Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

I really worked at it. Melanie Cooke was different to the others.

I knew I would just have to make a move on her sooner or later. But I didn’t want anything incriminating about me on LetsMeet.com , however unlikely it was that anyone would be able to trace me from my entry. After a couple of weeks or so of apparently innocent exchanges, I asked for her phone number.

She gave it to me straight away.

I called her on the untraceable, pay-as-you-go phone I’d bought specifically for the purpose. I kept our first chat light. I tried to pitch my voice higher than usual, and if she noticed that mine was the voice of a man much older than nineteen, she passed no comment. Instead, she asked if I was Scottish. I was surprised. I thought my accent was light, But it seemed she had a Scottish grandmother, so she had picked up on the nuances.

‘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.

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.’