The Jigsaw Man

by Nadine Matheson

  ‘Take a step back,’ said Pellacia as he walked up to the whiteboard. ‘What happens if we use all of our resources on putting together a case against Pine?’

  It was the same tactic that Rhimes had used when he could see that his team were at breaking point.

  ‘If we focus on Pine, then we have no eyes on Naylor and Blaine. Naylor has already slipped away from the officers protecting him and he has access to commercial and private properties because of his work,’ said Henley. ‘And Blaine? Well, he’s Olivier’s little helper. I’d have to be an idiot to think that he doesn’t know how to contact him or vice versa.’

  ‘Don’t forget Bajarami,’ said Pellacia. ‘She’s your loose thread.’

  Henley screwed up her face in concentration. She had to find a way to tighten the noose around her three suspects without jeopardising the lives of her jurors.

  ‘I’m going to head off to Bajarami’s place,’ said Henley. ‘Eastwood is already on her way.’

  There was a sharp rapping on the door. Henley turned around to see Ezra standing outside.

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Henley, concerned. The first time that Ezra had come to the incident room he’d stumbled across A3-size autopsy pictures on the wall. He hadn’t been back since.

  ‘Yeah, I just need to show you something,’ Ezra said. ‘In private.’

  Henley looked at Ezra quizzically. ‘What is it?’ She followed him out into the corridor.

  ‘You need to promise, right, that you won’t get mad,’ said Ezra, leaning against the wall and tapping his passcode into his iPad.

  ‘Why would I get mad?’ Henley knew full well that whatever Ezra had done would not be admissible as evidence in any court in the world.

  ‘In my defence, all I’ve done—’

  ‘What have you done?’ Henley snapped.

  ‘Take a look.’ Ezra handed the iPad to Henley.

  ‘It’s subscriber information,’ said Henley as she scrolled through the list of phone numbers. ‘From Olivier’s mobile phone.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve been waiting for the phone company to do a subscriber check, but they’ve been saying for the past few days that their systems have been unavailable.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘It’s best for all of us if I don’t answer that. So, Olivier’s phone is pay-as-you-go. Someone has been paying for the credit, which means that they’ve either been buying top-up vouchers, or they’ve been using their debit card online.’

  ‘Please tell me that they’ve used a debit card.’

  Ezra smiled. ‘That will be the inadmissible-in-court bit. All you need to know right now is that I’ve got the registered card details.’

  ‘Karen Bajarami couldn’t be that stupid,’ said Henley.

  ‘She tried not to be. It was registered to one of those cards that you can load up with money and use like a credit card, but she loaded it up using her own NatWest debit card which was registered to K.L. Bajarami.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘A hundred per cent, but there’s more. Now this stuff will be admissible as soon as I get the authorisation application processed.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘OK. There are private numbers that were calling his phone. So, I’ve unmasked them. The first number is Chance Blaine and the second number—’

  ‘Please tell me that it’s her phone.’

  ‘Full two-year contract that expires next March. She pays her bill by direct debit and is always running out of data.’

  For the first time since Kennedy’s body was found, Henley felt that she was getting somewhere. The panic was still there in the middle of her chest, but it wasn’t debilitating. She called Eastwood and told her to start the search of Karen Bajarami’s flat without her. She picked up the file containing Pine’s failed attempt to appeal against his sentence. The request for the court transcripts had taken some time, after arguments of who was going to pay for it, Joanna had made a call to someone. Stanford was taking bets over whether Joanna had offered a bribe, made a threat or gone with good old-fashioned blackmail.

  Henley read through the transcript. Pine’s barrister had ultimately failed to convince three Court of Appeal judges that Pine’s sentence should be suspended. Pine had been beaten up and raped on his second day in prison. His attacker had then injected him with heroin. Two days later, Pine had suffered a drug-induced psychotic break. Pine was ticking another box in Mark’s profile of the copycat. A victim of a traumatic sexual attack. The problem was that Pine had a clear alibi that ruled him out as a suspect. Henley’s phone rang. It was Eastwood.

  ‘Hi, Eastie. How did it go?’

  ‘For starters, Karen Bajarami lives with her mum, who was not best pleased about us rocking up at her front door while she was watching Bargain Hunt.’

  ‘What did her mum say?’

  ‘She watches too much telly if you ask me. Started mouthing off that she knew her rights and that she didn’t have to talk to us. I showed her a photograph of Olivier, asked if she had seen him. She said no.’

  ‘Did you find anything in the flat?’

  ‘We hit the jackpot. In Bajarami’s bedroom we found the mobile phone box for the same make and model that was found in Olivier’s cell. We also found an itinerary for an EasyJet flight to Malaga for two scheduled for yesterday. Passengers names: Karen Bajarami and Raymond McFarlane. In the wardrobe we found a duffle bag filled with men’s clothes, underwear, all brand new, five grand in cash and passports. Legit passport for Bajarami, fake one for Olivier. If you ask me, I don’t think Olivier putting a fork in her eye was part of Bajarami’s plan.’

  Henley looked at the phone number she had scribbled onto a Post-it note. When she had visited Karen earlier, she had seen her mobile phone on the cabinet, among the flowers and get-well cards. Henley dialled.

  As the phone rang, Ramouter walked through the door looking dishevelled. Henley put a finger to her lips as he opened his mouth to talk.

  ‘Hello.’ It was Karen’s voice. ‘Hello,’ she said again.

  Henley waited for a couple of seconds.

  ‘Peter. Baby, is that you?’

  Henley put the phone down, knowing that soon she would be placing her handcuffs on Karen Bajarami’s wrists. Unless Bajarami had realised it hadn’t been Olivier on the phone and tried to make a run for it instead.

  Chapter 83

  ‘I’ve got news,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Is it news that I’m going to be happy about?’ Henley had decided that the least she could do was treat Ramouter and Ezra to dinner as a thank you for coming in on a Saturday. Linh had readily agreed to join them.

  ‘I would be happy with it. I’ve got prints. A couple of partials taken from the plastic wrapping that Sean Delaney’s body was in. I’ve also got blood that doesn’t belong to him.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely. The only problem is—’

  ‘It’s not a match for anyone in the database,’ said Henley.

  ‘Nothing, and I ran it through three times. The only thing that I can confirm is that the blood that was found on Delaney’s body is a DNA match for one of the semen samples that were taken from Carole Lewis’s body.’

  ‘Thanks, Anthony. I know that you’ve been swamped. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Hey, anytime. Just sorry that it’s taken so long and, before you ask, I’ve been chasing down Naylor’s DNA results. I’m hoping for Monday morning at the latest.’

  ‘Was that good news?’ Ramouter asked.

  Henley repeated what Anthony had just told her. It was good news, but right now it had no value.

  ‘This is beyond frustrating,’ Ramouter said as they walked along the riverfront and towards the restaurant on Greenwich Pier.

  ‘Leon’s statement is not enough, and the ID isn’t enough either,’ said Henley.

  ‘But it gives us a date to work with. We can pinpoint when Sean Delaney was taken.’

  ‘That helps. I’m just wondering why he k
ept Delaney that much longer than the others.’

  ‘You saw the state of Delaney’s body,’ said Ramouter. ‘According to Linh he’d been dead at least four days before his body was dumped. It just makes me wonder, where had our copycat been keeping them? Pine lives on the fourth floor and you saw his flat – it’s small. And Naylor lives with his aunt and uncle. What if our copycat is keeping them somewhere else? Somewhere local.’

  He’s keeping them somewhere else. Henley thought back to the first time that they had met Dominic Pine at his flat. He had welcomed them in, but there had been something at the time that she couldn’t put her finger on. There had been a staleness to the flat. The dust, the old calendar on the wall. It had bought back memories of a fake identity case that she had worked on back when she was a trainee detective. Frederick Jankowski. A 58-year-old man had been using the identities of dead children in order to claim nearly a million pounds in benefits. When she had first visited his flat in Stockwell, it had smelled like an old suit that had been dumped in a charity shop. Musty as if the windows had never been opened. It turned out that Jankowski never lived in the flat. His real home was a large Victorian terrace in Kensington.

  ‘First thing tomorrow, let’s pay Pine another visit,’ Henley said to Ramouter.

  Chapter 84

  The depot for the Deptford London Ambulance Service was tucked between a row of terraced houses and a cash and carry, and set back behind gates.

  ‘How many ambulance services depots are there in London?’ Ramouter asked as Henley flashed her warrant card at the security camera.

  ‘Seventy. If I’m honest, I must have driven past this place a million times and never clocked it.’

  ‘There’s a lot to London,’ said Ramouter as he turned his attention to his side of the road where a young black girl with wild multicoloured hair sat on the ground. She was looking in Ramouter’s direction but straight through him. ‘Some poor sods think that the city will save them. How old do you reckon she is? Twenty-five?’

  Henley took a quick glance as she drove through the open gates. She couldn’t allow herself to feel any sympathy for a girl sitting in dirty shorts on a damp pavement.

  ‘We make our choices.’ Henley thought of the decisions she’d made that hadn’t benefited her or her family. ‘The world can age you.’

  ‘We thought that Dominic Pine would have been here,’ said Henley.

  ‘Why do you want to talk to Dom?’ asked the deputy station manager, Lisa, as they followed her through the control room, noisy with the sound of ringing phones and sirens.

  ‘We’re not at liberty to say, but it’s nothing for you to be concerned about it.’

  ‘He’s not in trouble, then?’

  ‘No. He isn’t.’

  ‘Hmm, and it’s too much wishful thinking that you’re here to tell us that you finally caught the bastards that broke in here last month and ransacked a couple of our ambulances?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with that.’

  ‘He’s one of our best,’ Lisa volunteered as she stopped at the lifts and pressed the button. The doors opened immediately. ‘That’s why I fought so hard for him to come back after all that nonsense.’

  ‘What nonsense would that be?’ Ramouter asked as he waited for Henley to step into the ancient lift.

  ‘All that prison stuff.’ Lisa had to raise her voice to be heard as the lift made a jaunty ascent. ‘He’s a good man. Works hard and if you ask me, what he did wasn’t wrong.’

  ‘But he broke the rules,’ Henley said. ‘The rules are in place for a reason.’

  Lisa tutted and rolled her eyes. Henley had the feeling that Lisa was going to launch into a well-worn rant.

  ‘Should he have done it? Should he have broken the court rules and told the other jurors about what he’d found out about the Jigsaw Killer?’ Lisa continued as the doors opened and they stepped out into an almost serene corridor. ‘Probably not. Was it worth putting him in prison for six months? Absolutely not. System is a joke. They were going to strike him off.’

  Henley tried to resist the urge to tell Lisa to shut up, but she doubted that anything would have stopped her so instead she asked, ‘Who was going to strike him off?’

  ‘Our ridiculous disciplinary board. Bunch of hypocrites. Otis, a guy who worked with me for fifteen years, and Dom’s old partner, had been tampering with the MDT in the ambulance—’

  ‘MDT?’ said Ramouter.

  Who the fuck is Otis? Henley thought to herself.

  ‘Mobile Data Tracking,’ Lisa stopped at the last office at the end of the corridor and knocked loudly. ‘It’s like GPS,’ she continued. ‘We use it to track our ambulances, see who is closest to the latest emergency. Otis used to turn it off and reset it so we could never get hold of him. Do you know what the board did when they found out? Suspended him for eight weeks, but with—’

  Lisa stopped talking as an Asian man in his mid-fifties opened the door. He extended a hand which Henley shook.

  ‘You must be DI Henley. I’m Ken Devi. The station manager. Thank you, Lisa, that will be all.’

  Ken led them into his office, which stood in complete contrast to the rest of the station. His desk was impeccably clean. Even Ramouter was starting to shift uncomfortably, as though he had just been called into the headmaster’s office.

  ‘Please take a seat. Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?’

  ‘No, we’re fine.’ Henley sat down in the chair in front of her.

  ‘OK, so. I’ve taken the liberty of printing out the information that you’ve requested. I must say that this has caused me a bit of embarrassment as I like to think that I’ve kept on top of these things, considering the problems that we’ve had in the past.’

  Henley could see that whatever Ken had discovered was causing him a lot of discontent. Ramouter raised an eyebrow at her.

  He handed a sheet of paper to Henley. ‘That is a list of all of the ambulances and fast response units that were dispatched from our station on 4 September between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. on 7 September. As you can see, we received a high number of emergency calls the evening of the sixth, which in itself isn’t unusual for a Friday night but—’

  ‘No vehicles were dispatched to the drug and alcohol centre on Comet Street in Catford?’ Henley handed the piece of paper to Ramouter.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Was Dominic Pine working that day?’ asked Henley.

  Ken nodded, causing his glasses to slide down his nose. He pushed them back up. ‘He was on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift.’

  ‘Who was his partner?’ Ramouter asked. Henley smiled to herself; she was about to ask the same question.

  ‘Dominic is one of our most experienced crew members, so he had been allocated to an FRU, that’s a Fast Response Unit. It makes sense as we’ve been short-staffed, and we can attend to more emergencies, so he didn’t have a partner, so to speak,’ Ken replied.

  ‘He was solo?’ Henley asked.

  ‘With the exception of when we’ve had him out training the new recruits, he’s been solo.’

  ‘You said Pine worked the six to six shift,’ said Henley.

  ‘Yes,’ Ken handed over another sheet of paper. ‘This a list of all the emergencies that Dominic was dispatched to. We track our ambulances and FRU with the MDT. Mobile Data Tracking. That way we can dispatch the nearest ambulance to the emergency. Dominic’s MDT was switched off between 9.22 p.m. and 11.37 p.m.’

  ‘On our way up here, Lisa was telling us about someone called Otis,’ said Ramouter.

  ‘I’m sure that Lisa enjoyed telling you that Otis was suspended for switching off his MDT,’ said Ken. ‘The one thing that Lisa and I can both agree on is that Otis should have been suspended.’

  ‘How long were Otis and Dominic partners?’

  ‘More than three years. I wouldn’t be surprised if Otis was the one who taught Dominic how to switch off the MDT.’

  ‘Pine had the MDT switched off for over two hours,’ said Henley. A two-hour win
dow would have been enough time for Pine to attend the detox centre and take Delaney. ‘Are you alerted when the MDT is switched off?’

  ‘No. All the person in the control room knows is that they can’t contact a particular ambulance. It’s imperative that we respond to an emergency within eight minutes, so they would have just moved on to the next one.’

  ‘In the past six months, how many times has Pine switched off the MDT?’

  ‘Seven times. The first couple of times were switched off for about three to five minutes before his shift ended back in June and July. But in the past six weeks, he’s turned it off four times. The last time was yesterday morning at 5.37 a.m. Just before his shift ended.’

  ‘Where is Pine now?’ asked Henley.

  ‘I’m assuming he would be at home. He swapped shifts with another colleague. Today is his day off.’

  Chapter 85

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said the sergeant who had been allocated the job of protecting Pine. He sounded as though he was half asleep. ‘Pine is working the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift. I dropped him off at the depot myself at quarter past five.’

  ‘We’ve just come back from the depot and his manager said that today is his day off,’ said Henley as she stood outside Pine’s front door. The door knocker was missing and the doorbell didn’t ring when Henley pressed it.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. I’ve got a copy of his rota and he’s working today and Monday.’

  Henley ended the call and dialled Pine’s number. She wasn’t surprised to hear the automated female voice tell her that the person she was trying to reach was unavailable. Ramouter’s face was against the window, peering through the yellowing net curtains, while Henley banged on the door with her fist.

  ‘Anything?’ she said to Ramouter, slamming the letterbox a few times.

  ‘Not that I can see,’ Ramouter replied. Henley kneeled down, and peered through the letterbox. All she could see was old carpet and an empty hallway that led to the kitchen.