‘That’s another thing we have in common,’ I gushed, without giving anything more away.
I didn’t text her at all. Texts remain on the records of mobile phone providers, as do messages left on 121, but there are no records of the content of spoken calls. We had several more phone calls, only very slightly flirtatious on my part, before I invited her to meet me. She took surprisingly little coaxing, agreeing quite swiftly to meet.
I told her to dress the way she had for her LetsMeet picture and that I liked her style. I kept everything light. I was becoming desperate to meet her. I didn’t want to say anything that might frighten her off, but Melanie Cooke was putty in my hands. She was asking for it all right and I couldn’t resist.
I was ready to cross the line. I had no choice.
NINETEEN
The conversation which followed shocked Vogel to the core.
‘Is there something you’ve forgotten to mention over the years, dad?’ he asked casually.
‘Sorry son, what are you talking about?’ Eytan responded.
‘I’m talking about he fact that I am not your son at all.’
‘Sorry? You’ve lost me.’
‘No, Dad. Please don’t dissemble. I was adopted, wasn’t I? And neither you, nor mum, chose to tell me.’ Vogel spoke in an even enough tone, but inside he was in turmoil.
‘Ah,’ murmured Eytan Vogel. It was little more than a breath.
‘Come on, dad,’ persisted Vogel. ‘Show me some respect. Tell me the truth.’
‘Uh yes, uh, we never wanted you to find out this way.’ The shock was clear in Eytan’s voice. David Vogel didn’t care.
‘Your mother always said it could happen,’ Eytan continued. ‘That you might learn the truth from someone or something else. She wanted to tell you from the beginning. It was my fault we didn’t. You know what Jewish fathers are like with their firstborn, I wanted you to be my son. You were my son. You are still my son, every bit as much as Adam. We never expected that your mother would get pregnant after we adopted you. We’d been trying for years, perhaps it was because there was no pressure any more. That’s what they say happens sometimes, don’t they …?’
Vogel let Eytan Vogel’s words wash over him, in the distance. He’d known. He’d already known, but having it confirmed on the phone, from three and a half thousand miles away, by the only father he had ever known was an extraordinary moment in his life.
Automatically, he began to reflect on what he’d already learned from this, so far, brief conversation. Adam was the natural son Eytan Vogel had longed for, so what did that make him, David? Not the much desired firstborn, that was for sure.
Another thought occurred to him.
He had stopped listening to his father and interrupted him anyway.
‘Dad, am I a Jew?’
‘Of course you’re a Jew, David. We brought you up a Jew. You were circumcised. You had your Bar Mitzvah, didn’t you? What more could we do?’
‘So my birth parents were not Jewish?’
‘Uh no. But that doesn’t matter David. You’re a Jew all right.’
‘Right. Goodnight, dad.’
Vogel ended the call before his father, or the man he had always thought was his father, could say any more.
Mary stood anxiously by Vogel’s side. She looked at him enquiringly.
‘I’m not even a Jew,’ he whispered. As a little boy he’d sat listening to Eytan’s stories of their family history, the good and the bad, the relatives who had died in the Holocaust all over Europe, those who had escaped and forged new lives – as Eytan, one of Germany’s kinder transport refugees, had done. Vogel had mourned and rejoiced at these tales of his Jewish heritage, but the heritage was a lie. The Jewish relatives were a lie, even his own father was a lie.
‘Is that what Eytan said?’ Mary queried.
‘No, he said I’d been circumcised and had my Bar Mitzvah, that I was a Jew all right.’ Vogel spat the last words out.
‘Well that’s true, isn’t it?’
Vogel shook his head slowly, still taking it all in.
‘Mary, I have no religious beliefs. Jews are a race, first and foremost, that is my ideology, you know that. Being Jewish was my birth right and it’s always been very important to me. I have always been proud of being a secular Jew. Somebody who has thought through the dogma of The Torah and rejected it, yet would live and die by the ideology of his race. By definition you can’t have secular Anglicans or Baptists or Muslims or even Buddhists. I could never practice any religion and I do not believe in any kind of God. I thought I was a Jew by blood, that I’d been born a Jew. I never had any reason to doubt that, but I wasn’t born a Jew and I don’t have the faith. So what kind of a damned Jew does that make me?’
The phone call to his father and the subsequent revelations weighed heavily on Vogel. After a largely sleepless night, he was in a thoroughly bad mood when he left for work early the next morning.
He tried to put the extraordinary and highly disturbing turn of events in his personal life to one side and concentrate on the day ahead. But he had his final report on the Melanie Cooke case to compile and he was not happy about that either.
In spite of the apparently unquestionable forensic evidence, Vogel remained unconvinced that a satisfactory conclusion had been reached. His mood darkened with every paragraph that he wrote. At home, and now at work, he found himself becoming overwhelmed with a feeling of helplessness, a vague awareness of events spiralling out of his own control.
And that was not usual for Vogel.
He was finally nearing the end of the report, around noon, when Hemmings strode into his office with news of a case that had just been referred to the major crime unit from CID at Trinity Road.
‘I need you to finish up the Cooke case and take this one over as soon as possible,’ said Hemmings. ‘Young Thai woman found dead in a flat in St Pauls. Smothered in her bed. At first they thought it was a domestic with an oriental twist.’
Hemmings smiled at what he apparently thought was some kind of a joke. Vogel obligingly stretched his features into something vaguely resembling a smile back.
‘You know anything about it, Vogel?’
‘I knew it had happened, and I saw something on the news, boss,’ he said. ‘Been too busy with the Mel Cooke case to take much notice. Anyway, the inference was that it was a domestic which would be cleared up pretty quickly.’
Hemmings grunted.
‘Actually, it seems there’s more than a bit of a mystery about it and Trinity Road have been doing some digging, with interesting results. The landlord found the body, three days ago now, after a neighbour reported a smell on the landing. He couldn’t raise his tenant, a man who’d said he wanted the place for his new wife while his own house was being done up, so he used his own keys to get in. Forensics reckon the woman’s been dead going on two months.’
‘Right,’ said Vogel, trying desperately to refocus his train of thought. ‘So, everything surely points to the man who rented the flat, doesn’t it? Husband? Boyfriend?’
‘Indeed. Only he doesn’t seem to exist.’
‘What?’
‘Well, he paid cash in advance for six months, so, as you can imagine, the landlord didn’t do a lot of checking. The man was seen in a rental car and Trinity Road have already managed to track that down. He used the same name to rent the car that he gave the landlord, Richard Perry, which checked with an apparently valid driving licence. He paid by credit card in the same name. He returned the car about a month later, at night, parked outside the rental place and stuck the keys through the letter box. He left no paper trail worth mentioning. All internet banking, set up with falsified ID, an accommodation address, everything is pretty much uncheckable. The Trinity Road boys are pretty sure he’s built a totally false identity.’
‘How?’ Vogel suspected he knew the answer and Hemmings confirmed it.
‘Obviously Trinity Road have tried everything to trace this Richard Perry and the only person
they can find so far, who’s details check out, died as a boy. It’s the old Day of the Jackal trick again. Hard to be believe it still works, though you have to be a pretty smart cookie to get away with it these days, which it’s pretty certain this character is. He’s clever and the attack was premeditated, it would seem. Anyway, he now seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘I doubt that, boss. He’ll be out there somewhere. What about the Thai woman? Do we know much about her yet?’
‘Well, her name was Manee Jainukul, she came here thinking she was going to marry a man she met through an internet dating site. Not a lot of family, they’ve only just found a sister back in Thailand.’
‘You said she’d been dead two months. Did nobody in Thailand raise the alarm when they didn’t hear from her?’
‘Ah, I said he was a clever bastard, didn’t I? He must have taken her phone after he killed her. The sister continued to receive texts and emails from her. She even got one after the body was discovered.
‘There’s something else too. According to the sister he didn’t call himself Richard Perry, Manee knew him as Saul. She didn’t even know his last name until she got here. Crazy eh? You travel half way round the world to marry a man and you don’t even know his full name.’
Vogel muttered his agreement.
‘Did she tell her sister his last name, or alleged last name?’
‘Apparently the sister said she thought she did, but couldn’t remember it. She had just been told Manee was dead though, so she would have been in shock and she doesn’t speak any English. Trinity Road have only been able to go through the Thai police, but I know they’ve been asked to talk to her again.’
With some reluctance, Vogel completed his report on the Melanie Cooke murder and began to study the files on the murder of Manee Jainukul.
SAUL
I’d never wanted to hurt Manee. I’d never intended to kill her. Honestly I hadn’t. I’d so wanted her to be my wife, really I had, and to give me the family life I’d always hoped for. It had never been my intention to hurt her. She’d been my last hope after all, that’s how I’d thought of her.
But she hadn’t been what I’d expected, not at all the way Thai girls were supposed to be. Or not the way I thought they were supposed to be, anyway. It wasn’t my fault that she had been so difficult, questioning everything that I did and criticising me all the time. She hadn’t been any different to the English girls I’d known.
Indeed, towards the end, she’d begun to remind me of my ex-wife. When I tried to have sex with her, all I could see was that pale judgemental English face I had grown to hate many years ago.
My dream Thai bride eventually began to openly mock me, when I failed in my desperate attempts to enter her – no longer so compliant – little body. Just as my ex had done. Or that’s how it seemed to me.
That had been the beginning of the end, I suppose.
Even then, I don’t think I ever planned to kill her. More than anything, I just wanted her to shut up. The night it happened, after I’d failed yet again to perform, she actually laughed at me. I told her to stop, but she didn’t. She had a high-pitched trilling sort of laugh. A very annoying laugh.
I shouted at her. It made no difference.
I grabbed a pillow and held it to her face. She stopped laughing then. I slackened my grip on the pillow. She pushed it from her face with her skinny, little arms and started to scream, which was even worse. I flung the pillow back over her face and lent on it with all my strength, pressing it into her, filling her nose and mouth with it, so that she struggled to breathe.
She beat on my back ineffectually with her little fists, but after a bit she stopped doing that. I felt her go limp beneath me. I lifted the pillow from her face. Her eyes were wide open and she lay quite still. She was definitely dead.
I had become desperate to find a way out of the hole I’d dug for myself but I hadn’t planned to murder the girl. Honestly, I hadn’t. I could hardly believe it had been so easy. That she had died so quickly.
I was in an even bigger hole now, of course. Or was I? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would get away with it, I’d always got away with everything before. It all went quiet for a bit. They didn’t find her body for a long time; I’d banked on that and on the trail going cold. Even then, it was a while before the press cottoned on to it not being just another domestic.
The Thai bride found dead in a Bristol flat and the way in which she had died, did eventually hit the papers and the TV news, as it had to. But they didn’t even know who I was, not really. The police announced that they were looking for a man who had used the name of Richard Perry, but had been known to the dead woman as Saul. They put out a call for anyone who might know him or might have had dealings with him to come forward. This man might be able to help them in their inquiries, they said, and everyone knew what that meant.
It seemed likely that they would have already gone into the dating website I’d used, but found that I hadn’t posted a picture of myself. I supposed that ultimately they would unearth the picture I’d emailed directly to Manee, the same doctored picture I had used before with Sonia. But that could take some time, as I had deleted all emails sent between Manee and me and cleared the records as best I could. In any case, I was pretty sure that it didn’t look enough like the real me for anyone to recognise me from it.
Sonia would recognise that picture of course, but not the real me.
The landlord I’d rented the flat from and the chap I dealt with for the rental car, would already have been asked for a description of me, I assumed. However, most people, in my experience, are not very observant.
All the same, as I went about my day to day business, I began to wonder if people were looking at me curiously. Perhaps trying to work out where they had seen me before. It was almost certainly my imagination. Someone would have reported me already, wouldn’t they? I would have been investigated.
I wasn’t though. I couldn’t understand how those around me could be so blind. They were stupid. They had to be stupid, compared with me anyway. I was going to get away with it again. They had nothing on me, not the real me. They couldn’t touch me.
TWENTY
Vogel took the call just before lunch, the following day, his first day running the investigation into the death of the young Thai woman in St Pauls. He knew he wasn’t operating on full power, as half his mind was still with the Melanie Cooke case.
‘How are you, you old bugger?’ asked Nobby Clarke.
Vogel’s spirits rose at once. He both liked and respected his former boss from the Met and one of his greatest regrets at leaving London was that he would no longer be on Clarke’s team. He thought the Detective Superintendent was one of the best police officers he had ever worked with.
‘All the better for hearing from you, boss,’ he responded truthfully.
‘I’m not your boss, Vogel,’ said Clarke, speaking with exaggerated patience.
Vogel smiled into the phone. It was well known between the two of them that he had never been able to call Clarke anything other than boss and never would be able to. Even though he knew well enough that the DS preferred informality.
The problem was that, in spite of the unlikely nickname, DS Clarke was a woman. A damned good-looking woman at that, Vogel thought. Tall, blonde and elegant. He didn’t even know what her real Christian name was and neither did anyone else. Clarke, for whatever reason, and in common with a famous television detective, had always kept it a closely-guarded secret. And, in spite of her frequent invitations to do so when they’d first worked together, Vogel certainly could not bring himself to call her Nobby.
‘Right Vogel,’ Clarke continued, after only the briefest of pauses. ‘Something’s just landed on my desk, which I thought you might be interested in.’
Vogel knew she would not have called for chat, they didn’t have that sort of relationship, and that she would cut to the chase straight away. The DS was not one for small talk. Unless she got on the
Scotch of course, then she could be quite garrulous.
‘There’s a connection with a case in your patch,’ Clarke continued. ‘Are you involved in the Melanie Cooke murder at all?’
Vogel felt his pulse quicken.
‘I’m deputy SIO,’ he said. Then he corrected himself. ‘Or I was, it’s done and dusted now, boss. DNA match with the father. He’s been charged. We announced it yesterday.’
‘I know,’ replied Clarke. ‘But I’m afraid I may be about to rock your boat, Vogel.’
‘I’m hanging on to the sides,’ said the DI.
‘We’ve been looking into the suspicious death of a male teenager found in a Soho hotel a month ago,’ Clarke continued. ‘He died of strangulation, that much was abundantly clear from the start. We don’t know yet, though, whether his death was murder or an accident. Have you heard of asphyxiaphilia?’
‘I don’t just do crosswords, I compile them, boss,’ replied Vogel.
‘Yeah.’ Clarke knew that well enough. She sounded totally unimpressed. ‘Not a term that fits naturally into the crossword section of our own dear Daily Telegraph, Vogel.’
‘I also read the news pages, boss. Fits in there. It’s a deliberate partial strangulation, using a cord – or often a belt – tightened around the neck. It reduces the amount of oxygen to the brain during sexual stimulation, heightening the pleasure of orgasm. Dangerous old game. Michael Hutchence, the INXS singer, was found hanged in a hotel room in Australia amid rumours of auto-erotic asphyxiation. That’s the same practice solo, during masturbation. The coroner delivered a suicide verdict but the auto-eroticism theory was backed by Hutchence’s wife Paula Yates, who said he would never have deliberately killed himself.’
‘How come you manage to sound like an anorak even when you’re talking about sex games?’ asked Clarke.
‘Sorry, boss.’
Clarke grunted acknowledgement.
‘Anyway, you are absolutely right, of course,’ she continued. ‘The assumption here was that this was a sex game gone wrong. Asphyxiophilia is particularly prevalent among certain sectors of the gay community. Our lad had clearly been indulging in some pretty extreme sex with another man. Forensic found signs of quite violent anal sex. The sexual partner was nowhere to be seen, when the body was discovered by a maid in the morning. Like I said, we are not sure yet whether the death was murder or an accident. But my own hunch is murder, the boy’s hands were tied in front of him with some sort of dressing-gown cord and there was a belt around his neck. He was in a kneeling position when he was found, but lying on his side. The belt had been pulled so tightly through the buckle, that his neck protruded all around it. I reckon it must have been held in place by somebody pretty strong until he died. I also reckon the whole thing was too violent to have been a sex game that went too far; there’d been no attempt to loosen the belt around the boy’s neck or untie the bonds around his wrists. Mind you, if it was a deliberate killing, we are dealing with some cool murderer here. DNA all over the place. Fingerprints too. He used a condom, but he left it in the bin in the bathroom. Arrogant bastard. We have his sperm, for God’s sake.’
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