Alice Teale is Missing

by H. A. Linskey

  The place had the feel of a ghost town, and Beth asked, ‘Why has it been left like this?’

  ‘It’s a strange tale,’ he said. ‘It started with a wealthy local man, Charles Denham, a descendant of the old mining family that invested in the colliery back in the 1800s. They made money hand over fist for nigh on a century, until the mines were nationalized by the government, not long after the Second World War. Denham sat on his fortune and didn’t do much with it. He was the local eccentric. A wealthy old man with too much time and money, and he was looking for a project. When the mine closed he was outraged and when the branch line followed it he was incensed, so he arranged to buy the disused railway station, complete with the platforms and buildings.’

  ‘What was he going to do with a station that had no railway?’

  ‘Restore it to its former glory then run steam trains from one end of the county to the other.’

  ‘An ambitious plan.’

  ‘It never got off the ground, and he died a few years later, without an heir. The place has been in limbo ever since.’

  ‘Why doesn’t the council just knock it all down?’

  ‘Because they don’t own it. No one does, really. It’s part of the unresolved estate of the man. Several relatives laid claim to his money, but it took a decade just to sort that out and nobody wanted this white elephant, so here it stands. Bizarre, isn’t it?’

  The sky was still overcast and the subdued light gave the station buildings and its platforms an eerie, almost silvery glow.

  ‘You can walk the old line for miles,’ Black told Beth as she followed him out of a central section where the tracks had once been, now flat land overgrown with grass and weeds, then they went up the ramp on to one of the platforms. It felt like they were stepping back in time. There was some graffiti, but if you closed your eyes you could almost imagine a train pulling in here.

  They passed the window for the ticket office then went down the ramp on the other side, under a metal foot bridge which hung over what would have been the track to link the two platforms.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘The cause of the bang,’ said Black.

  The opposite platform had a section of ramp missing at its far end. It ended in an abrupt rectangular shape which jutted out then dropped a few feet, leaving it short of the ground. ‘The edge of the platform must have crumbled away,’ Black said, crossing the old line to take a closer look. When Beth joined him there he was on his haunches looking at the ragged edge of the broken platform, then the long grass which grew next to it. ‘The girl walking her dog said the car swerved to avoid her and she heard a bang. There are no scrape marks from a car’s bodywork, but’ – he parted some of the long grass – ‘take a look.’

  Beth bent to examine the ground below and she could see fragments of plastic on the ground. ‘That could be pieces from a headlamp,’ she said.

  ‘If the car braked then swerved to avoid the girl’ – he made that movement with his hand – ‘its headlights would be roughly this height when it went across.’ He brought his hand round till it hit the lowest point of the broken platform. ‘If he stopped in time, he might smash a light but still be able to drive off.’

  ‘You think it was someone in a hurry to get away from here because he didn’t want to be seen with Alice?’

  ‘If it was Alice,’ he cautioned, ‘and we don’t know for sure that it was. At this stage, it’s only a possible sighting, no more.’

  ‘Might be worth checking the body shops, though there must be a hell of a lot of them around here.’

  ‘I’ll get someone down here,’ he said, ‘to bag up these bits.’

  19

  They got back to the town hall with the full intention of leaving it again as soon as they had checked for messages. It looked as if Ferguson and Rodgers had both gone home for the night, because the door to the major-incident room was locked. Black had to find his key to admit them. The first thing they noticed were the envelopes. There were three of them on the table Black usually worked from. When had they arrived and who had placed them there? Like the first envelope they had received, these were all large and brown with a local postmark and Lucas Black’s name and rank on them in block capitals. He noticed from the postmarks that, although they had all arrived together, they had not been sent at the same time but over a period of three days, and he cursed the vagaries of the postal system.

  Black opened each one carefully and upended them to allow the papers to gently fall on to the table without him having to touch them. Each envelope contained journal extracts, and Black wanted them to be examined by Forensics later, but they needed to read the words Alice had written now, before the pages were sent off. He used the blunt end of a pencil to separate the pages and position them on the table so each one could be scrutinized. There were seven extracts in total.

  The first was innocuous enough, Alice detailing her excitement at receiving the journal from her brother and stating that she loved him. Black wondered what the point was of sending that one? The second was more intriguing.

  ‘I’m just a walking shadow?’ Beth read. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means she’s depressed, doesn’t it?’ said Black. ‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’

  ‘Could be,’ Beth agreed. ‘And who is He? The only one who gets her, the one who can see through her like she is made of glass?’

  ‘Her teacher, her brother, a secret lover?’ Black offered.

  ‘It might be her brother,’ said Beth, ‘but why not say so?’

  ‘Maybe she’s embarrassed by how close they are because of all the gossip, or perhaps it’s someone else entirely. Alice said she has a secret. Maybe this is it.’

  ‘She’s a bit dramatic, isn’t she?’ observed Beth.

  Black shrugged. ‘She’s a teenager; they’re all dramatic.’

  ‘Are they?’ she asked. ‘Were you?’

  ‘Judging by the number of rows I had with my old man, probably, yes. Everything is amplified at that age, isn’t it, so it’s all a big deal. Kids fall out with each other one day and are friends again the next. If you throw in relationships, which are nearly always overblown, then you end up with a drama.’

  ‘I don’t remember it being quite like that.’

  ‘Youngsters are all daft, always have been. Look at Romeo and Juliet. He thought she was dead then he killed himself; she woke up and realized he was gone so she stabbed herself.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ blurted Beth.

  ‘Don’t tell me I’ve ruined it for you, Beth. Even I’ve seen it.’

  ‘No, no!’ she protested, waving her hand animatedly at him. ‘It’s Shakespeare!’

  ‘I know it’s Shakespeare. I might not be as educated as you are, but I’m familiar with Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘Not the play,’ she almost shouted. ‘The quote.’ And when he obviously had no idea what she was talking about, she added: ‘A walking shadow. That’s Shakespeare.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but not Romeo and Juliet?’

  ‘No, it’s Macbeth, I think,’ and she took a breath while she tried to remember it before reciting: ‘“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.” We studied it in English.’

  She pointed to the paper with Alice’s words on it. ‘I’m just a walking shadow,’ she repeated, ‘which comes just before “a poor player”, meaning an actor. So, I think it means that He knows Alice is acting but she doesn’t call herself an actor. It’s as if it’s a phrase they share, something they both understand.’

  ‘Perhaps this is an older man who has taught her things, along with a bit of Shakespeare. The same person who is responsible for her disappearance, even.’

  ‘She has English teachers,’ she said, ‘and Shakespeare will be on the curriculum. Plus, there is the young drama teacher.’

  ‘We’ve narrowed it down, at least.’

  ‘Unless I’m wrong,’ Beth conceded, �
�and it has no significance.’

  ‘I think it is significant,’ he said. ‘I think it’s their thing. She’s been playing a part all this time and this is the one person she can reveal her true self to.’ Black noticed Beth’s face change then. ‘What is it?’

  ‘“A walking shadow” is Macbeth’s speech, when he learns his wife is dead,’ said Beth. ‘And actually, she kills herself.’

  ‘Another hint at suicide,’ said Black.

  They both fell silent for a time while they read the extract about morals and how changeable they were. When they reached the end Beth read aloud, ‘What if there were no morals at all? What if we were free to love and be loved by anyone we wanted? At least that would solve my little problem.’

  ‘That backs up the idea that Alice Teale was seeing someone she shouldn’t be,’ said Black.

  ‘Someone married, perhaps?’ Beth wondered.

  Their suspicions were heightened when the next extract was a damning critique of her sex life.

  ‘This certainly supports the theory that she might have been seeing someone else,’ said Beth. It would also provide Alice’s boyfriend with an obvious motive.

  The next extract was from the time when Alice acrimoniously broke up with Tony and he did not want to accept it. The significance of these words seemed clear: ‘That’s when he called me a fucking bitch. Those were his last words before I walked out of the door,’ recited Beth.

  ‘He’s angry,’ said Black, ‘but just how angry? Normal angry, or …?’ Then he said: ‘And who is sending these bloody extracts to us, and why?’

  ‘They hint that Chris and Tony have a motive for making Alice disappear,’ she said, ‘so I think we can rule them both out as likely senders. Neither of them looks good here.’

  Next, they read the extract that concerned Chloe and Kirstie.

  ‘Bit harsh on her mates,’ Beth observed once she’d finished. ‘One of them, anyhow. I don’t suppose Chloe would be too pleased if she read that about herself. Makes her sound like a drama queen.’

  ‘Particularly if she has no inkling that that’s how her best mate feels about her. It would be quite a betrayal.’ Then he said: ‘And what about the other girl, Kirstie? What’s with the reference to my lips are sealed?’ he said, almost to himself.

  Beth picked up the paper again and read that passage aloud. ‘Kirstie and I both know Kirstie’s little secret, and some secrets ought to stay that way until they are ready to be let out, so in consideration of Kirstie, my lips are sealed, which is kind of appropriate, really.’ She looked up at Black. ‘Why would that be appropriate?’

  ‘You could go back and ask Kirstie?’ he suggested.

  ‘You think she’ll tell me?’

  ‘Doubtful, but it will be interesting to see if she tries to bluff or lie her way out of it.’

  ‘It’s very timely, this, isn’t it?’ observed Beth. ‘The journal extracts landing in our laps so soon after we spoke to them?’

  ‘So, the sender must know we’ve spoken to them both,’ he said, ‘or at the very least that we would be planning to speak to them because they are close to Alice.’ They transferred their attention to the seventh and final extract, which once again referred to Alice’s brother, Daniel.

  The Journal of Alice Teale

  Brother, I love you, and I’m sorry.

  I know you only did what you did because of me.

  Most girls hate their brothers. They think of them as gross, alien creatures, always getting in the way or telling them what to do. You were never like that, and I know you are always looking out for me and I do love you for it.

  Remember when we were very little and Mam used to put us in the bath together on a Sunday night and there were always loads of bubbles? Afterwards, she would wrap us up in those massive towels that were almost as big as we were. She kept them on the hot radiators so we would be toasty and snug then tell us to get into our dressing gowns, and she would let us watch a DVD for an hour before we went off to bed. Dad was always out down the pub, and it felt so safe and warm, sitting on the sofa watching cartoons with you, with steaming mugs of hot chocolate. I was always really happy then.

  There were the nights, years later, when I woke up terrified that someone was trying to get me. I never saw his face, but it was always the same man. I’d run out of my room and across the landing straight into yours; never to Mam and Dad, always to you.

  It didn’t matter how often it happened or how late it was, you never got mad at me. You always just pulled back the covers to let me in so I could snuggle up. You made me feel safe then, too. Always.

  I think we are kind of special and that is why I cannot tell you my secret. Look what happened last time you heard something bad. You walked into the pub and threw a drink right in that bitch’s face. I’m not saying she deserved it, though I won’t claim she didn’t. It is what it is, but if your intention was to kill the gossip and end the rumours about us, then, brother, I have to tell you: you blew it.

  20

  Beth had used the journey back to the town hall to describe everything else Kirstie had told her about Alice Teale’s life, including the rumours about Alice and her brother, Daniel, so it was perhaps less of a surprise when Black asked her now:

  ‘Do you think they were …?’

  ‘Having sex?’ She almost didn’t like to admit the possibility, having met Daniel, but she couldn’t rule it out. ‘Perhaps, or maybe she is writing the truth – he made her feel safe.’

  ‘But is it a partial truth? They used to have baths together.’

  ‘When we were very little,’ she reminded him. ‘That happens, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What about then there were the nights, years later …?’ He set down the paper. ‘She basically crawled into bed with him whenever she had a nightmare, which sounds like it was pretty often. I’m guessing he had a single bed. They must have been packed in pretty tight and, well, if they were older, and it sounds like they were, something might have happened.’

  ‘It might,’ she admitted, and immediately Beth thought of the bare torso Alice’s neighbour had seen through her bedroom window. Could that have been Daniel? ‘But how will we ever know?’

  ‘We could ask him,’ he told her, ‘but he’s never going to admit it, is he?’

  ‘And it doesn’t mean he is any more likely to have harmed Alice, either way.’

  ‘It makes him suspect but not necessarily a suspect,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to think about this, to be honest, or even if it’s credible.’

  ‘What if someone found out about it?’ she asked. ‘Proof, I mean, not just gossip?’

  ‘Would it make them go after Alice or Daniel?’ he wondered aloud, clearly thinking of blackmail. ‘And how would Daniel react if they did?’

  ‘Sophie Mayhew thinks Daniel is a psycho, but he did throw a drink in her face.’

  ‘You said she would be in the pub tonight, so let’s go and talk to her about him.’ Then he added pointedly: ‘Unless there’s somewhere you’d rather be?’

  ‘No, I’m good.’ She hoped he would leave it at that and not question why she had no plans of her own.

  ‘Okay, then,’ he said. ‘And let’s speak to this barman who worked with Alice at the club.’

  ‘The one who won’t take no for an answer?’

  ‘That’s the fella.’

  ‘Do you think his persistence eventually paid off?’ asked Beth.

  He considered this. ‘He could be the man in her window, or …’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t take rejection well.’ She completed the sentence for him.

  ‘Someone in this town is responsible for Alice’s disappearance,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s him.’

  The working men’s club was dead at this hour. It had just opened up again for the evening and only a couple of hardcore regulars were in there, dotted around a large room with numerous empty tables.

  ‘Is it always this quiet?’ Black asked the young barman.

  ‘No, it’ll fill up,
but not for an hour.’

  ‘In that case, you’ll be able to spare some time to talk to us,’ said Black, and he showed the lad his ID. ‘Ricky, is it?’

  Ricky looked worried then, but Black didn’t read too much into it. People often acted as if they had a guilty conscience around the police. Beth suggested they take a table close to the bar but away from customers, and Ricky sat down with them. The barman was a skinny but good-looking young man, and he had dark hair, too. Could his have been the torso in the window?

  ‘You work with Alice Teale, behind the bar?’

  ‘I work with Alice Teale, but not behind the bar,’ he said. ‘She’s too young. Alice is our pot lass, and she hoovers up at the end.’

  ‘But you work with her,’ insisted Black, because the distinction was unimportant to him. ‘You saw her two or three times a week here?’

  ‘On the busy nights, yeah.’

  ‘So that’s two or three nights a week?’ Black repeated.

  ‘Thursday, Friday and Saturday night we get busy,’ he said, ‘but she doesn’t work Fridays.’ Black knew Friday was the one night Alice could hang out with her friends at the school. ‘There’s another lass who does it then. I barely see Alice, to be honest. She turns up at eight and starts going around the room, brings back the empty glasses and wipes down the tables.’

  ‘What is she like?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Black sighed. ‘I mean, what … is … she … like?’ And he locked eyes with the man.

  The barman shrugged. ‘She’s all right. A canny lass, I suppose. I don’t have that much to do with her.’

  ‘But you must have a bit of interaction with her,’ said Beth, ‘if she brings dirty glasses back to the bar?’

  ‘Yeah, but that was about it.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to her?’ said Black.

  ‘Not really.’