Blood Axe

by Leigh Russell

  Ian was in favour of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, established to strike the right balance between the powers of the police and the rights and freedom of the public. It was common knowledge that in the past all sorts of undue pressure had been exerted on vulnerable people to force confessions, sometimes leading to miscarriages of justice. But while Ian would never want to see a return to such unregulated practices, there was a distinction between coercion and accepting the testimony of witnesses without any evidence to substantiate their claims. He was reluctant to rely on the statement of a distressed teenage girl. In the absence of any other witnesses, the truth became a chimera.

  Ian returned to the street, relieved that he didn’t have to cross the shop floor to reach the office behind the shop, which could be accessed from a back exit. Ted was outside. His normally slightly swarthy complexion had a greyish tinge. Ian wondered if he had been sick.

  ‘You all right?’

  Ted nodded. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Me neither. Not something you want to see either.’

  Ian could see Ted was shaken, and wished he could think of words to lessen the horror of what they had witnessed.

  ‘The head’s gone,’ Ted added unnecessarily, with a hint of panic in his voice. ‘They don’t know where it is.’

  ‘At least that should make the killer easier to track.’

  ‘Let’s hope so!’

  The female constable Ian had been waiting for approached.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he asked Ted before turning away.

  ‘Did you see the body?’ he asked the female constable as they walked together round to the back of the premises.

  Her relaxed demeanour suggested she hadn’t been inside the shop, and he wasn’t surprised when she shook her head.

  ‘I heard about it,’ she told him. ‘What a terrible thing for a young girl.’

  Ian nodded. At least he had been expecting to see a corpse, if not a decapitated one. He couldn’t imagine what the dead man’s niece must be feeling. He struggled to prevent his own horror from swallowing up his sympathy for the witness he was about to question.

  21

  It was highly unlikely that two killers would be abroad at the same time attacking people with weapons that were very similar, if not identical. The second victim having been killed while Gary was in custody made him an unlikely suspect for Angela’s murder. Ian had never believed he was guilty.

  Although he knew it was important to speak to the witness as soon after the event as possible, Ian regretted his impatience the moment he set eyes on the hysterical girl. Her head was buried in her hands while her shoulders shook with her sobbing. He stood awkwardly at the door of a tiny office, looking around. A back door led to the alleyway behind the shop, and a second door was labelled Staff Toilet. On a table next to a small sink were a kettle, and tins labelled tea, coffee and sugar, together with an unopened packet of chocolate digestives. The functional whitewashed walls and untreated wood surfaces formed a stark contrast with the carpeted interior of the shop.

  After waiting for what felt like ages for Dana to pause in her crying, Ian called her name softly. She looked up, terrified. Her dark hair had an unnatural reddish tint that didn’t sit well with her pale spotty complexion, and her dark eyes were red-rimmed and puffy from crying. She was wearing very dark nail polish on short, stubby nails.

  ‘Dana, we need to ask you about what happened here,’ he said gently.

  He pulled up a chair beside her, close enough to talk quietly to her, but not so close that he risked any contact. The female constable stood stolidly beside him without speaking. He wished she would take over, but wasn’t sure he could rely on her to ask the right questions.

  ‘It’s very important we find out who did this. You’re the person who reported this to the police, aren’t you?’

  Dana sniffed and nodded. Blowing her reddened nose loudly on a tissue, she raised her head to look at him. When she spoke, he was relieved to hear her talking coherently, in spite of her distress.

  ‘I was late for work this morning. I’m often late but he never – he never ever –’ She burst into tears again. Regaining her composure, she continued. ‘He’s my uncle. It’s his shop, that is, he’s the manager, and I work here.’

  Ian nodded encouragement. ‘So you arrived late this morning?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gave a faint smile. ‘I’m often late. My mum gives me hell for it, but Uncle Tim…’ She stopped and blew her nose again, stifling a sob.

  ‘So he’s your uncle?’

  ‘Yes. He’s the manager here. He gave me the job. He’s – he’s the nicest man I’ve ever met – he gave me a job –’ She began crying in earnest again.

  Ian waited patiently while she pulled herself together. Someone brought her a cup of tea and he sat there while she sipped it. As he was about to resume his questions, the sound of voices erupted in the shop. A second later a woman burst into the office. She was thin, with dark hair and wildly staring eyes. The moment she saw Dana, she flung herself forward to throw her arms around the girl who stood up to meet the embrace. The two women stood sobbing together for a moment. At last Dana drew back.

  ‘Mum, the police are here.’

  ‘I should hope so. What happened?’

  Dana’s mother sounded furious, as though the shop manager’s death was somehow Ian’s fault. Her anger was vicious, but he understood she was beside herself with grief.

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Ian replied levelly. ‘Please, sit down. You’re Dana’s mother, aren’t you?’

  The dark-haired woman nodded and collapsed on to a chair. ‘He was my brother,’ she said. ‘My little brother.’

  It was a while before Ian was able to question Dana again but at last she calmed down sufficiently to answer his questions. He felt more comfortable with her mother present, and was sure she did too. Dana told him she had arrived at work shortly before a quarter past nine to find her uncle lying dead, on the carpet. It was extremely difficult for her to talk about the body without both her and her mother breaking down in tears.

  ‘How could anyone do that?’ Dana’s mother kept asking. ‘It’s barbaric.’

  Every time she mentioned the grotesque nature of her brother’s murder, she and Dana began crying again. The interview progressed painfully slowly, punctuated by bouts of weeping. Ian struggled to remain focussed on his task. It felt callous to persist in questioning Dana but she insisted that she wanted to continue.

  ‘We could leave this until another time, when you’ve had a chance to come to terms with – with the shock,’ he suggested feebly.

  As he was speaking, he wondered if it was ridiculous to talk about coming to terms with what had happened. He wasn’t sure he would ever fully recover from the sight of the headless corpse. He couldn’t imagine how terrible the sight must have been for the people who knew and loved him.

  The girl flapped her hand in the air at him. ‘No, no, this is important, I know. I want to help find who did that – that horrible thing,’ she managed to stutter before she became incoherent again.

  At last Ian was able to continue with his questions. Both Dana and her mother were sure the body was Tim. When Ian asked for the third time whether they could be a hundred per cent sure it was him, Tim’s sister recalled a birthmark on her brother’s chest.

  ‘I should have thought of it before. It’s like a third nipple, although it isn’t. It’s a mole.’

  No longer crying, she was suddenly alert, excited by the possibility that the body might not be her brother after all. With a heavy feeling, Ian summoned a constable and sent him to check with a scene of crime officer, as the doctor had already left the scene. He could have wept himself, seeing how Dana and her mother sat, holding hands, their tear-streaked faces bright with a desperate hope. The presence of the blemish exactly wher
e Tim’s sister had described it was conclusive. This time, she was inconsolable.

  Dana carried on resolutely answering questions, but for all her determination to be of assistance, she was able to add very little to what they already knew. The door had been unlocked when she had arrived just after nine, the alarm switched off. Only Dana and the shop manager knew the code, which had recently been changed.

  ‘I want you to think very carefully now. Are you absolutely positive you couldn’t have shared the code with anyone else?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sure.’

  The doctor had confirmed that the murder had taken place between eight and nine o’clock the previous evening. It appeared the killer had entered the shop before closing time, with the intention of carrying out a robbery. Something had gone badly wrong, resulting in Tim being killed in the confrontation. After that, the killer had made his escape with his loot, and the door must have been left unlocked all night.

  ‘One final question. Can you give us any idea at all of the value of the jewellery that was taken?’

  Dana shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, but the robber must have taken about half the stock.’

  ‘But why do that to him?’ Dana’s mother asked again. ‘Everything was insured. Tim would never have risked his life to save his stock. Why would anyone do that to him?’

  It was a good question. With Dana and her mother in the room, no one asked the other question that was bothering Ian and probably everyone else in the shop. No one asked where the missing head might be.

  22

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Ian insisted. ‘Why cut off the victim’s head? It couldn’t have been to hide his identity because he was left there, on the floor of the shop he managed. There was no attempt to conceal who he was at all, really. His sister and niece recognised him from his clothes straight away. They knew it was him, even before the birthmark.’

  ‘The killer probably didn’t know about the birthmark,’ Ted pointed out. ‘So it could have been a clumsy attempt to hide the victim’s identity, by removing the most obvious identifying features.’

  ‘But then why kill him there, leaving the body in the shop where he worked? It makes no sense.’

  Eileen intervened. ‘The killer might have intended to remove the body but run off, because he was afraid of discovery. Perhaps he panicked and just took the head, in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ted agreed. ‘Don’t forget this was a robbery that went wrong. It wasn’t a planned murder.’

  Ian nodded. That at least could be true. But he had a feeling they were missing something vital. This didn’t strike him as a simple case of a robbery that had gone wrong, and he said so.

  ‘When do robbers steal people’s heads? Really? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  Eileen frowned. ‘Let’s not overcomplicate matters. Focus on the actual robbery for now. The shop was robbed. It was a jewellery shop, full of valuable stock. What was the total value of the missing items?’

  Ian shrugged. ‘The insurers are still working on their figures, but they reckon the total stock was worth well over a million and a half, but the jewellery store chain are going to come up with another figure of their own.’

  ‘Well, let’s say it was something over a million pounds,’ Eileen said. ‘The robber must have got away with something in the region of half of that value? What do we think?’

  Ian grunted. ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘Ballpark figure,’ she insisted.

  ‘Something like that, all right,’ he agreed, ‘if we have to make a guess.’

  ‘The exact amount doesn’t concern us at this stage,’ Eileen went on. ‘The point is this wasn’t a premeditated murder, but a violent robbery that ended in a brutal killing. So we can’t spend time debating why the body was left there. The killer was interested in getting away with his booty. He probably didn’t give the victim’s body a second thought.’

  ‘But why remove his head? That makes no sense,’ Ian was aware that he was repeating himself, but he couldn’t control his perturbation at the macabre nature of the incident. ‘And why take it away and hide it somewhere we haven’t yet been able to trace?’

  Whichever way they looked at it, the missing head was weird. They all saw the sense in consulting a profiler about so extraordinary a murder. Soon after their frustrated exchange, Eileen summoned Ian and Ted to her office where Ian was pleased to see George’s fluffy white hair. Eileen outlined the details of the killing to George who listened intently.

  ‘And the head, you say, has simply disappeared?’ he asked quietly when she finished.

  ‘We’re still looking for it,’ Ian admitted. He didn’t add that nothing about this seemed simple to him.

  ‘I doubt you’ll find it easily,’ George responded promptly, ‘not if he’s taken it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘The killer must have taken the head deliberately. It’s not the sort of thing you slip in your pocket by mistake. That means he wants to keep it, perhaps as a kind of trophy. Why else would he have gone to the trouble of taking it away? This wasn’t a crude attempt to mask the identity of his victim, because the body was left in the shop the victim managed. Find the head and you find the killer.’

  There was a faint murmur of agreement. They had all worked that out by now.

  Ian felt an uneasy sense of déjà vu as George continued. ‘This is a strange case and this new incident raises a number of questions.’

  Eileen frowned. It had not yet been confirmed that the two recent murders were connected.

  ‘It seems clear that the murders are linked in some way, even though there are differences. First, both victims were killed by a blow to the head, one vertical the other horizontal. Is this pattern giving us some kind of message?’

  ‘Should we look out for someone waving an axe in a diagonal plane next?’ someone asked with a grin.

  A few of the young constables sniggered. No one else took any notice. Everyone understood it was sometimes necessary to release the tension with flippancy. With a pang of regret Ian remembered indulging in such fooling around himself before he attained the rank of inspector and felt he ought to conduct himself with more dignity.

  ‘It’s an unusual murder weapon,’ the profiler continued in his clipped tones, ‘if for no other reason than that it can’t be easy to carry around without attracting attention.’ He paused. ‘No one carries an axe around without reason. It’s not a particularly easy weapon to use at close quarters. The bearer needs room to swing it. So it wasn’t carried for self-defence. Does this weapon suggest an element of premeditation? And yet – this was undoubtedly a targeted robbery.’ He paused again. ‘A murdering thief, or a thieving murderer? What is going through his mind?’ He paused again, but no one answered. ‘I merely ask the question.’

  Ian decided he rather liked George’s manner of raising questions. He had encountered opinionated profilers in the past. It was far better to adopt a collaborative approach.

  ‘You keep saying “he”,’ Eileen said. ‘Are you sure we’re looking for a man?’

  ‘Aggressive; wielding a heavy weapon capable of splitting a skull; severing a spinal cord with a single blow.’ George seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Removing a head while carrying loot.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I’d say this is a man. I may be wrong, of course, but I can only give you probabilities at this stage. Like you, I have absolutely no idea about the actual identity of this killer.’

  ‘You seem very sure we’re dealing with one killer?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Well, we may be looking for a copycat killer, of course. The first death was all over the papers, wasn’t it? That would explain the difference in the attacks, if the papers reported a head injury.’

  ‘Oh great. Now we’re looking for two crazies,’ someone muttered.

  ‘I’d be surprised if this wasn’t
the same killer,’ George said. ‘As you say, it’s completely crazy. The chances of two such maniacs hitting the streets at the same time have to be slim.’

  ‘But that’s just the balance of probabilities,’ Ian said.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You mean…’ Naomi stared at George, wide-eyed, ‘you mean this could be a serial killer?’

  No one spoke. It seemed to be tempting fate to point out that the emotive term ‘serial killer’ technically referred to someone who had killed three or more people.

  23

  A tracker dog had been brought in to try and trace the killer’s route from the shop. It wasn’t proving easy to establish the relevant scent from the mass of potential evidence at the scene. Many people had visited the shop the previous day. When Ian arrived, a handler was leading a German shepherd round the shop where it was sniffing at all the display cabinets that had been disturbed.

  ‘We’ve already followed a couple of false leads,’ the dog handler told him cheerfully. ‘But they did take us to customers who visited the shop yesterday,’ he added in defence of his animal. ‘We’re going to try the victim. It might be easier to track his head, assuming the killer carried it away with him. And if it doesn’t get us to the killer, we might at least recover the missing head.’