Jigsaw Man Read Online Free

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