What She Left: Enhanced Edition (32 page)

Interviewee shrugs her shoulders.

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 crowd, 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.

‘You were downing tequila in an Irish bar when I last saw you,’ Luke said.

‘Top weekend, wasn’t it?’

The two of them chatted – ‘bonding’ Luke would have described it as – about some altercation in a bar and drinking games and I felt a prickle of jealousy. I wanted to be part of the exchange.
What must it be like to be a boy?
I’d thought. Would it be
very
different?

And when we bundled out of the restaurant, after the game was up, he’d had the gall to ask: ‘Your place or mine?’

‘Mine,’ I replied, needing to be on home territory when I confronted him.

So we sat together on the Tube from Leicester Square to Balham like a normal, everyday couple. Ten stops he had, to deny or admit it. Even acknowledging his exchange with Adam hadn’t been a figment of my imagination would have been a start. But he sat, slouched in his seat with his legs apart, sticking out into the carriage so other passengers had
to negotiate round them and said absolutely nada. I’m such an idiot. When he’d rolled up after Prague, he’d dismissed my enquiries about the weekend with a ‘Bars, mostly’, and I’d swallowed it. Why wouldn’t I? Even when he’d added ‘a strip club or two, obviously’, I wasn’t over the moon, but it’s what boys do and I liked how he
could
share that with me.

According to the sanitized version I’d got, they’d ‘seen’ the castle, but not gone in. Debated whether to visit the Museum of Communism but never got round to it. Luke had gushed about the Charles Bridge and its baroque statues and informed me smugly it was where they filmed part of
Mission: Impossible
. ‘We had coffee in the Old Town Square, too – does that count as culture?’ he’d joked, plumping up the cushions and stretching back on the sofa.

‘For you, yes.’

‘Missed you,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ I replied.

‘I’m too old for this shit,’ he said. ‘I feel broken.’

I’d watched Luke and his pal and this guy had the same easy manner as him, but wasn’t anywhere near as hot.
My boyfriend
, I thought, watching him nodding and laughing. They talked about what a tragedy it was, Gary Speed hanging himself, and what Apple were going to do now Steve Jobs had died. ‘They’re at a creative crossroads,’ Luke said, and I stored that one away; I’d tease him with that later. ‘Creative crossroads,’ I’d say. ‘Get you!’ Then I largely tuned the pair of them out and joined a conversation on my left about a new exhibition at Tate Britain, a retrospective. Luke winked at me, it was a ‘Sorry, we can go soon’ and it gave me a warm, indulgent glow: we’d been seeing each other for eighteen months.

‘How much tequila did we put away on that trip?’ I heard my boyfriend ask his new best mate.

‘No idea,’ he replied, ‘and I doubt you did. You were sunk to the nuts most of the weekend with that girl from Dartmouth.’

EXCLUSIVE: New Salmon ‘romance’ link with ‘father figure’ Cooke

 

The academic slammed for taking a sick interest in Alice Salmon has been ‘romantically’ linked to the dead girl.

A disgusted witness says loner Jeremy Cooke, who’s penning a book on the femme fatale, took an ‘unnatural level of attention’ in her when she was a student under his care.

The onlooker claims to have spotted the childless 65-year-old, who lives in a £500,000 house, leading the tragic beauty back to his office when she was drunk as a fresher in 2004.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the former undergraduate, now a successful Midlands-based professional, came forward yesterday to lift the lid on the behaviour of the self-confessed ‘relic’, who cycles everywhere on his trademark decrepit bicycle. She’d approached other media outlets, but
Student News: Hot Off the Press
is the only website prepared to go public with it.

‘I bumped into the pair of them one evening just before Christmas and she was distinctly wobbly,’ she said. ‘I offered to take her back to her room in halls but he said, “No, she’s all mine, this one” and she was laughing so I figured she was OK. I should have been more forthright, but he was well senior so I had no reason to be suspicious.’

Only recently, reading press reports about the two individuals,
has the whistle-blower come to view the incident in a different light and conclude that he and Salmon may have had a ‘special connection’.

‘I’ve heard it said that they hung out together when she was doing her finals. She was probably flattered by the attention, as any young girl would have been. Cooke often offered to counsel students who weren’t even on his courses; he showered them – the boys and the girls – with inappropriate levels of kindness and support. Alice could have been infatuated or in awe of him. Maybe she saw him as a father figure. Yes, it could have been a kind of romance.’

The former student said Cooke’s interest in piecing her life together appeared to be more of a bid for fame and attention than a genuine academic endeavour. ‘A lot of lecturers are obsessed with recognition and legacy,’ she said.

A leaked student feedback form on the Gender, Language and Culture module shows the way the man, who was educated at a public school in a wealthy part of Scotland and has only worked in one academic institution, was regarded by undergraduates.

‘He’s like some throwback to a former era. It’s like he’s on autopilot or not in the room with you,’ one commented.

Another concluded: ‘Talk about clinging by your fingernails to the wreckage! Rumour has it the powers that be tried to get rid of him way back in the 1980s after some scandal but he’s hung on ever since.’

In an era when zero physical contact between teaching staff and students is tolerated, these allegations are bound to raise questions over the future of the ailing academic.

Student News: Hot Off the Press
contacted Cooke this morning, but he declined to comment.

Harding, Young & Sharp

3 Bow’s Yard

London EC1Y 7BZ

Mr Cooke,

We’ve never met and won’t, so I’ll keep this brief. I am Alice Salmon’s brother. My mother may or may not have deemed fit to mention in her correspondence with you that I’m a lawyer. It appears she’s gone into fanciful details about everything else.

My area is corporate law, but I have consulted colleagues who specialize in publishing and wish to bring it to your attention that your ‘Alice book’ is taking you into dangerous legal territory. Defamation is a potentially costly business. Cases centring on it are protracted and expensive, and personal bankruptcies are far from uncommon among those subject to claims. One can’t defame the dead, it’s true, but there are many legal avenues one could explore either to prevent publication or to seek post-publication recourse in relation to this work.

I presume my mother overlooked to request you resist putting the information she supplied – or indeed her own outpourings – into the public domain. Communication between myself and her is limited at present, but I need to remind you that, aside from any legal aspect, doing so would be highly unethical given her current state of mind. She had been coping so well, too. Her exchanges with you clearly trigger bouts of intensified unpredictability, so you must cease any communications with her forthwith.

The instant you began your pursuit of Alice you opened a Pandora’s box. You’re driving a wedge through what’s left of
this family. By nature my father is not a jealous or violent man, but we all have our breaking point. How would you react if you heard your wife once had a relationship with the very man who is now taking such a priapic interest in your late daughter? That your wife once attempted to take her own life? That she was (I’m minded I should say ‘is’) an alcoholic was, I gather, a fact of which he was aware; that one was a revelation solely to me. Congratulations, Professor, you’ve achieved what no one else has for thirty years – you’ve made my mother drink again.

You may surmise me contacting you is inappropriate – me sharing this information could in itself be interpreted as a breach of confidentiality – but when someone is not in their right mind it’s beholden on those closest to them to make decisions on their behalf.

You need to understand that if you further jeopardize my mother’s welfare, or indeed her relationship with my father, I will pursue you until you are penniless and the last copy of your squalid book has been pulped.

Yours sincerely,

Robert M. Salmon