Deadly Dance

by Hilary Bonner

  The little girls and boys walked past without even glancing in my direction. I was wearing dark glasses, made to look quite normal by the warm weather and a hoody. It was a size or two too big and not so well-suited to the temperature, but common enough at any time of year. I’d pulled the hood down over my forehead, partially concealing my face. I had become fairly well versed in the whereabouts of CCTV throughout much of the city and my stolen vehicles would lead anyone trying to trace me to a dead end but, with my predilections, you couldn’t be too careful.

  I hunkered down, pushing myself well back into the seat. My head slotted into the headrest with which the van was most conveniently fitted. Even if they glanced towards me, it was unlikely that any of the children would spot me.

  They were gone far too quickly.

  I removed my hand from my penis and let it become flaccid again. I did not zip up my fly. The best bit was still to come.

  After about half an hour, the children who had stayed at school for their midday meal – the vast majority of them – came running out into the playground. I had a good enough view across the road, but I needed a close-up. I reached for the binoculars I always carried on these occasions and raised them to my eyes.

  There was a trampoline in the corner at the nearer end of the playground. The children, supervised by a woman teacher, were taking it in turns to have a go. There was another teacher, a man, on duty at the far end of the playground. You always had to keep an eye on the teachers, but the woman supervising the trampoline was far too busy, making sure her charges didn’t kill themselves, to even glance in my direction. The man was watching some boys have a kick about and seemed more interested in giving them advice on their footballing skills, than anything else.

  Even if either of the teachers looked towards me, the way in which I was sitting, with my head tightly pressed against the headrest, would make it unlikely that they would even realise anyone was inside the van. Mine would appear to be just another empty vehicle. That’s what I hoped, anyway.

  There was a girl bouncing about on the trampoline. She would have been seven or eight, I thought. She was pretty, with fluffy, blonde hair. A picture-book child. She did a kind of somersault and ended up pretty much upside down. The skirt of her dress dropped over her inverted upper body, revealing sturdy, little legs and a flash of white knickers.

  I lowered my free hand between my legs and began stroking and fondling myself again.

  I was vaguely aware of children walking right by the van, but I couldn’t stop.

  Suddenly, I realised there was a face at the window, on the passenger side of the van. It belonged to a little girl, also aged seven or eight, I thought. I guessed she must be standing on tiptoe to make herself tall enough to look through the window at me. I found that exciting too.

  The child was clearly curious.

  I put down the binoculars. With one hand still on my penis, I reached with the other for the handle to the passenger window, the old-fashioned, manual sort, and wound it down. I always used gloves, of course, apart from when I was touching myself. It had to be flesh-on-flesh then. I never took unnecessary risks. Even though I knew my fingerprints were not on any police records, I wasn’t stupid. My free hand remained gloved throughout.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  My voice sounded wrong, high-pitched, squeaky, forced. The girl didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Is that a kitten you’ve got there?’ she asked.

  I glanced down at my lap. My hand very nearly concealed my otherwise exposed penis. I wondered if she could see tufts of my pubic hair, leading her to think I was stroking some sort of pet animal. A kitten? The very idea of that stimulated me even more.

  I looked back at her.

  ‘Would you like to stroke it?’ I asked.

  She looked doubtful.

  I stretched across to turn the handle on the passenger door, then pushed the door ajar. She stepped back to allow me to do so.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Jump in. It won’t bite.’

  She smiled, her eyes fixed on my crotch.

  It was madness of course, sheer madness. Some things a man like me knows he can never get away with, but neither can he always stop himself.

  Had she realised yet that I was not holding a kitten? I had no idea. My blood was up. I wanted her to put her hands on me and stroke me there more than anything in the world. I needed her to.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  She sounded doubtful, but still interested. I pushed the door a little more open. She took another step back, still staring at my crotch. I was close to exploding. I could almost feel her touch. I could imagine her lips. I could imagine touching her private parts. Gently. So gently. I was crazy for her.

  Another girl’s voice cut through the moment.

  ‘C’mon on, Alice.’

  Alice looked away from my crotch. I looked away from Alice.

  The second girl, of around the same age I thought, was standing about 100 yards away calling for her schoolmate.

  Alice still seemed uncertain.

  ‘It’s all right, Alice,’ I said.

  I knew her name now. It was always easier when you knew their names.

  ‘It won’t take a moment, Alice,’ I continued. ‘Jump in. You can have a stroke too. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Alice looked back at me and smiled again.

  I’d got her. Surely I’d got her. I reached out towards her with my free gloved hand. She only had to take it and I’d have her in the van quick as a flash. She’d be there for me. I’d be able to do what I liked with her. Drive away with her. Make her my own.

  I was breathing fast. I was nearly out of control.

  Then I heard another voice. An adult voice. Sharp and commanding. It came as a total shock.

  ‘Alice Palmer! What are you doing? Who are you talking to?’

  The voice came from across the road, but I could tell that it was getting nearer. I looked up. I had been so preoccupied by Alice, not to mention my throbbing penis, that I hadn’t even noticed playtime had ended. The children, including those I had been only half-aware of walking past the van, were all trouping back into the school.

  The woman teacher who had been overseeing the trampoline was crossing the road now, striding purposefully towards us.

  ‘Alice Palmer,’ she called again. ‘Come here at once. Move away from that van.’

  Alice duly backed off, her face flushed and turned towards the teacher. She looked uncertain. Confused. So she might. She had so nearly been mine.

  I slammed the passenger door shut, switched on the engine, thrust the van into first gear and took off with a screech of tires.

  SEVEN

  It was just after noon, when Vogel and Saslow arrived at the North Bristol Academy. This sprawling complex of red-brick buildings, dating back to the 1960s, was now reincarnated as one of the latest, educational innovations of modern government. An independently run school funded directly by the Ministry of Education.

  The buildings, which were in good order, retained the feel of being from another time. They were, it seemed, the only aspect of the North Bristol Academy which was not thoroughly modern. Apart from the smell, of course. The place smelt exactly the way Vogel remembered his own school smelling twenty-five years earlier. A distinct odour of powerful disinfectant wafted his way, as they passed the cloakrooms.

  The school secretary took them straight to the headmistress’s office.

  The head, Christine Chapman, was a handsome woman – in her late thirties, Vogel guessed – who had the manner and appearance of a senior executive high up in the business world, rather than a schoolteacher. Well, Vogel’s idea of a schoolteacher, anyway. But he reminded himself that is more or less what head teachers had to be nowadays. The wife of one of his team in the Met had been head of a primary school. When Vogel had asked her about her work, at, for him, a rare social gathering, she’d said that the most difficult part of her job was ensuring that she did not become total
ly distanced, both from her pupils and the art of teaching. Head teachers, like senior police officers, were expected to be managers before anything else nowadays. A concept with which Vogel consistently struggled.

  Christine Chapman rose to her feet, as Vogel was shown into her uncluttered, second-floor office, overlooking tennis courts and a playing field beyond. She stepped from behind a big, solid-looking desk made of pale wood, walked across carpeted floor and shook hands with both him and Saslow as they introduced themselves.

  Christine Chapman didn’t smile. She didn’t prevaricate.

  ‘I do hope you are not here to tell me what I think you are,’ she said.

  Vogel was momentarily surprised. Then he noticed the television mounted on the wall to the left of Chapman’s desk. The sound was off, but he saw that it was tuned to Sky News.

  The head teacher followed his gaze.

  ‘I saw a report earlier about the body of a girl, as yet unnamed, having been found in Bristol,’ she said.

  She gestured towards the computer on her desk top.

  ‘That led me to check this morning’s register, just in case. We have only one unexplained absentee today. Her name is Melanie Cooke. I was still trying to stop myself putting two and two together, when the office rang through to tell me that two police officers had arrived at our school. I so want you to tell me I am wrong, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘I am afraid I can’t do that,’ Vogel replied quietly. ‘She has yet to be formally identified but the young woman, whose body was found this morning, almost certainly is Melanie Cooke.’

  Christine Chapman said nothing. She stared at Vogel for a few seconds then returned to her desk and sat down behind it. She waved an arm towards two easy chairs, silently inviting the police officers to also sit.

  They did so.

  ‘I’ve been a teacher for eighteen years and a head for six,’ said Christine Chapman. ‘I’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. You’ll have to forgive me, Detective Inspector, I’m stunned. I can only imagine the effect this is going to have on the school, everyone …’

  Her voice tailed off. She straightened a pen on the desk in front of her so that it was perfectly in line with the edge. Habit, thought Vogel. Everything about the head mistress smacked of order. This was a highly organised, capable, woman on top of her job, he was quite sure. Now she just looked stricken.

  ‘We are very sorry for your loss, Miss Chapman,’ said Vogel. ‘But we do need to talk to you – as a matter of urgency – and to Melanie’s class teacher, any special friends and anyone else who might be able to help us. We need to know what sort of girl she was, what her day-to-day life was like away from home. We have a brutal killer on the loose and the first twenty-four hours in a murder investigation are vital.’

  Christine Chapman nodded.

  ‘I teach every class in the school for one period a week,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to get out of touch when you’re the head. As far as I know, Melanie was quite an average girl, although prettier than average, that’s for sure. She was bright enough, but worked only just hard enough, like so many of them. Popular too. No particular problems that I’m aware of, but I don’t know the girls like their class teachers do. I’ll call in Melanie’s class teacher.’

  Melanie’s class teacher, Marion Smith, was a grey-haired woman in her fifties, rather more resembling the slightly starchy schoolmistresses Vogel remembered from his own schooldays. Once she had got over her initial shock, been given a glass of water and received a few words of comfort from Christine Chapman, Marion Smith was able to provide a rather more detailed picture of Melanie Cooke, just as the head had predicted.

  ‘She was very good at art, worked hard at the things she liked to do and not so hard at the subjects she had trouble with. She was a fairly easy pupil, never got in trouble. A happy, likeable girl, I’d say.’

  ‘And friends?’ enquired Vogel. ‘Any particular friends?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sally Pearson. Inseparable, those two.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Vogel. ‘Could we have a word with Sally straight away?’

  The head agreed. A very nervous looking Sally Pearson arrived just minutes later. She was another potentially pretty girl with an abundance of red hair, but unfortunately suffering from a severe dose of teenage acne.

  Christine Chapman broke the news to Sally, as she’d requested she be allowed to do.

  Sally Pearson barely seemed to react. Her eyelids flickered, her lower lip trembled very slightly, but she said nothing. It was as if she wasn’t quite taking in the grim news she’d just been given, thought Vogel. He had been in this kind of situation before. It was not unusual for people to fail to grasp such a reality until much later. That could sometimes help with a police inquiry, though, because they were inclined to answer questions more factually and without personal bias whilst still in shock and before emotion sets in. But sometimes they just became unable, or unwilling, to respond properly.

  ‘Sally, I can only imagine how difficult this is for you, but we really need your help,’ began Vogel gently. ‘Do you know where Melanie was planning to go last night?’

  Sally shook her head, still remaining silent.

  ‘She told her parents that she was going to have a homework evening with you. Were you expecting her?’

  Sally shrugged and spoke for the first time, her voice little more than a whisper.

  ‘She said she might come round.’

  ‘So weren’t you anxious when she didn’t turn up?’

  Sally shrugged again without saying anything more.

  ‘Was she in the habit of not turning up, when you’d arranged to meet?’ Vogel persisted.

  Sally looked up from the floor and finally returned Vogel’s steady gaze.

  ‘Mel only said she might come round,’ she said, with heavy emphasis on the word ‘might’.

  Then she looked back down at the floor again.

  Vogel continued to question the girl for a few more minutes. It was not a fruitful exchange.

  Sally Pearson insisted that she had no idea whether or not Melanie had a boyfriend. She had no idea if she’d ever had contact with a man online. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Melanie outside school.

  Indeed, it seemed she knew nothing, at all, about anything.

  ‘All right, Sally,’ Vogel said eventually. ‘I’m sure you are very upset. I’ll not bother you any more today.’

  The interview wasn’t getting him anywhere. A murder investigation is like any other police investigation. You have to prioritise your resources and your time.

  SAUL

  I wanted to meet Sonia too. I really did. After all, it had been my express aim to find someone I might ultimately marry. Someone who could give me the kind of family life I longed for and save me from the life I feared I may be stuck with.

  But the picture I’d painted of myself was so far removed from what I really was, I wondered if she would ever accept me. I had created a depiction to which, I feared, I could do no justice. I had a heck of a lot more to explain away than the facial hair I’d doctored into my Marryme.com picture, the colour of the hair on my head and the definition of my chin. A heck of a lot more.

  Why had I been such a fool?

  I told myself that I could not be the first person to build themselves up a bit in order to impress a potential date online. In fact, it was probably pretty common. Sonia would understand, surely. But I suspected I had gone a lot further than most.

  It was eventually agreed that we would meet in Bath, a beautiful town, and easily accessible to us both.

  She said she would drive. I said I would come by train. She said she would meet me at the station. She supplied me with her mobile phone number, just in case.

  I said I’d had an accident with my phone – drowned it in the bath – and that I hoped my new one would arrive very soon, certainly by the time of our arranged meeting.

  Just before I left home, I emailed her to say that my new phone hadn’t ye
t arrived, but I would have her number with me. If there appeared to be any problem with our arrangements, I would find a way of calling her.

  I dressed the way I thought she might like me to be dressed. Indeed, the way she might expect me to dress.

  I wore a dark jacket over jeans. Surely just right for a schoolteacher on his day off.

  My perfectly pressed, pale blue shirt was open at the neck. I had spent a long time ironing it and even longer deciding on my footwear. Silly, I know, but at the time I felt that my whole life rested on this meeting.

  I put on a pair of nearly-new, Adidas trainers first. They were exceptionally white and they didn’t look or feel right at all. Then I tried my best, shiny, black, lace-up shoes. They were old fashioned, but smart. I felt that Sonia would rather like me to be a bit of a young fogey. Well, youngish.

  All the same, they didn’t seem quite right either.

  Eventually, I settled on a pair of elderly and rather battered, but good quality, brown, suede slip-ons. They had a touch of the young fogey about them too, I thought.

  As the train trundled into Bath, I wondered desolately why I had spent so long and wasted so much time worrying about my feet.

  My face was the problem and even more so was the unlikely background I’d invented. All those silly stories. Why on earth had I told her I’d been in the foreign legion? It was so stupid. Why was I such a fantasist? Why could I not just be myself?

  The Saul I had created for Sonia was really so unlike me. It was so ridiculous, because she was one person who might have accepted the real me. I got the impression she would accept almost anything in order to have someone to share her life with.

  Now I feared I would not be able to pull off this first meeting and that she would realise just how much I had oversold myself.

  Even if I succeeded initially, then what?

  I remembered the old Irish joke. A motorist visiting Ireland stops to ask directions from a local. The Irishman looks thoughtful.

  ‘Well now sir,’ he says eventually. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’