‘Oh my God,’ she said quietly.
‘And that’s all there is to it, really.’
‘What happened? To you, I mean?’
‘I was suspended while the press ran a lot of stories about trigger-happy police firing on unarmed civilians, or at least ones who were armed only with a length of wood. Even the local MP questioned our professionalism and demanded a review of just who should be allowed to carry firearms and whether I was qualified enough. It was a year before I was exonerated, and even that was portrayed in the media as the police sticking up for one of their own. I can’t say I blame them. The wife testified that the guy was mentally ill and no real threat to anyone. He would have come quietly, apparently, according to her.
‘It was a shitstorm and I am an embarrassment. Everyone I knew kept their distance,’ he concluded, ‘and they still do.’ He turned to face her then and said, ‘So now you know.’
When he had finished, she didn’t know what to say but, somehow, she managed, ‘Lucas, I am so sorry.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘So am I.’
38
Like every big night out, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, the effects of the alcohol therapeutic after a stressful period. Now, though, Beth knew she would have to bury her feelings of nausea, as well as a splitting headache, and just get on with a hugely important day for the case. Getting out of bed had been a struggle and, for once, she would have gladly carried on sleeping, but guilt forced her to get up. She drank deeply from a bottle of water that she had no recollection of leaving on her bedside cabinet and immediately swallowed two ibuprofen, noticing she had carelessly dropped yesterday’s clothes on the floor.
How pissed was I?
Beth experienced a few moments of dread while she relived the previous evening in her head until she could account for virtually all of it without experiencing a sense of shame. Beth had been pretty drunk when she and Lucas had finally parted, but they had gone their separate ways in different taxis without falling out. She had neither punched him nor kissed him, thank God, and the only vaguely embarrassing thing she could recall was an impromptu sharing of secrets. For some reason, she didn’t feel in the slightest bit bothered about telling him how her ex had run off with her best friend. In return, he had provided her with such a frank, honest and affecting account of the shooting she now felt able to put an end to her worries about his integrity. It was an immense relief.
Somehow, she managed to get to Collemby at the same early hour as usual, but she was still feeling frail. Lucas Black was the only other one there at that time and he looked tired.
‘Hangover breakfast?’ he suggested as soon as Beth walked into the major-incident room, and she was grateful he was feeling the same way. They went straight to the café, which was busier than usual, with building-site workers in need of hearty food before the start of their day.
Black ordered two kill-or-cure fry-ups and mugs of coffee for them both then handed her the latest extracts from Alice Teale’s journal, which had arrived with that morning’s post.
The Journal of Alice Teale
Oh my God. OH MY GOD!
It isn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. All this time, I thought I was doing it wrong or that I’d numbed or damaged myself somehow when I was younger, but no. It just took the right person, someone who knew what they were doing, someone I felt so at ease with I could lose myself completely in the moment, so I didn’t worry about how I looked or smelled or what I tasted like or how vulnerable I felt. All that time in Tony’s garage and those sessions in Chris’s bedroom and I never could. Not once.
All it took was a little while in the back of his car, with his light, insistent touch, and, I swear, I saw stars. My whole body shook. When I finally came down, I wanted to pass out. I was so relaxed I could have fallen asleep right there in his arms.
I’d have done anything for him then. Anything.
‘Who do we think He is, then?’ asked Black.
‘She doesn’t say,’ said Beth. ‘Except it isn’t Chris or Tony. And why send us that bit now?’ she asked, almost absent-mindedly.
‘Alice’s teacher used to drive her home,’ said Black. ‘But how many people knew that, and who knew that you have been talking to Simon Nash?’
‘The whole school knew we were there, and I imagine a lot of people worked out who we were talking to.’
‘And they would have told everybody else,’ he agreed. ‘But who knew about the lifts?’
‘Kirstie told me,’ she recalled, ‘and she said the other girls teased Alice about it, so it must have been an open secret that Mr Nash drove her home after rehearsal sometimes.’
‘That car park out front is wide open. Anyone could have looked out and seen her get into his car, but was it an entirely innocent arrangement? I thought Nash might be Alice’s secret lover, too, but this arrived at the same time,’ and he handed her the other extract.
The Journal of Alice Teale
He’s bad, too. A real bad boy, and aren’t we all supposed to love those? It’s always the bad ones who get a girl’s heart beating faster, the ones who make them risk it all, give up everything. At least, that’s what happens in all the books and films. I wonder why? The films would be boring otherwise, I suppose. Perhaps real life is too dull for us without them, too. Maybe that’s it.
But would I actually leave with him if he asked me?
Would I abandon everyone and run off with him somewhere, change our names so they can never find us, start again like we were two entirely different people and never go back? Never see my mam or dad again? What about my grandad?
Here’s the thing. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If He asked me, I’d say to hell with everybody else. They could think what they liked because it wouldn’t matter any more.
Yeah, I’d do it.
If he asked me.
But he won’t. I know that.
He is playing a part, too, and he’s good at it, very good. He has to be. It’s self-preservation, really. I don’t reckon many people get to see the real man, the one beneath the surface. I might actually be the only one who has.
But I do think he loves me.
I do believe that.
39
‘Doesn’t mention her brother, does she?’ Black observed when Beth had finished reading. ‘Leaving him, I mean.’
‘I think she knows he would forgive her, whatever she did with her life.’
‘Even if she ran away with a total wrong’un? Perhaps,’ he conceded, ‘but who? The drama teacher, who is about to marry Little Miss Perfect? That might qualify as self-preservation, but is he really a bad boy? I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s Keech, the womanizing English teacher who lives with a former pupil but wants Alice to be the next one in his life?’
‘And I hate to say it, but he is attractive.’ When Black’s eyes widened at this, she said, ‘I don’t fancy him – I think he’s the personification of sleaze – but he is handsome, he’s been around, and his only competition is a bunch of spotty teenage boys. For every girl who cringes when he’s near them, there’ll be another with a crush on him. I think it’s complicated when you’re that age, and he does keep getting the girls.’
‘He does.’ He hoped Alice Teale might have had more taste than that. ‘But even Collemby School would fire him for having an affair with a seventeen-year-old pupil, and we would arrest him.’
‘All the more reason to keep it secret,’ said Beth.
‘I spoke to the officer who investigated the allegation against him,’ Black said. ‘The one where he was accused of groping his pupil. It didn’t get very far. The girl had a history of making false claims about a number of things.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘She said she’d had an accident in a department store, but CCTV proved she didn’t actually fall down the stairs. She also claimed she’d been beaten up by a group of older girls but then withdrew the allegation.’
‘That doesn’t make it false,’ said Bet
h. ‘A lot of people change their minds about pressing charges against people who hurt them in case they hurt them again. There is a history of dishonesty, then, but that would make her the ideal target for an abuser, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Black, ‘which is why I didn’t leave it there. As part of the initial investigation, Keech voluntarily submitted his CV so they could check up on his previous jobs, but when the girl retracted her story they didn’t bother to find out why he had left any of those schools.’
He handed Beth a piece of paper with the schools’ names typed on it and the dates Keech had worked at each one. ‘He’s moved around a bit, always in this region, nothing unusual at face value, no stays that look suspiciously short, and when he left it was always at the end of the year, not in the middle of term, as you might expect if he was sacked suddenly because of something he’d done with a pupil.’
Beth surveyed the list. It might be unusual for a teacher to work in six schools in a little over twenty years, but she told herself not to bend the facts to fit her theory that Keech was a bad man. If he had moved from place to place, he must have been able to provide references. Perhaps he got bored easily and needed new pupils or different challenges. Had he moved for family reasons, when he still had a family? You couldn’t tell any of this simply by glancing at a list. Beth would need to dig deeper than that until she was satisfied.
‘I’m on it,’ she told Black.
Beth knew it would take all day to get around the schools that had employed Mr Keech and, right from the off, she wondered if it was a complete waste of time. The first school on the list was a dead end because the head and the office staff had no recollection of the man since they had all joined the school since his time there. They managed to find a teacher close to retirement who did remember Keech, but the details he could recall weren’t all that helpful.
‘Long-haired young chap, smoked a lot. I remember he drove a rusty old banger of a car.’ He chuckled at the memory.
‘But can you remember anything else about the man at all?’ she asked him. ‘How he interacted with the pupils?’
‘God, no,’ he said. ‘Feels like a lifetime ago.’
‘I suppose that does at least mean he wasn’t involved in anything controversial or unusual, then?’
‘Can’t have been,’ he said brightly, ‘unless you count driving a car that looked like it had been welded together in metalwork class.’
The second school she visited was called St Margaret’s and she was greeted with open hostility there. The deputy head was tight-lipped and defensive, as if the reputation of her entire school were being questioned. After a twenty-minute interview, Beth was assured there was absolutely nothing of any suspicious nature involving any of their teachers from that time.
Beth was going to press the point, but then she realized that Keech would have been newly married back then and perhaps less likely to have strayed at that point. Even if he had been chasing every girl in the school, they were hardly going to admit that now.
‘You don’t seem very willing to entertain the thought that Mr Keech might have been too close to some of his pupils?’ Beth said, as a parting shot.
‘Not when there was no evidence of any kind of impropriety,’ she told Beth.
‘Your primary concern being the school’s reputation?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, my main concern is finding the man who murdered a seventeen-year-old girl. There is ample evidence that Mr Keech has had inappropriate relations with pupils or former pupils, as it is common knowledge he has slept with at least two of them at his most recent school alone. If it turns out he has had anything to do with this girl’s death, we will want to know if any other former pupils have been seduced or assaulted by him.’ She finished with: ‘It won’t be possible to keep your school’s name out of the newspapers then.’
She drew a complete blank at the third and fourth schools she visited, but at the fifth school they were at least passably cooperative and she was directed to a female former colleague who had worked with Keech in the English department. Just when she thought she might be getting somewhere, the woman who worked on the reception desk came back with dispiriting news. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘Miss Barton is away on the school’s outward-bound trip to Devon. She’ll be back in a few days. I could take a message,’ she offered.
Beth wondered if there was any point, but decided to be thorough. She wrote down her contact details and handed them to the woman, who promised she would pass them on to Miss Barton upon her return, or if she phoned the school in the meantime.
On the drive home, Beth told herself there would likely be many wasted days like this one in her police career and she would just have to get used to it. It was never like this in the cop shows on TV.
It was late and the sun was setting when Beth walked into the major-incident room. Black waved at her to draw her attention while he was talking on the phone.
‘That is good news,’ he agreed with the caller, then glanced at his watch. ‘No, we’ll check it out now, before he breaks camp.’
When he had ended the call, he said, ‘Grab your coat. All those new resources haven’t been for nothing. We’ve finally found Happy Harry.’
40
He explained it all on the way. Happy Harry had been spotted by a farmer, who had been spoken to by a uniformed officer. He was one of many who had been asked to keep an eye out for the homeless man, who might have been one of the last people ever to see Alice Teale alive while he was rooting around in the bins. Though it was late, cold and raining, Black didn’t want to delay the search or give the man any chance to leave the area.
‘Aren’t we supposed to call for back-up in situations like this?’
Black snorted. ‘To question an old wino? You’re joking, right? We’d never hear the last of it. No, we’ll just have a look up there and see if we can find him, then bring him in.’
They drove out to the edge of the woods which bordered the farmland and parked their car in a layby next to a gate which led to a track that divided the woodland. ‘This is it,’ he told her, ‘the lane where Harry was spotted.’ They started to walk up the track together. Black had a torch, but there was still just enough light for them to see roughly where they were going, so he kept it switched off and in his pocket for now. Being out here like this as it was getting dark was eerie and Beth kept thinking she saw movement in the trees either side of them, until she peered more closely and realized it was just the fading light forming opaque shapes between branches. The lie of the land didn’t help. To their left, the woodland was level with them, but on their right it fell away and the drop became longer and steeper as they went.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea? How much do we know about this Harry? Is he really harmless?’
‘Mostly,’ he said quietly.
‘What does that mean?’ It didn’t sound good.
‘I asked around,’ he explained. ‘He’s been begging for booze money in Collemby and the surrounding villages for years.’
‘That it?’ For some reason, she thought he knew more about the man than that but wasn’t letting on.
‘It’s rumoured he might have been in the army once,’ he said.
‘Meaning he has actual training and knows how to kill people?’ All of a sudden, being out here in the dark woods like this seemed a very bad idea.
‘It was a long time ago’ – he shrugged this off – ‘and I’m with you, so it’ll be fine.’
They walked in silence for a while and, as they trudged along the path, it grew darker still.
‘It gets dark really quickly,’ she said.
‘It’s the bloody trees,’ said Black. ‘They blot out what’s left of the light.’ But he didn’t turn on the torch in case it signalled their presence to Harry.
‘Five hundred yards’ – he lowered his voice – ‘that’s what the farmer said. That’s where he spotted Harry. One minute he was on the lane, the next he’d disappeared into t
he woods.’ And so they walked the distance together, trying not to make any noise that might spook Harry. It was impossible to be entirely quiet because the path had been layered with gravel and loose rocks that scrunched under their feet. Anyone could have heard them coming.
Sure enough, there was a flurry of movement from the trees up ahead and, when they looked towards the sound, they saw a figure break from cover and hare across the path ahead of them then disappear into the bushes. This didn’t look like an old man. He was fast, astonishingly so for someone who spent all his days drinking. Only fear could have propelled him along like that.
Black cursed and set off after him, calling, ‘Stay here!’ to her over his shoulder. Even if she had wanted to go with him, Black covered the ground too fast and she was left trailing in his wake. He disappeared into the bushes after Harry.
Beth stopped where she was, stood, listened and waited. Nothing. When minutes had passed, she called, ‘Lucas?’, but there was no answer. ‘Lucas!’ Still no reply. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she hissed.
Beth heard a noise then and whirled round, but it was too late. The crashing sound was a figure charging from the bushes on the other side of the path but right by her. It smashed into her, sending her hurtling backwards off the raised lane, and she fell off the path and down the steep hill, hitting the ground hard then rolling over and over as her momentum took her through the bushes and down a long, muddy bank below. Beth’s body had crashed against the ground with such force it knocked the wind out of her. She picked up speed, desperately trying to stop herself by grabbing at the ground with her hands and using her legs as a brake, but the drop was too steep. Her head hit an exposed tree root, stunning her, and something sharp scraped her cheek, drawing blood.
Alice Teale is Missing Page 23
