Alice Teale is Missing

by H. A. Linskey

  ‘You don’t still love her, then?’

  ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘We can’t always help the way we feel about someone,’ said Beth, ‘even if they’re with somebody else.’

  ‘I don’t see Alice any more. You can’t love someone if you never have any contact with them. After a while, it just fades.’

  ‘Why don’t you see her any more? Did you cut off contact, or did she?’

  When he did not immediately answer her, Black cut in: ‘Was it because of the words you sprayed on the school wall?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ It was a cry of exasperation from the young man in the back seat. ‘It was before that,’ he admitted. ‘She just didn’t talk to me any more.’

  ‘Is that why you did it?’ asked Black. ‘Or was it because she was back with her old boyfriend and you hated seeing it?’

  ‘That must have really hurt,’ said Beth when he didn’t answer.

  ‘Why’d she call it off with you, Tony? Did she get cold feet when people stopped talking to her? You didn’t mind so much, did you? It was you and Alice against the world, wasn’t it? You went out on a limb for her. When she dumped you and got back with Chris, it was all for nothing. They took her back, but they didn’t take you back. Tony was the bad boy who got between Alice and Chris and stabbed his friend in the back.’

  ‘They weren’t really my friends anyway,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘But you thought they were,’ Black reminded him. ‘Until this happened. There you were, alone and dumped by the girl who had cost you everything, so you went up to the school with a can of spray paint and put a message on that wall.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He seemed too weary to either deny it or explain further.

  ‘You said so,’ Beth reminded him. ‘You admitted it to the headteacher.’

  ‘You’ve got all that anger and resentment in you and you want to express your innermost feelings,’ said Black, ‘so you got your can of paint and sprayed “Alice Teale is a slag” on the wall.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Was that honestly the best you could come up with? Calling the love of your young life a slag?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to convince me, Tony.’

  ‘Convince you of what?’

  ‘That you’re not dangerous,’ said Black. ‘That you didn’t let that anger get the better of you and make Alice disappear.’

  ‘I would never do that.’ He sounded appalled, but Black wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily.

  ‘But she’s a slag, Tony, you said so yourself, and what do young men like you want to do to slags, eh? Get even with them? Punish them? Make them pay for the way they make you feel? Was that it? Why shouldn’t we make you our prime suspect, right now?’

  ‘Because that’s not why I sprayed the wall.’

  ‘Then why did you do it?’

  Tony just shrugged at that.

  ‘And why admit it?’ Beth’s tone showed she was more surprised by this than the act itself. ‘Why confess when there was no proof it was you? You could have lied.’

  ‘You’re pretty good at that,’ said Black.

  ‘I had my reasons,’ he said, but then clammed up once more.

  ‘And I think I know what they are,’ said Beth. ‘You didn’t put that pathetic message up on the wall to get your own back on Alice,’ she told him. ‘I think you sprayed it there because you knew the head would make you leave. You wanted to be kicked out, didn’t you, Tony?’ When he didn’t argue she continued: ‘You hated every minute there once Alice got back with Chris. You had to put up with them hugging and kissing in the common room, whispering into each other’s ears, holding hands in the corridor? Who would want to hang around after that?’

  His resistance seemed to crumble then and, with apparent reluctance, he confirmed Beth’s theory. ‘My mam told me I had to keep going for another year, so I could sit the stupid A levels. When the head asked if I had sprayed the wall, I just said, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” and he let me leave.’ Tony looked like he might be about to start crying, but he managed to contain his emotion. ‘It was either that or punch someone.’

  ‘So you did it to get kicked out?’ asked Black. ‘I don’t buy it.’

  ‘It’s true. If I’d just left, my mam would have made me go back there.’

  ‘You’re frightened of your own mam?’ he asked.

  ‘Not frightened, but she goes on and on at me and she never understands.’

  ‘Why did you use that word “slag”?’ asked Black. ‘Was Alice seeing someone else?’

  Tony looked at him as if he was an idiot. ‘You know she was.’

  ‘I meant someone other than Chris.’

  ‘No.’ Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t know, do I? I told you I never saw her any more, except round school when she was glued to Chris. I sprayed the wall to get kicked out, like she said.’ And he nodded towards Beth.

  Black considered this for a moment then said, ‘You’re not in the clear, Tony. Not by a long shot. Now get out.’

  The boy left the car and started to walk back to his house. When he was gone, Black started to drive again. ‘What was that, then?’ he asked Beth. ‘Feminine intuition?’

  ‘Just intuition,’ she snapped. ‘It was the only reason for him to fess up to it like that. He knew he’d be kicked out, and that’s what he wanted.’

  ‘Right,’ said Black calmly. ‘Well, the next time you think you know the reason why a suspect did something, tell me, not him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That might have been the reason he sprayed the wall, and it might not have been, but now, thanks to you, he has an excuse for it.’ He quoted Tony’s words back at her, ‘“I sprayed the wall to get kicked out, like she said.”’ Beth felt sick then because, whether she liked it or not, Black was right. She had just given Tony a way to explain his behaviour and he had taken it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began. ‘I just …’ Then she stopped. What had she been doing? Guiding a suspect because she herself had not believed he was capable of harming his ex, showing Black how clever she was or just opening her mouth and speaking without considering the consequences? Maybe all three at once. All of a sudden, Beth felt incredibly stupid.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, but Black didn’t reply or even speak another word to her on the way back to the major-incident room.

  35

  In the end, there was no great fanfare when the news came. There never is. It began with a walker, one of the more adventurous types, the kind who likes to take the road less travelled, which was why he used a treacherous, eroded, long-neglected footpath directly overlooking the sea. He didn’t seem to mind that he was inches from the edge or that the drop here was almost as high as Cullernose Point, the Northumbrian landmark near Craster he had passed a short time ago on his walk. It was a sunny morning, and the North Sea was calm for once, which was probably why he noticed her bobbing against the rocks, a bundle of wet rags going gently back and forth, trapped in a tiny inlet below him. He might have easily walked by without realizing it was a body, as she lay face down in the water, but one of her arms was outstretched and a milk-white hand was floating on the surface.

  He didn’t say anything because there was no one to hear him. Instead, he stood on the edge of the cliff, peering down intently to make sure he hadn’t imagined it, that she wasn’t some stag-do sex doll or shop-window mannequin which had been dropped over the edge for a joke. Then he would look foolish for wasting the authorities’ time. But the hand looked authentic and so did the hair that floated out around her head, resting on the surface of the water like seaweed.

  This was real. He turned abruptly and started to jog back down the path to get help.

  A call was taken and then another, inquiries were made and, eventually, the right people for the job were located and despatched in a rubber boat; the body was retrieved and pulled on board then taken for examination.

 
An hour later Lucas Black picked up the ringing phone on his desk and took the call. He had been expecting it, but still.

  Maybe she picked up on it from the expression on his face, but Beth quickly ended the call she was on. Black realized she was watching him. He asked all the relevant questions, wrote down details of time, location and the condition of the body, enquired about the post-mortem and finished by asking whether there was any doubt about the identity of the victim, bearing in mind there was trauma to the head and the body had been found in the sea. He was told the clothes matched, but it was the jewellery that was the clincher. No matter how mangled a face and body might become when subjected to brutal treatment then dumped in the sea, rings, necklaces and earrings remain largely undamaged. The local police had been able to check Black’s detailed description of the missing seventeen-year-old and confirmed that their body was wearing a gold necklace with a cross, two plain stud earrings and a ring that matched hers exactly.

  Black didn’t need to wait for formal identification on this one.

  It was Alice.

  He thanked the caller, replaced the receiver, looked up into Beth’s grim face. ‘They’ve found her.’

  ‘I knew it was going to end this way,’ said Beth helplessly, ‘but I still had this hope at the back of my mind.’

  ‘Like she was just going to turn up somehow?’ asked Black.

  ‘Yes. I know it was stupid.’

  ‘I had it, too,’ he confessed.

  ‘I think we were all hoping for the best,’ said Beth. ‘I feel like I know her now.’

  ‘That’s it,’ agreed Black. ‘It’s the journal, seeing her own words written down like that.’

  ‘And the fact that she was so bloody young, with her whole life ahead of her.’

  ‘Which always makes it worse. That, and not having all the answers.’

  ‘Not yet, we don’t,’ said Beth, and there was a new determination in her tone.

  Black obviously felt the same way. ‘I want to get this bastard, whoever it is.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone being so cold-hearted.’ She shook her head.

  ‘I’ll need to go and see the family,’ he said.

  Even though it was the last place she wanted to be, Beth said, ‘I’ll come with you. Her poor brother. He’ll be devastated.’

  ‘They all will,’ said Black, though they were both wondering how Ronnie Teale would really feel about Alice’s death.

  She always knew this would be the worst part of the job, but nothing could have prepared Beth for the moment when Black broke the news of their daughter’s death to the Teales. Abigail Teale let out a loud wail of despair, while her husband gripped her by the shoulders, squeezing her tightly, as if he could physically restrain her grief somehow, all the while saying, ‘No, no, it can’t be right, it can’t be her.’

  Daniel Teale bent double in his chair and buried his face in his hands, as if he didn’t want anyone to see his grief, or perhaps he was blotting out the news, along with the rest of the world, while he wept for his sister, and Ronnie just kept on talking: ‘No, no, no.’ He was shaking his head, as if they had got this all completely wrong somehow. ‘This isn’t right,’ he told them. ‘That’s not …’ And for a moment Beth actually thought he was going to say what I wanted, but instead he just carried on denying the reality of the situation: ‘No, you’ve made a mistake. She’s all right. I know it.’ Was this simply denial, or something more sinister? Beth was tempted to ask him what he meant by it, but this wasn’t the time for an interrogation. Ronnie Teale always seemed to be on the verge of an explosion of rage or frustration but, today at least, it was justified. The hard questions could come later but, for now, both Beth and Black would leave the family to grieve.

  The hour she spent at the Teales’ home was the longest of Beth’s life. She got home physically and mentally exhausted, drank an entire bottle of wine in less than two hours and still couldn’t sleep.

  The next day, other detectives and police officers started to show up, all of them reassigned from other ongoing investigations now that Alice Teale had been confirmed dead and the case officially designated a murder investigation. Beth counted twelve new detectives in the major-incident room, and she couldn’t get near Black until he had finished briefing them all. Tasks were discussed and assigned and the extra manpower was backed up even further by the presence of additional uniformed officers who had been found from somewhere and sent to Collemby to assist with the legwork, which included going over old leads and conducting house-to-house inquiries all over the town.

  DCI Everleigh oversaw everything from HQ, but everyone looked to Black to provide real guidance. He may have only been a DS, but he was the most senior man on the ground and had been there from the beginning of the investigation, so his word counted more than his rank. Confirmation of the girl’s death brought a deluge of new leads from the public, who kept the phones ringing almost non-stop. All these potential leads had to be analysed and followed up. Beth already knew the vast majority would lead nowhere. It would mean long days of busy, often noisy activity, chasing leads until they hit dead ends then starting all over again.

  When Black received the results of the post-mortem he called everyone together.

  ‘There was blunt-force trauma to the head and face,’ he told the assembled group, ‘as well as multiple fractures, which you would expect if she was thrown from a height into the sea. There are rocks everywhere along that section of coastline,’ he explained, ‘but it wasn’t the blunt force that killed her.’

  ‘Then how did she die?’ asked Beth.

  ‘Alice was strangled,’ he said. ‘The pathologist doesn’t want to go out on a limb on this one.’ Then he added: ‘They never do. He does think it’s likely that some of the injuries to the face, head and body occurred before her death, while others are likely to have been caused by the rocks. In a way, we’ve been lucky, because strangulation cases don’t always show outward signs, but this guy was thorough. He spotted characteristic abrasions on the skin around the neck, and petechiae.’ Before she could ask him what that was, he explained: ‘That’s a tell-tale series of small red spots that appear on the skin, and they were still visible.’

  ‘Even after she had been in the water, perhaps for several days?’ asked DC Rodgers.

  ‘The pathologist reckons she must have landed on the rocks then been pushed on to a ledge by the sea before she was spotted in the shallows of the sheltered cove, so the body was in a much better condition than it would have been if it had been dumped way out.’ Black didn’t need to add that this had minimized the damage caused by sea creatures.

  ‘He thinks she might have been badly injured but still alive. Then, before she went into the water, someone finished her off.’

  ‘Why would you beat someone severely around the head then strangle them?’ asked Beth. ‘Why not finish the job with whatever you were striking them with?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Black admitted.

  ‘Where exactly was the body?’ asked one of the new detectives.

  ‘In a tiny inlet, close to Cullernose Point, not far from Craster.’

  ‘Craster?’ queried Beth.

  ‘Do you know it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been there,’ said Beth, ‘and so has Alice. She went there with the rambling club.’

  ‘Simon Nash’s rambling club?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘Then why would he mention it?’ asked Lucas, ‘if he was guilty of dropping her body from a cliff near there? You immediately thought of him.’

  ‘Perhaps that was someone’s intention – to put Simon Nash in the frame by dumping Alice’s body there.’

  They worked long and late, putting in the hours until they were both tired but still reluctant to give up and go home. That was when Black remembered something. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘It’s the diner’s opening night.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ll be late
, but we can still make it. Are you coming?’

  ‘Do you want to go?’ asked Beth.

  ‘They’re my friends,’ he said, ‘so, yes, but you don’t have to.’

  Beth thought of Gemma then, and her eager invitation, as well as her paranoia that no one would show up for the launch of her dream. ‘I’d just forgotten about it,’ she admitted, ‘same as you, but yes, I can be there.’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘To be honest, right now, I feel like I need a bloody drink.’

  Beth had to admit that, despite her reservations about spending more time with Black than was strictly necessary, she really needed one, too.

  36

  The opening of the diner was a success. Virtually everyone who had been invited was there, the train carriages were packed, the drink flowed, the food arrived hot and on time and was devoured gratefully by hungry guests. They ate standing inside or, because it was another in a succession of warm nights, outside, so they could admire the view of the Northumbria coast. The local press were there, photographs were taken and most people, including Beth and Lucas, had had the sense to arrive and leave by taxi, so they could enjoy the wine all evening.

  Beth made up for their lateness by buying flowers for Gemma on the way and Black got a bottle of champagne for the happy couple who had put so much work into their venture. Their hosts repaid them with effusive thanks, warm hugs and guest-of-honour status. Beth was beginning to really like them both and couldn’t help but feel they deserved this success.

  To Beth’s shame, she couldn’t recall the last time she’d had a proper night out; that wasn’t an ageing detectives’ leaving do. She mixed with the other guests and drank way more quickly than usual to combat her shyness and ease the stress of the previous days and found that this helped to take her mind away from the case, for a little while at least.

  Eventually, the crowd thinned and she found herself heading back to top up her glass at the same time as Lucas. She still didn’t know how to take the man, or account for his actions, but he was the only one in the room she knew at all, apart from her hosts, and she was too tired to stay angry at him now. Perhaps the discovery of Alice Teale’s body, along with the shared ordeal of breaking the news to her family, had brought them a little closer to a truce, at least in her eyes. With the simple wisdom of drink, Beth reasoned that Black had done what he’d done for whatever reason and that she would never learn the full truth, nor could she ever ask him about it, so she would tolerate his presence alongside her at the party. Despite everything, she had learned that he was a good detective, a diligent and hard-working man and that he actually cared about Alice Teale, which proved that he really did give a damn after all. They drank together, without talking about the case, and it was nice to simply forget about everything for a while.