Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

‘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.

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.

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.