Alice Teale is Missing

by H. A. Linskey

  ‘Sometimes people can’t help themselves.’

  ‘I would never do that. Anyway, it has a lock on it and she has the key.’

  ‘If you do find this journal, then we obviously need to see it. It might shed some light on all of this.’

  ‘I get it,’ said the younger man impatiently, as if Beth thought he might be stupid.

  ‘I mean it,’ she insisted. ‘We have to find this journal, Daniel.’

  The Journal of Alice Teale

  They all think I’ve got it nailed down, that it’s so effortless and I just glide from place to place like I’m on castors – from home to school to job and all the extra-curricular stuff we are expected to do to bulk out a CV with nothing else on it – but they don’t know the truth. They can’t imagine what I’ve been going through. The pressure has been building up for so long now but soon everything will come crashing down and I know it’s going to take me with it.

  Until then I have to keep on pretending. I get to choose which role I’m going to play, but it always depends on the audience. Play the part, love, play the part, and hope that none of them ever really works you out. You’ve secrets none of them would believe.

  You’re disgusting.

  You’ve known that for a while, but you don’t care so much any more. Not now you know the truth about them.

  Only He gets me. He can see right through me like I’m made of glass.

  I can’t tell him, though. He would know straight away that I’m not going to take this, because it feels like I have nothing left to lose.

  God, I feel so empty. There is nothing left now.

  I’m just a walking shadow.

  8

  Beth and Daniel walked in a loop that took them to the rear of the boy’s house just as their talk reached a natural conclusion. A middle-aged man was standing by the back wall of the house next door, washing a car in his shirtsleeves. Beth caught him staring at them and he looked away. Daniel didn’t bother to greet him.

  ‘Daniel, would you mind if I took a look at Alice’s room?’

  ‘It’s already been searched,’ he reminded her, ‘but you can if you want.’

  She didn’t expect to find anything new in Alice’s room but thought she might at least be able to build a clearer picture of the girl they were looking for.

  Daniel led her through a paved backyard. There were a few potted plants to add colour and a wrought-iron table with some chairs by the rear window. The house was empty.

  ‘Mam had to go to work,’ he told her. ‘No choice.’ He meant financially, but Beth couldn’t imagine how Mrs Teale could keep her mind on her job with her daughter still missing. Maybe it was even harder to sit around doing nothing, feeling helpless.

  ‘Where does she work?’

  ‘The minimart, on the tills and stacking shelves. It’s a job.’

  He led the way up the stairs, pointed to Alice’s room, and Beth opened the door. There was just enough space here for a single bed, a tall, thin wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a bedside cabinet. The room was cluttered with clothes. They were piled on the bed, including a discarded pair of jeans and a T-shirt that had been dropped there, next to a light blue scarf with stars on it and a couple of spaghetti-strap tops. It looked to Beth as if Alice had taste on a limited budget. She guessed that most of this stuff had been bought with her wages at the club; she doubted Alice got too many handouts from her dad. There were pairs of shoes and books on the floor, as well as handbags and some cushions that were supposed to be decorating the bed.

  ‘Mam’s always on at her to tidy the place.’

  ‘Typical teenager,’ observed Beth. ‘Always in a hurry to be somewhere else.’

  ‘My room’s worse,’ he admitted.

  The room held all the necessities of a teenage girl’s life, including a couple of hairbrushes, some scrunchies, lipsticks, cheap items of jewellery, scented candles and an incense burner with grey ash on it.

  Beth picked up a camera body that was missing a lens and Daniel said, ‘It got chipped when she dropped it at rambling club. It’s old.’ Beth put it back down then picked up another item, which had a familiar symbol on it. It was an old notebook with a pentacle embossed on its cover, and there was a pack of Tarot cards underneath it.

  ‘That’s not her journal,’ said Daniel.

  Beth opened the book and saw that notes had been written on several pages. ‘She into this kind of thing?’

  ‘For years.’ He smiled. ‘I blame Charmed. She watched all the reruns. What little girl doesn’t want to be a witch?’

  Beth read from the book: ‘A spell to cast love?’

  He laughed. ‘Must have had a crush on someone who didn’t notice her.’

  ‘… a spell to enact revenge?’

  ‘Yeah, well, she was only messing. That’s old, too.’ He meant the notebook.

  ‘She use the Tarot cards on her friends?’

  ‘Sometimes, I think,’ he said. ‘For a laugh.’

  Beth put the notebook down and turned her attention to the posters on Alice Teale’s wall. Some of them had slogans written on them. One said, ‘I’m not perfect … but I’m close.’ Another had the words ‘Nasty Girl’ written across the silhouette of a hot female dancer. Then there was a striking portrait of the famous Afghan girl wearing a red shawl, her piercing eyes staring intently into the lens of the camera. There was an old poster for Trainspotting, with the cast against an orange background, though Alice couldn’t have been born when it was made, and a music poster featuring Benny Blanco.

  ‘She’s old school,’ said Beth, and she pointed to a vinyl turntable with a pair of speakers on top of the chest of drawers.

  ‘Alice likes anything retro,’ he explained. ‘Everybody does these days – old Nokia phones, proper cameras, paper journals, books, records. They’re all big now.’

  Beth understood. It was an antidote to spending virtually every waking minute online as they were growing up. Kids were craving authentic experiences, things they could touch and hold.

  Beth leafed through a pile of second-hand LPs from the seventies and eighties: Tears for Fears, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Human League, a faded copy of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. ‘She likes the old ones, then?’

  ‘They’re cheap,’ he explained. ‘Most of them are from charity shops.’

  Beth walked towards the window and peered out. Alice had a view of her neighbours’ backyards and a set of allotments at the rear of her house. The neighbour was still standing there, absent-mindedly rubbing his car with a wash cloth. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

  ‘I’ll go out the back door,’ she told Daniel.

  The wash cloth was moving half-heartedly, rubbing the same spot on his car, as Beth reached him.

  ‘You’re a detective,’ said the man, as if Beth didn’t already know this.

  ‘I am.’ Beth wasn’t surprised. It was clear he wanted to talk to her. That was why he was hanging around, pretending to clean his car. She planned to ask him some questions of her own. Maybe he knew something.

  ‘Any luck finding young Alice?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘You obviously know her?’

  ‘I’m Bryan. The next-door neighbour,’ he said, and Beth wondered if he might be enjoying that status around town. He didn’t look too upset by her disappearance.

  ‘Know the family well?’

  ‘Er … quite well,’ and Beth took that as a no. She couldn’t imagine Ronnie Teale getting on with a busybody like this and Abigail probably kept herself to herself.

  Beth could have left at that point, but killers often knew their victims and sometimes liked to talk to the reporters or detectives who covered the cases they themselves were involved in. They couldn’t help it.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me about Alice that might be useful?’ she offered. ‘What did you make of her?’

  ‘Nice lass,’ he said a little hesitantly. ‘Bit wild, perhaps.’

  ‘Wild? In what way?’

>   ‘I heard she had a fair few boyfriends.’ His tone bordered on disapproving. He lowered his voice then, even though the street was empty apart from them. ‘She used to sunbathe, you know.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Making the most of the heatwave.’ Bryan jerked his head towards the property next door. ‘In the backyard.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘She’d be out there, with her books and stuff, studying and sunbathing,’ he said, and when Beth just stared back at him, he added: ‘In the nuddy.’

  ‘She sunbathed naked?’

  ‘In the afternoons, while her parents were out at work.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw her.’

  Beth turned to survey the scene. ‘But there’s a big wall between your backyards.’ Alice sunbathing nude might have been a little unusual, but she would have expected privacy in her own backyard.

  ‘Well, I didn’t see her from here,’ he protested. ‘I just happened to look out of my bedroom window and I saw her’ – and he almost whispered it – ‘with no clothes on.’

  ‘And she did this more than once?’

  ‘She did it a few times last summer and, again, more recently, when the weather turned warmer.’

  ‘And you happened to glance out of your bedroom window each time?’

  ‘Well, it’s not a crime, is it? I’m allowed to look out of my own window.’

  Beth looked up at the window in question. ‘Where did she sunbathe? At the bottom of the yard?’

  ‘Er, no, they have a table and chairs by their back window. The kind that lie flat if you adjust them.’

  ‘And you could still see her from your bedroom window? You must have been standing on a chair.’

  ‘What are you talking about? It’s not my fault if she parades herself like that.’ Beth said nothing and he became even more flustered. ‘I’m not a bloody peeping Tom.’

  No, of course not, thought Beth, but you did take an unhealthy interest in the attractive, naked teenager who lived next door, which might mean you know more about her than you’re letting on. ‘She doesn’t care who sees her,’ he went on. ‘She never draws her bloody curtains.’

  ‘How do you know she never draws her curtains?’

  He looked flustered again. ‘Because I have to come out here sometimes, don’t I, to get to my shed or put the bins out.’

  ‘Was that when you noticed her curtains weren’t drawn?’

  ‘They’re always wide open.’

  Beth realized that, with no houses behind hers, Alice Teale might have assumed no one would be able see into her bedroom. She also wondered how frequently Bryan liked to visit his shed in the evenings.

  ‘So you will have seen Alice through her window,’ she said. ‘Often.’

  ‘Not often,’ he protested. ‘Just on occasion when I was walking back through my yard. I’d sometimes catch a glimpse of her.’

  ‘By accident, exactly.’ Beth nodded because she didn’t want him to clam up at this point. ‘Ever see anyone else in the room with her?’

  ‘She had music blaring out once, which was why I looked up – so I could see where it was coming from, you understand – and there was someone with her then.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘It was another girl, and they were being daft together.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I think they’d been drinking, and they were jumping about – dancing, I s’pose you’d call it – but it didn’t look much like dancing to me, and the noise didn’t sound much like music either.’

  ‘One of her friends, then?’ Beth wondered if it was Chloe, or perhaps Kirstie.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ever see anyone else with her? A boy, maybe?’ she asked him. ‘Or a man? You might well have done, if you were working in your shed.’

  ‘I did, once.’ He lowered his head so that he didn’t have to look the police officer in the eye when he said: ‘There was this lad with her.’

  ‘In her bedroom?’

  ‘Aye, I noticed him because he had his shirt off.’

  ‘Her boyfriend? He’s the same age as her. Seventeen.’

  ‘I’ve seen her boyfriend,’ he said. ‘This was a different bloke.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘He looked more like a man than a boy.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Had Alice somehow smuggled an older man into her bedroom? ‘How much older was he than her boyfriend?’

  ‘Hard to say from where I was. A few years? I wasn’t really looking.’

  ‘But you noticed he was shirtless.’

  ‘Yes, and there was no one else in the house then.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘There were no lights on downstairs.’

  He doesn’t miss a trick, thought Beth. ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I just saw this bare torso and a flash of dark hair.’

  Had he been mistaken? Did the boyfriend have dark hair?

  ‘You saw Alice with this young man,’ she said. ‘Was she dressed?’ The bluntness of Beth’s question seemed to unsettle him.

  ‘Not fully, no.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘She was in her underwear, I think …’ It was almost a stammer. ‘Bra and pants – that sort of thing. That’s what it looked like to me.’

  ‘What colour bra and pants?’ asked Beth innocently.

  ‘What c—? What difference does it make?’

  It didn’t, but Beth was enjoying unsettling the man. He deserved it for his perving. ‘Perhaps she was wearing the same ones when she disappeared.’

  ‘From what I could see’ – he was struggling to answer – ‘it was a black bra.’

  ‘Matching?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Did the knickers match the bra?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell from that angle, could I?’

  If that was true, Beth was surprised he hadn’t used a stepladder to get a better look. ‘And you only got the merest glimpse of her companion?’ she probed. ‘Dark hair and a flash of his torso,’ Beth repeated. ‘But not a good look at his face?’

  ‘Not a good look, no,’ said Bryan, ‘but it definitely wasn’t the boyfriend.’

  Then who was Alice Teale’s secret lover and, more importantly, was he responsible for her disappearance?

  9

  Moments before DI Fraser left both the incident room and the Northumbria police force, at one and the same time, he casually mentioned the press conference. When Black looked blank, he asked, ‘Didn’t Everleigh tell you? Well, there’s no point in me doing it, is there? I can’t go on the telly as the face of an investigation I’m no longer part of. No, it will have to be you.’

  Black didn’t like the sound of a televised press conference, but Fraser was right. If Black was leading the search for Alice Teale, then he should be the one appealing for help.

  ‘Start with a prepared statement giving everyone the details, and make sure you know your stuff, in case any smartarse journalist lobs a tricky question at you.’

  ‘When is it?’

  Fraser made a show of looking at his watch. ‘In a little under an hour.’

  ‘Wait – what?’

  When Beth Winter finally returned to the town hall, she found DS Black busily writing a statement to be read out at a press conference that was apparently only minutes away. She introduced herself to DC Rodgers. He was a gaunt man with a moustache and sweat marks on his shirt beneath both arms. She found herself automatically leaning back as she shook his hand. DC Ferguson shook her hand, too. He took her right hand in his, then placed his other hand on the outside of hers so that it was trapped between both of his as he shook it some more. ‘Nice to meet you, pet,’ he said, with heavy emphasis on the ‘nice’. He stared at her intently and beamed at Beth as if she were the mail-order bride he had been waiting for.

  It said something about Ferguson that Beth instantly felt more comfortable speaking to the
man who had killed an unarmed civilian.

  ‘Can I help at all?’ she asked Black.

  ‘How can you help?’ he demanded, without looking up from the statement he was struggling to complete.

  ‘I don’t know. I was just …’ Trying to be sympathetic, but fuck you.

  ‘You can’t do anything here so make yourself useful and go and see the boyfriend, will you?’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear what I found out at Alice Teale’s home?’

  He seemed conflicted then. He looked at his watch, sighed, pushed the statement he was writing to one side and said, ‘Obviously, I want to hear it.’

  She kept it factual and moved on whenever he grew impatient at what seemed to him to be an unsubstantiated opinion but, in the end, he listened while she told him everything she had learned.

  ‘You don’t like the dad, then,’ he said, as if this were a case of Beth taking an irrational dislike to him and not merely an analysis of the man’s unusual behaviour.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to like his daughter.’ When Black opened his mouth to challenge that view, she quickly added: ‘According to his own son.’ Then she conceded, ‘Though Daniel doesn’t think his father is responsible for her disappearance. I saw little actual concern or worry on the part of Ronnie Teale. He was frustrated, angry and basically unhelpful, bordering on obstructive. It wasn’t the reaction of a man who is genuinely fearful for his daughter’s life.’ Black thought for a moment but didn’t answer. ‘I think there is something seriously wrong in that family, I really do.’

  ‘What about his alibi? Does it stack up?’

  She had been expecting him to ask. ‘I checked it out on my way back here.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The landlord of the Black Stallion wouldn’t say that he wasn’t there at nine o’clock but he couldn’t say for sure that he was, and they don’t have CCTV in there.’

  ‘Hardly surprising. They’ve barely got glass in their windows. Okay, you’ve made your point. We’ll keep him in mind.’

  If they had been the kind of detectives you saw on TV, this would have been the moment when he might have said, Good work, DC Winter, in order to keep her motivated, but they weren’t and he didn’t. Instead, he just mumbled, ‘That it?’