Christine Chapman nodded.
‘I teach every class in the school for one period a week,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to get out of touch when you’re the head. As far as I know, Melanie was quite an average girl, although prettier than average, that’s for sure. She was bright enough, but worked only just hard enough, like so many of them. Popular too. No particular problems that I’m aware of, but I don’t know the girls like their class teachers do. I’ll call in Melanie’s class teacher.’
Melanie’s class teacher, Marion Smith, was a grey-haired woman in her fifties, rather more resembling the slightly starchy schoolmistresses Vogel remembered from his own schooldays. Once she had got over her initial shock, been given a glass of water and received a few words of comfort from Christine Chapman, Marion Smith was able to provide a rather more detailed picture of Melanie Cooke, just as the head had predicted.
‘She was very good at art, worked hard at the things she liked to do and not so hard at the subjects she had trouble with. She was a fairly easy pupil, never got in trouble. A happy, likeable girl, I’d say.’
‘And friends?’ enquired Vogel. ‘Any particular friends?’
‘Oh yes. Sally Pearson. Inseparable, those two.’
‘In that case,’ said Vogel. ‘Could we have a word with Sally straight away?’
The head agreed. A very nervous looking Sally Pearson arrived just minutes later. She was another potentially pretty girl with an abundance of red hair, but unfortunately suffering from a severe dose of teenage acne.
Christine Chapman broke the news to Sally, as she’d requested she be allowed to do.
Sally Pearson barely seemed to react. Her eyelids flickered, her lower lip trembled very slightly, but she said nothing. It was as if she wasn’t quite taking in the grim news she’d just been given, thought Vogel. He had been in this kind of situation before. It was not unusual for people to fail to grasp such a reality until much later. That could sometimes help with a police inquiry, though, because they were inclined to answer questions more factually and without personal bias whilst still in shock and before emotion sets in. But sometimes they just became unable, or unwilling, to respond properly.
‘Sally, I can only imagine how difficult this is for you, but we really need your help,’ began Vogel gently. ‘Do you know where Melanie was planning to go last night?’
Sally shook her head, still remaining silent.
‘She told her parents that she was going to have a homework evening with you. Were you expecting her?’
Sally shrugged and spoke for the first time, her voice little more than a whisper.
‘She said she might come round.’
‘So weren’t you anxious when she didn’t turn up?’
Sally shrugged again without saying anything more.
‘Was she in the habit of not turning up, when you’d arranged to meet?’ Vogel persisted.
Sally looked up from the floor and finally returned Vogel’s steady gaze.
‘Mel only said she might come round,’ she said, with heavy emphasis on the word ‘might’.
Then she looked back down at the floor again.
Vogel continued to question the girl for a few more minutes. It was not a fruitful exchange.
Sally Pearson insisted that she had no idea whether or not Melanie had a boyfriend. She had no idea if she’d ever had contact with a man online. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Melanie outside school.
Indeed, it seemed she knew nothing, at all, about anything.
‘All right, Sally,’ Vogel said eventually. ‘I’m sure you are very upset. I’ll not bother you any more today.’
The interview wasn’t getting him anywhere. A murder investigation is like any other police investigation. You have to prioritise your resources and your time.
Saul
I wanted to meet Sonia too. I really did. After all, it had been my express aim to find someone I might ultimately marry. Someone who could give me the kind of family life I longed for and save me from the life I feared I may be stuck with.
But the picture I’d painted of myself was so far removed from what I really was, I wondered if she would ever accept me. I had created a depiction to which, I feared, I could do no justice. I had a heck of a lot more to explain away than the facial hair I’d doctored into my Marryme.com picture, the colour of the hair on my head and the definition of my chin. A heck of a lot more.
Why had I been such a fool?
I told myself that I could not be the first person to build themselves up a bit in order to impress a potential date online. In fact, it was probably pretty common. Sonia would understand, surely. But I suspected I had gone a lot further than most.
It was eventually agreed that we would meet in Bath, a beautiful town, and easily accessible to us both.
She said she would drive. I said I would come by train. She said she would meet me at the station. She supplied me with her mobile phone number, just in case.
I said I’d had an accident with my phone — drowned it in the bath — and that I hoped my new one would arrive very soon, certainly by the time of our arranged meeting.
Just before I left home, I emailed her to say that my new phone hadn’t yet arrived, but I would have her number with me. If there appeared to be any problem with our arrangements, I would find a way of calling her.
I dressed the way I thought she might like me to be dressed. Indeed, the way she might expect me to dress.
I wore a dark jacket over jeans. Surely just right for a schoolteacher on his day off.
My perfectly pressed, pale blue shirt was open at the neck. I had spent a long time ironing it and even longer deciding on my footwear. Silly, I know, but at the time I felt that my whole life rested on this meeting.
I put on a pair of nearly-new, Adidas trainers first. They were exceptionally white and they didn’t look or feel right at all. Then I tried my best, shiny, black, lace-up shoes. They were old fashioned, but smart. I felt that Sonia would rather like me to be a bit of a young fogey. Well, youngish.
All the same, they didn’t seem quite right either.
Eventually, I settled on a pair of elderly and rather battered, but good quality, brown, suede slip-ons. They had a touch of the young fogey about them too, I thought.
As the train trundled into Bath, I wondered desolately why I had spent so long and wasted so much time worrying about my feet.
My face was the problem and even more so was the unlikely background I’d invented. All those silly stories. Why on earth had I told her I’d been in the foreign legion? It was so stupid. Why was I such a fantasist? Why could I not just be myself?
The Saul I had created for Sonia was really so unlike me. It was so ridiculous, because she was one person who might have accepted the real me. I got the impression she would accept almost anything in order to have someone to share her life with.
Now I feared I would not be able to pull off this first meeting and that she would realise just how much I had oversold myself.
Even if I succeeded initially, then what?
I remembered the old Irish joke. A motorist visiting Ireland stops to ask directions from a local. The Irishman looks thoughtful.
‘Well now sir,’ he says eventually. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’
It’s a good joke, I think. But there was nothing funny about my situation. Just like the visitor to Ireland I had no choice; I had to start from where I was. Or rather from where I had put myself.