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 revelation. 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,
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.