Despite his best efforts, in the end, Blaine had pissed himself. Olivier smirked at the memory. Blaine had whimpered while Olivier held a kitchen knife to his throat, telling him where his body parts would wash up if he called the police. The whimpering failed to cover up the sound of Blaine’s piss running down his bare legs. He thought that Blaine would have shown a bit more appreciation for leaving him alive, but thinking about it now, maybe he should have put Blaine out of his misery.
Olivier leaned over the wrought iron railings and looked down into the dirty waters. He watched as two swans navigated their way around floating plastic bottles. The tide was high. He felt fine drops of river water splash up towards his hands as the Thames broke against the river wall. Scraps of blue-and-white police tape were wrapped around the railings, fluttering against his knees. A nearby yellow sign appealed for witnesses to a murder.
Olivier looked across the river at Docklands. There were new buildings now and an abundance of cranes, with bright red lights on them, stretching into the sky.
He should have kept running. He could have jumped on the back of a truck, heading the other way, towards Calais. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of newspaper that he found on the floor of the car he had stolen. Page seven of the Evening Standard from the other day. He ran a calloused thumb across the story on the top of the page. Victim identified. Daniel Kennedy. The first one.
‘Fucking amateur,’ Olivier muttered as he reread how Daniel Kennedy’s body was found at the bottom of the Watergate Steps; a mere four feet from where he now stood.
It had all started here. In some way, he should have been grateful for the copycat. The murder of Kennedy had acted as a catalyst. The ignition for Olivier to finally put his escape plan into action.
Olivier breathed in the scent of the river and wondered briefly if the copycat had stood in this same spot and if he had smelt the blood of murder on his skin. Olivier smiled to himself, but there was no humour in it. Henley had been right. This person, this copycat, was a poor imitation of him. Olivier had no intention of sitting back while the copycat took liberties. He ripped up the article and watched the wind carry away the shreds. He would not be reading in a paper that Henley had caught the copycat. No. The paper was going to report that Henley had found the pieces of the copycat that Olivier was going to leave behind.