Mal Roper (Tim Treloar) has developed a disturbing obsession with Bernie Winter (Jane Hazlegrove) in Coronation Street, but fans of the ITV soap fear there may be more worrying revelations ahead.
Mal’s first appearance on the cobbles was a red flag in itself when he turned up at the café and punched Roy Cropper (David Neilson) and accused him of having an affair with his wife, Alice.
Viewers will know that Roy had been writing to prisoners, having experienced first-hand the loneliness inmates can feel after being wrongly accused of murder.
He then received a letter from a woman called Alice, who claimed he had helped her son, and the pair began to communicate more frequently, before eventually agreeing to meet. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, their meeting never went ahead.
Pairing that with the fact that Mal has clearly been hiding a sinister side, Metro readers have begun to theorise that Alice doesn’t actually exist…
Fans think they’ve worked out the truth
In recent scenes, Mal’s true colours were revealed when he held Bernie against her will in Roy’s Rolls.
When she finally got through to him that she didn’t reciprocate the feelings he had for her, his demeanour changed, and he accused her of being a ‘cheap tease’.
Things escalated even further from there when Bernie returned home and found that someone had cut her face out of her wedding photos and, of course, she suspected Mal.
Following the exposure of his dark side, fans have been wondering if this was part of a bigger plot all along, and have questioned whether or not Alice ever really existed.
‘What’s the betting that there never was a wife called Alice and he was gaslighting Roy all along?’ Metro reader Julie asked on Facebook.
Jenny echoed the sentiment, wondering: ‘Does Alice exist or was it him writing to Roy?’
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‘I think it was him and Alice didn’t exist,’ Isla agreed, while Lorna added: ‘I am sure it was him writing to Roy.’
Clare was also on the same page, writing: ‘Think he was Alice & writing to Roy.’
Other fans wondered if perhaps something even more sinister was going on, with Ann speculating: ‘I think he murdered his wife.’
With the amount of villains on Coronation Street at the moment, it really wouldn’t surprise us!
Could this theory be true?
As Metro‘s local soap detective, I have taken a deep dive into Mal to see whether or not this theory has legs – and there is certainly evidence to back it.
Before Mal even arrived on the cobbles, we saw a glimpse of him in a sinister scene, holding a phone open on a text exchange between Roy and Alice.
Earlier in this same episode, Nina Lucas (Mollie Gallagher) and DC Kit Green (Jacob Roberts) warned Roy about the dangers of catfishing, with Kit explaining that they’d had a rise in reports at the station.
The fact that Mal was in possession of the phone certainly set off alarm bells, and could be proof of the theory that there never was an Alice in the first place.
Although it could be argued that Mal had simply found the texts, he didn’t confront Roy about his communication with Alice until after he’d sent her flowers, making out that this was how he found about about the supposed affair.
However, he did seem genuinely shocked to hear Roy’s side of the story, and when he later met Bernie in the Chariot Square bar, his devastation was convincing.
He even told her that he knew what she was going through with good friend Debbie Webster (Sue Devaney) facing sentencing for drink driving, revealing that it had been his son up in court.
This seemed to be true, given that Alice had initially thanked Roy for writing to her son – but was it a son that Mal and Alice shared, or someone Mal had made up on his own?
It would be tough to carry on such a monumental lie, but we have seen Mal fib on more than one occasion, and do so convincingly.
He managed to convince Roy that he needed much more work done on the electrics in his flat so that he could stick around for longer.
On top of that, during his confrontation with Bernie in last night’s episode, Mal made out that they’d kissed before taking drugs, but this wasn’t the case at all. They had clearly already taken the pills, as Bernie had pointed out that they weren’t having the desired effect.
Mal could be more dangerous than anyone has realised
If the theory that Mal made Alice up is true, then it leaves us with some major questions. Firstly, how did he know to write to Roy?
Roy wasn’t exactly advertising that he had been writing to prisoners until he was caught red-handed by his friends. So, if Alice doesn’t really exist, that only leaves one other possibility: Mal must have been an inmate himself.
Could Mal have a criminal past, leaving Bernie in even more danger than she might realise?
And secondly, why target Roy? Was Mal’s plan to sink his claws into Bernie all along, with Roy just collateral damage, or was it completely unrelated?
After all, he couldn’t have known she would be at the Chariot Square that night, or that she worked for Roy, could he?
But is there ever really such a thing as a coincidence in soap?
One thing is for certain, Mal is a dodgy character, and it is surely only a matter of time before his true colours are revealed…