Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

‘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.

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.

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.’