The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  ‘Well I’m playing on the Wii for ten minutes,’ Oliver says.

  ‘No, it’s my turn,’ Bella shouts and they push each other in a bid to get to the living room first.

  Victoria pours herself another cup of tea and tries to avoid looking at the pile of letters on the shelf. She shifts her focus slightly so she can see out to the garden. There she catches sight of her underwear flapping on the clothes line next to a duvet cover, the end of which is trailing on the dirty path. How long has that been out there? At least three days, a week maybe. It’s been wet, dry and wet again.

  Doug starts clearing away the plates. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down,’ he says and kisses the top of her head.

  ‘The kids aren’t that bad, Doug,’ she jokes.

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Stirling’s not happy.’

  ‘Because you released Alden on bail? Well it’s not his case, Vic, it’s yours and you have your reasons.’

  ‘It’s not that straightforward. It’s linked to one of his cases; you can’t look at one without the other. In Stirling’s mind I’m dragging my heels … I’m obsessing over Eve’s investigation when I have enough to charge Alden with murder. He thinks I’m undermining his authority.’

  Doug analyses her face, the way he often does when he senses his wife is not telling him the whole story.

  ‘And that’s it? That’s what’s bothering you?’

  She sighs, rubs her temples. Doug knows her better than she knows herself. Victoria can stand her ground. Challenging authority is not a new one on her and she doesn’t bow to pressure easily. If it was simply a case of taking her time in order to be thorough, she’d brush off Stirling’s barbed comments. ‘Big mistake. Huge,’ he told her yesterday when she informed him she was releasing Alden, unaware no doubt that he’d just pinched a line from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. No, it’s not his disapprobation that’s eating away at her. It’s Eve’s file. Nathaniel Jenkins called yesterday to tell them he had it, if it was any use. A conversation with Eve’s mum had miraculously reminded him that Eve had been emailing it to him as a backup. What is it about people and their memories? Were they all getting high and smoking dope at university while she was at police training college? Is that why everyone she speaks to seems to have irreversibly damaged their powers of recall?

  Victoria has the file now. This is the chief source of her anxiety. She’s eager to read it but she’s also dreading what she might find.

  If Eve Elliot was right and David Alden didn’t attack Melody Pieterson, Stirling nailed the wrong man. Not only that, but it would mean he was accountable for Eve’s murder. Victoria can handle undermining authority, but ruining the reputation of the man who helped shape her career is an altogether more terrifying prospect.

  She smiles at Doug. ‘I’m not convinced Alden killed Eve, it doesn’t stack up, and I’d rather not be the person to find out Stirling messed up.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you have a choice.’ He gets up from the table and hands her the car keys from the side. ‘As much as we’ll miss your sparkling conversation, we can live without you for a few hours,’ he says.

  She kisses him. ‘Thanks, it would give me a chance to …’

  ‘Go.’ He waves her away.

  Within minutes her coat is on, she’s heading out of the door shouting, ‘Love you, see you later’ to the kids, pretending not to hear Oliver joke to his sister, ‘Who did she say she was?’ or the sniggers that follow.

  It’s Saturday. The station will be free of Stuart Stirling’s presence. She wants to make a good start on the file. Before she settles down at her desk, she walks to the coffee machine, inserts thirty pence and waits as the plastic cup fills with a black liquid tar. It’s disgusting, chemical, barely palatable, so they tell her. ‘How can you drink that, ma’am?’ It’s something of a joke, extended, in her view, beyond its natural life by the bags of Nicaraguan arabica or Venezuelan Mérida she opens to applause at Christmas. Even DCI Stirling entered into the spirit of it one year by giving her a cafetière. It’s found its way into the kitchen now, where its presence is better appreciated. What she doesn’t tell them is that at home she enjoys a decent blend but here in the station she prefers to drink this stuff; the association it has with work centres her in the task. To borrow a phrase from a glossy women’s magazine, drinking crap coffee is her ritual.

  It comes as no surprise that the file is dense. Eve’s background on APPEAL must have taught her to be thorough. Victoria scans down through the first few pages of press cuttings detailing Melody’s attack and David Alden’s subsequent conviction. She is trying to work out how Eve has organised the file, what system she has used, if there is a system at all. Six pages in she finds a list, numbering in order of priority the evidence against Alden: the CCTV, the last known sighting of Melody, his whereabouts that evening. The email that he sent suggesting she come to the club. The rest of the file deals with each of these points individually with what at a glance looks like supporting evidence. A later section is given over to interviews with witnesses and Melody’s friends.

  She hears the clock tick-tock above her head. How long did she tell Doug she would be gone? She can’t remember if she did. Taking a sip from her plastic cup, the familiar burnt taste hits the back of her throat, and she starts reading the first section, entitled ‘CCTV’.

  Chapter Four

  Eve

  HERE’S A FUNNY thing. My friend Kira and her brother Rex did a little video for their dad’s seventieth birthday reminiscing about what he was like when they were growing up. Kira said he was a soft, like a cuddly teddy bear, compared with her mother, who was by far the stricter parent. Her brother said the opposite. He recalled his dad shouting, flying off the handle (they edited that out for the video). Kira couldn’t remember one instance when he so much as raised his voice. They lived in the same house, were eighteen months apart in age and according to their parents they had been treated in exactly the same way.

  Neither Kira nor Rex were deliberately lying so you ask the question: how could their memories throw up such different experiences?

  It boils down to perception. Ask two people what they made of a party, a book or a film and they won’t give you the same answer.

  In that sense there can be many different stories describing the same event.

  In David Alden’s case there were two.

  The window of time was limited, definite. At the beginning and the end were absolutes. At 10.35 p.m. on 17 August 2007 the clock started. This was when David Alden walked out of the Orb club in Hammersmith. His figure, casually clothed in jeans, a shirt and a lightweight summer coat, could be seen descending the stairs from the bar, opening the door on to the street and fading out of shot. It was all recorded on the club’s in-house CCTV. In the minutes that followed he walked to his car, a vintage Porsche 911 in racing green, parked around the corner. He waited, allowed the engine to turn over before driving up Shepherd’s Bush Road, skirting the roundabout to turn left on to the Uxbridge Road.

  Roughly half a mile from there he stopped at a garage to buy a packet of Malboro Lights and chewing gum. This too was recorded on CCTV, so he could be seen both inside the shop and outside on the forecourt. According to the timer on the recording it was 10.51 p.m. when his car pulled out of the garage back on to the Uxbridge Road heading west. Between nine o’clock and midnight twenty-three cars made the same manoeuvre. The police logged their registrations as a matter of procedure but it was the green Porsche 911 that particularly interested them. It placed their suspect in the right area at the right time.

  Until this juncture there had been one unified narrative, undisputed by Alden and the officers questioning him. But this was the moment it forked into two conflicting stories.

  Story A: the case against David Alden

  David Alden drove out of the Texaco garage on Uxbridge Road to meet Melody Pieterson at a predetermined location. Ostensibly he was going to take her back to the club, but in fact he had oth
er things on his mind. He wanted to have sex with her, thought she wanted the same; hadn’t she led him on after all? They went out together regularly, exchanged emails, texts, chats over the garden fence. They shared music. He knew the signals. It had been building for months, this thing, so he made a move in the car. Why not? Except when he tried to kiss her she pushed him away and he realised, head filling with shame, that he had got it all wrong. She didn’t want him after all. Had she laughed? Shouted? Was that why he flew into a violent rage? Was it why his hands reached out to her throat and found they could clasp around it so easily? Too easily. She was only slight, a thin slip of a woman. A few minutes earlier he had wanted to kiss the sloping curve of her neck; now it was where he applied pressure to squeeze the breath out of her.

  It was over so quickly. A few minutes, five at the most. Minutes in which he lost himself in the act. It was only when he stopped, released his hands from the grasp, that the enormity of what he had done washed over him. He was a different person to the one who had bought cigarettes and chewing gum ten minutes before. He was a murderer now. At least he thought so. He couldn’t wake her, didn’t know she had slipped into a coma. He panicked. What should he do? What would a killer do? He would get rid of the body as quickly as possible.

  So he drove out to Ham, a place familiar to him since it was near where he had grown up. His car was seen close to Ham Common Woods on CCTV. This was where he dumped Melody Pieterson. After that he got back in his car and drove back to the club in Hammersmith. The CCTV recorded him walking through the doors again at 11.52 p.m. This was the end of the window of time. Perhaps he wasn’t in the mood to DJ that night. Who could have blamed him? But he had to, out of necessity, because as alibis go, playing in front of a crowd of two hundred was as good as it got. When he was finished, he invited a friend back to his flat, a man by the name of Jack Wilton, who stayed until the morning.

  The next day Alden took his car to be valeted on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. The receipt was found in his wallet. It was the prosecution’s case that this was intended to destroy evidence of what he had done the night before. But he forgot to clean his coat. When that was analysed, strands of Melody Pieterson’s hair and clothing were present.

  Story B: the case for the defence

  David Alden claimed he had been driving to meet a friend in Brentford (it didn’t help his case that the friend turned out to be an acquaintance made through occasional and small-scale drug deals.) It was the fifth time they had met outside the Seven Stars pub. On each occasion the transaction lasted no more than a few minutes. David Alden had not felt the need to ask questions of Ritchie, such as his surname, his address. He didn’t even know whether his supplier was a regular at the pub or simply used it as a convenient place to do business. Of course by the time he found himself in a police interview room he wished he had asked a few questions, gleaned pertinent information that would have made Ritchie appear less imaginary construct, more real person. While David wasn’t naturally inclined to disclose the identity of a drug dealer, it was preferable to being charged with the attempted murder of a friend.

  David Alden did not drive beyond Brentford that night. Indeed the defence insisted it was hard to determine the make or model of the car seen close to Ham Common Woods. The CCTV was of such poor quality, it was difficult to see more than headlights glowing in the dark.

  He cleaned his car regularly, always on a Saturday. There was nothing unusual about this.

  He had given Melody Pieterson a lift two days before the attack and this was the reason, he suggested, why her hair and fibres from her clothes were found on his coat. It must have been sitting on the passenger seat when she got in.

  On 29 April 2008, a jury of five women and seven men convicted David Alden of grievous bodily harm with intent. Story A had got their vote.

  *Melody Pieterson does not remember anything about the night of the attack?

  I spent three evenings going through the judge’s summing-up and case notes in order to make my own. It wasn’t fun, let me tell you, but it was important to boil it down into proper English because judges and barristers and even police officers tend not to talk like anyone else you know. On the third evening, at half past ten, I wrapped up warm with gloves, a scarf and a hat and headed out to my car. The snow had crusted on the windscreen. I considered abandoning the plan or postponing it at least. But I wasn’t in the mood to wait. Patience and I had never been the best of friends.

  I gave the car a cursory glance. A can of de-icer would have been a helpful if surprising find but in its absence I resorted to scraping at the windscreen with a credit card. When I’d cleared a patch of frost large enough to see through, I headed out of my street. The wheels skidded on ice. Of all the nights, I thought. But I wasn’t going back and to my relief the Uxbridge Road had been gritted. Half a mile up it, I pulled into the Texaco garage, bought some crisps and a hot chocolate and waited in the car until my watch said 10.51 p.m. Then I pulled out, turning left on to the road. A quarter of a mile from there I turned left again at Larden Road and parked for two minutes before continuing my journey. The traffic flowed easily all the way to Ham, a small suburban town bordering the Thames. I located Ham Gate Avenue and drove to the top, to the gates of Richmond Park. Again I pulled over and waited a few minutes before turning round and retracing my route. I tried to keep my speed steady, hovering around the limit all the way. Eyes on the road, not daring to look at the dashboard clock because it held the answer and I didn’t want to know the answer until I had stopped. I passed my own street and headed to the Orb in Hammersmith instead. Parking was easy at that time of night. I found a spot around the corner, got out of my car and walked to the entrance of the club, where I finally allowed myself to look at my watch. It was 12.01 a.m.

  If David Alden had attacked Melody, he must have moved quickly.

  I was a good sleeper, bordering on the professional in the sense that if I put my mind to it I could sleep anywhere, at any time. I even fell asleep standing up once, although there was a certain amount of wine involved in that feat. The night I returned from Ham I couldn’t sleep at all; loud thoughts and adrenalin wouldn’t allow it.

  By the time the grey morning light crept into my room I was stale. I craved air and space. It was early, around seven, and I was on a later production shift that day so I threw on my trainers, joggers and a coat and headed out. If you have a problem, take it for a walk, my dad used to say. He was a firm believer that the motion, the rhythm of the steps could help you find a way out of any quandary.

  I parked by the banks of the Thames at Hammersmith. The sun was up, the dreary sky of an hour ago was now a golden haze. The river greeted me, winking and gleaming in the light. Out towards the middle of the river a team of rowers sliced through the water spurred on by their cox shouting instructions from a loudspeaker. Cold air streamed through my lungs, made my nose run.

  What was I going to do?

  Should I go back to David and Annie and offer to help, or let it pass? Was I up to doing it alone?

  I reached for my phone and called Nat.

  ‘Why are you ringing me at half past seven?’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What you mean is it can wait but you’re too impatient.’

  ‘Something like that. Have you got time?’

  ‘I’m actually on the toilet having a dump, but if you’re happy with that situation then go ahead.’

  ‘OK, I’m going to put that mental picture out of my mind and I won’t ask why you have your phone with you on the loo. Now listen …’

  I started to tell him David Alden’s story in detail, the files I’d looked at, the trip to Ham Gate.

  ‘Bullet points please, darling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got all morning.’

  ‘All right, I hear you. I can’t see how he would have had time to attack her and dump her body.’

  ‘You don’t think the police woul
d have worked that out?’

  ‘Come on …’ We’d both covered enough stories to know the police made mistakes, accidental or otherwise. ‘And Annie said his legal team were all over the place at the trial.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a lot to take on. What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Run a mile.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I think you already know what you should do, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering me at seven in the morning when I am trying to empty my bowels.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s why I love you.’

  ‘Pleasure’s all mine.’

  ‘The window of time was so slim it would have been almost impossible for you to have picked Melody Pieterson up in your car, strangled her, dumped her body and then returned to the club by midnight.’ I tried to drain my voice of excitement. I’m not altogether sure I was successful.

  ‘On top of that, there’s no clear image of your car in Richmond. Just one grainy CCTV shot that an expert witness claimed could have been your car. But if you look at it, there’s no way you can tell what kind of car it is.’

  Annie was staring at David but his head was down, hands clasped in front of him as if he was meditating. On the table were the remnants of three full English breakfasts and three mugs of tea. I was learning fast that David was a complex character. He gave off so many different signals at once – happy, nervous, sulky, pensive, each one layered over the other – that it was impossible to determine what mood he was in.

  ‘What are you saying, Eve?’ he said finally.

  With my fork I prodded an uneaten sausage. ‘I’m saying that if you really want to do this then I’m prepared to help.’

  David turned to Annie. For a few beats there was no one else in the café. Years of strain and setbacks and hurt condensed in that moment.

  She reached out with one hand to squeeze his. With her other hand she took a napkin to wipe her eyes. David turned back to me.