The Jigsaw Man

by Nadine Matheson

  ‘As you are aware,’ the Commissioner Superintendent said loudly, before Henley had even had a chance to open her mouth, ‘Peter Olivier escaped from custody nine days after the first three victims were found—’

  First. It was only a small word but what it implied didn’t bode well. From the corner of her eye she could see that familiar muscle in Pellacia’s jaw start to tense with frustration. Callum took the bait.

  ‘You mean there are more? Are you saying, Commissioner Superintendent, that you expect there to be more body parts being scattered on the streets of London?’

  ‘That is not what I said.’ Larsen’s words almost tripped over each other.

  ‘“The first three bodies” is what you just said. Which means that there have been more than three victims.’

  ‘That is no more than speculation.’

  ‘Commissioner Superintendent, how can you call it speculation when, by your own words, less than a minute ago, you confirmed that this copycat has killed more than three people?’

  ‘As I was saying—’

  ‘The victims were members of the jury from Peter Olivier’s trial in 2017,’ Callum said loudly. ‘The trial of the Jigsaw Killer.’

  The cameras flashed viciously and the hum from the reporters grew louder. This is a shark pool, Henley thought.

  ‘But isn’t it correct that Carole Lewis is the fourth victim to be identified, and that the murder investigation has now been transferred from the Murder Squad at Wood Green police station to the Serial Crime Unit?’ Callum sounded triumphant.

  DS Lancaster. That bitch, Henley thought, as she locked eyes with Callum. She knew that Lancaster had been angry, but she hadn’t expected her to go mouthing off to the press.

  ‘I’m not prepared to comment on individual murder investigations,’ said Larsen.

  ‘Tessa Botchway from the Guardian. Are you able to tell us why these jurors were targeted?’

  Pellacia leaned towards the bank of microphones. ‘As the Commissioner Superintendent said, all lines of investigation are being pursued.’

  ‘This is a shitstorm,’ Henley muttered under her breath. Just then, Larsen’s assistant appeared from the wings and whispered something into his ear.

  ‘I’m sorry, but something has arisen and I’m going to have to leave. DSI Stephen Pellacia and DI Anjelica Henley, who are leading the investigation, can answer any remaining questions. I will leave you in their capable hands.’

  Henley and Pellacia exchanged a glance as Larsen practically ran through a side door.

  ‘Inspector Henley? Oi, are you not going to talk to me?’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough, Callum?’ Henley stopped in the middle of the car park. She could see Ramouter waiting for her next to the car.

  ‘Long time no see, innit. You’re looking well,’ said Callum.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was wondering why you were so quiet up there. I thought that you would have more to say, especially after your boss cocked it up.’

  ‘You know that I’m not one for the spotlight. Anyway, you got all your questions answered.’

  ‘Not the point, though, is it? It would have been interesting, you being the senior investigating officer and being involved in the original investigations, to know your thoughts.’

  Henley shrugged and turned her back.

  ‘I’ve just a quick question,’ Callum said.

  ‘You had your opportunity to ask questions back inside.’

  ‘I know, but I wanted to talk to you. You’re the one with all of the information.’

  ‘And there are rules—’

  ‘When do you lot ever play by the rules? It’s one question, that’s all.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Carole Lewis wasn’t dismembered, was she?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t.’

  ‘So why have you taken over the investigation?’

  ‘That’s two questions, Callum.’

  ‘There wasn’t something on the bodies, was there? I don’t know… Like a mark or symbol?’

  It wasn’t just a random thought. Henley sensed that Callum was working off a credible leak and not a pie in the sky theory that had come to him while he stuffed his face with another sausage roll. There was only one person that Henley could think of who could have passed on that information about the symbols. DS Lancaster, bitter that Henley had ridiculed her by pointing out her ineptitude.

  ‘You’ve got the notes from the press conference,’ said Henley. She clicked the unlock button on the key fob and indicated for Ramouter to get into the car. She walked towards the vehicle, Callum calling after her.

  ‘But I wanted something from you. You are the great Jigsaw slayer aren’t you, Inspector?’

  Henley climbed into the car and slammed the door shut. ‘That stupid bitch,’ she said, starting the engine and waiting for the security gates to open.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Ramouter asked as he reached for his seatbelt.

  ‘DS Lancaster has been leaking information to the press. I knew that she was pissed off, but this is… I don’t understand how she thinks that she can get away with this?’ Henley glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw Callum standing in the same spot adjusting his laptop bag and smirking.

  ‘What are you going to do? Grass her up? That will ruin her.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. She can’t fuck around with my investigation and get away with it.’

  Chapter 61

  As Henley had anticipated, the press conference had resulted in an influx of phone calls to the SCU. Pellacia had managed to convince someone on the upper floors of New Scotland Yard to transfer some experienced bodies to their team. Eastwood had been dispatched back to Belmarsh and Stanford was standing with two detective constables who she recognised from Peckham CID.

  ‘I saw that car crash of a conference,’ said Stanford, walking over to Henley.

  ‘I don’t even want to talk about it,’ she replied. ‘Have you seen Ramouter?’

  ‘I think he’s downstairs with Ezra, but don’t disappear on me. I’ve got some info for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Pellacia asked me to look into how Olivier got hold of the insulin. It came from the hospital wing. They finally did a stock check and discovered that three vials of insulin were missing and the insulin that was found in Olivier’s cell has the same batch number.’

  ‘It has to be a prison officer that was helping him,’ said Henley as her mind flashed back to Karen Bajarami and Ade Nzibe.

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me. Prison officers are just as corrupt as some of our police.’

  Henley walked into Ezra’s room and looked around. ‘Where’s the Boy Wonder?’ she asked Ramouter.

  ‘He’s gone to get lunch. He should be back in a bit. There is good news though. We’ve finally got the enhanced footage from the storage facility.’

  ‘Have you had a chance to take a look?’

  ‘I would have, but the files were password protected.’ Ramouter turned the laptop in her direction. ‘But there is something else.’

  ‘What is it?’ Henley pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘Well, the appeal for witnesses might have produced a hit.’

  ‘For which victim?’

  ‘Sean Delaney. Remember that his manager confirmed that he had been at work late on the Sunday night before he went missing. According to their records, he left the building at 9.42 p.m. His mobile phone showed that he got a call from… I’m not sure what to call them, clients, patients? Anyway, his name is Leon Merrick. I’ve been chasing him for the last couple of days and I managed to speak to him a little while ago.’

  ‘Get to the point.’ Henley immediately regretted her tone. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Ramouter continued: ‘He says that the night Sean disappeared, he had been calling him for most of the day. He’s a heroin addict, had been withdrawing and was desperate to talk to Sean. He couldn’t get ho
ld of him and ended up using. Says that it must have been a bad batch because it was the first time that he thought that he was going to die. So, he goes to the centre on the off chance that Sean or someone might be there. The front door is closed so he tries the back where the staff car park is. He’s not too sure about the time but reckons that it was about eight-ish.’

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘He thinks that he saw Sean passed out in the back of a car.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘No, he remembers seeing a car. He hesitated at first because for some reason he thought that it was a police car, but then he realised that it wasn’t. He saw a white male standing next to the car and that the door was open. He thought that the man might have been a dealer, so he approached him and asked him for drugs, but the man told him to fuck off.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Henley. ‘Was there anything else that he remembered? A better description of the man with Sean?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Henley, suddenly remembering that despite the chaos in her life at the moment, she was supposed to be mentoring the trainee detective.

  ‘Only that he remembers tapping on the window, but the man pushed him out of the way. After that, it’s all a blur to him.’

  ‘It might still be an idea to get him in front of a sketch artist. You never know what could happen. We might finally get a break.’

  Henley turned around as Ezra came into the room. ‘You took your sweet time,’ she said.

  ‘Good afternoon to you too,’ said Ezra as he dumped a greasy bag onto the table. ‘Burger and chips. Do you want some?’

  ‘No thanks. We have work to do,’ Henley said, pointing to his computer.

  ‘Sorry, boss, I’m on it.’ Ezra sat down at his desk and mirrored his laptop’s screen to the television.

  ‘Doesn’t seem very exciting,’ Ezra said as CCTV footage of the front office of the storage facility filled the screen. ‘It’s not long. Only three minutes.’

  ‘This is much better,’ said Henley as the video revealed an assistant sitting at the desk. About thirty seconds later a woman came into view. With the enhanced footage Henley could clearly see that the woman was wearing a brunette wig that covered the sides of her face, obscuring her profile. She was wearing a denim jacket and black Capri trousers. Dark glasses. Nothing memorable about her. Until the woman raised her right hand.

  ‘Ez, pause it there.’ Henley stepped towards the screen. ‘Can you zoom in?’

  ‘I can but not too much otherwise you will just be looking at a bunch of pixels.’

  ‘What are we looking at?’ asked Ramouter.

  ‘Her right wrist. She has a tattoo. Does that look like stars to you?’

  Ramouter squinted at the screen. ‘Yeah it does, three of them. It would be better if she took off her glasses.’

  ‘Karen Bajarami has tattoos on her right wrist. Shooting stars that run from her arm to the back her hand. I noticed them when we were at Belmarsh.’

  ‘Do you think that it’s her?’ Ramouter asked.

  Henley continued to watch the footage in silence. The woman took off her glasses and leaned over the counter as she signed some paperwork. For a brief moment, she gazed towards the camera, then turned to the door.

  ‘Pause it, Ezra. It’s her. That’s Karen Bajarami.’

  Chapter 62

  Henley took the Carole Lewis investigation file to one of the empty offices on the third floor, away from the bustle of the incident room. She reviewed the list of twelve jurors. Twelve people thrown together by chance. Even after their names were selected there was no guarantee that they’d sit on an actual jury. They could have easily spent two weeks in a holding pen with 150 others, but, again, randomly their names had been pulled out of an envelope and their fates had been sealed.

  Five of the jurors were dead. One from natural causes, the other four by the hands of the copycat. The only question that was evading Henley was ‘why?’ What made these people such a target? It wasn’t as if they were the ones who had found Olivier guilty after six days of deliberations.

  Henley tapped the case file with her pen. She didn’t even have a list of suspects. She had no idea how many people had been in that courtroom each day, watching those twelve jurors before they were discharged. The only thing that Henley knew for sure was that her killer wanted to be famous. He wanted to make a name for himself, place himself atop the headlines. At the end of the day that what’s every serial killer or serial rapist wanted. Not anonymity.

  Carole Lewis was the first juror. The test case. The lucky one in the sense that she hadn’t ended up in pieces at the bottom of a stairwell or dumped in the bushes. Henley opened the file to the CRIS report. All 259 pages of it so far. The entire investigation had initially focused on the husband, even though no evidence pointed in that direction.

  Henley frowned as she came across an entry dated two days after Carole Lewis’s husband had been invited in for a voluntary interview.

  03/05/2019 21:39

  ADS 205276 DS THOMPSON

  Susp has been arrested and interviewed in regard to the primary offence of MURDER.

  Disc seat: D08765783H interviewed and arrested. Exhibit: JPH/1

  Susp, Alan Lewis, stated that VIW1 had been harassed and complained about a stalker. Cannot recall the name but says that the VIW1 knew him but was not a friend. Recalls that VIW1 had reported the harassment to Muswell Hill Police Stn.

  MIT SUPERVISOR’S UPDATE

  OIC actions seen and noted. CPU at Muswell Hill to be contacted – enquiries made re: any possible harassment allegations made by VIW1.

  A sharp rapping at the door pulled Henley out of her thoughts. She was surprised to see Dr Mark Ryan at the door.

  ‘I was in the area and I thought I would see how you’re doing,’ he said.

  ‘You were in the area?’ Henley stared hard at Mark.

  ‘OK, I wasn’t just in the area. Stephen called me.’

  Henley rolled her eyes.

  ‘Don’t be like that. I brought food. From that restaurant you were telling me about.’

  Henley looked down at the brown paper bags with the familiar logo of the Caribbean restaurant on Deptford High Street.

  ‘That’s guilty conscience food.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Did you get fried plantain?’

  ‘Two portions and the Guinness punch.’

  ‘So, he told you about the delivery to my house?’ Henley took the bags from Mark.

  ‘Reason why I’m here, and I wasn’t lying about being in the area. I was lecturing at the university. I left you messages.’

  ‘It’s been manic. I should have called you back.’

  ‘How’s Rob?’

  ‘Over the moon. At his parents’,’ Henley replied, opening the containers. ‘No one cares that I’m upset. They’re too busy applauding Rob for doing the right thing.’ Henley thought of Emma as she picked up a slice of plantain and put it in her mouth. ‘Emma would eat plantain all day if I let her. In fact, she just loves food. God knows what Rob’s mum is making her eat. I shouldn’t be blaming him for taking her somewhere safe. I know that I’ve gone about things the wrong way, but she’s my child.’

  ‘We all do what feels right to us at the time. No one can blame you for being upset.’

  ‘But he took the choice out of my hands, Mark. I miss my baby. If I was coming home and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to her for the millionth time, then it would be worth it, but I’m not.’

  ‘You’re being too hard on yourself. You can’t control everything.’

  ‘I can’t control crazy people dumping severed heads on my doorstep or cutting up young girls into pieces and dumping them in the park like rubbish or even a delusional judge releasing a rapist and a kidnapper out into the streets, but I should be able to control what goes on inside my home. What use am I if I can’t even do that?’

  ‘Would you have preferred to have been the one to tell Rob t
o go instead of the other way around?’

  ‘Don’t psychoanalyse me, Mark.’

  Mark held his hands up in surrender. ‘Sorry, sorry. Force of habit. I’m here as a friend. Nothing else. So, the investigation?’

  ‘Which one? Olivier being on the run or our copycat?’

  ‘Copycat.’ Mark put his fork down and picked up his drink.

  Henley nodded. ‘We think he may have killed someone back in May.’

  ‘There was a case in the States, about ten years ago. Two serial killers in Arizona who were competing with each other. Between the pair of them they must have killed about twelve people.’

  ‘You think that Olivier and the copycat are in competition with each other?’

  ‘It’s a theory. There has to be some explanation for why the copycat is using Olivier’s exact method of killing his victims—’

  ‘Not exactly the same. He induces some form of paralysis first, so we’re assuming they can see what’s being done to them.’ Henley mindlessly dissected the chicken on her plate.

  ‘But if you put that to one side, the MO is exactly the same. They’re both cutting up the bodies and discarding them.’

  ‘Olivier didn’t keep trophies, but my copycat is.’

  ‘My?’

  Henley ignored the look in Mark’s eye. ‘Don’t read too much into it. I just mean that it’s my case. The point is that this copycat has taken Zoe’s eyes, Kennedy’s tongue and Delaney’s ears.’

  ‘And you’re sure that he’s keeping them?’ asked Mark.

  ‘What else is he going to do with them? You’re the expert.’

  ‘I don’t think DS Stanford would agree with you, but you want to know why a killer would keep trophies?’

  Henley nodded as she sipped on her Guinness punch.

  ‘Human nature. People like to keep mementos from the big moments in their life. Once your copycat has got rid of the body, what proof does he have of his achievement? What better way for your copycat to impress Olivier and say to him, “Look at me. Look at what I did for you.” Olivier didn’t need any trophies. His agenda with his six attackers was simple. “You violated and ridiculed me. I’ll kill you.”’