Jigsaw Man (40 page)

She frowned, things slowly clicking into place. ‘Was this a couple of nights ago?'
She gave Tartaglia's address.

‘That's right. He'd been watching the house.'

‘So it was you. I saw you in the street when I was coming home. You ran off.'

‘Yeah. Sorry.'

‘We thought you were a journalist.' She felt dizzy and sat down on the edge of the
bed for a moment, as things started to slot into place in her mind. So Zaleski had
known all along that she was staying with Tartaglia. No doubt he had followed her
there from her own house the day after Claire's murder. It would have been easy,
nobody paying particular attention. Perhaps he didn't want to risk attacking her
at Tartaglia's. Or maybe, for reasons she couldn't fathom, he wanted to wait until
she was back at home to kill her. He was a sharp judge of character and he knew her
well enough. He rightly anticipated that she would eventually return. The anonymous
calls to the house had been made by him, as she had suspected, checking to see if
she was there.

‘Who is he?' Peter said, jerking his head in Zaleski's direction.

‘His name's Adam Zaleski and he's killed several people. If you thought he'd killed
your uncle, why didn't you go to the police?'

‘We didn't have any proof. We couldn't get access to my uncle's bank accounts or
anything, which is why I decided I had to find out more on my own. He called himself
Tom, but it was pretty clear it wasn't his real name. I kept an eye on him for a
few days and I searched his things, but there was nothing I could go to the police
with. He was equally suspicious of me and he did a rather amateurish job of following
me on a couple of occasions. I wanted to find out who he was, so I got a mate of
mine to nick his wallet. There was nothing in it apart from some cash and a couple
of my uncle's credit cards. Uncle Kit was pretty tight with his money. He'd never
have given his cards to anyone, so I knew then that something definitely must've
happened to him, but it was all still pretty circumstantial. Without Uncle Kit's
body, or anything else, I didn't think the police would take me seriously. I tried
to scare him into doing something to give himself away. I thought maybe if I kept
up the pressure he'd crack, but then I realised he had other plans. When he came
back to the house earlier this evening, he looked as though he was packing up his
things to make a run for it, so I followed him here.'

Too exhausted to reply, barely able to keep track of what he was saying, she stood
up. As she did so, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Zaleski's blood was
smeared and spattered over her face like war paint. She had told herself repeatedly
that somehow she would get through it and now, seeing her reflection, she realised
that finally she had. She was still alive and the nightmare was over.

‘Will you call the police?' she asked Ward, with a final glance at Zaleski. ‘Before
I do anything else, I need to get out of these disgusting clothes and take a shower.'

‘Of course. I'll wait for you downstairs.'

As he turned to leave, she heard the screech of tyres outside, followed by car doors
slamming and the sound of sirens coming at speed towards them down the street. Peter
crossed the room and peered out through the curtains.

‘Looks like the cavalry's already here.'

‘Can you go and let them in, please? I don't want them breaking down the front door.'

Forty-six

‘Drop me here,' Tartaglia said to Minderedes, as they turned the corner of Shepherd's
Bush Road into Brook Green. It was just past seven in the morning. The sky was dark
and heavy with cloud, a light drizzle falling. He had been cooped up in overheated,
airless rooms all night and he wanted to walk the last few blocks to his flat in
order to clear his head. He was looking forward to a shower and maybe a quick nap
before the questioning of Simpson resumed later that morning. He hated all-night
sessions but it had been worth it.

He had arrived at Sam Donovan's house to find her alive and Zaleski dead. Donovan
had been taken to Hammersmith Police station, along with a man called Peter Ward
who had also been at the house, and who claimed that Zaleski had murdered his uncle
out in Thailand. Ward was an officer in the Parachute Regiment, lately returned from
Afghanistan. He had an unblemished military record, according to his direct superior,
who had been woken up in the middle of the night to confirm his story. Ward described
how his mother, his uncle's much older half-sister, had become worried when she had
failed to speak to her brother on his birthday, something which she had done every
year. When she tried to contact him via email, the replies had been uncharacteristic
and had set off alarm bells, but the local Thai police had said there was nothing
amiss. They had sent somebody over to Kit's house and been told that Kit had gone
away. They didn't seem to want to inquire further. Next thing Ward and his
mother
heard, the shutters in the house in Bedford Gardens were open and lights were on
in the house, as confirmed by one of the next-door neighbours who used to keep an
eye on the place when Kit was away. When they had tried ringing the house, a strange
man had answered, saying that Kit was still out in Thailand. Ward had then watched
the house on and off for a couple of days and had seen a man coming and going, and
sleeping in his Uncle Kit's bedroom at the front, but there was no sign of his uncle.
Deciding to find out more, he had moved in and shared Kit's house with Zaleski for
a few days, while keeping him under surveillance with the help of some friends. He
had given the police a log of some of Adam Zaleski's movements over that time, which
included a visit to his former home in Ealing. There, just a year before, he had
attempted to murder Sam Donovan, before setting fire to the house and disappearing
abroad, his last recorded whereabouts being on a plane out of Paris' Charles de Gaulle
airport bound for Indonesia. Tartaglia had also nearly died in that fire at Zaleski's
house and he wondered what Zaleski had felt as he sat, apparently for nearly three
quarters of an hour, in Kit's car outside the burnt and boarded-up shell of the home
where he had lived for almost all his life.

The little they had managed to piece together previously of Adam Zaleski's background
revealed that he was the child of a young woman of Polish descent who had committed
suicide shortly after he had been born. He had been taken in by elderly grandparents
and there was anecdotal evidence of Zaleski having suffered physical abuse, both
at home and at the Catholic school where he had been sent. By all accounts he had
hated his grandparents, and it seemed likely that he had murdered at least one, if
not both, of them in that house, as well as others too. Tartaglia couldn't begin
to imagine what
memories the house must have conjured up for Zaleski, as he sat in
the fading light gazing at what was left of it. But he had no interest in whether
it was nurture or nature that had shaped Zaleski into a predatory and cold-blooded
killer. Endless analysis of a killer's background and childhood often missed the
point: some people simply enjoyed killing.

What exactly had happened at the Donovans' house was still unclear, but he had managed
to speak briefly to Sam before she was taken away to be interviewed formally by others
elsewhere in the building. He was struck by how normal she appeared, all things
considered, and he felt deeply relieved. Rather than scar her, the horrifying events
leading up to Zaleski's death seemed to have had a cathartic effect. The dark cloud
that had hung over her had lifted. Although exhausted, she seemed more positive than
he had seen her in a long while, much more like her old self. She had actually smiled
at him and allowed him to put his arms around her. Speaking to Steele later, the
general view was that in the circumstances, Donovan had used reasonable force to
defend herself and was unlikely to be charged.

Rounding the corner into his street, he saw the familiar white TR6 parked half up
on the pavement immediately outside his house. His first instinct was to turn away,
but it would just be putting off the inevitable. He jogged up to the car and peered
in. The windows were misted with condensation but he could just make out the shape
of Melinda fully reclined in the driver's seat, apparently asleep. He rapped on the
glass and saw her start. Peering dazedly up at him, she cranked down the window.

‘What are you doing here?' he asked.

Melinda yawned. ‘You woke me.'

‘Why are you here?'

‘You know why. We need to talk.' She stretched her eyes open wide, blinked a couple
of times, then rolled the window up again. Gathering her things together, she climbed
stiffly out of the car and he held out his hand to steady her. She wasn't dressed
for the cold and she shivered, pulling her short leather jacket tightly around herself
as she locked the car.

‘I've been here for bloody hours,' she said plaintively, licking her finger and rubbing
away smudges of mascara from under her eyes.

‘You should get yourself a transit.'

‘Ha, ha. Why wouldn't you return my calls?'

‘I've been a bit busy.'

‘I thought we had a deal. What's been going on?'

How much should he tell her, he wondered, as he turned and walked away towards the
front door.

She followed him inside, into his flat.

‘Sit there,' he said, pointing to the sofa. ‘I'll make us some coffee and then we
can talk.'

Melinda sank down in the middle of it, proceeding to unzip her ankle boots and rub
her feet. He went over to the player and selected some music, then walked down the
corridor to the kitchen. He packed some coffee into a pot, filled it with water,
and put it on the stove, replaying in his mind the events of the night as he worked
out which parts he should tell her and which to edit out. There would be an official
briefing later, but he had no problem giving her a lead. If it hadn't been for her,
they might still be scrabbling around in the dark.

The fire at the house in Castelnau had been put out quite quickly. The main structure
of the building appeared relatively undamaged by the explosion, which had been set
off in a dustbin just outside the back door, more as a diversion than anything else.
A thorough search revealed a maze of passages
and small, windowless coal cellars
leading from the garage to the basement of the house. An old-fashioned wooden workbench
was pushed up against a wall in one of the cellars and although it had been scrubbed
clean, the surface tested positive for blood, which they assumed was human. Beside
it, stowed in a small tool chest, were a series of very sharp knives, an electric
saw, a hacksaw with a serrated blade, and a couple of pairs of meat shears, along
with several long upholstery-style needles and butcher's twine. In a small fridge
they found an opened bag of Transglutaminase – known as TG, or meat glue, in the
catering trade – used to bond flesh together. There were more bags in the two freezer
chests alongside, which also contained a selection of human body parts, all neatly
dated, vacuum packed and labelled: Jane. Jake. John. Marek. The body parts would
be subject to a series of post-mortems which, in the absence of a full and detailed
confession from Simpson, might at least offer some idea of how they had died. DNA
testing was also expected to confirm that they matched the body parts found in the
Sainsbury's and Aldford fires. They would try to trace Nowak's family in Poland for
DNA confirmation. According to Chantal, she had only started coming to the house
a few months before and claimed not to know anything about what Simpson had kept
locked up in the garage. She looked so genuinely horrified when Minderedes told her,
that Tartaglia decided to believe her.

He generally avoided speculating about why a killer behaved in a particular way.
Sometimes their actions were designed to play games with the police and media and
also to shock. It was often just a smokescreen. But he didn't feel this was true
of Simpson. His behaviour shed some genuine light on his personality. In the absence
of any insight yet from Simpson himself, it was all they had. If he had been asked
to characterise Simpson,
he would have described him as angry, vengeful and damaged,
yet his actions spoke of an orderly, practical mind. In spite of everything that
had happened to him, Simpson had sobered up and reinvented himself after coming out
of jail. Maybe the regeneration wouldn't have been complete without getting even
with English. One thing then led to another. Perhaps killing English had failed
to satisfy him. Or maybe the opposite was true: perhaps it had given him a taste
for revenge, a desire to put his chaotic world back into some sort of order. However
much emotion had played a part in the murder of Richard English, the planning and
execution of Jake Finnigan's murder showed all the cold, calculating traits of a
psychopath.

Why Simpson had dismembered Jane Waterman's body when she had been so kind to him,
Tartaglia couldn't fathom. But maybe as far as Simpson was concerned, the answer
was purely practical. She was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it. He
was used to butchering the carcases of dead animals during his daily working routine
and it was just a way of dealing with the awkward question of what to do with her
body so that he could remain undisturbed in the security of the house. That had been
his overwhelming priority. It then made sense to do the same with the bodies of John
Smart, Marek Nowak and Jake Finnigan. Why Simpson had chosen to sew the body parts
together and set fire to them in a public way could only be guessed at. Was he seeking
some sort of recognition for what he had done? Why else leave Richard English's wallet
at the scene of the Sainsbury's fire? English's murder would never have been discovered
without it. Perhaps Simpson was just thumbing his nose at the authorities. Or, in
mixing the parts up together, he was trying to depersonalise the victims and render
them anonymous. In any event, it was about power and taking control, something that
had been
badly lacking in Simpson's own life. He thought of what Melinda had said.
Like Frankenstein, the composite bodies that Simpson set on fire had become his creations.
God-like, he could give and he could take away. Remembering the way the boy had described
him at the Aldford fire, he had probably taken pleasure watching them go up so publically
in smoke.