Even then, I don’t think I ever planned to kill her. More than anything, I just wanted her to shut up. The night it happened, after I’d failed yet again to perform, she actually laughed at me. I told her to stop, but she didn’t. She had a high-pitched trilling sort of laugh. A very annoying laugh.
I shouted at her. It made no difference.
I grabbed a pillow and held it to her face. She stopped laughing then. I slackened my grip on the pillow. She pushed it from her face with her skinny, little arms and started to scream, which was even worse. I flung the pillow back over her face and lent on it with all my strength, pressing it into her, filling her nose and mouth with it, so that she struggled to breathe.
She beat on my back ineffectually with her little fists, but after a bit she stopped doing that. I felt her go limp beneath me. I lifted the pillow from her face. Her eyes were wide open and she lay quite still. She was definitely dead.
I had become desperate to find a way out of the hole I’d dug for myself but I hadn’t planned to murder the girl. Honestly, I hadn’t. I could hardly believe it had been so easy. That she had died so quickly.
I was in an even bigger hole now, of course. Or was I? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would get away with it, I’d always got away with everything before. It all went quiet for a bit. They didn’t find her body for a long time; I’d banked on that and on the trail going cold. Even then, it was a while before the press cottoned on to it not being just another domestic.
The Thai bride found dead in a Bristol flat and the way in which she had died, did eventually hit the papers and the TV news, as it had to. But they didn’t even know who I was, not really. The police announced that they were looking for a man who had used the name of Richard Perry, but had been known to the dead woman as Saul. They put out a call for anyone who might know him or might have had dealings with him to come forward. This man might be able to help them in their inquiries, they said, and everyone knew what that meant.
It seemed likely that they would have already gone into the dating website I’d used, but found that I hadn’t posted a picture of myself. I supposed that ultimately they would unearth the picture I’d emailed directly to Manee, the same doctored picture I had used before with Sonia. But that could take some time, as I had deleted all emails sent between Manee and me and cleared the records as best I could. In any case, I was pretty sure that it didn’t look enough like the real me for anyone to recognise me from it.
Sonia would recognise that picture of course, but not the real me.
The landlord I’d rented the flat from and the chap I dealt with for the rental car, would already have been asked for a description of me, I assumed. However, most people, in my experience, are not very observant.
All the same, as I went about my day to day business, I began to wonder if people were looking at me curiously. Perhaps trying to work out where they had seen me before. It was almost certainly my imagination. Someone would have reported me already, wouldn’t they? I would have been investigated.
I wasn’t though. I couldn’t understand how those around me could be so blind. They were stupid. They had to be stupid, compared with me anyway. I was going to get away with it again. They had nothing on me, not the real me. They couldn’t touch me.
Twenty
Vogel took the call just before lunch, the following day, his first day running the investigation into the death of the young Thai woman in St Pauls. He knew he wasn’t operating on full power, as half his mind was still with the Melanie Cooke case.
‘How are you, you old bugger?’ asked Nobby Clarke.
Vogel’s spirits rose at once. He both liked and respected his former boss from the Met and one of his greatest regrets at leaving London was that he would no longer be on Clarke’s team. He thought the Detective Superintendent was one of the best police officers he had ever worked with.
‘All the better for hearing from you, boss,’ he responded truthfully.
‘I’m not your boss, Vogel,’ said Clarke, speaking with exaggerated patience.
Vogel smiled into the phone. It was well known between the two of them that he had never been able to call Clarke anything other than boss and never would be able to. Even though he knew well enough that the DS preferred informality.
The problem was that, in spite of the unlikely nickname, DS Clarke was a woman. A damned good-looking woman at that, Vogel thought. Tall, blonde and elegant. He didn’t even know what her real Christian name was and neither did anyone else. Clarke, for whatever reason, and in common with a famous television detective, had always kept it a closely-guarded secret. And, in spite of her frequent invitations to do so when they’d first worked together, Vogel certainly could not bring himself to call her Nobby.
‘Right Vogel,’ Clarke continued, after only the briefest of pauses. ‘Something’s just landed on my desk, which I thought you might be interested in.’
Vogel knew she would not have called for chat, they didn’t have that sort of relationship, and that she would cut to the chase straight away. The DS was not one for small talk. Unless she got on the Scotch of course, then she could be quite garrulous.
‘There’s a connection with a case in your patch,’ Clarke continued. ‘Are you involved in the Melanie Cooke murder at all?’
Vogel felt his pulse quicken.
‘I’m deputy SIO,’ he said. Then he corrected himself. ‘Or I was, it’s done and dusted now, boss. DNA match with the father. He’s been charged. We announced it yesterday.’
‘I know,’ replied Clarke. ‘But I’m afraid I may be about to rock your boat, Vogel.’
‘I’m hanging on to the sides,’ said the DI.
‘We’ve been looking into the suspicious death of a male teenager found in a Soho hotel a month ago,’ Clarke continued. ‘He died of strangulation, that much was abundantly clear from the start. We don’t know yet, though, whether his death was murder or an accident. Have you heard of asphyxiaphilia?’
‘I don’t just do crosswords, I compile them, boss,’ replied Vogel.
‘Yeah.’ Clarke knew that well enough. She sounded totally unimpressed. ‘Not a term that fits naturally into the crossword section of our own dear Daily Telegraph, Vogel.’
‘I also read the news pages, boss. Fits in there. It’s a deliberate partial strangulation, using a cord — or often a belt — tightened around the neck. It reduces the amount of oxygen to the brain during sexual stimulation, heightening the pleasure of orgasm. Dangerous old game. Michael Hutchence, the INXS singer, was found hanged in a hotel room in Australia amid rumours of auto-erotic asphyxiation. That’s the same practice solo, during masturbation. The coroner delivered a suicide verdict but the auto-eroticism theory was backed by Hutchence’s wife Paula Yates, who said he would never have deliberately killed himself.’
‘How come you manage to sound like an anorak even when you’re talking about sex games?’ asked Clarke.
‘Sorry, boss.’
Clarke grunted acknowledgement.
‘Anyway, you are absolutely right, of course,’ she continued. ‘The assumption here was that this was a sex game gone wrong. Asphyxiophilia is particularly prevalent among certain sectors of the gay community. Our lad had clearly been indulging in some pretty extreme sex with another man. Forensic found signs of quite violent anal sex. The sexual partner was nowhere to be seen, when the body was discovered by a maid in the morning. Like I said, we are not sure yet whether the death was murder or an accident. But my own hunch is murder, the boy’s hands were tied in front of him with some sort of dressing-gown cord and there was a belt around his neck. He was in a kneeling position when he was found, but lying on his side. The belt had been pulled so tightly through the buckle, that his neck protruded all around it. I reckon it must have been held in place by somebody pretty strong until he died. I also reckon the whole thing was too violent to have been a sex game that went too far; there’d been no attempt to loosen the belt around the boy’s neck or untie the bonds around his wrists. Mind you, if it was a deliberate killing, we are dealing with some cool murderer here. DNA all over the place. Fingerprints too. He used a condom, but he left it in the bin in the bathroom. Arrogant bastard. We have his sperm, for God’s sake.’