Mary stood anxiously by Vogel’s side. She looked at him enquiringly.
‘I’m not even a Jew,’ he whispered. As a little boy he’d sat listening to Eytan’s stories of their family history, the good and the bad, the relatives who had died in the Holocaust all over Europe, those who had escaped and forged new lives — as Eytan, one of Germany’s kinder transport refugees, had done. Vogel had mourned and rejoiced at these tales of his Jewish heritage, but the heritage was a lie. The Jewish relatives were a lie, even his own father was a lie.
‘Is that what Eytan said?’ Mary queried.
‘No, he said I’d been circumcised and had my Bar Mitzvah, that I was a Jew all right.’ Vogel spat the last words out.
‘Well that’s true, isn’t it?’
Vogel shook his head slowly, still taking it all in.
‘Mary, I have no religious beliefs. Jews are a race, first and foremost, that is my ideology, you know that. Being Jewish was my birth right and it’s always been very important to me. I have always been proud of being a secular Jew. Somebody who has thought through the dogma of The Torah and rejected it, yet would live and die by the ideology of his race. By definition you can’t have secular Anglicans or Baptists or Muslims or even Buddhists. I could never practice any religion and I do not believe in any kind of God. I thought I was a Jew by blood, that I’d been born a Jew. I never had any reason to doubt that, but I wasn’t born a Jew and I don’t have the faith. So what kind of a damned Jew does that make me?’
The phone call to his father and the subsequent revelations weighed heavily on Vogel. After a largely sleepless night, he was in a thoroughly bad mood when he left for work early the next morning.
He tried to put the extraordinary and highly disturbing turn of events in his personal life to one side and concentrate on the day ahead. But he had his final report on the Melanie Cooke case to compile and he was not happy about that either.
In spite of the apparently unquestionable forensic evidence, Vogel remained unconvinced that a satisfactory conclusion had been reached. His mood darkened with every paragraph that he wrote. At home, and now at work, he found himself becoming overwhelmed with a feeling of helplessness, a vague awareness of events spiralling out of his own control.
And that was not usual for Vogel.
He was finally nearing the end of the report, around noon, when Hemmings strode into his office with news of a case that had just been referred to the major crime unit from CID at Trinity Road.
‘I need you to finish up the Cooke case and take this one over as soon as possible,’ said Hemmings. ‘Young Thai woman found dead in a flat in St Pauls. Smothered in her bed. At first they thought it was a domestic with an oriental twist.’
Hemmings smiled at what he apparently thought was some kind of a joke. Vogel obligingly stretched his features into something vaguely resembling a smile back.
‘You know anything about it, Vogel?’
‘I knew it had happened, and I saw something on the news, boss,’ he said. ‘Been too busy with the Mel Cooke case to take much notice. Anyway, the inference was that it was a domestic which would be cleared up pretty quickly.’
Hemmings grunted.
‘Actually, it seems there’s more than a bit of a mystery about it and Trinity Road have been doing some digging, with interesting results. The landlord found the body, three days ago now, after a neighbour reported a smell on the landing. He couldn’t raise his tenant, a man who’d said he wanted the place for his new wife while his own house was being done up, so he used his own keys to get in. Forensics reckon the woman’s been dead going on two months.’
‘Right,’ said Vogel, trying desperately to refocus his train of thought. ‘So, everything surely points to the man who rented the flat, doesn’t it? Husband? Boyfriend?’
‘Indeed. Only he doesn’t seem to exist.’
‘What?’
‘Well, he paid cash in advance for six months, so, as you can imagine, the landlord didn’t do a lot of checking. The man was seen in a rental car and Trinity Road have already managed to track that down. He used the same name to rent the car that he gave the landlord, Richard Perry, which checked with an apparently valid driving licence. He paid by credit card in the same name. He returned the car about a month later, at night, parked outside the rental place and stuck the keys through the letter box. He left no paper trail worth mentioning. All internet banking, set up with falsified ID, an accommodation address, everything is pretty much uncheckable. The Trinity Road boys are pretty sure he’s built a totally false identity.’
‘How?’ Vogel suspected he knew the answer and Hemmings confirmed it.
‘Obviously Trinity Road have tried everything to trace this Richard Perry and the only person they can find so far, who’s details check out, died as a boy. It’s the old Day of the Jackal trick again. Hard to be believe it still works, though you have to be a pretty smart cookie to get away with it these days, which it’s pretty certain this character is. He’s clever and the attack was premeditated, it would seem. Anyway, he now seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘I doubt that, boss. He’ll be out there somewhere. What about the Thai woman? Do we know much about her yet?’
‘Well, her name was Manee Jainukul, she came here thinking she was going to marry a man she met through an internet dating site. Not a lot of family, they’ve only just found a sister back in Thailand.’
‘You said she’d been dead two months. Did nobody in Thailand raise the alarm when they didn’t hear from her?’
‘Ah, I said he was a clever bastard, didn’t I? He must have taken her phone after he killed her. The sister continued to receive texts and emails from her. She even got one after the body was discovered.
‘There’s something else too. According to the sister he didn’t call himself Richard Perry, Manee knew him as Saul. She didn’t even know his last name until she got here. Crazy eh? You travel half way round the world to marry a man and you don’t even know his full name.’
Vogel muttered his agreement.
‘Did she tell her sister his last name, or alleged last name?’
‘Apparently the sister said she thought she did, but couldn’t remember it. She had just been told Manee was dead though, so she would have been in shock and she doesn’t speak any English. Trinity Road have only been able to go through the Thai police, but I know they’ve been asked to talk to her again.’
With some reluctance, Vogel completed his report on the Melanie Cooke murder and began to study the files on the murder of Manee Jainukul.
Saul
I’d never wanted to hurt Manee. I’d never intended to kill her. Honestly I hadn’t. I’d so wanted her to be my wife, really I had, and to give me the family life I’d always hoped for. It had never been my intention to hurt her. She’d been my last hope after all, that’s how I’d thought of her.
But she hadn’t been what I’d expected, not at all the way Thai girls were supposed to be. Or not the way I thought they were supposed to be, anyway. It wasn’t my fault that she had been so difficult, questioning everything that I did and criticising me all the time. She hadn’t been any different to the English girls I’d known.
Indeed, towards the end, she’d begun to remind me of my ex-wife. When I tried to have sex with her, all I could see was that pale judgemental English face I had grown to hate many years ago.
My dream Thai bride eventually began to openly mock me, when I failed in my desperate attempts to enter her — no longer so compliant — little body. Just as my ex had done. Or that’s how it seemed to me.
That had been the beginning of the end, I suppose.