Jigsaw Man (3 page)

‘What about the hotel staff ?'

‘We're taking statements from anyone still here who was on duty last night. I can
give you the full list of names.'

Tartaglia looked at Minderedes. ‘You'd better start waking up the guests as soon
as the rest of the team gets here.'

‘A few are already up,' Johnson said, ‘but we told them to go back to their rooms.
We've closed off the second floor entirely, so nobody can go in or out. We've left
the main stairs open but we've stopped access to the lifts and the back stairs unless
authorised. Do you want to take it any further than that?'

Tartaglia shook his head. ‘That's fine for now. Just make sure nobody leaves the
hotel until they've been spoken to and their IDs have been checked.' Theoretically,
he would have liked to lock down the entire hotel, but it wouldn't be practical.

‘Have you got a map of this place?' he asked.

Johnson handed him a sheet of paper. ‘This is the ground floor.'

‘What about cameras?'

‘There are a few dotted around, here and here,' he said, marking the paper for Tartaglia.
‘It's pretty minimal coverage, though. The manager gave me some spiel about guests
needing their privacy. I suppose they get their fair share of celebs here,
but luckily
there's a camera at reception, so we should be able to get a visual of Herring.'

‘Where's Security?' Minderedes asked.

‘In the basement, next to the gym,' Johnson replied.

‘Start with that,' Tartaglia said to Minderedes. ‘I'll come and find you when I'm
done with the crime scene.'

‘The CSM was looking for you,' Johnson said to Tartaglia, as Minderedes disappeared
out of the door. ‘She's still up in the room. I can take you there now, if you're
ready. This place is like a rabbit warren.'

‘Carry on with what you were doing. I'll find it myself.' He wanted to be on his
own for a minute. Try and clear his thoughts. The room where he had been with Jannicke
had been on the first floor at the front of the building, not that he'd paid much
attention to the location at the time. He remembered using the main stairs by reception
and that was about it. He wondered whether she was already up and getting dressed,
and if he would bump into her at some point. It would be a little awkward, but he
felt no real embarrassment.

‘It's number 212, at the back of the building,' Johnson said, following him out of
the snug. ‘There's a lift that gets you out right by the room. Go through the bar,
and you'll come to it.'

Tartaglia glanced at the map. The hotel was a rectangle, with four wings built around
a long central courtyard. He remembered reading in some blurb the previous night
that the rear wing had once been a small theatre or cinema. The bar was empty and
silent, apart from the distant sound of a hoover, and the strong smell of cleaning
products hung in the air. Grey early-morning light filtered in through the row of
tall windows and the room looked more austere and less welcoming than he remembered
it. As he passed the table where he and Gianni had been sitting only a few hours
before, he wondered what
time Gianni had left and whether he had gone home on his
own.

The lift was outside the entrance to the restaurant. He heard the clatter of plates
and cutlery and saw staff through the glass panel of the door preparing for breakfast.
He showed his ID to the uniformed PC guarding the lift, then took it up to the second
floor. Breakfast TV blasted from one of the rooms nearby. It wouldn't be long before
people would be up and about and the usual complaints would start about being delayed
and having to account for themselves, along with the inevitable, probing, ghoulish
curiosity.

The section of corridor between the lift and room 212 had been taped off and a pathway
marked out on the carpet leading to the door. Tartaglia helped himself to protective
clothing from a box on the floor and was about to head towards the room when he saw
Tracy Jamieson, the crime scene manager, emerging from the lift behind him.

‘There you are,' she said cheerily. ‘I was wondering when you'd get here.'

‘Why are you so perky this morning?'

‘No reason. I tried calling you but some funny bloke answered your phone.' Tall and
athletic, she was fully suited and masked, but he could tell from her brown eyes
that she was smiling.

‘I left it in a taxi last night.'

‘Ah . . . These things happen. I'm afraid I had to make a start without you.'

‘So where are we?' he asked, grateful that she wasn't going to make a song and dance
about it.

‘As you can see, we've cleared a path so you can go into the room. It looked sexual,
so I asked for a pathologist.'

‘Who's on call?'

‘Arabella. She's already been and gone. She's pretty certain, from a quick visual,
that cause of death is manual strangulation. There's clear bruising to the neck
and very obvious petechial haemorrhaging. She took some intimate swabs so we don't
lose anything, but said the rest could wait until later.'

‘Was the woman killed in the room?'

‘We think so. On the bed. Someone's pummelled the right side of her face. She was
still alive, judging by the swelling and bruising and the amount of blood on the
sheets. I've examined the areas of exposed skin and she's now ready to go. I want
to get her out of here before the world wakes up, so they'll be bringing a stretcher
up any minute now.'

‘Do we have an ID?'

Jamieson shook her head. ‘She's in her underwear but her clothes and personal things
are gone, apart from an overcoat and a pair of heels in the cupboard.'

He wasn't thinking clearly, but the most obvious solution was that the killer had
taken her clothes and personal things for some reason. Why he had left the shoes
and coat behind was another matter.

‘How far have you got with the room?' he asked.

‘Nothing interesting so far. The photos and video are done. I can walk you through
it all later, if you want. We'll do light-sourcing and fingerprints but, given it's
a hotel, how far do you want to take it?'

‘That's fine for now. I'll just take a quick look at the room, then I'll get back
downstairs.'

Jamieson led the way to the door and clicked it open with a passkey, saying, ‘I'll
be back in a minute.'

Inside, a room-service trolley was parked up against a wall of the small internal
lobby. An unopened bottle of champagne stood in a watery ice bucket beside two unused
flutes. He
pulled it out and looked at the label. Krug. No ordinary champagne, he
noted, wondering how much a bottle would set you back in such a place. He lifted
the metal covers off two plates. Half a dozen oysters beneath one; some sort of white
fish under the other, with a gravy boat of what looked like congealed Hollandaise
under a napkin on the side. So, the killer rings down to room service and orders
food. Things must have been going well up to that point. Then something goes wrong
and half an hour later, the woman's dead. Was that what had happened? It didn't quite
stack up.

There was a small marble-clad bathroom to one side. The lights were on and he gave
it a cursory look before pushing open the bedroom door. As he went in, he was hit
by a blast of chill air. Someone had been sick on the floor just inside the room.
The waiter, he assumed, or someone else from the hotel. The room was spacious and
almost identical to Jannicke's, with a modern black four-poster bed pushed up against
one wall, a desk in one corner and a couple of armchairs grouped around a coffee
table. The heavy red-striped curtains were still drawn, as they had been the previous
night, and the lighting was very dim. Even so, he could see that the bed looked as
though it had been hit by a typhoon, sheets and duvet half on the floor, pillows
and cushions scattered around. The victim lay across the bed on her side, dark hair
covering her face, her body partially hidden under a tangle of blood-stained sheets.
He had never had a problem being alone with a body before, but he found it all suddenly
oppressive and, in the shadowy light, felt strangely disorientated, almost intoxicated
again. His vision blurred and for a moment he saw another woman lying before him,
looking up at him, mouth slightly open, as if about to say something. It was as though
no time had passed, he was in a room on the opposite side of the courtyard, it was
still
night outside, and he had never left the hotel. He blinked and shook his head.
Maybe he was still drunk. He would get some strong black coffee as soon as he was
done. He heard a noise and turned to find Jamieson in the doorway, holding a large,
folded plastic sheet.

‘Was this how you found her?' he asked a little abruptly, trying to recover himself.

‘More or less. Arabella didn't need to shift her much to get what she wanted.'

He looked again at the scene in front of him, the chaos of the bed, the blood, the
body lying untidily in the midst as though it had been violently discarded. He would
study the photographs and video that had been taken but it looked as though there
had been quite a struggle. Frenzy was the word that came to mind.

‘Were there any defence wounds?'

‘Doesn't look like it.'

‘What about restraint marks?'

‘Again, nothing Arabella commented on.'

He frowned, surprised. He would call Arabella Browne later for more of an insight.
Also, if the victim was drunk or had been drugged, it would show up on the toxicology report. Hopefully, the post mortem and forensic analysis would reveal more clues.
He gazed around the room again. Apart from the area immediately around the bed, he
was struck by how tidy it all was, nothing out of place. The air conditioning was
making a racket above him and he suddenly felt very cold. He checked the thermostat
on the wall. It was on the ‘Low' setting, reading sixteen degrees, with the fan turned
up to the maximum.

‘Did anybody change the thermostat?'

‘No. It's been like this since I got here. Wish I'd put on my thermals.'

He frowned again, wondering why somebody might have deliberately turned down the
thermostat when it was only a few degrees above zero outside. It was hardly conducive
to a romantic atmosphere.

‘You say her clothes are gone. Did you find anything belonging to the man who booked
the room?'

‘No.'

He made a mental note to ask if Herring had checked in with luggage and if anybody
had taken it up to the room. Unless the victim had left her things in another room
in the hotel, Herring would have needed something to carry them in, something that
wouldn't draw attention to him when he left the hotel in the early hours of the morning.

Jamieson unfolded the plastic sheeting and spread it out on the bed beside the body.

‘Can you give me a hand?'

Together they rolled the woman over onto her face and Jamieson started to untangle
the bed sheet from the body's legs. ‘Hang on. Take a look at this,' she said, indicating
the back of the woman's thighs.

He peered over her shoulder. Faint, uneven red lines crisscrossed the woman's skin
in places.

‘We need some light,' Jamieson said, unzipping the front of her suit. She pulled
out a small torch, which was hanging on a cord around her neck, and shone it on the
woman's legs. The white beam illuminated what looked like a series of crudely formed
capital letters. At first Tartaglia thought they had been tattooed on the victim's
skin, but looking closer he realised that they had been scored by something sharp,
deep into her flesh. There was no bleeding, so the cuts had been made postmortem.

‘Did you find a knife or anything with a blade?' he asked.

She shook her head, peering at the marks. ‘Whatever it is, the blade's really fine
and sharp. Like a Stanley knife.'

‘He may have taken it with him, but we should be looking at corridors, bins, stairwells,
drains, anywhere close where he might have ditched it. I'll get a search team onto
it right away. Can you read what it says?'

‘ “E” something, then “O” something, then “S” something. The last bit looks like
“Som”. She crouched down until her eyes were almost level with the top of the woman's
legs. ‘That's better. I can read it now. “
ERIS QUOD SUM.
”'

He squinted, but still couldn't see clearly. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. I'm pretty sure.'

She passed him the torch and he crouched down beside her, angling the beam until
he could make out the letters clearly. Eris Quod Sum. She was right. It was part
of a familiar quote, although he couldn't remember what it was from.
Eram quod es.
Eris quod sum
. He looked up and met her gaze. ‘It's Latin,' he said. ‘You find it
on gravestones. It's the dead speaking to the living. “I once was what you are now.
What I am, you will be.” Basically, we're all going to die.'

‘How very ominous. I didn't know you spoke ancient Italian.'

‘Benefits of a good Catholic education,' he said, getting to his feet. ‘Did Arabella
see this?'

‘No. She was in and out of here like greased lightning. Sounded like she had the
flu.'

‘I'll catch up with her later, then.' It would have been useful to have Arabella
Browne's initial input right away, but it could wait.

‘Who's the message for, do you think? It's pretty ominous.'

He grimaced. His head ached and he had seen enough for now. ‘It's probably a wind-up.
CSI
gives them all sorts of
creative ideas. Let's get her out of here ASAP. I need
to get back downstairs.'

They rolled the woman onto her back and as Jamieson moved to bag up her feet and
hands, Tartaglia glanced automatically towards the woman's face. His mind was already
sorting through a quick priority list of things to be done next, but something caught
his attention, some sort of fleeting impression of familiarity that made him pause.
He looked at the woman again, hoping that it was a trick of the dim, shadowy light
or his own tiredness and state of mind. Her face was bloodied and disfigured on one
side by the beating she had received. Death also had a way of robbing a person of
their humanity and turning loved ones into strangers. Still unsure, he moved over
to the other side of the bed and as he brushed back the remaining hair from her face,
the breath caught in his throat. Unable to speak, he blinked, studying every detail
and contour, hoping that somehow he was mistaken.