I reached out and touched his cheek.
He jerked away from me.
‘I love you too, Tim,’ I said again.
It was the truth. In as much as anything about me was ever the truth.
I moved closer to him, put my arm around him.
‘Will you let me kiss you?’ I heard myself say.
I saw that the tears were falling down his cheeks now. He turned to me. I showered him with kisses. It wasn’t long before he began to respond. It wasn’t long before we were in bed. My bed. In my house. I knew it was madness.
After we had made love, he began to question me again. The same questions. Why was I like I was? Why had I been so dishonest with him? Could I ever change? Could he and I ever have a proper relationship?
I answered everything the best I could, whilst actually telling him nothing. I said I would try to change. I really would. It would be difficult for me after all these years, but I would try. I wanted us to have what he called a ‘proper relationship’ and I would try to make that happen.
Eventually, he fell asleep. While I just lay there watching him, wondering what an earth I was going to do next. How I was going to get him out of my bed without upsetting him? How I was going to carry on with my life? Wondering whether it would ever be possible for me to do so, with Tim as a part of that life. I wanted Tim. I really wanted Tim, but in my heart I knew I could no longer have him. He demanded too much.
Around 11 a.m. I felt and heard my phone buzz. I’d put it on silent and tucked it under my pillow, where it would be safe from clever fingers and prying eyes.
It was a call I had to take.
I studied Tim carefully. He’d been sound asleep in the same position for over an hour, his tousled hair spread over the pillow, his mouth slightly open. He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t flicker.
I tiptoed out of the bedroom, still naked, and took the call in the spare room. When I returned Tim remained in the same position. I sincerely hoped he wasn’t just pretending to be asleep. Again.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute or two, just watching him, before gently shaking him awake.
He smiled at me sleepily, stretching his long limbs.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Gone eleven,’ I replied, hoping he would assume it was even later than it was. I really had to get rid of him. I needed to leave the house. I had things to do that would not wait. I wasn’t sure quite how to go about this without causing another scene. Tim came to my rescue.
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep. Is it really that time? I have to go. I’ve got an exam this afternoon.’
There followed a frantic few minutes of panic: Tim rushing in and out of the bathroom; trying to dress in a hurry; pulling on his jeans, the wrong way round at first; looking for his jacket and a shoe that had disappeared under the bed; me helping him look and going downstairs to make a coffee he didn’t drink. Whilst I was downstairs, I stowed away the pile of mail that had attracted his attention in a locked drawer. Eventually, in a surprisingly short period of time under the circumstances, he was on the doorstep preparing to leave.
‘Are we going to make this work now, Leo?’ he asked.
‘I do hope so,’ I replied truthfully.
He stepped towards me, looking as if he were going to kiss me goodbye. Automatically I stepped backwards, away from the doorstep, further into the hallway. My hallway. My house. My doorstep. My neighbours. What if anybody saw? It was bad enough that he was there at all, but he could be anybody, I told myself. A relative. An electrician. A plumber. Without tools? I knew I was probably being ridiculous. Why would my neighbours even notice whether he was carrying a bag or anything else? He could have been a workman giving me an estimate on a job, a bit young, perhaps, but surely there was no reason for anyone to assume he was my lover, was there? I was beginning to feel quite shaky. The last few hours had been madness.
Tim didn’t push it.
‘You really are a wimp, Leo,’ he said, but he was smiling, he wasn’t angry any more. Our lovemaking had been as good and as special as it always was. You couldn’t stay angry after that and I suspected Tim might be beginning to believe things could work out for us, eventually.
He turned and began to walk away.
Then he paused looking back over his shoulder and swung around towards me again.
‘By the way, for how long do you want me to continue to call you Leo?’ he asked. I felt a chill engulf my entire body. ‘Whilst you were on the phone, I had a look around. You’d left your wallet in the pocket of your jacket, hanging behind the bedroom door.’
How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let this happen?
Tim smiled again, a knowing smile.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’d guessed Leo wasn’t your real name. I told you that, but I know what you do for a living now, too. Can’t see that it matters though, plenty of gays in your job.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Of course. I’ve just been stupid. I am Leo, though. Your Leo.’ He looked a tad confused. ‘Everything will be all right, Tim,’ I continued. ‘I promise. We’ll talk it all through properly the next time we meet.’
He took a step towards me, again.
‘You’ve no idea how happy it makes me to hear you say that,’ he said.
Was he never going to go?
‘Tim, your exam,’ I reminded him frantically.
His expression changed.
‘Oh, Christ, yes, I have to run,’ he said and he did, literally. I watched him run off down the road.
I’d started to shake. I was having a major trembling fit. It was something that happened occasionally and I so hated it. I slammed the door shut and retreated inside. I could feel myself losing control, physically and mentally.
I smashed my right fist into the wall, again and again. I wanted to hurt myself. I hated myself, but then, that was my problem.
I’d always hated myself and I hated what I feared must come next. Something had to be done about Tim. I couldn’t get the boy out of my head, but I had to. I had to get him out of my head and out of my life. He’d been to my home. He had pried into my very existence. He knew my other name. He knew what I did for a living. He knew how I lived my life. No man had ever got this close to me before. I hadn’t allowed any man to get this close.
For several days, I did what I usually do in every aspect of my life when things get difficult. I stalled. I answered each text and phone call from Tim. I had to. I couldn’t risk him turning up unannounced again. For me, that was an unacceptable intrusion. I didn’t like intrusion. It felt like I was being stalked. I had to end it somehow. I began to forget that I had fallen in love with him. In the real world, I could not love anyone. I never had been able to. I never would be able to and certainly not another man.
Tim started to become insistent about fixing a date for our next meeting. If I didn’t want him to come to me again, then I must make a trip to London. Soon. He said he had to see me. He felt we’d crossed a bridge, made a leap, all sorts of nonsense. The biggest nonsense of all, which he landed on me during one of our many, increasingly angst-ridden telephone conversations, was that he wanted me to meet his parents.
‘Your parents?’ I gulped. ‘Your parents don’t even know you’re gay.’
‘Not yet,’ he responded excitedly. ‘But the time has come. I know who and what I am, now, and I’m not going to live a lie. No way.’
I’d known that, hadn’t I? From the beginning. But I’d still carried on seeing him.
‘Neither am I going to let you live like that, not any more,’ Tim went on. ‘I’m going to tell them this weekend. We always sit down together for a big Sunday lunch. Time to talk. I’m going to tell them then.’
He sounded so sure of himself. I felt weak. My carefully constructed life was about to implode. I was quite sure of it.
I arranged to meet him at the Premier Inn on the Saturday evening. The night before his planned family revelatio
n. I had no choice.
We would go back to the Freedom Bar and hit those cocktails, I promised. Eat there or at any restaurant he chose. I wanted things to be different too, I said. I wanted us to be a normal couple, just as he did, and we would start on Saturday evening.
I was lying of course, but I had to convince him that I was prepared to change and ensure that he wouldn’t be suspicious of me.
EIGHTEEN
Terry Cooke continued to declare his innocence throughout a series of interviews. But then, as Hemmings said, didn’t they always?
It was only on the telly that murderers conveniently confessed all to investigating officers.
As Vogel had said, you didn’t get much more conclusive evidence than DNA.
And Cooke, whilst quite reasonably protesting that of course his DNA could be found on his own daughter and that meant nothing, could not explain how follicles of the hair from his head had been found in Melanie’s fingernails. He also had motive, of sorts, and more than likely, considering his wife’s reliance on prescription drugs, the opportunity to perform the murder.
Less than seven hours after his arrest, Cooke was duly charged with his daughter’s murder.
The case was put in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service and Vogel just hoped they made a good fist of it this time. The team all went to the pub to celebrate, like they always did. Vogel, although he didn’t drink, almost always went along. Not on this occasion.
He just couldn’t face it. There were two reasons.
The first was that it still didn’t feel right to him. In spite of the overwhelming forensic evidence, he couldn’t quite believe that Terence Cooke was responsible for his daughter’s murder.
The second was that letter! After showing it to Mary, he’d decided he really mustn’t continue to carry it around with him, not in the middle of a murder investigation anyway. If he wasn’t going to do anything about it, then he should leave it alone. He’d tucked it in the desk drawer in the sitting room, where he and Mary kept all their important papers. Out of sight, out of mind. But it hadn’t quite worked like that. Even though he’d been so busy, he hadn’t been able to get the letter entirely out of his mind. It had somehow lurked there throughout.
As soon as he got home, he sat down at the little desk and, whilst Mary fetched him food and drink as usual, retrieved the letter and read it once more.
Dear Detective Inspector Vogel, it began, curiously formal in view of what was to follow, Vogel thought.
There is no easy way to say this, so I am just going to come straight out with it.
I have reason to believe that you are my half-brother.
Vogel paused there. When he’d first opened the letter that second sentence had come as such a shock, that his first inclination had been to screw the piece of notepaper into a ball and throw it away. After all, it couldn’t be true, could it?
But he’d been unable to carry that through. He’d carried on reading, as he was now doing for the umpteenth time.
A few weeks ago, I found papers amongst my mother’s belongings which made it clear that she had a child, a son, when she was just sixteen and that the boy had been adopted. My mother – our mother – was seriously ill in hospital at the time I found this out; she had suffered from a severe stroke, from which she is slowly recovering, so it was a while before I could question her about this.
She broke down. She had kept you a secret for so long that it was very hard for her to talk about you, but eventually she told me everything. How she had been given no choice but to give you up. She was a schoolgirl at the time, who fell pregnant after an ill-advised, one-night stand with a fellow pupil. She’d been able to keep track of your progress over the years; the adoption had been arranged through a family friend, who had connections with a Jewish charity which placed unwanted children (not that she didn’t want you, please understand that) with Jewish families, rather than through the more anonymous and legally-protected, local authority channels.
That is why I know your name and have been able to write to you at your place of work.
My mother married a few years later and I was born. I am thirty-four. You also have a younger half-brother, William, aged thirty, but he knows nothing of any of this yet.
My mother does know that I am writing to you, and wishes, particularly after having been so very ill, that she had dared to contact you many years ago.
I hope you will forgive this intrusion into your life, David Vogel, and I want you to know that it is meant with only the best of intentions and comes from the heart. From both our hearts, my mother’s and mine.
We both hope that you will want to meet us, that is the real intention of this letter, of course, but we will understand if you don’t. My mother’s heart has already been broken – forty-three years ago, when she was forced to give you away.
With all best wishes,
Ellen Hunt
When he’d finished reading, Vogel removed from the envelope the photograph which had accompanied the letter. A photograph, fairly recent he thought, of a woman approaching sixty (his mother), a younger woman (his sister) and a younger man (his brother). His birth family. Did he resemble any of them? He wasn’t sure. They were all very dark, as he was, dark-haired and dark-eyed, that is, but quite fair-skinned.
One of the three people in that picture had no idea he existed, until a few weeks ago. One still did not know. But the biggest secret of all had been kept from Vogel, by the two people he’d been brought up by and whom he had regarded as his natural parents.
He’d never been told that he was adopted.
Mary came back into the room, while he was still studying the picture. She was carrying a tray and placed it on the dining table, at the far end of the sitting room. She saw at once what her husband was doing, came over and laid a hand gently on his arm.
‘David, why don’t you call Eytan? You really should talk to him, you know.’
Vogel nodded in apparent agreement, but made no move to use a phone.
‘It might not even be true,’ Mary persisted.
‘It’s true all right,’ said Vogel. ‘You’ve read the letter. It wasn’t written by a nutter. There is no malice in it, just the opposite. It’s the work of an intelligent, articulate woman, someone who had assumed that I at least already knew I was adopted. After all, adoptive parents are supposed to tell their children the truth as they know it, aren’t they?’
Mary nodded, ‘Call Eytan,’ she said yet again.
Vogel glanced at his watch.
‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget Israel is two hours ahead of us, perhaps I’ll call tomorrow.’
‘David, that means it isn’t yet nine o’clock in Tel Aviv. Surely not too late to call your father …?’
Mary let the last words tail away.
Vogel smiled wryly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I’m calling a man who, almost certainly, isn’t my father at all.’
All the same, he picked up the phone and began to dial.
AL
There was something about Melanie Cooke which particularly attracted me from the moment I first spotted her entry on LetsMeet.com.
It wasn’t just the way she looked, although she was stunning. The photo she chose to post showed her wearing a skimpy top, those shorts they call hot pants that I so like, torn tights and very high heels. I was turned on by that, certainly, but it was what I could see in her eyes that really got me.
She was knowing, as if she had done and seen it all before. She didn’t look like the kind of kid who would run, when confronted by a man instead of a boy. Indeed, just the opposite. I told myself she was looking for someone like me, just as much as I was looking for someone like her.
We began to correspond.
She told me early on that she lived in Bristol. She might have had a knowing look in her eye, but she was totally disingenuous. I told her I lived in Bristol too. She opened up even more after that. It was if my havi
ng said I lived in the same city provided some sort of reassurance. Silly girl.
She wrote to me in detail about her family life, about the problems she had coping with her too-strict stepfather and her too-clingy father and how she hated her younger sister, whom she felt had taken her place with her mother. I couldn’t imagine sharing the kind of stuff she shared with me with my closest friend – that is, if I had any close friends, which I didn’t.
I was very careful in my replies. I said nothing suggestive at any time. Neither did I ask her to send me any photographs of a more explicit nature. I had a pretty good awareness of the trending interests of young teens. For obvious reasons, I kept up to speed. I was able to talk to her about her interests, as if I too were a teenager. I asked about the kind of music she liked, the apps and games she had installed on her laptop and phone, and I was able use the right sort of language. Or I hoped so, anyway. I could go way beyond cool, wicked, and savage. I kept up to date through the web, because teen slang changes so rapidly. I sympathised with her about her fam (family) and enquired about her squad (group of friends).
I really worked at it. Melanie Cooke was different to the others.
I knew I would just have to make a move on her sooner or later. But I didn’t want anything incriminating about me on LetsMeet.com, however unlikely it was that anyone would be able to trace me from my entry. After a couple of weeks or so of apparently innocent exchanges, I asked for her phone number.
She gave it to me straight away.
I called her on the untraceable, pay-as-you-go phone I’d bought specifically for the purpose. I kept our first chat light. I tried to pitch my voice higher than usual, and if she noticed that mine was the voice of a man much older than nineteen, she passed no comment. Instead, she asked if I was Scottish. I was surprised. I thought my accent was light,. But it seemed she had a Scottish grandmother, so she had picked up on the nuances.
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