Blood Axe

by Leigh Russell

  ‘It was Wednesday evening,’ she stammered. ‘My – he – my uncle let me go home because he’d been out and left me on my own in the shop most of the day. It was our day to stay open until six and then he said he had to stay late after that because he was doing some stocktaking, but he said he didn’t need me. He said he’d be there for a while...’

  The inspector nodded. ‘Go on. What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  Dana explained about the man who had been standing at the bus stop watching the shop. She hadn’t realised at the time, but he had been waiting until she left so that he could find her uncle alone in the shop. It could have been the other way round.

  ‘He might have been waiting for another bus,’ her mother pointed out.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t,’ she snapped, ‘because as I was going off, on the bus, I saw him go into the shop.’ It was true, every word of it.

  The inspector took her seriously. ‘Can you describe this man?’

  ‘Yes. I had a good look at him. I remember him really well.’

  She was eager to impress the detective. She might not be pretty, or clever, but she could help him find her uncle’s killer. He must want that more than anything, just as she did.

  ‘He was quite tall, and really ugly. He was bald, and he had a stupid little beard, and he looked really creepy.’

  The inspector went out and returned a moment later.

  ‘Is this the man you saw?’ He showed her a photo. ‘Take your time, Dana. Look very carefully.’

  She could sense a suppressed excitement in his voice. She knew what he wanted her to say.

  ‘Yes!’ she shouted, although she wasn’t really sure if it was the same man or not.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She couldn’t go back on her word now, not without looking stupid. In any case, it looked like the man she had seen at the bus stop. It probably was him, and she was going to help make sure he was caught and locked up.

  ‘Yes, that’s him. That’s the man who was waiting outside the shop on Wednesday. You know who he is, don’t you?’

  With luck, the inspector would ask her back to look at an identity parade. As she gave him what she hoped was an alluring smile, she heard her mother burst into tears at her side.

  ‘The bastard,’ she sobbed, ‘the vicious, crazy bastard! How could he do that?’

  At once, the inspector turned his attention to her mother. Dana really hated her sometimes.

  27

  Ian went to Frank’s house himself. This time he had no hesitation in setting off to make an arrest, armed with the knowledge that Dana had seen Frank outside the jewellers’ shop on the night Tim had been killed. Only as he drove to the suspect’s house did he begin to wonder how reliable a witness Dana was. Putting such reservations aside for now, he rapped smartly at the door. After all, he was only pursuing a lead. It wasn’t as though he was judge and jury in the matter. After a moment Frank came to the door. He was clearly startled when Ian announced the purpose of his visit.

  ‘What are you talking about? She was my daughter. All right, she was my stepdaughter, but I brought that girl up, from a child, and in all the time I knew her I never touched a hair on her head. I might have yelled at her for her wild ways – she used to go out drinking to all hours, even when she was only fifteen, and her poor mother at home worrying herself sick. There were times I would have liked to give her a good slap, given half a chance, but her mother was too soft. I tell you I never lifted a finger against her and that’s God’s truth. As for anyone thinking I was responsible for what happened - that’s outrageous. It’s sheer spite. Who was it told you I had anything to do with Angela’s death? Who was it?’

  Moira came to the door. She burst into noisy weeping when she learned what was happening.

  ‘That’s crazy!’ she screeched. ‘Leave us alone! Frank was with me, he was with me.’

  By the time they reached the police station, Frank had recovered his composure. He remained calm throughout the process, waiting for a lawyer to arrive, listening patiently to the convoluted preamble that had to be read at the start of the interview. At last they were ready to begin. He stated his name and sat staring stonily straight ahead.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ Ian began.

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Between six and seven in the evening.’

  Frank frowned at the unexpected question, but he answered readily enough.

  ‘I was on my way home from work.’

  ‘Do you have any witnesses?’

  Frank’s frown deepened. ‘There were other people at the bus stop…’

  It occurred to Ian that Dana might have seen Frank waiting for his bus, without him being in any way involved in Tim’s murder.

  ‘It’s not a crime to travel on a bus, is it?’ Frank added, as though he could read Ian’s mind.

  ‘What time did you arrive home?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, I don’t know. I didn’t make a note of the time in case you came round asking questions. Look, I left work at the usual time, about five thirty, quarter to six, and waited at the bus stop for about five or ten minutes. But it was a nice enough night so I changed my mind and decided to walk.’

  ‘So you didn’t take the bus?’

  ‘No, like I just said, I walked. It’s only two miles. Sometimes I get the bus, sometimes I walk. It depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  Frank looked puzzled. ‘On the weather, on how tired I’m feeling, on how long I have to wait – what does it matter? Sometimes I walk, that’s all. It’s no big deal. I should walk home every day, of course. For the exercise.’

  Frank’s voice was steady. He sounded as though they were engaged in a friendly chat about ways to keep fit. His face gave a different impression. Although it was fairly cool in the interview room his forehead and upper lip were shiny with sweat, while his sharp, little eyes darted rapidly from Ian to Ted and back again, as though he was trying to weigh up how much they really knew about his movements that evening.

  ‘Did you go into any shops on your way home?’ Ted asked.

  Frank shook his head. ‘No.’ He frowned. ‘I’d just finished a day’s work. I wanted to get home.’

  ‘Yet you didn’t wait a few minutes for the bus.’

  ‘No. It was a nice evening. I wanted to clear my head, I guess. Look, I can’t really remember what was going through my mind. It’s not a crime to take some exercise, is it? It just helps.’

  ‘Helps with what?’

  ‘I’ve not been sleeping well since we lost Angela. The doctor said exercise would help.’ He sighed.

  They took a break shortly after that to check the bus timetable. The schedule confirmed Frank’s account, establishing that he could have caught a bus home from the stop outside Tim’s shop. Leaving work shortly after five thirty he might well have just missed one bus, meaning he would have had to wait about ten minutes for the next one. It was perfectly reasonable to believe he had decided to abandon waiting for the bus in favour of walking home. Dana’s accusation proved nothing.

  ‘No, it proves nothing,’ Eileen conceded, ‘but it’s a bit of a coincidence. He was a possible suspect for Angela’s murder – he knew her, at least – and now he’s admitted to being in the street outside the shop just about the time Tim was killed, and we have a witness – reliable or not – who saw him go into the shop. And he’s strong enough to carry an axe.’

  Ian had to agree Frank was a viable suspect.

  ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ Eileen repeated. ‘I don’t buy it. Let’s keep him in overnight, and see if we can persuade him to talk in the morning.’

  Ian wasn’t sure why he didn’t go along with her suspicions. Although he had been unconvinced by Dana’s statement, he was as disappointed as the rest of the team when the evidence failed to show anything that supported her account.
Grainy CCTV at the bus stop showed a figure that resembled Frank walking in the opposite direction to the jewellers’ shop at six o’clock. For a while the street had been almost deserted until at nearly seven CCTV from the shop doorway revealed a cloaked figure entering. Dana might well have seen Frank at the bus stop, noticed his bald head, and maybe even remembered his face sufficiently to recognise his picture the next day. But under the cloak, there was no way of identifying the person going into the shop after a lapse of almost an hour.

  ‘I don’t think she was deliberately lying,’ Ian told Eileen. ‘Eye witness statements are notoriously unreliable, and she’s only a kid who’s just discovered her uncle’s decapitated corpse. It’s understandable she might be a bit hysterical about it all.’

  Eileen’s dismay was emphatic, but she had to accept that Dana’s account wasn’t borne out by the CCTV evidence. While they all agreed it was a suspicious coincidence, Frank being outside the shop at that time, they had no proof he had gone into the shop, only the confused account of an unreliable girl. They focussed on Angela’s murder, checking into Frank’s background in even finer detail than before, and questioning everyone who knew him. It was a mammoth task. The results came back fairly uniform. Frank was a steady sort of a man who had never been known to react violently to provocation. His marriage to Moira was, as far as they could tell, stable.

  ‘I love my wife,’ he told Ian, speaking with a quiet dignity that Ian found convincing. ‘She needs me now more than ever. Angela meant everything to her. It’s not right to leave her on her own just now. Please, let me go home to my wife.’

  Ian went home that evening, hungry and disgruntled, to find his own wife upstairs placing neatly folded clothes in a suitcase. More of her clothes were laid out on the bed, as though she had been choosing what to pack.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She turned to him with a tentative smile. ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘Going away?’

  ‘Yes, I told you, I’m going to stay with my parents for the weekend.’

  He didn’t remember her saying anything about it but resisted saying so. She would accuse him of never listening to a word she said, and the conversation would threaten to end in a row.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  She turned back to her packing.

  ‘When are you off?’

  ‘Tomorrow. First thing. I’ve booked a taxi to the station…’

  ‘A taxi? Don’t be silly. I’ll drop you.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  She sounded annoyed. He wondered if she had been expecting him to remonstrate or at least tell her he would miss her. Going to her parents for the weekend was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. They had talked about it several times, in general terms, and he had always supported the idea. They were her family, after all, and he knew she missed them.

  ‘I know how busy you are right now,’ she added. ‘I just thought you’d be off really early or, if you weren’t going out at the crack of dawn for once, then you’d want to lie in. You must be knackered.’

  He sighed. She was right. He was worn out, and the end of the case was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Well, give your parents my best, won’t you? When are you coming home?’

  From behind, he saw her shrug her shoulders. ‘I thought I might as well stay a few days, while I’m there.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  There wasn’t really anything more to say.

  ‘Are you going to stand there watching me pack? Why don’t you put the telly on? As soon as I’m finished here I’ll get the dinner started.’

  He went downstairs, his thoughts already back on Frank, weighing up the possibility that he might be guilty. First thing in the morning a team would set to work, checking Frank’s movements, and looking into whether he could have acquired an axe anywhere. A knife would have been impossible to trace, but this killer had inadvertently offered them a possible lead. Not many people carried axes. With any luck the unusual weapon would lead them to the killer.

  28

  On Saturday morning Ian overslept. He woke with an uneasy feeling that he had forgotten something. He couldn’t grasp what was hovering at the edge of his consciousness, like a half remembered dream. Only when he was up and dressed did he remember that Bev had gone away for the weekend. He hadn’t been awake to say goodbye. He called her at once to wish her a good trip, but she didn’t answer her phone. His words sounded forced, but she would appreciate the message. At least, he thought she would. In the first few years of their relationship he had sensed a quiet harmony between them. He wondered now if that had been a fantasy. Ironically, since their marriage, he seemed to have become increasingly divorced from her feelings. After all this time she should have become used to his job, but she still seemed to resent the long hours he worked when he was on a case. He wondered if there was something else troubling her, and whether he should challenge her about it when she returned.

  Driving to work he tried to put Bev out of his mind. He had to focus on the case. As soon as he reached the station he checked with the officers researching Frank’s background. A team had been at work for hours searching for a loophole in Frank’s alibi, or a credible reason why he might have wanted to kill his stepdaughter. Both teams had drawn a blank. Although his wife was the only person who could give him an alibi, he had no obvious reason to want to kill his stepdaughter.

  ‘Keep looking,’ Ian insisted, but they all knew it was hopeless.

  By midday they had to accept that they couldn’t hold Frank any longer without charging him. Ian faced him across the table once more in an interview room. Frank looked dejected, but he met Ian’s gaze steadily enough.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said miserably.

  ‘You’re free to go, but don’t leave the area without letting us know.’

  ‘Does that mean I’m under house arrest?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. You’re free to go, get on with your life, go to work, but don’t move from your address without telling us where you are.’

  ‘Get on with my life?’ Frank repeated bitterly.

  ‘I’m very sorry about your stepdaughter. We’re doing all we can to find her killer.’

  ‘By locking me up and spending your time questioning me, and leaving Moira all alone?’

  Frank’s voice rose in anger. His brow lowered threateningly and his face turned a darker shade. Ian wondered whether he might be driven to violence, given enough provocation. There was no question that teenage girls could be extremely annoying. He pictured Frank coming home from work, downing a few beers, or perhaps whiskies, while his wife wound him up about her absent daughter.

  ‘She’s barely sixteen, Frank.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’ Gulp of beer or whisky. ‘You don’t seriously expect me to go out at this time of night and search the streets for her?’

  ‘Yes. It’s what any father would do.’

  That might have touched a nerve. Angela wasn’t his daughter. Perhaps he resented that. Ian imagined Frank, drunk, goaded by his wife into going out. He might have come across Angela on her own in the street and seized her furiously by the arm.

  ‘You’re coming home with me.’

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father.’

  Again, that raw nerve. Drunk and enraged, Frank might have lashed out wildly, giving the girl a fatal injury... with an axe. That was where Ian’s theory fell apart because it made no sense. Frank might have had an inkling about where to look for Angela on a Sunday night, but why would he carry an axe with him when he went out looking for his stepdaughter. Not just any axe, but an axe stolen from the Jorvik Viking Museum. It seemed highly unlikely.

  Meanwhile, Frank’s irritation appeared to have dissipated. He leaned back in his chair, his expression calm and his face paler than it had been a few seconds earlier.
He was waiting. Slowly his heavy-lidded eyes closed. A faint sheen of sweat shone on his bald pate. He looked as though he was dozing off. With a start he woke up and glared around in surprise, as though he couldn’t remember where he was. His eyes met Ian’s and he gave a resigned shrug.

  ‘Nearly dropped off there,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night. It’s not exactly comfortable in there.’

  He jerked his head in the direction of the cells. He could have been making conversation with a mate in the pub. The idea that he might have lashed out in anger against his daughter didn’t ring true. Ian stood up.

  ‘You’re free to go, Mr Carter,’ Ian repeated. ‘Just don’t leave the area, or go too far from home, without letting us know or you could find yourself in trouble again.’

  ‘Again?’ Frank echoed. ‘I haven’t done anything.’ He sounded weary, but not angry.

  Ian sighed. For the second time in two days, he had released a suspect. Although he hadn’t believed either Gary or Frank was guilty, it was always disappointing to learn that they didn’t have enough evidence to charge a suspect and the investigation was right back at the starting blocks. As long as they had no idea who had killed Angela or Timothy, there was no way of knowing whether the axe murderer might strike again.

  Having dealt with Frank’s release, Ian made his way to the major incident room where the profiler was discussing the case with the rest of the team.

  ‘This is no ordinary killer,’ George was saying as Ian entered the room.

  ‘What’s an ordinary killer?’ Naomi muttered.

  Ian nodded in agreement with her. The more he saw of his young colleague, the more impressed he was with her proficiency. All the same, her attitude bothered him. She didn’t appear to take the work seriously. Looking for a dangerous killer who had killed twice in four days, they were under pressure to find him quickly. Ian hoped that her seemingly blasé approach was simply her way of dealing with the horror of what they were facing.