Jigsaw Man (35 page)

‘I know it sounds daft, but someone told me they'd lost a chef at one of the hotels
so there was a good job going begging. Chefs with Dave's talent don't grow on trees.
Richard knew that what happened at Stoneleigh Park that night was as much his fault
as Dave's. He'd had his pound of flesh and Dave had more than paid for what he'd
done, so . . .'

‘English doesn't strike me as a man with much of a conscience, and I understand your
husband had problems.'

‘Dave used to be an alcoholic, but he kicked the booze when he was inside. He was
sober all the time he was living with us.' She stared at him almost defiantly for
a moment, then shrugged. ‘I thought it was worth a try, at any rate.
Anything
was
worth a try from where I was standing, with the rent to pay and three of us to feed
and Dave sitting on his arse all day while I went out to work.'

‘But your husband didn't see it that way?'

‘No. He got really angry. He said he'd rather walk under a bus than go grovelling
back to Richard. He said Richard was to blame for everything that'd gone wrong in
his life. He was still seething about it all when I came home that night.'

‘Were you worried when he didn't reappear?'

She looked him straight in the eye and shook her head. ‘Not to start with. I thought
maybe he was trying to teach me a lesson, or maybe he'd gone out and got pissed,
like old times. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, and they say it just takes
one drink to tip you over the edge again. I thought if he'd fallen off the wagon,
he'd be feeling too ashamed of himself to come home. Even so, I was sure he'd toddle
back eventually, tail between his legs. But then a couple of days went by and I did
start to get worried. I thought something must've happened, that maybe he'd had an
accident, so I called the police. They weren't much help, particularly when they
found out he'd come out of prison only a few months back. They said he'd probably
turn up again.'

She was still looking at him and he saw the emotion in her eyes. He decided she was
telling the truth and that she did care what had happened to her husband. ‘So you
have no idea what happened to him?'

‘No.'

‘His parole officer told us he'd had some sort of a breakdown in jail,' he said.

‘He should never have been put inside in the first place. He needed help, not punishment.
And something really horrible happened to him while he was in there.'

‘I know. I've seen the report.'

‘It sent him over the edge for a while. When he came out, he was a different person.'

‘How would you describe his character?' Motive was one thing, but it didn't sound
as though Simpson was capable of the cold bloodedness and calculation required for
the killings.

She sighed wearily. ‘What can I say? He was a bit of a loner. Although he liked to
go out drinking with the other kitchen
staff after they finished their shift, he
didn't have any really close mates. He was quite shy, quite inside himself, if you
know what I mean. I never really knew what was going on with him, most of the time.'

‘He must have been pretty organised and disciplined to run a big kitchen and earn
a Michelin star. Yet he sounds as though he was all over the place, even before he
went to jail?'

‘When I first met Dave, he was full of energy and dreams. He wanted to be this great
chef. He'd left school at sixteen and worked his way up from the bottom. He was so
hungry for it. I've never seen anybody work so bloody hard . . .'

‘So what went wrong?'

‘Success, I suppose, and all the stuff that goes with it. If you've got one star,
you then need to go for the second. What made it worse was that Richard had promised
him shares in the business, but he kept delaying and delaying, stringing Dave along.
It was almost sadistic. Dave couldn't cope with the pressure.'

‘You said he was a different person when he came out of prison.'

She nodded. ‘He was very bitter, very angry. It was eating him up. Maybe being sober
made him think about things, about his life and what he'd done, how he'd screwed
up his chances. Seeing it all in the cold light of day, there was no escape I guess.
I couldn't blame him, but all the fun had gone out of him. When he was drinking he
wasn't great to be with, but I didn't much like the new, sober, Dave either.' She
folded her small, plump hands on the table in front of her and looked down at them.
‘All I know is that something'd changed in him and then he disappeared.'

‘You said you didn't care where he is or how he is, but you do think he's still alive?'

Biting her lip, she looked up at him and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.
‘A few months after he went missing, a friend of mine saw him at a petrol station.
He blanked her, but she was sure it was Dave. I realised then that he'd just walked
out on us. Couldn't even be bothered to let me know he was OK.'

‘Does he have any family who might be putting him up?'

‘His parents split up when he was young. His dad died a few years back and he didn't
get on with his mum. He spent a couple of years in care and he said the people were
really kind, but that's as much as I know. He never talked about anyone else. What
is it you want with him?'

‘What about mates?'

She shook her head, staring hard at him, then asked softly. ‘What's Dave done, Inspector?'

‘Maybe nothing.'

Tears began running down her cheeks. ‘Please tell me. If he's been involved in something,
I need to know. I'm still his wife. Daisy's his daughter.'

‘We need to find your husband. To talk to him. Hopefully, that will be all. Do you
have
any
idea where he is?'

She took a tissue from her sleeve, blew her nose loudly, then slowly nodded. ‘There's
one place I'd try. When my friend saw him at the petrol station, he was with this
woman. From the way my friend described her, I'm pretty sure she's someone who used
to work at the hotel. She used to hang around Dave like he was some sort of god.
She caused no end of trouble.'

‘You mean Chantal Blomet?' He failed to hide his surprise. Wondering why he hadn't
picked up on it, he tried to remember precisely what Chantal had said. It had been
a brief interview, and what with learning that Simpson had beaten up
Richard English
and been sent to jail, his mind had been on other things.

‘You think he's with her now?'

She looked up at him, curious. ‘You know her, then? If he's spinning her stories
about a new restaurant and all that stuff, she'll probably still be hanging around.
She's like an effing limpet. He couldn't get rid of her even if he wanted to.'

He thought again of how Price had described Chantal, and her words rang true. ‘Do
you have any photos of your husband?'

‘I've got a few put away somewhere for Daisy. Give me a moment and I'll take a look.'

She was gone a couple of minutes, finally returning with an A4 envelope. ‘Here you
go,' she said, sitting down and handing it to him.

He spread the small collection of photographs on the table. The majority were formal
pictures from their wedding, and there were pictures of Simpson with his daughter
as a baby. Simpson looked more or less the same as in his arrest photograph, an
overweight, latter-day Billy Idol.

‘Do you have anything more recent?' he asked, handing them back to her.

‘There'll be something on my phone. I've got hundreds. I haven't had time to go through
them all and delete the ones of Dave.'

She went out of the room again, returning a moment later with her mobile. She stood
beside him, tabbing through, until finally she said: ‘Here. This is him. It was at
a friend's housewarming, just a few days before he disappeared.' She turned the
screen towards him.

Ellie Simpson was in the middle of the image, wearing a silver spangled jumper, flanked
by two much taller men.
Neither of the men looked like the Dave Simpson from the
file.

‘Which one is your husband?' he asked.

‘The one on the left.'

‘He had blond hair in the other photos. May I take a closer look?'

‘He used to bleach his hair,' she said, handing him the phone. ‘Getting beaten up
in prison didn't help either. He looks completely different, doesn't he?'

He enlarged the image. The resolution wasn't great but it was as though he was looking
at a different man. The post-jail Dave Simpson was several stone thinner and much
more wiry. The softness had gone and his face looked haggard, as though he'd aged
twenty years.

‘I hated him with long hair like that,' she said. ‘It suited him better when it was
short.'

She said something else but he wasn't listening any more. He realised where he had
seen Simpson before and sat back in the chair, still staring at the screen. He suddenly
felt awake for the first time that day, as though somebody had poured a bucket of
ice-cold water over him. Automatically he handed her back the phone, put his hands
flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet.

‘Can you email it to me at this address?' He handed her his business card. ‘Can you
do it right now?'

Outside in the street, as he ran towards where Minderedes was waiting in the BMW,
he called Steele and explained.

Forty-two

Tartaglia tucked the torch away in his pocket and sprang upwards, grasping the large
overhanging branch of the tree close to its base. He used the trunk for purchase
and slowly hauled himself up into the wide crook, swinging his leg over so that he
was sitting astride the branch. In the distance, he saw the bobbing lights of the
torches belonging to Minderedes and two uniformed police officers coming towards
him from the car park. They were in a stretch of grassland belonging to the London
Wetlands nature reserve, which lay at the back of a large section of Castelnau to
the east, bordered on the other side by the river. The centre had already closed
for the day when they got there and it had taken a while to find somebody to open
the gates for them.

The tree overlooked the back of Jane Waterman's house and gave him a good temporary
vantage point. The house stood about a hundred feet away beyond a high wall, the
roof and turrets silhouetted against the night sky. The garden was impressively large,
with a lawn and flowerbeds and what looked like a gazebo in one corner. A quick recce
had shown that the surrounding walls were too tall to climb, so they had sent for
ladders and lights. In the dark, it was unlikely that anybody looking out of a window
would see him; not that anybody appeared to be home. The curtains were open, with
no lights on anywhere. He might be waiting there for a while, he thought, shifting
his position to make himself more comfortable.

The Polo had gone from the drive when he walked past the front of the house twenty
minutes earlier, and there were no lights on at the front. Having asked permission
of the neighbours on either side, Wightman, Chang and another couple of uniformed
policemen were lying in wait in their front gardens, well hidden from the street
and from the house where Tartaglia had last seen Dave Simpson. Simpson was linked
to Richard English, Jake Finnigan and, now, via Jane Waterman's house, to John Smart,
but everything else was speculation. They intended to arrest Simpson and had a warrant
to search the premises, but they also needed confirmation that Simpson and the man
known as ‘Spike' were one and the same. Hannah Bird wasn't answering her phone, so
he had eventually had to track down Sharon Fuller at home, where she had just started
cooking dinner for her family, and send her off to Peckham to see Mrs Tier with a
printout of the photo that Ellie Simpson had emailed him.

He had been up in the tree for a good twenty minutes when he received a text from
Wightman:

Red VW Polo just pulled up on drive

Is it Simpson?
Tartaglia texted back.

No. Single young female occupant. Now going inside house.

Tartaglia told him to wait and do nothing. Simpson was the priority. He had borrowed
a pair of binoculars from the Wetlands office and as he scanned the rear of the house,
a light came on at the back and Chantal Blomet entered the kitchen. They had been
trying to track her down via the hotel where she worked, without success. At least
now they
would be saved further trouble. He watched as she took off her coat and
scarf, hung them over a chair, then started to unpack the contents of a couple of
shopping bags. Moving quickly backwards and forwards between the fridge and the cupboard,
she seemed very at home. When she was finished, she switched on the kettle and sat
down at the table. She took a mobile phone out of her handbag, stared at the screen
for a moment, then put the phone back in her bag, made her coffee and carried it
out of the kitchen. A few seconds later a series of lights came on and he watched
her go upstairs to what looked like a bathroom on the first floor. She pulled down
the blind.

‘Find out what's happened to the ladders,' he whispered to one of the uniformed officers
standing below. ‘Go back to the wildlife centre and call from there. I don't want
any noise out here.'

About ten minutes later, he felt his phone vibrate again; another text:

Man on foot. Looks like Simpson. Going in through front door. What shall we do?

Wait. I'll come round to you

He watched the windows for a moment, but no more lights came on inside and there
was no sign of Simpson. He had probably gone straight upstairs to see Chantal. Tartaglia
slid over onto his front and dropped down to the thick, soggy turf below.