What She Left: Enhanced Edition (35 page)

‘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

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.

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.

But I hadn’t imagined it.
You were sunk to the nuts most of the weekend with that girl from Dartmouth
. This guy obviously hadn’t realized Luke and I were an item – or that we definitely weren’t when they’d been in Prague. Luke briefly twisted round to me and smiled an artificial, forced smile, his whole demeanour screaming, ‘Did she hear?’.

Yes, I heard all right.

Then he sat through the rest of the meal – even insisted on ordering a dessert – and acted as if it hadn’t happened. Had coffee, still said nothing. Even a liqueur.

How many other trips away had he lied about? He’d been on loads since we’d met – with the rugby club, lads’ weekends, birthday bashes, a stag do or two. Dublin, Newcastle, Brighton, Barcelona.

Then all the way home, those ten stops on the Tube, nothing. Maybe he was working on the principle that if I didn’t raise it then he’d have got away with it. There was a calm, calculated steeliness about him I’d never witnessed before.

Those ten stops on the Tube were his opportunity either to deny it or confess. The man I thought I loved wouldn’t have sat for ten stops and not raised it. At Oval, he even had the balls to suggest we went to see
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
because there was a poster for it, but I shrugged off the suggestion; I was calculating exactly when the Prague trip had been – and concluded it must have been a good couple of months after we met because it was definitely after Emily T’s wedding.

It occurred to me that I could pretend I hadn’t heard. I had that choice. It would actually be simple to pack it away at the back of my brain, ignore it. Some women go through their entire lives like that, holding the truth at bay – but bollocks to that old bollocks. He’d messed up and now we had to deal with it.

I’d been apprehensive of tempting fate, but Luke was different. Meg said I shouldn’t get carried away. ‘There’s got to be something wrong with him – he’s a man!’

‘If there is, I haven’t found it yet,’ I always responded. ‘And I’ve had a pretty good look! There again, my judgement’s hardly bombproof when it comes to men, is it?’

‘No, but it’s impeccable when it comes to friends!’

When we got back to the flat, Soph and Alex were in the lounge with friends, so we went to my bedroom and I blurted it out. ‘That rugby weekend you went on in Prague – did you sleep with someone?’

He denied it initially but soon changed his tune, perching awkwardly on the edge of the bed, like a schoolboy who’d been caught out.

It was nothing. He was drunk. The two of us were barely an item. Blah blah blah. ‘I’m the same person I always was,’ he claimed.

‘That’s the problem – maybe I hadn’t realized who that was.’

I’d been so determined not to cry, but of course I did. It was the mini Christmas tree that set me off, the lights twinkling, and I remembered how the most random stuff used to make me upset – an old photograph, a child walking a dog, a sink full of saucepans – and I despised Luke for making me feel
that
again. ‘I’m not fucking stupid,’ I screamed and someone in the flat next door banged on the wall.

‘No one said you are.’

‘And don’t patronize me.’

He rubbed his forehead.

Maybe we’d simply never been compatible. The way he’d wittered on about that movie at Oval – how stylish it was, how classy, how clever – I’d been listening thinking,
Yes, but probably boring
, and what kind of man rattles on about a spy film and Gary Oldman when he’s slept with another woman?

I saw the picture of flowers on the wall, left behind by the previous occupant. I’d come back here because I’d needed to be on my own territory, but this flat wasn’t mine; this room wasn’t. We were supposed to be getting a place together. ‘I want us to not communicate for two months.
No phoning, no texting, no nothing.’ And the stupidest thing came to mind – that that was a double negative.

‘But we’re getting a place together,’ he said. ‘It’s only a fortnight to Christmas.’

I so wanted a hug, to nestle my head into the crook of his neck, breathe in that smell: alcohol and smoke and the remnants of shower gel, then collapse into bed – me on the right, him on the left.

‘I like being near the door,’ he’d said the second night he stayed. ‘In case I need to make a speedy getaway!’

He’d made me laugh a lot that day.

‘I’m not going to let this happen. I won’t, I can’t,’ he said.

Carry on
, I thought.
You keep going. You’re merely digging your own grave
.

Academic fighting to ‘keep Salmon name alive’ is dying

 

The popular professor undertaking a ‘touching tribute’ to former student Alice Salmon is dying of terminal cancer, we can reveal today.

Professor Jeremy Cooke has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the most common form of the disease among men in the UK.

The leading academic is believed to have privately vowed to continue living a normal life, despite his illness, which became public after an anonymous post on a forum by someone referring to themselves as ‘Lone Wolf’.

‘Survival statistics for prostate cancer have been improving for thirty years and, if it’s caught early, a sizeable majority of patients
can live for five-plus years,’ a retired surgeon from a Southampton Hospital explained. ‘The outlook is far bleaker if it spreads to other parts of the body, such as the bones.’

Students and staff have rallied to support the man known fondly as ‘Old Cookie’. Former colleague Amelia Bartlett said: ‘He’s a terrific academic with a fierce intellect. I hope he’s able to apply his trademark philosophical wisdom to this awful situation.’

Ex-student Carly Tinsley said: ‘He was a bit of a legend – happy to play squash with us or join us for a beer in the union. He consistently went the extra mile in providing mentoring and support. He even gave me vitamin tablets when I had freshers’ flu. I wish the press would stop hounding him.’

In a recent anonymous review-form feedback from students, one declared: ‘His lecture on Melanesia was amazing. It’s made me totes determined to visit that part of the world – that’s got to be about the ultimate accolade for an anthropologist.’

Another said: ‘At school the teachers parroted what they’d read in other books, but at least he’s been there done that. His knowledge on sociolinguistics is second to none.’

A long-term resident of Hampshire, Cooke first came to public prominence in 2000 when he featured in the popular BBC documentary
The Making of Us
.

The recipient of a clutch of high-profile awards, including the coveted Merton Harvey Award for ‘Inspiring Young People in the Field of Anthropology’, he’s well known for his strong environmental views.

Educated at the respected Glenhart School near Edinburgh, and a stalwart supporter of several local charities, he famously vowed in a BBC radio interview five years ago to ‘ditch the bloody car and cycle wherever the bloody hell I can’.