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: Alboy@mymail.com. 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 from 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.