said in December.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re done.’
‘They all abandon me eventually,’ he chuckled.
‘We’ve got that in common. The students do that to me. Thanks for everything. I feel better. I’m cured.’
‘That’s not a description I tend to use. I’d view you as “in remission”.’
I jumped in my car – the TVR I’d bought on a whim the previous summer – and played my new favourite song, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.
Doctor Richard Carter had become one of my closest friends.
Twitter activity referencing Alice Salmon,
29 January to 5 February 2012
From @EmmaIrons7
So much for me never joining the Twitterati – I’ve landed! Can’t wait to see u next month. Bring your dancing shoes!!
January 29, 11.39 a.m.
From @EmmaIrons7
You’ll LOVE the dress I bought yesterday BTW.
January 29, 12.04 p.m.
From @EmmaIrons7
Why you not replying to my much-slaved-over tweets???
January 29, 18.31 p.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
Much soz, Ems. Been ploughing thru work ahead of weekend. Party party x
January 30, 17.55 p.m.
From @Carolynstocks
Good luck with the article this week. Go knock ’em dead
January 31, 08.50 a.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
Aw thanks, Cazza. Bricking it x
January 31, 09.16 a.m.
From @NickFonzer
In your part of town tomoz and owe u dinner if u fancy grabbing bite to eat? That Italian u like?
February 1, 15.44 p.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
Be ace to see you, but will struggle this week – next week?
February 1, 15.55 p.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
Early nite tonite for this crime-busting gal ahead of big weekend in my old hood. Stay safe x
February 3, 19.37 p.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
When will I ever learn?
4 February, 20.07 p.m.
From @GeordieLauren12
You lightweight, we’re never gonna let you forget this, bailing out early on a reunion!
4 February, 23.05 p.m.
From @AliceSalmon1
Say hello, wave goodbye.
4 February, 23.44 p.m.
From @Carolynstocks
Answer your flippin’ phone, Salmon …
5 February, 11.09 a.m.
From @MissMeganParker
Can’t get hold of @AliceSalmon1 either. Prob nursing monster hangover somewhere!
5 February, 13.34 p.m.
From @Carolynstocks
You been kidnapped? Am sending out search party if you don’t call me back soon.
5 February, 14.04 p.m.
From @MissMeganParker
Also been ringing @AliceSalmon1 with no luck – assuming her phone’s dead, she never charges it!
5 February, 14.22 p.m.
Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
8 August 2012
Hello again, Larry,
‘It’s going to be bitter, don’t be late back,’ Fliss had instructed me, when I informed her at 4 p.m. I was nipping out for my constitutional.
At six, a text enquiring when I’d like supper. At seven, a phlegmatic ‘Where are you?’.
But I couldn’t pass up an opportunity such as this. You see, old chap, Alice was in town. A gift from the gods.
It wasn’t hard to locate her. Initially via her digital trail then, the scent picked up, I was on to her in the flesh. Like a bloodhound, I was. The melee enabled me to go unnoticed relatively easily; it merely necessitated selecting suitably distant vantage points from which to monitor her – the challenge was staying in close proximity. She soon had me puffing; ran me ragged, she did. That was to be the night, Larry. I was determined to exorcize a few ghosts, come clean about the night of the anthropology bash.
She was in a group of four, a fluid tetrad that expanded and contracted, her three friends dropping out of sight then reappearing; others, joining them, staying, melting away, breezing back. Inevitably there was a cavalcade of men, vying for her attention. Not that I objected to them plying her with alcohol; it would gird her for the conversation I intended to have with her. City lads, some of them, hoodlums. ‘On a reunion,’ I heard her shout to one over the din. Others, students: boisterous and badgering my party into drinking games. Much frivolity.
As you’ll have ascertained, Larry, I’ve been back over the events of that February evening in intricate detail, deconstructing Alice’s movements and conversations. You see – and you’ll have to bear with me on this one – but the authorities have got it wrong. My suspicion is that someone close to Alice wished her ill. You’ll understand if I don’t elaborate at this stage. Going public on a hunch can be a dangerous business for an academic; reputations have been ruined by less. I’m afraid this will have to be an exception to our rule: for now, a secret between us.
‘Worried about you,’ Fliss texted me.
None of those philistines would have been alert to it, but behind the alcohol-propagated happiness, Alice wore a veil of sadness. It was so reminiscent of Liz I had to restrain myself from tramping over and marching her out of those places. She was about the same age that her mother had been when our paths crossed. Mid-twenties. Ripe.
Another fellow on the scene at one point. A well-heeled sort. I’d edged closer; his hand might have been on her arm. She laughed so violently at one of his wisecracks that her head rolled backwards and the strip light made her hair look identical to her mother’s. I’d been intending to explain about my association with Liz, too, when we had our discourse later, but feared that might be too much for her to hear in one go. I feared there’d be a scene.
Alice’s response to him I couldn’t decipher, but I did catch his. ‘Whoever he is, he’s an idiot for letting you go.’
‘Tell him that,’ she said.
‘Give me your phone and I will.’
This, I thought, with a swirl of melancholy, must be ‘chemistry’.
Another text from Fliss: ‘Are you safe?’
I actually made a record of the events of that evening upon my return home: locked myself in my study and logged them while they were fresh. Subsequently, I’ve repeatedly anatomized the constituent parts. One’s training teaches one to amass a watertight case. Heaven knows, there have been plenty of digressions in this case: attention-grabbing deviations. Sideshows, the lot.
At one point, this boy inverted his empty pint pot on his head, then deposited it on the table and punched both arms skyward and she liked that, Alice did: she howled with laughter. I could see why; if he’d been at my school, I’d have had a crush on him: those shoulders rigid from rowing, an easy, insolent smile: intelligent but a lack of application. I’d encountered plenty of boys like that, Larry. I’d scuttle along in their slipstream, perversely grateful for their c
ontempt and cruelty. If I had to pinpoint it, that was where my misanthropy was gestated: against a backdrop of rugger boots clicking on changing-room floors and the drilling of Latin declensions and conjugations. The abiding conviction that every last damn one of them was against me.
‘Ever indulge in a dab of the old charlie?’ he asked her.
‘No. Or hardly ever.’
‘Which is it?’
‘The latter, hardly ever.’
‘Tonight’s hardly ever,’ he said.
Another text from Fliss. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
Alice turned and it was tricky to make out if she was peering back towards her group or the chalkboard on the wall with its rainbow of lettering: 8 SHOTS, £7. ‘Suppose you only live once.’
‘Attagirl,’ he said. ‘Attagirl.’
Internal memorandum among governors at Southampton University, 17 August 1982
From: Anthony Devereux
To: Charles Whittaker
Status: Urgent and strictly confidential
Charles,
I’m unable to reach you by telephone, but we need to speak as a matter of urgency. I expect you’ll be up to speed regarding the situation with the English tutor Elizabeth Mullens. You may have more information at your disposal than that to which I’m currently privy, but my understanding is that she attempted suicide earlier today. It appears one of the cleaning staff alerted the emergency services having discovered her, whereafter she was rushed to A & E. I gather her condition was dire. Clearly a personal tragedy, but with my professional and commercial hat on, I’m mindful of the wider implications. The press are bound to pick this up – especially given that a cleaner’s involved; they’re clinically incapable of discretion – so we need to thrash out a statement. Much sadness, shock, that sort of tone. Wouldn’t hurt to hint at a few personal ‘issues’ and with a fair wind they’ll join the dots re her penchant for a drink. If it had been off-site it wouldn’t be so damaging. Since the incident, rumours about Mullens and Cooke in anthropology have been brought to my attention. If the two of them are/were in a relationship that will complicate matters. Cooke is older than her and married and neither of those facts will escape notice. The last thing we need is a scandal, Charles. A lecturer killed himself at one of those dreary, provincial northern polytechnics last year and the newspapers had a field day; it ended in resignations. My instinct – and I write this in confidence, because our association dates back over twenty years – is that Cooke is devoid of talent so this could be a germane point at which to reappraise his future. That may also go some way to satiating the newspapers’ bloodlust. It might be prudent for you to send Mullens flowers. Thank heavens the students are on vac – can you imagine the febrile environment we’d be attempting to contain were it term?
Yours as ever,
Anthony
PS: On an unrelated note, might you be free to join us on the evening of the 24th for our business in practice round table? One of the guests is an IBM director whose premise is that home computers will soon be as common as TV sets.
Alice Salmon’s ‘Favourite quotations’ Facebook profile,
14 December 2011
‘I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.’
Geoffrey Chaucer
‘Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.’
Oscar Wilde
‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’
Mark Twain
‘For Sale: one heart. Horrible condition. Will take anything for it. Please.’
Anon.
‘In a free society, there comes a time when the truth – however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say – must be told.’
Al Gore
Post on Truth Speakers web forum by Lone Wolf,
14 August 2012, 23.51 p.m.
It’s not just the Iceman’s head I’ve seen inside, I’ve seen inside his house and it’s a mansion! I had a squiz on Google Earth, but had to wait for him and his missus, the pointy shrew-like snob, to go to Waitrose to get inside. Don’t judge me, the end most def justifies the means in this case, and this is proper journalism – not that shite that Alice did, but uncovering things the establishment don’t want uncovered. The Iceman needs to be exposed for the PERVERT he is.
That Megan bird who used to hang around with Alice has been gobbing off about him on her blog. Like, weird photos and stuff he’s got stashed around the house, though I didn’t stick around long enough to rummage them out. Anyway, I’ve more. I’ve tapped another professor for info – oh yes, some fossil in a nursing home by the name of Devereux who I heard about from one of the maintenance men at the uni and this dude worked with Iceman way back and despises him. I had to spin some line about researching an article on the great professors that this part of the world had produced for them to let me in, but don’t hold that against me – it’s not like I hacked Milly Dowler’s phone!
I opened by stressing how fantastic it was to see him and putting on my best posh voice and he tucked into the chocolates like he hadn’t been fed for a week. I had to wind him up a bit, tell him this book of the Iceman’s would ensure he’d be the one who got remembered – like how everyone gushes about Darwin but no one recalls Wallace, a line I’d rehearsed – but he soon blabbed like a baby.
‘He raped a student, that’s what he did,’ Devereux said, bubbles of spit in the corner of his mouth. ‘Took her to his office and put it up her.’
‘Go on.’
‘I always had my suspicions, but couldn’t corroborate them – then recently read an article quoting someone who implied as much, too. She’d spotted him arm-in-arm with an intoxicated student. The pieces of the jigsaw fell into place then. I’ve calculated when it was and I bumped into him the next morning scuttling out of his office, shifty as buggery. Why would you spend a night in your office, when you’ve got a charming old rectory of your own just a few miles away in the New Forest? Mmm?’
‘Good point.’
‘Wasn’t his usual prickly, combative self that morning either. Yes, it rings true. He believed his own hype. “Untouchable”, that was what he used to call himself.’
Bingo! There was me half prepared to give Icy the benefit of the doubt, let him get away with merely being a stalker, but he took her to his office by all accounts and shagged her when she was COMATOSE drunk, and now me climbing in a back window isn’t such a big deal, is it?!!!
I played it cool with Devereux, pretended I already knew that, sensing that there might be more to come. Gave him my spiel about how Jeremy Frederick Harry Cooke will be claiming in his book that he had impeccable morals while others like him were shagging like rabbits.
‘Rabbits,’ he screeched. ‘I’ll give you rabbits. Cooke couldn’t keep his pencil prick in his pants. He was a sex addict.’
Then he told me something else. I’ve got much MORE information than Megan Parker and all I’m going to say now is it’s mega and when you hear this you’ll start taking the other stuff I say more seriously. Then my revelations will go VIRAL and his stupid book will rot in a few libraries, but my stuff will go round the world, except for countries like China where you can’t even get on Facebook because the government’s got this ‘great firewall of China’ thing.
I wasn’t originally intending to go public, but he’s the one who went back on our deal and if he’s going to play dirty then I am, too. He bangs on about evolution but I’m flexible, I’m responsive, I adapt.
I’m going in for the kill. Time for the lone wolf to howl. Pity my prey.
Extract from Alice Salmon’s diary,
9 December 2011, age 25
When you love someone, you notice stuff the rest of the world doesn’t. A blink, a rigidity in their shoulders, a minuscule aberration in their intonation. I saw all those things in my boyfriend (is that now ex-boyfriend?) after Adam came out with that line in the restaurant. Then, cool as a
cucumber, Luke retorted with: ‘What’s the food like in here?’ And the conversation wheeled off, diverted, precisely as he’d intended it to.
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 26