‘Intriguing,’ said Vogel, but he couldn’t let his brain dwell on it. He really couldn’t. He had another case of his own now. He was already having trouble enough moving on from Melanie Cooke, then he remembered Clarke’s opening gambit.
‘I don’t see what it could have to do with the Cooke murder, though, boss?’
‘I’m getting to that, Vogel. You’re ex-Met. I’m sure you know about our DNA backlog. Everything has to be prioritised. A gay boy found dead in a hotel room is pretty low priority round here. My personal hunch that it could have been murder didn’t count for much under the circumstances. This place is still full of homophobes and mysogynists. We didn’t get the DNA back til this morning. My lot wacked it into the national data base and hey presto, there was a direct match with the DNA found on Melanie Cooke.’
Vogel couldn’t believe his ears.
‘What? That doesn’t make sense. The murder of a schoolgirl and the death of a gay man during a sex game just don’t match at all. It can’t be the same perpetrator. How could it be?’
‘People can be bisexual you know, Vogel.’
Vogel thought for a moment.
‘When did you say you found that dead boy?’
‘Nearly a month ago.’
‘Well, I suppose that, technically, Terry Cooke could be your killer,’ said Vogel reluctantly. ‘Melanie died a week ago now and we didn’t arrest her father until four days later, after we got our DNA results back, just a tad quicker than yours.’
‘Stranger things have happened, Vogel. Remind me how old the girl was, will you?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Well our boy is only eighteen. Not quite paedophilia territory, but perhaps your man just likes ’em as young as he can get ’em and of either sex.’
‘Perhaps, but we have no evidence of that. We investigated big time whether or not Cooke had been abusing his daughter on a regular basis, but we found nothing to suggest that. Although the girl’s clothes were ripped and there were bruises around her breasts and her vagina, there was no sign at all that sexual intercourse had taken place. Indeed, she was a virgin, apparently. The favourite theory is that Cooke killed her out of frustration at her behaviour, because she was running wild and didn’t want to know her dad any more. Then he tried to make it look like a sexual assault, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually have sex with her.’
‘She wouldn’t have bruised if she was already dead, Vogel.’
‘Well, maybe at the same time he was throttling her. I don’t know, boss. To tell the truth I’ve never liked this one, but DNA can’t lie or so we are told. Only, now you’ve brought this to the table …’
‘That’ll teach you to boast about compiling crossword puzzles, Vogel.’
Vogel didn’t bother to respond to that.
‘You are sure about the DNA results, aren’t you boss?’ he asked. ‘Not one of forensics’ famous cock-ups is it?’
‘Pretty sure, Vogel. In any case, it’s all being double-checked as we speak.’
‘I just find it hard to believe, boss.’
‘Indeed. I suppose you have yet to consider that there could be a famous forensics cock-up at your end?’
‘The thought was beginning to occur to me.’
‘You’d certainly better do some double-checking too, Vogel.’
‘Yep. I guess so.’
‘Right, then we should reconvene.’
Vogel didn’t respond. He couldn’t quite take in what he had been told. He was missing something important, he felt sure of it. And, if he was right, Nobby Clarke was missing something too.
It was the DS who finally broke the silence.
‘Are you still there, Vogel?’
‘Sorry boss, I was trying to think,’ he said. ‘By the way, I presume you have an ID on the victim?’
‘Yes. His wallet was on the bedside table. Cash, credit cards, students’ union card, bus pass and so on all still in it. His phone was there too. We were able to ID him straight away: Timothy Southey. First year student at LSE. He lived with his parents in Clapham. They were told as soon as the body was found. Not by me, thank God. One advantage of a highfalutin, damned desk job. No more death calls. Apparently they didn’t even know the lad was gay and still won’t accept it.’
‘Which hotel was he found in?’
‘The Leicester Square Premier Inn.’
‘Who booked the room?’
‘Our likely killer, he walked in off the street and paid cash.’
‘Right. He’d still have been asked for a name at least though.’
‘Yes, but he wouldn’t give his real name, would he? Registered as Leo Ovid. Doesn’t even sound like a proper name. There’s not a single Ovid listed in the London phone book.’
‘Curious. People giving false names usually use something common, don’t they? I know John Smith is a cliché too far, but nothing to draw attention, isn’t that the criteria if you’re checking into a hotel and you’re up to no good?’
‘I wouldn’t know Vogel,’ remarked Clarke in a deliberately neutral tone. ‘Not bloody Leo Ovid, though, surely.’
‘You’ve got the boy’s phone. Was this Leo listed on it?’
‘Indeed. Along with more than one contact number. One of them was just a wrong number and the others were all defunct pay-as-you-go phones.’
‘So, no way of tracing him?’
‘No, not from that anyway.’
‘No doubt you’ve checked the records. Read his texts? Listened to voicemail? Hasn’t that lead to anything?’
‘Nope, not really. No voicemail messages and most of the text messages were from Timothy to Leo expressing undying love and trying to arrange a date. The ones from this Leo were all vaguely defensive and there’d been a couple cancelling earlier meetings. The only thing clear to us, was that Leo seemed to be leading our young victim a merry dance, but that’s no surprise given what happened. Maybe murder was what he’d intended all the time, who knows. I’ll email you a transcript. You can have a look for yourself.’
Vogel thanked her and ended the call. He suddenly had a great deal of work to do.
LEO
I suppose it seems crazy to say that killing him hurt me as much as it did him. But that’s the truth, I was quite sure of that. Tim is dead. He is at peace. I now have to live with what I have done and I will never find peace. Never.
I left the hotel in the early hours, hovering by the lift until I was pretty sure the attention of the night staff had been distracted. I had my baseball hat on and was keeping my head down. It was highly unlikely that I would be recognised by anyone or be identifiable on any CCTV footage, but I didn’t wish to be spotted leaving in the middle of the night. I thought it might look suspicious and draw attention to myself, even in a Premier Inn in Soho.
It might have been safer, of course, to have waited until eight or nine in the morning, when my leaving would have been camouflaged by other guests checking out. But I couldn’t spend the rest of the night in a hotel room with a dead body, could I? And his dead body too. My beloved Tim.
I still do not know quite how I managed to tighten that belt around his neck. It was not a problem for me physically. I am a strong, fit man, but I loved Tim. Truly, I did. In as much as I have ever managed to love anyone, of course.
His death was an ordeal for me too. I had to watch the light fade from his eyes, the colour from his cheeks, as I pulled the belt tighter and tighter through its buckle. He struggled too. He was almost as strong as me, but not quite. I had persuaded him to allow me to tie his hands. All part of the game, I’d assured him.
But, as he began to realise that what was happening to him was no kind of game, he thrashed around with his legs, nearly kicking me in the face more than once. I just managed to avoid contact. At the very least, I would have been badly bruised and that might have been hard to explain away in my day-to-day life.
He made terrible gurgling sounds as he died. I shall never forget those sounds, but I did not allow myself to be
deterred from my deadly and unavoidable purpose. I’d switched the TV to radio and tuned into a music station on high volume. To drown the sounds of our love-making, I’d told Tim. He’d smiled and accepted it. He’d trusted me totally, my young lover. In the physical sense, at any rate.
God knows, I hadn’t wanted to kill him, but I cannot kid myself that it was an accident, nor even that it wasn’t premeditated. I’d planned every bit of it. I’d had to. Tim had got too close to me. He knew about me. He knew who I was. If only he’d been prepared to step back, to stay away from my other side, but Tim was incapable of that. He’d wanted what he called a ‘normal relationship’. I didn’t have the faintest idea what a ‘normal relationship’ was. Not with a man or a woman. Not with anyone.
But I knew that, in Tim’s case, it represented a huge threat to everything that I was. Everything I had become. I had to remove that threat. I had no choice.
TWENTY-ONE
Vogel went to see Hemmings straight away to bring him up to speed with the news from the Met. The shocked DCI agreed that the Melanie Cooke investigation must be reopened and that Vogel should drop the St Pauls murder case to divert all his energies back to it.
‘This could leave us with more egg on our faces than you and I are likely to eat in a lifetime,’ muttered Hemmings.
Vogel could only agree.
Supported by Saslow, he spent the rest of that day and most of the following morning re-interviewing Terry Cooke. He was still being held in a police cell at Patchway, awaiting transfer to prison where he would be held in custody until trial. Unless the charge against him was dropped of course, thought Vogel.
When questioned closely about his movements at the time of Timothy Southey’s death and whether or not he had ever met the young man and so on, Cooke grew more and more bewildered.
Eventually, Vogel told him about the DNA match with samples taken from Southey’s body.
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Cooke. ‘It’s some sort of fit-up, stuff like this doesn’t happen to blokes like me. I’ve told you, I’ve never been to any Premier Inn anywhere, let alone one in Soho. I’ve never even heard of Timothy Southey. I’m not an effin’ shirtlifter, for fuck’s sake. Anyway, it’s bloody simple now, you’ve got to do another DNA test on me right away. The stupid bastards have got my sample mixed up. That’s all it can be.’
Cooke’s brief stepped in for the first time then.
‘Clearly you should arrange that at once, Mr Vogel,’ she said. ‘And you should know that I shall also be advising my client to undergo a private and independent DNA test.’
Under the circumstances, Vogel didn’t blame her and Cooke’s request for a second DNA test hadn’t actually been necessary. It had always been Vogel’s next move.
Vogel was well aware that mistakes of this magnitude were, as they used to say in the Met, rare as a silent cabby. But everything about Cooke and the way he dealt with each questioning session was leading the DI to strongly suspect that one had been made in this instance.
DNA was generally regarded as a magic bullet by police forces throughout the world and with good reason, but laboratory error was not totally unknown. If that was what had happened in this case, then Vogel had never had personal experience of anything so major.
He suspended the interview. He and Saslow, accompanied by a uniformed officer, took Cooke around to the custody suite and supervised the second DNA test, taken by the custody sergeant himself. Then they headed back to Kenneth Steele House.
The transcripts of Tim’s text exchanges with his probable murderer and the records of phone calls to and from unidentified pay-as-you-go phones, still lay on Vogel’s desk. The DI prepared to go through them again, and every report, and every bit of evidence compiled on the Melanie Cooke murder too.
Logic told him that the Terry Cooke DNA match had to be a massive blunder by forensics. The results of the latest DNA test would be at least a couple of days, even though a request had been made at the highest level for fast-tracking. But, until Vogel knew for sure that Cooke’s DNA had been a mix-up, he intended to check and double-check every possible detail of Melanie and Timothy’s murder cases.
AL
I had waited anxiously, at our appointed meeting place. It was a bar which was always busy, not just at weekends, and where I knew there was no CCTV. I made sure I was there early and bagged a table by the door. I spotted Melanie as soon as she walked in. She looked all around, her eyes searching faces. They swept over my face and onwards. She did not recognise me and I had not expected her to, not from that photograph.
I stood up and took a few steps towards her. Her back was turned to me by then.
‘Melanie,’ I said quietly.
She swung around to face me, her smile of greeting quickly fading.
‘You’re not …’ she began. ‘You can’t be …’
I nodded.
‘You are Al?’
I nodded again, smiling.
‘But …’ She let the word fade away.
She didn’t really need to say anything else.
‘I’m Al and I am so pleased to meet you at last,’ I said, reaching out to shake hands with her. She ignored my hand.
‘You don’t look much like your picture,’ she responded sharply.
That was an understatement.
‘I know, I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to sound friendly and reassuring and nothing more. ‘Not close up enough and a bit whiskery, I fear.’
‘So are you,’ she said.
Razor blades for breakfast, I thought. I tried to rise to the challenge.
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t meet me, if I sent you an up-to-date photo.’
She didn’t reply. She looked uncertain and suddenly very young, in spite of the provocative way she was dressed. That reignited my interest, of course. I saw her glance towards the door. I couldn’t let her go, not now I was so close.
‘Don’t leave,’ I said. ‘Just have one drink.’
‘Uh, I shouldn’t have come.’
‘Yes, you should. Look, I really like you. I’m not so bad am I? Still fit?’
She pursed her lips and half smiled.
‘Just the one,’ I coaxed. ‘What do you like to drink?’
‘I’m underage.’
I damned well knew that, didn’t I? That was the whole point.
‘So have you never had an alcoholic drink, then?’ I asked in a teasing voice. ‘Not even an alcopop?’
She bristled.
‘Of course I have,’ she said. ‘And wine, well, just once or twice.’
‘So is it an alcopop then?’ I persisted.
‘All right.’
‘Any particular flavour?’
She shrugged.
‘How about blackcurrant? I’m told that’s very nice.’
She nodded.
I led her to the table by the door, where I’d been sitting before and where I’d left my pint of lager. It was as far way from the bar as possible. I didn’t want the staff questioning her age. From a distance, dressed the way she was, she could pass for late teens. I hoped so anyway. I went to the bar to order, keeping one eye on her as best I could, just in case she decided to leave. Not that I had any idea how I was going to stop her, if she simply stood up and went. I could hardly wrestle with her in a busy bar. I would just have to hope for the best.
I ordered the alcopop and a double vodka shot. As soon as the barman’s back was turned and making sure that Melanie couldn’t see what I was doing, I tipped the vodka into the glass of alcopop.
I hurried back to our table. She hadn’t left, that was the first hurdle over with.
She sipped gingerly at her drink. I took a big swallow from my previously untouched glass of beer.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Take a proper swig. It won’t bite you.’
She did so. This was encouraging, I thought.
I was good at talking to kids. Men like me always are. The trick is to be ever so interested in them and totally sympathetic. She’d alrea
dy told me quite a lot about her life and, like so many teenagers, she wasn’t happy with it.
‘I can understand how hard it must be for you, living with your stepdad, you know,’ I said. ‘I had a stepdad. I hated him.’
She smiled.
‘Jim’s all right really,’ she said. ‘But he’s so strict. He’s stricter than my own dad. It’s like he’s trying to control me all the time and I just think, yeah, right, who are you, anyway, ordering me about like that?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly how I felt.’
She finished her drink quickly. That pleased me.
‘Just one more?’ I asked.
‘I shouldn’t,’ she said.
But she did. And had another. Each time I added a double vodka shot to her alcopop. Once I’d got her going, she couldn’t stop talking. It was like our online exchanges, only more. She gave me the run down on her entire family, her school, her school friends, everything.
The colour rose in her cheeks. Her eyes brightened. She was halfway through her third drink and a detailed account of a disastrous family holiday the previous summer, when she said she had to go to the loo. I hoped she wasn’t going to be sick, but I didn’t think she would be. Not yet. I didn’t care what happened to her later, after I’d finished with her.
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