‘You’re joking, aren’t you? It’s Saturday.’
Rob stood in the bathroom doorway as Henley knelt by the side of the bath, holding on to Emma, who was pretending to swim.
‘It’s only for a couple of hours,’ said Henley.
‘You shouldn’t be going in at all. We have plans.’
‘It’s a children’s party. Simon will understand.’
‘You’re just looking for an excuse to get out of it.’
‘I’m not. It’s my nephew’s birthday. I promise that I will be back in time. I’m not going to miss it.’
‘That’s not the point and you know it. You’re letting this case take over. Exactly like the last one.’
‘I can’t just leave my team to get on with it. I thought that you understood that.’
‘I do understand, but this is shit.’
‘Don’t swear in front of Ems. Pass me her towel.’
Rob moved sullenly from the doorway and handed Henley the pink towel from the rail.
‘Is Stephen going to be there?’
Henley didn’t answer as she lifted Emma out from the bath and wrapped the towel around her.
‘Well, is he?’
‘Stop trying to make this into something that it isn’t,’ Henley replied. ‘Of course he’s going to be there. It’s work. Believe me, no one wants to be at the SCU on a Saturday.’
Henley focused on drying Emma. She wasn’t going to rise to it.
‘Come on, baby,’ she said to Emma. ‘Let’s get you dressed. Mummy has to go to work.’
Rob sighed heavily as he realised that he was fighting a losing battle. ‘Just make sure that you’re back by one,’ Rob said as Henley picked up Emma and walked down the hallway towards their bedroom.
‘The desecration of the body is clearly overkill,’ said Dr Mark Ryan.
‘I thought that chopping up a body into pieces was overkill,’ said Stanford.
Despite the fact that no one in the SCU had been paid for overtime since April the team was all there. Mark looked directly at Stanford, who was sitting on his desk in the incident room, sharing a tube of salt-and-vinegar Pringles with Eastwood. There was no love between Mark and Stanford. Stanford was of the opinion that criminal profilers were overpaid for pointing out the obvious. Mark, who objected to the title profiler and maintained that he was a forensic psychologist, had made it clear that he thought Stanford was arrogant, untrustworthy and insecure.
‘Stanford, behave.’ Henley poured a brown sugar packet into her tea and took a bite of her McDonald’s hash brown. Her diet really had gone to shit.
‘The dismembering of the body wasn’t overkill,’ Mark said sternly. ‘This all about cruelty. People like Olivier have suppressed their pain and rage for years. Their pain usually stems from a trauma in their past.’
‘But what triggered him? You don’t suddenly wake up one morning feeling a bit mardy and decide to go on a killing spree, and why not stop at killing them?’ asked Ramouter. He leaned forward, clearly intrigued. This was what Henley liked about Mark, what made him so good with juries when he was appearing as an expert witness.
‘Because dismemberment is a release. The killing isn’t enough. Olivier is a psychopath. For him, cutting up the bodies and displaying them in public was a reflection of his disrespect, grandiosity and narcissism. He took pride in his work, which is the only emotion that he would feel.’
‘You don’t need a bloody degree to work that out,’ Stanford muttered under his breath.
Henley screwed up the greasy McDonald’s bag and threw it at Stanford’s head. ‘Stop,’ she said. Stanford mouthed sorry and bent down to pick up the screwed-up bag.
‘Our copycat, on the other hand, is different.’ Mark began to pace the room like a college lecturer. As much as he openly expressed his dislike for the Hollywood myth of the criminal profiler, he did enjoy the audience.
‘For copycat killers, it’s all about attention. This person probably has the same psychological issues as Olivier. A loner. Childhood trauma. Psychopathic traits, but the difference is that there is also an inferiority complex. Our copycat isn’t interested in the cat-and-mouse game of you catching him. He wants recognition and even approval from Olivier.’
Stanford snorted as Dr Ryan stopped at his desk, looked straight at him and smirked.
‘The copycat’s ego will always come into play. They will try, in some small way, to make the crime their own.’
‘That would explain the use of the muscle relaxant and the missing parts,’ said Henley.
‘Exactly. There are two types of serial killers. Those who are act-focused and those who are process-focused,’ said Dr Ryan.
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Henley.
‘Olivier is act focused. He kills quickly because it’s all about expressing his rage, but your copycat is process-focused. Incapacitating them so that they can see their limbs being removed, watching them die and then further mutilating their bodies. He kills slowly because he gains enjoyment from the torture. Olivier’s main motivation was revenge. Your copycat is killing because he likes it.’
Dr Ryan stopped walking and the room grew silent. Henley pushed aside her half-eaten bacon and egg McMuffin. She had lost her appetite.
‘I’ve given up Arsenal at home for this,’ said Stanford. ‘Tell us something that we don’t know.’
‘Who should we be looking for?’ Henley jumped in. ‘Is it just an obsessed fan or someone actually connected to Olivier?’
‘If it was just an obsessed fan, I would have expected the selections of the victims to be random, but that’s not the case here,’ said Mark. ‘There are four reasons why people kill. Love, lust, money or pure hate. I suspect that it’s the latter for your copycat. Kennedy and Darego were in a relationship and I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t some connection between them and Delaney. Your copycat hates your victims for something they did to him collectively.’
‘What do we know about Delaney?’ asked Eastwood.
‘Not much,’ said Ramouter. ‘Other than that he’s forty-one years old, worked as a support worker for the Leopold Drug and Alcohol Centre in Catford. He’s married to Jamie Hawkins-Delaney. I went around to see him first thing, but he was in no state to talk to me. I’m going to try again this evening.’
‘But our copycat knows about the symbols,’ said Eastwood. ‘I’ve been through the court transcripts for Olivier’s trial. They confirmed that the only people present were the judge, jurors, court clerk, usher, the prosecutor and his junior defence barrister and the two officers who were sat in the dock with Olivier.’
‘And at no point was that information in the press?’ asked Mark.
‘Never. We’ve spoken to the twelve jurors and they’re all adamant that they didn’t discuss the case with anyone.’
‘So, our copycat has to be someone who is connected to Olivier?’ asked Henley.
‘Friends. Family,’ suggested Ramouter.
Mark shook his head. ‘Olivier was a loner, but that’s not to say that people wouldn’t want to be his friends. People write to prisoners all the time. He may be a psychopath but he’s personable.’
‘It makes Blaine look like a stronger candidate,’ said Ramouter. ‘He was part of Olivier’s legal team; he’s still visiting him and he has no alibi for Friday night. Even though when I asked him, he said that he was with his girlfriend.’
‘OK, if our copycat is connected to Olivier, why is he moving so quickly?’ asked Eastwood.
It was the question that had been troubling Henley the most.
‘He’s killed three people in a week,’ Eastwood continued. ‘Olivier killed seven people over eight weeks.’
‘I’ll admit,’ said Mark, ‘it’s a concern, but as I said, it’s not about you. Your copycat wants to impress. The one thing that may work in your favour is that he’s more likely to slip up. It’s probable that he’s killed previously, that there were others before Kennedy and Darego, but a lag between victims is not unusual. I don’t know if you remember the case of Futoshi Kobayashi in Japan, about five years ago. He killed nine women in three weeks. It’s quite fascinating—’
‘You would find it fascinating,’ Stanford mumbled under his breath.
‘Kobayashi,’ Mark continued, ‘preyed on suicidal women online. Convinced them to come to his home and to take part in a suicide pact. Obviously, that didn’t happen.’
‘What did he do?’ Ramouter asked.
‘Funnily enough, he dismembered them too. He also went a little bit further than that. He completely dissected them, threw their organs and flesh into the communal rubbish bin and kept the bones in storage boxes.’
Henley looked around the room. Everyone was frozen. Stanford’s face was a mixture of disgust and disbelief.
‘I wish I’d never asked,’ said Ramouter.