What She Left: Enhanced Edition (43 page)

‘She killed my baby,’ Megan screeched.

I recoiled, but she grabbed for my waist.

‘That was why I went to Southampton. She had to know what she’d done – went there to tell her.’

I extricated myself from her grasp and her hands dropped clumsily on to her stomach and she started to cry then, Larry.

‘Night after she discovered Luke had done the dirty on her she turned up at my place and got mortal. She wouldn’t go to bed. I got us up the stairs, but she slipped.’

The tree outside my office whooshed. More tears. Big snotty gulps.

‘If she hadn’t hung on to me, it would have been all right, but then we were at the bottom of the stairs and she was on top of me and she was laughing; she was fucking
laughing
.’

Pity flooded me, commingled with a fast, glittering fury. The window, a slab of glass against the blackness.

‘For once it was going to be about me not Alice, but she couldn’t even let me have that could she, a baby? Flushed away part born and dead, flushed away …’

‘My God,’ I said.

‘The press say
I’ve
got a screw loose, but Alice was nuts. She opened up her wrist once when she was thirteen like she was peeling back the opener on a Diet Coke can, but Alice, your precious Alice, even managed to make that sound rational.’

‘She’s not mine,’ I said. ‘For the record, she’s not that.’

‘Those threats she got,’ she said, a string of snot hanging from her nose, ‘that stuff on Twitter, those letters, they were all me. I’m Freeman. Even the dead flowers, me.’

‘You pushed her into the water, didn’t you?’

‘Went there to show her the damage she’d done, because me,
I
was the damage she’d done.’

‘You pushed her into the water, didn’t you?’

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she whimpered. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ Then: ‘They won’t believe you.’

‘You pushed her and then you sent that text to make it look as if she’d taken her own life.’

‘They don’t trust you. If you were a brand you’d be toxic.’

‘But we’re not brands.’

‘We’re all brands.’

The wind whipped through the branches of the elm,
my
elm.

‘Used to worship that woman, I idolized her. Would pretend I was her sister to strangers, her twin.’

I’m ignorant to much, Larry, but obsession is territory with which I’m well acquainted. Its coarse rub, its barbed spike, its musty off sourness. The line between love and hate is paper-thin and when you love someone and it turns to hate there’s an inverse relationship between the two. What I
asked next was cruelty in extremis given her disclosure, but I had no choice. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘Too early,’ she said. ‘Too soon.’ She stood up, I let her, and she sneaked into a corner, before crumpling to the floor. ‘Tried to explain I was pregnant when she was at my place but blind to it, she was, too drunk. Blind blind blind. She was supposed to be my oldest friend.’

No witnesses, no CCTV footage. Two girls and one of those in a graveyard in a village near Corby, a Brontë inscription on her headstone:
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me
.

‘I’ll be dead soon,’ I said. ‘At least give me the consolation prize of closure.’

‘What have I done?’

‘Lied.’

‘Once you cross a line you can’t turn back.’

‘You can, you always can.’ I recalled an adage of my mother’s: A lie’s halfway round the world before the truth’s got its boots on. ‘Being honest isn’t hard, it’s lying that’s hard.’

Larry, I deliberated whether to force her into my car – dragoon her to a police station or coerce her to repeat her confession so it would be on the record. ‘You won’t get away with this.’

‘I’m good at secrets.’

‘I am, too. But I’m better at truths.’

‘PR’s a story,’ she said.

Yes, a story. She’d have turned up the collar on her coat or wrapped her scarf round her face – it was snowing, it wouldn’t have attracted any attention – and headed back to the car, driven to the Lakes, then the next day she’d have rung Liz and Dave, having left it until the news had broken, and been a tower of support. She’d filled that role well, as
for years she had the one of best friend. ‘No wonder you turned on me so abruptly.’

‘Had no choice. Luke was in the clear, the suicide theory was getting sidelined – you were the next best suspect.’

So my hypothesis was correct. Chameleon-like, she’d backed whatever the prevailing premise was, then, when it became expedient, fixed her crosshairs on me.

Larry, an impartial observer may decree that I myself have an agenda here. Clearly, a book such as mine –
What She Left
is the title we’ve opted for – could benefit from a revelation such as this. A twist. But it’s the truth and one can’t be partly truthful, any more than one can be partly blind, or partly dead, or partly pregnant.

I stared out at the night. I’d be out there soon. The fact blackjacked me: I’m dying. ‘You don’t deserve to be a mother. If you had a child, you’d destroy it.’

‘I pushed her and I heard her screaming and I walked away and I’m glad I did.’ Her head lolled sideways. ‘Feel sick,’ she said. ‘Didn’t even want a baby; I’m too young to have a kid. Just my luck, a one-night stand with some douchebag from work and I end up pregnant! But once I realized, it felt so right.’ She hugged her knees, buried her face in her hands. ‘Priest I should be talking to, not a has-been lecturer. How can you miss something you never had?’

‘Easy. It’s called imagination. You’ve had ours running ten to the dozen.’ We sat and in the eerie quiet I thought:
After tonight, I’m never going to make anyone cry ever again
. ‘That text, it was Wilde originally. Plath appropriated it.’

‘Me too.’ Then after a pause, she added: ‘Her phone was on the ground. After she went in the water – jumped, slipped,
you pick
– after it had gone quiet, I grabbed it and, bingo, off the text went to Mummy. Far as Liz was concerned, I was Alice. I was Alice saying goodbye.’

It was that effortless, Larry – the press of a few buttons, a couple of exclamation marks, an emoticon or two. That’s all it takes to say goodbye. That’s all it takes to die.

‘Crocodile tears,’ I said. ‘All crocodile tears.’

‘An eye for an eye, Indiana. A tooth for a tooth. She was a murderer.’

The little vixen may be confident she’s got away with it, but I shall bring her in front of the courts. I shall put my head above the parapet, I shall stand on the ramparts and shout, and she will not escape the long arm of the law. I, too, shall ‘publish and be damned’ and this iniquity will not stand. Larry, I was shedding a tear or two myself. It felt warmly cathartic. I could cry, I could.

‘You can’t touch me,’ she said.

‘I can,’ I said, crabbing towards her, raising my hand. ‘And I shall.’

She looked up and there was more than fear in her eyes.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Departure

 

Dear Marlene,

 

I have a little time on my hands ahead of tomorrow’s flight so will take this opportunity to pen slightly more than my rushed-off, phlegmatic dispatch of yesterday.

 

My most recent consultant’s appointment didn’t go well. Three
years is his current best guess, five at a push. So much for a bloody book making you immortal, eh?

 

I’m reasonably reconciled to my fate. Ironically, the news often elucidates more vexation among those with whom I share it. I haven’t perfected the language of such exchanges yet. A
Guardian
crossword compositor I’m fond of latterly announced his terminal illness through his clues: a sign of growth (6) and a food transporter heard to gradually reduce an endless effusion (10). ‘Cancer of the oesophagus’ it dawned on me as I filled in the boxes in the SCR.

 

There shall be no more hanging on, limpet-like, for redundancy. I am to retire. I’d prefer to slip away, but they’re planning a bash. So, a warm glass of mediocre wine, some canapés and a few words from my leader (take the tie off him and he could pass as a student himself), inevitably referring to my ‘contribution’ and ‘unique’ methodology, then after that brief bout of bonhomie I’ll pack away my office, wipe clean the desk, click the door shut behind me and head home to Fliss and the dog.

 

My wife is reacting to the circus that’s building around the forthcoming publication with characteristic fortitude and grace. Dutifully, she ploughed through a proof in one sitting before wheeling round to an apprehensive me and declaring, ‘Well, well.’ I may not give a fig about the critics’ response, but my wife’s I most definitely do. ‘I’m not proud of what you did, but I’m proud of you for getting to the truth,’ is her official line. Behind the scenes, off-camera, there have been tears and smashed kitchenware: the lightning bolt that Liz’s maiden name was Mullens a notably distressing one.

 

She jokes about me becoming a media luvvie because of my TV and radio appearances. Inscrutably honest (I’m hardly in a position to self-censor now, am I?), unintimidated by controversy, prepared
to vault from a discussion on contemporary cocaine usage to ethnography, I’m arraigned on panels with genial presenters who grapple with how to pitch me: ‘tireless pursuer of justice’ or ‘old lech’.

 

Hitherto, I’ve zealously resisted disclosing my final revelation, deflecting such hungry demands with the riposte that my principal wish is to bring the guilty party to justice and that necessitates imparting an unabbreviated story. It’s also, of course, the book’s denouement and spoilers hit sales.

 

Perhaps I should have gone public with my theory as soon as it dawned on me; but I’ve learnt the dangers of going off half-cock. Instead, I redoubled my efforts, prompting Megan to do likewise. Surreal, with hindsight, those research sessions we shared: an elaborate chess game, Alice’s past the pieces, moves and counter-moves, my suspicions blooming, her attempts to influence my conclusions becoming more craven, her ever-more desperate bid to create her own narrative, the one she’d have written, the past she would have wished, the future she sought. I was on to her long before her one ill-advised reference to the text she’d sent from Alice’s phone, but that was the clinching corroboration. Fiction aficionados refer to ‘the lie that reveals the truth’. Well, so it was for me. The lie that revealed the truth in this case an electronic message about lying in the grass and having no yesterday or tomorrow, and being at peace.

 

I am not blind to the fact that claiming publicly someone murdered their best friend is potentially libellous. Even intimating one didn’t do all one could in that situation could be construed as defamatory. But the truth is an indefatigable defence against libel. Plus, there is a precedent. Media scholars will be familiar with a
Daily Mail
front page from 1997. Under the headline ‘Murderers’, it published photographs of five men, so convinced was it they
were responsible for Stephen Lawrence’s death. ‘If we are wrong, let them sue us,’ it said.

 

Come on, Megan. If I’m wrong, if I’m lying, sue me.

 

As for Alice herself, I’ll never claim my volume is encyclopaedic. One merely has to recall coverage of the Joanna Yeates case (Fliss berated me for taking an ‘unhealthy’ interest in it) to be reminded of this. Her Wikipedia page proffers her alma mater, her height, the pub in which she was last spotted, it even apprises you of the last CCTV footage of her – buying a pizza – but, ultimately, such
paucity
of detail. It may give you the grid reference where her body was found, but it doesn’t give the coordinates of her heart.

 

No doubt readers drawn to its novelistic qualities will also castigate me for partly giving away the finale at the beginning (our heroine dies in Chapter One). But that’s how life is; it’s not as if one’s unaware at the start what’s going to happen at the end.

 

Fliss teases me that it’s destined for the remaindered pile, but success is a lottery. Coincidences, luck, assumptions, misunderstandings – these are the primary drivers of fate. If Liz hadn’t mistakenly assumed the book deposited on her doorstep was put there by Megan, rather than Gavin, she may have never visited her and, in turn, might never have arrived, waif-like, on my doorstep. It was one of Alice’s favourite books,
Never Let Me Go
.

 

I can’t wait until the morning; I’ve planned it down to the nth degree. Fliss has always dreamed of visiting California and tomorrow I’ll make that dream come true. All those holidays traipsing around the Valley of the Kings and the Panathenaic Stadium and the Ades Synagogue were utterly spellbinding, but this will be two weeks of unashamed
fun.
We’ll lap up the sunshine and eat cardiac-inducing servings and drive too fast in our 1970 Chevy – hideously impractical, of course, and an atrocious gas-guzzler, but
to hell with the bicycle for a fortnight, it’s one of my bucket-list items. I wonder when exactly the penny will drop with Fliss – when I announce she’ll be missing night school, when I inform her we need to drop Harley off at the kennels, when she sees her passport? That’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to: a smile breaking on my wife’s face. Because she’s got the most beautiful smile.

 

Marlene, I’d be a liar if I claimed it hadn’t crossed my mind that you and I take up corresponding. But I won’t be writing again, for similar reasons to why I’ve drawn a halt to my tête-à-têtes with young Gavin. We’d hate anyone to get the wrong idea now, wouldn’t we? Whatever might they say? He’s an odd one, that Old Cookie. You’ve got to watch him. Let’s leave it at this, eh? At yours sincerely.

 

Let me instead dream often of visiting your great country. Arriving unannounced on your doorstep, your husband bowling out to greet me. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ he’d say. We’d take a dram together and put the world to rights and reminisce and head out on day trips, two old buddies, two brilliant minds, two old rogues, driving along Route 1 or Route 11 and visiting Fredericton and Moncton, specks against the mountains. The great Larry Gutenberg and I.

 

Now I shall return to my packing. First, though, I shall go to the condensation-covered window and, with a flicker of déjà vu, draw the outline of a heart and in it write my and my wife’s initials. That’s enough. For now at least, that’s more than enough.

 

Yours sincerely,

Jeremy Cooke