What She Left: Enhanced Edition (42 page)

‘You were there, weren’t you?’ I repeated. ‘You were in Southampton?’

Larry, she grappled with the consequences of her utterance, struggling, lunging mentally for a response. The alcohol had definitely begun to take its toll, her features were pinched, strands of hair wayward. Bloody pricey, this wine, but worth every penny at this rate.

I pulled my chair towards hers so we were closer. ‘You were there, Megan, weren’t you? Admit it.’

She was furious, terrified – a compound I’d scarcely witnessed before. Only once, in fact: Liz. She muttered half a line.

‘Again,’ I demanded. ‘Louder.’ Larry, my voice was raised. For an impotent man, I had a savagely charged focus. I may have been on the verge of physical aggression. ‘Again,’ I repeated. ‘We’ll stay here all night if need be.’

She screwed up her face, calculations, computations, formulations, but the Gagnard-Delagrange, that exquisite white – elegant and energizing and full of grace – had worked its magic, twisting the machinery of her mind out of shape.

I said: ‘It’ll be preferable if you volunteer this up. Here. Now. To me. It’ll be better for you.’

‘Only went because she was so drunk.’

‘So you
were
there?’

Her eyeline wandered up to the ceiling and erratically followed the coving around. ‘Yes, but not with her, not near her.’

‘Why?’

‘Suicide,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No’

‘Yes.’ Her attention rolled off the garish Victorian rose bowl on to the patch of mould that had recently grown from tennis-ball to dinner-plate size. ‘She’d talked about it before. How much more evidence do you need?’

‘Some, I’d like some.’

‘There’s plenty.’

‘There’s none.’

She hiccoughed, squirmed in her seat. I poured her the remainder of the bottle. Not the first girl to have been in this office in this condition. There was Alice and others. Yes, others.

‘We’re making progress now, Megan.’ I took hold of my letter opener, an old-fashioned slender stainless-steel knife. Tapped it with my right hand in the palm of my left. ‘It wasn’t suicide, was it?’

‘Stop denying it. There’s proof.’

‘There’s not a shred.’

‘The text,’ she shouted, ‘that’s proof.’

We locked eyes and I shivered. ‘What text, Megan?’

She hesitated, then blundered on: ‘The suicide text.’

‘Suicide text?’

‘That Plath quote she sent to Liz just before she did it. You can’t get more conclusive than that – a suicide text!’

Liz’s secret permeated back to me:
They got everything else, but they never got that.
‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘Read about it.’

‘You can’t have.’

‘Did, was in the paper.’

‘
Which paper?’

‘
A
paper. Don’t have to put up with this,’ she said, hauling herself up.

I put my hand on her shoulder, applied pressure. ‘Surely, you can illuminate me as to which paper because it sure as hell hasn’t referred to a suicide text in anything I’ve seen and Alice is the one subject on which I’d confidently claim to be better read than anyone.’

‘Yes, you freak.’

‘That’s right. I’ve got box files full of cuttings. We can go through them if you like. Come on, let’s do it together.’

‘Actually, Mr Kleptomaniac, it was on a website; yes, that’s it, on a website.’

‘Pop yourself round here then and I’ll pull up every single online piece about her that’s ever been written, I’ve got them bookmarked, and you point it out.’

‘Haven’t got a photographic memory, have I? All I can remember is that it was on the web: her texting the thing about death being beautiful and lying in the soft brown earth.’

‘For someone who claims to have an imperfect memory, you seem remarkably well acquainted with that line.’

‘Feel peculiar,’ she said.

‘It’s time, Megan. No more lies.’

She made a jagged, zigzagging movement with her hand. ‘Doesn’t always travel in straight lines,’ she said, then lost her thread.

I’ve never mentioned the text to a soul … not even David
, that’s what Liz had said
.
‘It ends tonight.’

‘She fell.’

‘So you saw it happen?’

‘Yes. No.’

‘Which was it?’

‘That weir, it’s so high.’

‘Why mention the weir, Megan?’

‘Was a long way away.’

‘But you did see her go in the water?’

‘She jumped.’

‘How can you be positive if you were a long way away?’

She put her head in her hands; I prayed she didn’t descend into gobbledeygook or pass out. ‘I tried to save her.’

‘Oh, you tried to save her now, did you?’

‘Over the last twenty-five years, I mean. Spent my whole life saving her from herself. She was an accident waiting to happen.’

I stared at the mould on the ceiling. No point getting that treated now; a task for the next incumbent of this office. ‘Outside the police force, only three people in the world know about that text: Liz, me and the person who sent it.’

‘Tried to get her away from the edge, but she’d got the madness. She got it from her mum; she couldn’t help herself.’

She went to stand, but I forced her down. Her stare darted to the door. Locked.

‘She ran away from me. She slipped.’

‘But you said she jumped.’

‘Can’t you just leave me alone? Please. I can’t do this.’

‘What did it sound like, Megan? When she entered the water?’

‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘Because no one knows we’re here. Because I can. What did the splash Alice make sound like?’

‘I tried to save her after she’d fallen in, she was howling out for help and I tried, I’ve never tried to do anything harder in my whole life …’

Larry, she’d been exuberant when news broke that Luke had been arrested.
Too
exuberant. Then when he was released, she needed a new focus, a new target. Coldly and calculatingly attempting to shift the finger of suspicion towards a new suspect:
Me
.

I said: ‘She wouldn’t have been able to cry out for help because her mouth would have been full of water. She wouldn’t have been able to get the air
to
shout out.’

‘Stop it,’ she said.

‘She’d have tried to cough it back up, but water would have flooded her stomach.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘She’d have been struggling, flailing, flapping, crying; she’d have tried to roll on to her back; she’d have been hyperventilating.’

‘Hate it,’ she said. ‘Hate you. Hate her.’

‘She would have held her breath, but you can’t hold your breath for ever; we have a breathing reflex because we have to get rid of the carbon dioxide in us. Within a minute or so she’d have gone under – sunk, sunk like a lump of lead.’

I recalled how, her options constricting, Megan had dubbed me a liar, a pervert, a
monster
. She knew I was on to her. Her throwaway line about reinventing Alice and us
reinventing ourselves in the process had been the giveaway. ‘Why would we wish to do that?’ I’d asked and her hand had crept across my knee. Of course we enter contested waters here, Larry – those of recall, interpretation and description (it’s been an enduring source of curiosity to my wife and me that we have diverging views on what actually constitutes ‘pink’). But of Megan’s actions, even though the incident in question was some weeks ago, I have no doubt. Her hand had twitched and moved a fraction higher. ‘How would you like that?’ she’d asked. ‘Us having a secret? You’d like that very much, wouldn’t you? They wouldn’t understand, but we do. It can be our secret, one of our secrets.’

‘Get out of my house,’ I’d commanded her.

Subsequently, evidently wise to my percipience, a raft of blog posts making all manner of fallacious claims.

‘Alice’s brain wouldn’t have had oxygen,’ I said now. Me, the puppetmaster, Larry. Whipping her grief and shame and fury towards some inexorable climax. ‘Starved of oxygen.’

‘No,’ she wailed.

Nearly there
, I thought, and was back at her, punching on, pushing, surges of power racking my frail body, virile, primal, immortal, grabbing for the luminescent insight, like a Navajo after peyote or a Guahibo after ayahuasca. ‘She would have been convulsing; she would have frothed at the mouth.’

A long, ghostly scream. I did that, Larry, I made Megan Parker cry and I kept it up as I hove in on the breakthrough, my own ultra-pure revelation: truth. Truth for me and for Alice.

‘It would have been pitch-black. Alice would have sunk into the blackness.’

She put her hands over her ears, banged her feet on the floor. ‘What gives you the right to torture me like this?’

‘Being at death’s door. Touching mortality, that’s what does. But mostly, knowing.’ Apologies, Larry, for not sharing my theory with you earlier, but putting one’s head above the parapet can be a dangerous occupation. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You killed her, didn’t you?’

She blinked and let out a kittenish mewl and I went to her and stroked her hair and she angled her head up at me, doe-eyed and hunted, and her mouth made the words: ‘She killed my baby.’

Three weeks after you died, it was, when I discovered your email. Subject field:
US
. That was almost eighteen months ago, but it still grates. Of all the places you didn’t deserve to end up, Al – in my junk folder. It got shunted in there because of the attachment: the photo of a card you’d scanned, a picture of two lemmings peering over a cliff, one saying, ‘You go first’, the other, ‘No, you go first,’ and underneath you’d put
Sometimes in life you have to make a leap of faith
.

When I’d seen it, it was like a hammer blow. So that was what you’d meant by the river when you’d referred to lemmings – the email you’d sent me a day before you died explaining you wanted us to get back together but needed more time. The email you never had a reply to. No wonder you were furious I turned up.

Didn’t share the email with anyone initially, figured it would only support those stupid suicide theories that were doing the rounds. But the brain-dead dolts who were suggesting that hadn’t been with us in Margate, had they? They
hadn’t been there when we were planning getting a place together, hadn’t heard you say it was all very grown-up and scary, but sometimes in life you have to make a leap of faith. Like so much of their information, it was second-hand. Then Cooke got in contact about his project. He said he’d understand if I’d rather not share any of our communications – or that I could do so ‘off the record’ and he’d only use them for background – but you’d have been quite taken with his book idea. Came to the same conclusion about the stuff I jotted on my laptop immediately after we lost you. My gut reaction was to delete it – some I have – but transparency’s what’s called for. ‘It’s not good to bottle stuff up,’ you used to say, bugging me, so there’s one life lesson I
have
taken from you.

‘Have it,’ I told him, handing him a memory stick. ‘Take it. You’ll struggle to make head or tail of it. It’s nonsense.’

Fact is, we’re part of each other’s stories. Being your boyfriend, Al, that was a privilege, an honour. I can hear you calling me an old sop-bag, but it’s important to put that on the record. Cos in the unlikely event of anyone ever actually reading his book – it’s no Dan Brown, is it? – that’s what I’d like them to view me as,
your boyfriend
. Can’t get my head round why a woman as wonderful as you ever dated a bloke like me, but being open feels like being respectful to who you were (‘paying homage’, you might have said, what with your arty Radio 4 talk!). I’ve got a sneaky suspicion you’d like the notion of the pair of us in a book together, too. Stories need balance, you used to say. They need context. They have to hear from all sides.

I suppose we all dealt – are dealing – with what happened differently and I can appreciate why some people have stayed schtum. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, but opening up felt right for me. I had to get that stuff off my chest. I might be a mug, but I trust Cooke.

‘Don’t make your mind up about me conclusively yet,’ he’s urging me. ‘When it’s actually published, you might take a dimmer view.’

Sounds like he’s got one or two ghosts of his own to exorcize, but it seems such an act of respect, worship almost, the care and passion he’s put into researching you and getting answers.

‘My volume,’ he cautioned, ‘there’ll be parts that you’ll find difficult.’

‘You’ve heard about my reading abilities then!’ I joked.

Hope you don’t mind, Al, but I do laugh at times. You wouldn’t want me never laughing, would you? Is it bad, but nowadays I can go nearly whole days without thinking about you then you’ll rush in at me. This afternoon I was in a tedious meeting at work – I’m still there, but am going to take your advice and retrain as an architect – and I discreetly pulled up your email. You felt very alive when you were with me. You loved me.

Cooke’s right, it is a crime to forget and that’s happening. Not among those who were close to you and cared for you and loved you (although we’ve obviously had to reappraise who falls into this category), but more widely. Alice Salmon, people will say. The one who was kidnapped? No, she was the Christmas one. No, the one who drowned, attacked by her boyfriend. No, he was let off, positive he was. Didn’t she have a complicated love life? Didn’t that professor man work it out in the end … ?

Hope you don’t mind, Al, but I’ve seen a couple of other girls. Nothing serious and neither’s worked out so I’m having a break from dating. It’s not fair on anyone. Maybe there’ll come a point when I am ready. Is that OK? Whoever she is, she’s going to have a tough act to follow.

After you died I might have gone a bit nuts because I used to reply to the lemming email (I most definitely haven’t
shown those to Cooke), but now I’d like to laugh a bit more again, if that’s OK. Your mum tells me – we meet in Starbucks, your dad won’t have me in the house – that I can’t torture myself for ever. ‘Live,’ she says. ‘You have to live.’

‘But
how
?’ I used to not infrequently ask her.

‘One day at a time,’ she’d reply, ‘one day at a time.’

You know some people do that inverted commas thing with their fingers when they mention the word ‘relationship’, well, when I think of our relationship, Al, it’s not in inverted commas. It’s in the million tiny reminders. Anyone sitting cross-legged, big glasses, skater skirts, Margate on the telly, Prague, seeing someone read a text on a train and smile, fluffy earmuffs, a tiny tattoo. It’s the stuff that anyone who’d never met you would say was silly, but to me they’re the things that make you, you.

It’s music, especially. Used to hate hearing songs you loved, but I like it now so I’ve done you a playlist of what you’d have been listening to this summer. Haven’t gone for any soppy, sentimental shite – I’ve picked tracks that would have prompted you to spring up from the sofa and scream, ‘I
love
this song’, or reach across and crank up the car radio, or send you charging headlong out on to the dance floor at Clapham Grand, then smile back at me, then keep on dancing.

I’m going to put on my iPod now, Al, turn up the volume and walk – walk into the night on the common as you used to, and listen to your voice …