‘It was hard for me to take the next step,’ I said.
‘And you really think you are ready to take the next step now, do you?’ he asked. He seemed a little mollified, at least.
‘Yes,’ I said. I was lying of course. Or was I? There was some truth in it.
‘All right,’ he countered swiftly. ‘Let me into your life. You say you live alone. Let me visit you at your home.’
‘I will,’ I said. I was definitely lying about that. ‘But can we do the Premier Inn one last time?’
He remained silent.
‘I think of it as our special place,’ I persisted desperately. ‘I feel so relaxed and happy there with you. It would help me a lot.’
‘You need help to be with me?’ he queried. His voice had edge.
I feared I might lose him for ever. I couldn’t lose him. I had to say something he would want to hear, quickly. Anything at all that would make him see me again.
‘Look, you know that’s not what I meant,’ I said. ‘Go along with me on this, Tim. I will explain more when we meet and, if you like… if you’re free, I’ll make sure I have a day off the next day and you can come back to my place in the morning.’
I heard him sigh. ‘You expect me to believe that, after what you’ve done?’ he asked.
‘I’m hoping you will believe it,’ I said. ‘Hoping with all my heart. We have something together, you and me. Something special.’
There was another pause.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll do it your way, but you’d better be telling the truth, because I won’t let you mess me around again, do you hear?’
I said that I heard.
‘And I want us to meet somewhere else first, have a drink, go out to dinner, like a proper couple. OK?’
A proper couple? I loved the idea, just as I so feared I was beginning to love Tim. But it could never be, of course. Not for us. Not for me. I was different.
All the same, I said that was OK.
I’d got to the stage where I would agree to anything so that I could see my Tim again, to lie with him, stay in the same bed as him and make love with him.
One more time.
That was probably all it could be now, but it was better than nothing.
Twelve
It was almost midnight before Vogel got home. His wife was used to it. As usual, she had waited up for him. Well, half waited up. When he entered the living room, he saw that Mary was sound asleep on the sofa. She was wrapped in her favourite, fluffy dressing gown. It was turquoise coloured and just a shade darker than the bedsocks keeping her toes warm. Mary liked coordinated colours.
The room wasn’t yet cold. Vogel reached out a hand towards the wood burner. The fuel had gone out, there was no longer any glow at all, but there was still a little heat coming from the stove.
He leaned over his wife and touched one shoulder, shaking her gently. She woke straight away, the anxiety in her eyes fading as she focused on him. She was always apprehensive when he was on a big case, particularly if he was late home, even though he almost always was.
They had moved to Bristol from London the previous year, not long after Vogel had been badly injured in an incident in Soho. Mary told herself that The Avon and Somerset Constabulary was surely a less dangerous force for a copper to serve in than the Met. She still worried, though.
That was not why they had moved, of course. Vogel would never allow personal safety to influence him professionally. But Mary wouldn’t forget, for as long as she lived, the night she was told that her husband had been rushed to hospital following a clash with a violent criminal. Back then, they had been living in a flat in a mansion block in Pimlico. A far cry from a suburban bungalow on the outskirts of Bristol and — if it hadn’t been for their daughter, Rosamund, and her special needs — they would still be there. Mary was quite sure of that.
Vogel was a Londoner through and through. To be a detective in the Met had been his only, real, professional ambition. To most people, Bristol was a vibrant, modern, cosmopolitan city but, to Vogel, it was merely an outpost of the capital and virtually green-wellies territory. But then, so was everywhere.
However, thankfully, to Mary’s relief, he was proving able to immerse himself in his work in Bristol, just as much as he had in London. That was what Vogel did. Mary knew that her husband loved her; she considered herself very happily married, but it was only Rosamund for whom Vogel would ever have been prepared to move out of his beloved metropolis. Mary suspected he would even give up the job altogether for Rosamund, if it ever became necessary. He would do anything for Rosamund, anything at all to make her life better.
Rosamund had been born with cerebral palsy. She was a happy and intelligent girl, trapped within a body that consistently failed her, except when she was in water. Swimming was Rosamund’s greatest joy. The water gave her freedom. In water, her body was no longer an encumbrance and this small, apparently very ordinary, suburban bungalow was the reason Vogel had been prepared to move out of London. The previous owner had installed a seventeen-foot-long pool, equipped with a jet swimming system, in the garage. It presented an opportunity to make swimming an experience Rosamund could enjoy whenever she wanted, instead of on occasional and often quite difficult visits to municipal swimming pools.
Mary had accidentally discovered the property advertised in a copy of Somerset Life magazine, which she’d picked up in her dentist’s waiting room. And David Vogel, who had not imagined in his wildest dreams that he would ever be able to afford any sort of home swimming pool for his daughter, quickly put in an offer. He told his wife it was clearly fate that she had found the bungalow and Rosamund must come first.
‘How’s it going, David?’ Mary asked.
Vogel had left home before six that morning and made his way straight to the Melanie Cooke crime scene. He hadn’t called Mary since. He rarely did when embroiled in a major case, but neither would she expect him to. All she knew, so far, was that a girl’s body had been found in a Bristol backstreet.
When Vogel came home though, it was different. Mary was the DI’s sounding board, his release. She knew that he trusted her implicitly and that she was the only person in the world with whom he shared his innermost thoughts. Mary took her feet off the sofa and made room for her husband. He sat down next to her, allowing weariness to show for the first time that day, as he slumped backwards and gratefully kicked off his shoes.
‘It’s hard,’ he said. ‘The dead kid’s about the same age as our Rosamund. That was all I could think of, at first.’
Mary didn’t intend to let him dwell on that.
‘And since then?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you tell me the rest of it? Shall I make a pot of tea first? Have you eaten?’
‘Not since lunchtime,’ Vogel admitted, which was better than it often was.
Mary retreated to the kitchen, where she made tea and a pile of cheese salad sandwiches, liberally laced with mayonnaise, the way she knew Vogel liked them. Meanwhile, he’d brought the log burner back to life, throwing a couple of firelighters at it and a handful of sticks, before stoking it up with bigger logs. Mary poured the tea and then sat down beside him. Vogel drank most of the first cup and hungrily bolted down one of the sandwiches, before he told his wife everything.
She was the only one who heard about his gut feelings, his worry about the lack of evidence so far and his fears of a random killing. Everyone David Vogel worked with thought he was totally self-contained and so he was, in public. But at home, Mary was his rock and on that first night after the discovery of Melanie Cooke’s body, Vogel needed her as much as he ever did. Mary rarely commented until her husband had finished, allowing him to talk everything through. He always told her how much it cleared his mind to do so.