‘Of course,’ replied Polly Jenkins, smiling an enigmatic smile.
Saslow wasn’t sure whether she believed her or not. The approach had certainly been effective.
She called Vogel to give him the news about Melanie Cooke’s online adventure. An adventure which now seemed likely to have led to her death. The all-out hunt for a paedophile called Al had begun.
LEO
We arranged to meet at the pub just off Leicester Square. The one with the conveniently situated gents’ toilets, right by the entrance, which I used as a place to change clothes. I felt safe there. Safer, perhaps bizarrely, than at The Freedom Bar, which Tim had suggested as a meeting place. There, I’d felt that both Tim and I had stuck out because of our awkwardness among the cool set. Or my awkwardness at any rate. I suggested one of those big, anonymous, Chinese restaurants, which was almost next door, for our dinner. Both the pub and the restaurant were close to The Premier Inn, therefore involving as little public appearance as possible.
As usual, I tried to keep the risk of being recognised by anyone from my day to day life, however unlikely that might be, to the minimum. I made sure I arrived at the pub early and, from just inside the doorway, had a good look around to make sure that there was no one around who might know me. I’d changed earlier, and already been to the restaurant and reserved a table that was close to the door and in a secluded corner booth.
Fortunately, Tim was tickled by the corner booth, which he seemed to find romantic. He did not appear to notice that I positioned myself as far away from him as possible. He talked and talked, and I talked too, rather a lot for me. I told him as much as I dared about myself.
‘If you disappear on me this time, if I suddenly can’t get hold of you, don’t even think about coming back to me again with tales of lost and stolen phones,’ he said sternly.
I could see that his eyes were twinkling, but I knew he meant it.
I’d given him my new mobile number and we’d been in touch again several times before this meeting. I hadn’t felt the need to confess that this was yet another pay-as-you-go phone.
‘No chance,’ I said.
Again, he didn’t seem to notice my determination not to get too close to him when we were outside, walking together to the hotel. I kept as much as possible of the pavement between us.
Having decided to give me another chance, he threw himself into the occasion with his customary enthusiasm. We were in each others arms as soon as the door to our room had closed behind us. If anything, our lovemaking was even better than before. There was a tenderness between us that I had never previously experienced, either with a man – or with a woman, which I had tried out in my all too frequent attempts to achieve conventionality – and yet there was excitement too.
So it was with a heavy heart that, in the early hours, when I was quite sure he was deeply asleep, I untangled myself from his arms, dressed stealthily in the bathroom and crept from the room as silently as possible.
Yet again he did not wake and that was a relief. I could not stay until morning as I had promised, of course, because then I would be expected to fulfil my other promise; my promise to take Tim home with me. That would never do.
I caught the first train of the day, just after 5 a.m. and spent the journey thinking over the wonderful time I had with Tim and the future. If indeed we could have any sort of future together. I so hoped that we could, although I knew it could never be the kind of future he hoped for.
This time I certainly did not intend to break off communication with him. The pay-as-you-go phone would stay. It was Tim’s phone now. I would allow Tim to be a part of my life, as long as he accepted that there had to be limitations.
Of course, I wasn’t at all sure that I could get Tim to go along with that. He was going to be pretty angry, when he discovered I had disappeared in the early hours yet again, that was for sure. It was quite possible that he would fulfil his threat to have nothing more to do with me. But I knew how much he cared for me, as indeed I did for him, in my own way. Every time we spent together enhanced those feelings.
I told myself that I was in much the same situation as a married man, who kept promising his mistress that he would leave his wife, but there was always something stopping him. The children. Ill health. Even just money. Those ‘other women’ often accepted that for many years.
I hoped for something like that with Tim. That he would accept stolen nights at The Premier Inn and similar locations, perhaps even the occasional holiday, somewhere discreet. Even that would be risky, but it might be worth it. Although I suspected it was unlikely that it would be enough for Tim. He had already more or less told me it wouldn’t be.
I just hoped I could convince him otherwise.
I had been home about an hour when the doorbell rang.
I did not encourage casual callers or indeed callers of any kind, but I shopped online occasionally. I tried to remember if I had any deliveries outstanding. I was pretty sure I didn’t.
Whilst I was thinking about that, the doorbell rang for a second time.
There were sometimes people collecting for charity in our neighbourhood and there was a local election pending. It could be a canvasser. It could also be a Jehovah’s Witness, but it was a little early in the day for them, surely.
I took my usual course of action, without any good reason to do otherwise. I ignored the bell.
It rang for a third time. I didn’t think political canvassers or even Jehovah’s Witnesses were ever that persistent. Reluctantly, I took myself into the sitting room. From the bay window, if I craned my neck, I could see anyone standing by the front door. Obviously, I recognised my caller at once. A cold shiver ran down my spine.
It was Tim. My Tim. My secret lover. He was standing outside my home, about to invade my sanctuary. Clearly he hadn’t been asleep when I’d left him earlier. He must have followed me.
I was so afraid. Afraid of what he would do. Afraid of what I would do.
I backed away from the window, moving softly, retreating well into the room. Perhaps he would just go away, if I didn’t answer the bell. I knew I was kidding myself though.
The door bell rang yet again. It carried on ringing for a long time. Half a minute maybe. Strident. Threatening. Then it stopped and I heard his voice. He began to shout at me through the letter box and he was angry again, very angry.
As I had known he would be, when I’d left him in our hotel room.
But I hadn’t expected him to follow me and vent his anger at me through my own letter box.
‘I know you’re in there, Leo,’ he yelled. ‘I watched you going in. I’ve been standing here outside, looking at where you live, deciding what to do. Now, I’m doing it. I’m confronting you, Leo. I’m calling your bluff. I am giving you one last chance to tell me what’s going on. I know you are there and I’m not leaving until you let me in.’
FIFTEEN
The civilian specialists on the internet team hacked their way into Melanie’s LetsMeet.com account. They found records of several chat sessions between Mel and a correspondent who called himself Al. There was no overt sexual content and, if Melanie had been meeting Al on the night she was murdered, she did not arrange to do so through LetsMeet.com. Al had posted a picture on the site purporting to be him. It was of a teenaged boy, in shorts, on a beach. The boy was little more than a pin figure in the distance and when the tech team tried to zoom in on his face, it pixelated. Vogel wondered why on earth that picture alone hadn’t warned Melanie Cooke off. It wasn’t even a proper, recognisable photograph.
The email address to which Al’s account was linked was an anonymous one: [email protected]. It proved untraceable and had already been closed down. The computer he used also seemed untraceable. All location tracking software had been deactivated. But, during one exchange, this Al had asked for Mel’s mobile phone number, which she had promptly supplied.
Further checks were made into Melanie’s phone records. There were no texts or voicemail messages fro
m Al, but there was a call registered on the day before Melanie’s murder. It was from an unidentified caller and had lasted six minutes. The phone used was an untraceable, pay-as-you-go mobile.
Vogel suspected that the unidentified phone call had been from Al. He wondered if Al had used the call to arrange a meeting with Melanie, but there was no way of knowing for sure. Text messages remain on the records of mobile phone providers, as do voicemail messages. Conversations made on mobile phones are not recorded, unless a specific phone is targeted by the police or some kind of surveillance agency. Therefore, the content of any phone conversation Melanie may have had with her Al would remain unknown.
Claire Brown’s interviews with Alice Palmer, the little girl approached at Moorcroft School, and the teacher, who may have saved her from abduction, provided little further information, as Vogel had predicted. Alice did, however, reveal more details to Claire than had been in the original police report. The report hadn’t mentioned the kitten Alice said was on the van driver’s lap, nor how he had tried to coax her into the van to stroke it.
Vogel found that quite chilling. There was no way of proving it so far, but he felt strongly that Melanie Cooke’s Al and the weirdo in the van were one and the same man. Little Alice Palmer had had a very narrow escape indeed.
In addition to poring over computer and phone records, Vogel and his team continued with the same dogged police work. Knocking on doors, checking sex offenders’ lists, interviewing and re-interviewing family, school friends, teachers, neighbours, local shopkeepers and anybody who might be able to help.
Nobody could. Al was totally elusive.
AL
I’d told myself there wouldn’t be any harm in getting to know a few young girls on the net. Surely I could have some personal contact, without actually putting myself or anyone else into danger.
There were plenty of appropriate websites or inappropriate, a lot of people would say. The names said it all really: CrushOnMe, Chat2Me, and FlirtyTeen, which actually advertised itself as being for kids of 15. My favourite, because it required so little personal detail and was so accessible in every way, was LetsMeet.com.
None, except on the dark web of course, presented themselves as deliberately targeting – and offering – contact with children. But it became abundantly clear that many of the teen sites were more than happy to promote kids who were almost certainly not even into their teens yet.
I began to contact girls regularly. I don’t think that made me a groomer, not really, because I never had any intention of taking things any further than a bit of internet titillation. Honestly, I didn’t.
It was so easy. These girls, sometimes quite little girls, were so trusting and so eager. You only had to watch the news to know what could happen to them. No doubt there were parents and teachers warning them off, telling them not to talk to strangers and certainly never to talk to strangers on the world wide web. Everyone knew where that could lead, but they still did it.
I said I was younger than I was, of course, much younger. I said I was a nineteen-year-old student. You could add about a decade and a half to that and, long ago, I’d given up studying anything except the best way to fulfil my needs.
On most of the teen sites, you had to say you were a teenager. Although it was pretty damned obvious, to me anyway, that many of the male participants had waved goodbye to their teens many years previously.
I invariably posted the photo of myself taken when I was a student, or very nearly, it was just after I left school. It was genuine enough, but a bit blurred and far from close-up. In fact, I was only a tad more than a spec in the distance, but you could see this was a young person, a kid. Me, aged 18 actually, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, on a beach, running towards the camera. I supposed that was what had so conveniently distorted the image. I would never be recognised from that photograph, not even by somebody who had known me back then. That was why I liked it. My mother had been the photographer. She was dead now, long dead.
One or two of the girls I contacted questioned the photo and asked me to post a better one. So I ignored them.
The majority just seemed to accept it.
You should have seen the pictures some of them sent to me, a total stranger. One girl sent me a selfie of herself in the bath. You couldn’t actually see much of her body, just one arm and a little leg, but all the same. I asked her to show some more, but she didn’t come back to me. But almost all of them sent provocative pictures. Or they were provocative to me, anyway. I mean what could be sexier than a picture of a girl who looks about twelve, heavily made up and pouting for the camera, even if she’s fully dressed?
They knew how to pose, these kids. It was extraordinary.
If I’d thought clearly about it, it was a foregone conclusion that I ultimately would not be able to control myself. That I would want to touch as well as look.
I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t my fault. Really, it wasn’t.
SIXTEEN
The results of DNA analysis of samples taken from Melanie Cooke’s father and stepfather finally came through, four days after her murder. There was a direct match between the hair follicles found in Melanie’s fingernails and that of her father, Terry Cooke.
Saslow had been the first of the team to pick up the email from forensics. She printed it and brought it to Vogel, who was in the canteen with Willis. In an unusually ebullient display, Willis shouted ‘yes’ and smashed a clenched fist on the table.
‘There we are then, boss,’ he continued. ‘I told you I had a feeling about that man, didn’t I?’
Vogel nodded.
‘And it seems you were right,’ he said. ‘I must admit though, I wasn’t expecting this, particularly after the Al revelation. Sally Pearson actually told Saslow and Jenkins that Melanie had arranged to meet Al on the night she was murdered.’
‘Sally could have got it wrong,’ said Willis. ‘Indeed, it looks like she did. Maybe Melanie chickened out of meeting this Al or perhaps it was all bravado and she was always planning to meet her dad.’
Saslow looked puzzled. ‘Why would she lie about that to her mum and stepdad?’ she asked. ‘And why would a father, who allegedly adores his daughter, kill her?’
Willis shrugged. ‘Why do they ever?’ he responded. ‘Yet more often than not it’s a father or a stepfather, or sometimes an uncle, even a mum, rare but not unheard of, who is guilty when a girl of this age is murdered. We all know that.’
Saslow nodded. She wasn’t so very long out of police college. She still remembered much of what she had been taught verbatim, including statistics and crime figures.
‘“More than seventy per cent of murders in this country are committed by family members or people extremely close to the victim, like a sexual partner, and, therefore, less than thirty per cent are committed by someone the victim does not know,”’ she recited. ‘It’s just that the fact that Melanie had told her friend that she was meeting a man she’d met on the net, that very night, is such a coincidence.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Vogel. ‘But, what if her dad found out what she was planning to do? Perhaps he saw her dressed the way she was, maybe he bumped into her by chance, in the street, even. She wouldn’t have dressed like a young tart if she’d actually arranged to meet her father, surely? We know he didn’t like the way she was behaving and what she was getting up to. If he’d found out she was going to meet this Al, or indeed any man at all, looking the way she looked that night, he’d have been furious with her, wouldn’t he? Maybe he just lost his temper with her, and, like you said before, Willis, made it look as if there had been a sexual assault in order to cover his tracks.’
‘I suppose so, boss,’ said Saslow doubtfully. ‘Meeting her by chance though? That’s even more coincidental. It just doesn’t seem quite right. Any of it. And Sally Pearson telling us she’d arranged to meet this Al seemed such a good lead.’
Vogel wasn’t comfortable with any of this either and he told Saslow so.
‘I agre
e with you, Dawn,’ he said. ‘But it seems we must both be wrong. You can’t argue with a direct DNA match. Hair follicles found in a victim’s fingernails indicates a clear attempt at self-defence. Terry Cooke has to be our man. Come on. Let’s bring the bastard in.’
SAUL
For about a week, things went very smoothly. I’d stocked the kitchen cupboards with everything a woman could want. I’d bought Manee perfume and a gold chain necklace.
She seemed almost happy.
I was fairly happy too. I had so far been able to avoid all physical contact, something I was very nervous about, of course. I continued to say that I respected her, that I wanted us to be married before we had sex. Unfortunately, however, Manee quickly seemed to grow frustrated with that; quite quickly, actually.
‘You not normal man, Saul,’ she proclaimed. Of course, she had no idea how accurate that assertion was.
‘Am I ugly?’ she asked. ‘You no want Manee?’
I assured her that she was not ugly and that I wanted her very much, which was true. I was just afraid. Afraid of the same old.
But when she began to kiss me, I kissed her back and it felt good, very good. Maybe this time it would be different, I told myself. I allowed her to lead me into her bedroom. Then it all started to go wrong, as usual. The foreplay was successful. I knew what was expected me, but there was, as usual, no way I could achieve full intercourse. My organ remained flaccid, even though I was so aroused I thought I might go crazy.
When I had been a young man, experimenting with girls, I had been able to manage half an erection. Indeed, bizarrely, I had got one of my girlfriends pregnant, almost as soon as we’d started trying to have sex. They say that impotent men are often exceptionally fertile. It had certainly seemed to be true in my case. As the years passed, things went from bad to worse for me. The fear took over. Every time, I was sure that I was going to fail and so I did. Totally.
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