Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

‘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.’

‘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?’