Deadly Dance Read online

  ‘My name is Saul and I am a 33-year-old supply teacher,’ I wrote. ‘I live in a village near Swindon and I would like to meet a young woman of around my age whose intentions are as serious as mine. I can easily travel anywhere in that region or to London or the West of England. I want to share my life with someone. I want a family, so I’m looking for someone who would have a child with me. I don’t care what that someone looks like, what she does or doesn’t do for a living, or anything like that. I don’t mind whether or not she already has a child or children. I just want someone to care for, who will care for me. I’ve never really had that, not as an adult. I want the same sort of marriage my parents had: long, loving and complete. But I never seem to meet anyone with the same values and ambition that I have. My interests are simple and quiet. I like to read and go to the cinema. If you are out there, please get in touch. I need you.’

  It was true. I needed her. I really did. Even though I did not yet know who she was. In fact, there was a lot of truth in what I wrote for my profile on that website.

  Not all of it, of course. But I was confident that, when I finally met my someone, she would understand my reluctance both to post an accurate photograph of myself and to plaster the intimate details of my personal life all over the net.

  I would save that for the right person. For the one who would become my wife. Until then I would keep my secrets.

  TWO

  Vogel was still standing, quietly looking at the sad scene before him, when the rest of his team began to arrive.

  One high-heeled, silver shoe lay close to the body. Totally unsuitable footwear for a 14-year-old in any circumstances, Vogel thought. He knew his colleagues (and sometimes even his own wife) considered him old fashioned and behind the times, but he was too old and set in his ways to change now. In days gone by – before the age of political correctness – police, judges, and lawyers alike might well have referred to a victim, dressed up the way this one was, as having asked for it. Vogel would never even think that. He was a compassionate man. He felt deeply for the victims he encountered, sometimes rather too much. He just wished that young girls would think a little more about how they presented themselves and the effect that might have on the wrong sort of man. They shouldn’t have to, of course, he didn’t disagree with that. But there was no shortage of evil perverted bastards out there and this poor kid had been unlucky enough to meet up with one.

  Vogel couldn’t see the second shoe. The CSIs might find it. The girl could even be lying on it. It was also possible that her murderer had taken it as a souvenir, such things were not unusual.

  ‘Morning boss.’

  Vogel swung on his heels. DC Dawn Saslow, newly transferred from uniform, sounded as bright and cheery as she always did.

  Vogel grunted.

  Saslow’s eyes dropped to the body at his feet. Her whole demeanour changed.

  ‘Sorry boss,’ she said, her voice quiet now.

  Saslow, an attractive young woman, fresh-faced with shiny dark hair fashioned into a geometric bob, had already proven herself to be an officer with considerable promise.

  ‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for,’ said Vogel. ‘Not yet anyway.’

  The DC half smiled.

  Not for the first time did Vogel wonder at the way they all behaved when confronted with such horrible sights. The coppers, the doctors, the CSI team. There was always banter. It was the only way they could get through it, he supposed.

  Detective Sergeant John Willis was right behind Saslow, still fastening his protective polyethylene suit as he hurried towards the crime scene.

  He and Vogel had been working together for six months now. Vogel found Willis to be intelligent and often, he thought, more sensitive than a lot of police officers. At 35 the DS would be hoping for promotion soon. Vogel would be sorry to lose him. The two men had already gained something of a rapport, although neither of them were prone to giving away a great deal about themselves.

  Vogel nodded towards Willis, who inclined his head very slightly, his watchful, grey eyes taking in the scene before him. Vogel saw the sergeant wince. But, in common with his superior officer, it was not Willis’s way to show the emotion he was undoubtedly feeling. Not if he could help it anyway. He glanced back at Vogel and waited for instructions.

  Unlike Saslow, Willis didn’t speak. He didn’t make it necessary for Vogel to say something banal. Nor indeed to pass any comment about the wretched nature of this inquiry, which the Avon and Somerset Constabulary’s Major Crime Investigation Team were about to embark on. DCI Reg Hemmings – the head of MCIT – was Senior Investigating Officer, as usual in a case of this severity. Vogel had already been appointed deputy SIO, a more flexible and hands-on role. He began to issue the instructions now required.

  ‘Right Willis, let’s see if we can find someone, anyone, who saw or heard something,’ Vogel began. ‘There must have been some noise. Screaming, I would say. There are flats over a lot of those shops and bars in West Street and presumably people living in the two houses just up the lane. Get a team together to knock on doors.’

  Willis spoke for the first time.

  ‘Yes boss,’ he said quietly.

  The DS was always a man of few words; something else Vogel liked about him.

  Vogel turned to Saslow.

  ‘OK Dawn, you’re with me,’ he said. ‘The poor kid’s mother hasn’t been told yet.’

  Vogel watched the shadow flit across Dawn Saslow’s face. He would have been disappointed if she hadn’t reacted like that. He hated this side of the job too. They all hated making death calls.

  The district Home Office Pathologist arrived just as Vogel and Saslow were about to leave. Karen Crow had been the first woman in the country to gain such an appointment. She was nearing retirement now and inclined to give the impression that she had seen it all before.

  None the less she shook her head sorrowfully at the sight of the young body spread-eagled before her and glanced curiously around.

  Even now that day had broken, Stone Lane remained shadowy and somehow forbidding. The entire network of insalubrious alleyways and cul-de-sacs, which led off West Street and Old Market Street, was inhabited only by rats and the occasional prowling cat after dark.

  ‘What the heck was she doing here on her own at night?’ Karen Crow muttered vaguely in the direction of Vogel.

  ‘She wasn’t on her own,’ said Vogel grimly. ‘And I’ve no idea what she was doing here.’

  The whole Old Market area was certainly no place for a schoolgirl, not once night had fallen. There was The Stag and Hounds on the corner; Bristol’s oldest pub and looking its age. A number of bars better known for late night brawls than anything else. Sex shops catering for every possible inclination, one was little more than camouflage for a brothel and several other brothels in the neighbourhood were making no pretence of being anything other.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible the body could have been moved,’ Vogel continued.

  The pathologist was staring at the dead girl, as if willing her to come to life and tell her story.

  ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ she muttered. ‘Not from the way she’s lying.’

  Vogel shrugged his agreement.

  ‘We can approximate a time of death from what the girl’s mother has already told us and from the time her body was found,’ he continued. ‘It’s unlikely she would have been killed here until quite late in the evening. Too many people about, even on a Thursday night, and it’s mid May. Doesn’t get dark until nearly nine. But you’ll let us know as soon as you’ve got anything more concrete, indeed anything at all, won’t you, Karen?’

  ‘Oh no, I was planning to keep it all to myself.’

  Vogel stretched his lips into an apology for a smile. He just meant he didn’t want to have to wait for a written report. And Karen Crow knew that perfectly well.

  ‘My mobile, yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Naturally, Detective Inspector,’ the pathologist countered.

  ‘Right
we’re just off to …’

  Vogel didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Karen Crow knew exactly where he and Saslow were off to.

  ‘Good luck,’ the pathologist said quietly.

  Vogel smiled wryly. A genuine smile this time. He actually liked Karen Crow because he knew how good she was at her job. Nothing else about the people he worked with really mattered to Vogel.

  LEO

  I sat in a corner of the Bakerloo line tube trying to make myself invisible. It was always like that. As usual on these occasions, I was convinced that everybody around me would know at once what I was. Not that I was entirely sure myself, of course, nor ever had been. I would be all right, well just about, once I’d completed my transformation. But a bag of nerves until then.

  I’d hurried home to get ready as soon as I’d finished work and now I was on my way to Soho, to the heart of London’s gay scene.

  I wasn’t a frequent visitor, but there were days when I just couldn’t keep away. This was one of them. And I had a special reason for returning rather sooner than usual after my last visit.

  As the tube I’d taken from my railway station approached Piccadilly Circus, I began to think about what might lie ahead that evening. It wasn’t straightforward for me. It never had been. I wasn’t just out to get laid, like so many men, straight or gay, of my age.

  Or maybe I was. I wasn’t entirely sure about anything connected with my sexuality.

  Certainly I was aware of a degree of excitement rising within me as I rode the escalator to street level, followed the shuffling queue of other passengers through the ticket barriers and headed for the exit closest to Leicester Square.

  There is something about coming to terms with what you are. And I rarely did. I wasn’t like most gay men I’d encountered. I wasn’t glad to be gay. I didn’t have the slightest desire to be gay.

  I didn’t even like the word. I’ve never liked euphemisms, and surely that’s what ‘gay’ is.

  When you called yourself a homosexual, it didn’t sound quite so modern and attractive. And what about queer? Is that what I was, queer?

  I had a 1969 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia at home that had belonged to my mother. Homosexuality is listed in it as a mental illness. In my blackest moments that was how I thought of myself. I was mentally ill. Irreparably so. And nobody could help me.

  It wasn’t about other people’s perception of me, because nobody in my life knew. I hadn’t been given a bad time for it by my parents, or anything like that. Neither my father, my mother, or my stepfather ever had a clue about my secret sexual leanings. Why would they have done? I wasn’t the slightest bit camp in my everyday life. I made damned sure of that. I wore the most conventional of clothes. I joined in with all the usual sexist, and sexual, banter you get among a group of men at work and in the pub. I was one of the lads, wasn’t I?

  I had an invented love life. With women, of course. Nothing too extravagant. I left most of it to the conveniently disreputable minds of others. Occasionally, I made sure that I was seen with an appropriately attractive, young woman in a bar or at a party. Indeed, I dated them. That wasn’t difficult for me. I enjoyed female company and women always had liked me. Perhaps because they instinctively knew that I wasn’t really one of the lads. That I was actually as uncomfortable as they were with some of the near-the-knuckle jokes and innuendo. Make no mistake about it, even in this the age of political correctness, such jokes were still the staple conversational diet of the majority of men of all ages when no thought-police are present. Particularly after a drink or two. Usually when women were out of earshot, but not always even that.

  I rarely dated a woman twice, and there was never an attempt at anything sexual, of course. I couldn’t cope with that.

  I live alone now, so I don’t have to pretend in my own home. But I’m alone deep inside myself, too. That’s the problem. Terribly alone. Sometimes the urge to share what I am, or what I think I am, with another, similar human being becomes too much for me. It’s more than a sexual urge. Human beings are like all animal species, aren’t we? We have a need to be with our own kind. Birds of a feather flock together. Hyenas run with hyenas. Wolves hunt in packs. Rabbits interbreed in their burrows.

  So, every so often, I can no longer keep up the pretence of being an uncomplicated, heterosexual man, with little more than one thing on his mind. It’s then that I venture out into the gay world. Even though it frightens me to do so. I seek camouflage. I transform myself, or try to anyway. I have a small separate wardrobe of clothes set aside for these occasions: my favourite clothes.

  For my trip to Soho, I’d chosen the pale blue skinny Levis I called my pulling jeans. Also a tight-fitting, light-weight, black leather jacket, with studs on the collar and cuffs, which I always wore with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow. On top I had a black T-shirt, with a V-neck that showed off my pecs and my six-pack. I was, after all, pretty fit.

  I wasn’t wearing any of those on my journey of course. I couldn’t take the risk of being seen dressed like that as I left my house or anywhere en route. They were tucked away in the rucksack I carried over one shoulder.

  Once I’d arrived in Soho, I always felt safe somehow. I believed I could be myself. Indeed, anything I wanted to be. I knew a pub in an alleyway off Leicester Square, where the gents’ toilet was conveniently situated down a flight of stairs right by the door. It was there that I habitually changed out of my straight clothes.

  As usual, I scurried in with my head down. I would look totally different when I left. The cubicles were of a generous size and fairly clean. I slipped quickly out of what I was wearing and into what I regarded as my gay-man gear.Then I took the jar of styling gel from my bag and smeared it over my hair, combing it through and pressing it flat to my head – except for a small quiff to one side at the front.

  I carried with me a little mirror, which I hung from the hook on the cubicle door so that I could check my appearance.

  My pièce de résistance was the snake tattoo, which wound itself around my deliberately exposed right forearm. Only, it wasn’t a real tattoo, of course. Just a clever transfer, which I would be able to remove before returning to work after the weekend.

  It always gave me a tremendous sense of forbidden pleasure to apply that fake tattoo. I had done so before I left home and also liberally applied fake tan – almost everywhere except my face, much of which was covered in designer stubble. I’d deliberately missed shaving that morning, so that by the time I arrived in central London my naturally heavy facial hair would provide a certain camouflage.

  A close shave before I returned to work would get rid of that, but the fake tan would take a few days to fade away. Until it did, I would have to be careful to keep the sleeves of my shirt down and my cuffs buttoned.

  It would not be hard for me, though. I was used to being careful.

  I ran up the stairs and left the pub as swiftly as I’d entered it. I hurried back towards Piccadilly Circus again, turned right into Shaftesbury Avenue then left into Greek Street and left again into Old Compton Street. This was it. The heart of gay Soho. I passed The G-A-Y Club and The Admiral Duncan without pausing. The former was too stereotyped for me; the first stop for gay men who had just got off the train from the provinces. The latter held too much history. Unlike many of its clientele, I was old enough to remember the night the place was bombed by anti-gay activists in 1999. Three men were killed and upwards of 70 injured. I’d not long left school and was struggling to come to terms with the nature of my sexual feelings. I had already come to despise myself for them; something that has never really changed. A part of me, in those days, thought the Admiral Duncan atrocity would, in my case, have been justifiable retribution. It was possible that a part of me still did.

  I crossed the road to Clone Zone, one of a chain of sex shops, which proudly promoted itself as having ‘the UK’s largest selection of top-quality, gay sex toys, aromas, fashion, underwear and jock straps.’ It also boasted that all i
ts merchandise was ‘processed through our own fulfilment centre.’

  I don’t have much of a sense of humour. Neither the gay nor the straight me. But even I couldn’t imagine how anyone could pronounce something like that and keep a straight face. They had to be joking, surely.

  The Clone Zone sold Poppers, a drug widely used by gays which enhances sexual arousal and performance. That’s why I went to Clone Zone. I could buy them on the internet. But I prefer to purchase what I need while I am in Soho and discard it, just as I do my gay self, before returning to my other life.

  Poppers is a slang term for a group of chemicals also known as club drugs. Composed of alkyl nitrates or isopropyl nitrates, they have been popular since the 1970s disco scene and, more recently, widely used amongst gay men as a way to enhance sexual pleasure.

  The drug opens up blood vessels, increasing blood flow and reducing blood pressure, while increasing the user’s heart rate and producing, literally, a rush of blood to the head.

  It is legal to sell them in the UK, in bottles with labels like Liquid Gold, Rush and Xtreme Power, as long as they are not advertised for human consumption. I don’t do the harder drugs popular in the gay community, like mephedrone or crystal meth. I need to remain in control of my head, even if not other parts of my body. I continued on my way, turning right off Old Compton Street into Wardour Street. A bottle of Xtreme was tucked into my jacket pocket, which I, one way or another, was quite determined to find a use for later.

  I was beginning to feel the spirit of ‘anything goes’ all around me. I began to walk with more of a spring in my step. I held my head higher and started to look around me, taking it all in. There was a drag queen standing in a doorway to my right, smoking a cigarette through a long, black, Bakelite holder, twenties or thirties style. She smiled at me. I smiled back.