The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries)

by Colin Cotterill

  Were I a wronged Japanese woman, my first sample would be from my baby. There was no cartoon to tell me how to get a blood sample from the womb, so I had to assume this test only worked on fully birthed babies. I had no baby, so I carefully cut the bloody fingerprint from the threatening note and put it into the liquid that would go into the first test tube. All I needed then was to find something generic from A, the maid; a mustache hair, perhaps, blood spatter from a punch in the nose, a slice of skin. Then I’d be able to compare the DNA. It was almost as simple as a pregnancy test.

  My phone.

  “Sissi!”

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “DNA paternity test.”

  “I think it might be too soon to tell. Give it a few months.”

  “No. It’s not that. I’m attempting to match a warning note and Conrad’s maid. She’s got a thing for him, and I’m the femme fatale who’s taken him from her.”

  “You bitch.”

  For some reason my mind wandered to the dog bowl in front of our shop and the fact I hadn’t seen the animals since I got back.

  “Siss, can I get back to you?”

  “Certainly. But I do have information for you.”

  “About the conference?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great, but I’ve just had a bad feeling.”

  “Overuse of MSG?”

  “Worse than that. I’ll phone you back.”

  I hung up and went to the balcony. It was unusual this close to mealtime that the dogs weren’t clambering around my ankles. I whistled. Nobody came. I banged a spoon on a pot—still no response. Nothing to worry about. They’d probably gone on their beach walk without me. Come across a snake. But, no. Not even tug-of-war with a snake took precedence over food. I walked to the shop. The new bowl was still lying there. I picked it up. It was the largest size you could buy. Pink with a bone motif. And there were words handwritten in Magic Marker around the outside.

  I told you to keep off. This will happen to you if you don’t.

  The letters got smaller toward the end so they’d fit. The bowl was empty. My dogs—my eat-anything dogs—were missing. I put the bowl to my nose, not sure if I was mistaking new plastic for that bitter smell of poison. My stomach buckled. I called their names. They never came when I called their names, but I thought they might sense the urgency in my voice and oblige me.

  I jogged around the huts, calling frantically. The strengthening wind carried my words away. I got on my knees and looked beneath the gazebo tables. I screamed above the growl of the surf for them to stop pissing me about. I’d envisioned it already, individual deaths at the hand of nature—brained by a falling coconut, liver flukes, drowning, kicked by a mad cow—but I’d never considered genocide. Not the annihilation of the entire pack. I’d never confess I was fond of them, but I wouldn’t wish them a slow, painful death. And Gogo had escaped the grim reaper once that week. It didn’t seem fair.

  I walked around the back of the coconut shed, and that’s where I found them. The scene was oddly ceremonial. Their bodies lay parallel, like lines of coke. I sat, exhausted, on the old water pump and sighed. This was the result of a troubled mind. Why would she do this to me? To us? Could love really be this cruel? The three dogs looked up at me at the same time, as if they’d received a stage cue. They’d been staring at the dead rat, fixated. As we don’t have CCTV fitted I could only guess how events had unfolded. I wrote it up later as a screenplay for a short, but I’d read how hard it was to work with animal actors—especially rats.

  EXT. DAY—BESIDE THE CLOSED SHOP

  A bowl of bacon slices wrapped around an unidentified substance sits in the middle of the car park. A motorcycle is driving off in the distance. STICKY, GOGO, and BEER watch the motorcycle, then look to the bowl. STICKY, who has been known to eat entire cowpats, marches up to the bowl, tail wagging.

  Gogo: Wait, brother. No.

  Sticky (Indignantly): Why not? It’s bacon. You know how I’ve dreamed for a bowl of bacon?

  Gogo: You wouldn’t know pig from lizard. (She coughs from the exertion of her recent medical traumas.) This looks suspicious. Beer, you tell him. He never listens to me.

  Beer (Who doesn’t give a hoot or a howl either way): She says it’s suspicious.

  Sticky: How would she know?

  Gogo: It was delivered by a stranger. You know what a stranger is? Someone who hasn’t invested any time or love into our upbringing. If a rasher of bacon looks too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true.

  Sticky pushes his nose against the still-warm fat.

  Sticky: I’m eating it.

  Gogo (With the last of her strength): Look, just indulge me this once. I’ll make a deal with you. We sit back over here under the tree. In a few minutes the fat rat from the woodpile will get the scent. She’ll come and take a bite. If she finishes that and goes for a second helping, we chase her off and you can have the entire bowl to yourself.

  Beer: What about me?

  Gogo: Look, you two had my back during this near-death thing. I owe you both. Bear with me on this. If I’m wrong, I’ll make it up to you.

  The three dogs retreat to the overhanging tree and wait. It’s only a minute before the fat rat from the woodpile comes out of her hiding place and sniffs her way to the bacon. She looks around, aware of some hostile scent, but the lure of the fresh meat is too much to resist. She grabs a bacon roll and eats it on the spot. CU STICKY salivating. The rat finishes the entire plate, then sniffs around for more. But suddenly her face is racked with agony. She puts her hands to her throat and runs in panic to escape the awful feeling of her intestines being eaten away, shredded one agonizing centimeter at a time. An acidic foam of bile seeps from her mouth. She makes it to the back of the coconut shed before her entire musculature clamps shut and she emits a blood-curdling scream, pirouettes and crashes face-down into the gravel. The dogs, following close behind, can only stare in awe.

  Sticky: Shit!

  9.

  It Is Forbidden to Enter a Woman Even a Foreigner If Dressed as a Man

  (Buddhist temple)

  My second night of unprecedented bliss went pretty much the way of the first, except we skipped the axes. I’d toned down my som tam and spicy squid so as not to confine him to several wasted minutes in the bathroom. We didn’t even drink. Thai food works best with a cold glass of water. We skipped dessert.

  I woke up at one stage to find him sitting up, one hand on my hip, staring at my leg. It was odd.

  “Are you working out how much they’d charge per kilo?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “At the butcher’s shop.”

  It was the first joke that didn’t work. It was the only time I’d seen a look of anger on his face. He pulled his hand away.

  “Don’t ever say anything like that,” he said. “It’s not funny.”

  I rolled over and looked into his eyes. He was half-asleep but serious. Unexpected seriousness was a turn-off for me. I liked to know I didn’t have to censor myself before I spoke. I raised an eyebrow, and his anger dissolved so fast it could have all been in my imagination. Perhaps I’d been having a threatening dream and he was part of it. In shadows from the far light of the walk-in closet, he looked stern, old.

  “It’s just…” he began. “My grandmother.”

  He looked away.

  “What about her?”

  “She was a naturist. She advocated every woman’s right to be nude in public. Even into her forties she and her friends would go to the countryside, shed their clothes, and sunbathe in the fields. But it was the dawn of the era of the combine harvester and … and one weekend Granny was asleep in a wheat field. The silent beast chomped effortlessly through both the wheat and, to our dismay, through Granny Green. It threw her parts in every direction. It took a week to put her together in time for the funeral. Only her right leg was missing. Later, we discovered that a tramp had found it and tried to sell it to the local butcher. That�
��s why…”

  “Oh, look, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can be really insensitive at times. I didn’t mea— Are you laughing?”

  “Only shedding tears for the memory of Granny Green.”

  “You are. You bastard. You’re laughing. Your granny wasn’t chopped up by a combine harvester.”

  “She choked to death on a lump of shortbread.”

  “I believed you … you…”

  I attempted to suffocate him with the pillow which, naturally, led to what suffocating a man with a pillow invariably leads to. I was crazy about him. I was wide awake when we finished.

  “You’re quite a liar,” I said.

  “It’s my job.”

  “Tell me about your axe book.”

  “Certainly, at two in the morning after three rounds of passion, there’s nothing I’d like more than to talk about my work.”

  “Come on. Help me out here. I can’t sleep. If you tell me a story, I might drop off. My friends tell me your books are a bit slow.”

  He smiled and punched me playfully on the nose.

  “Then they obviously haven’t read them. My books are a gripping combination of graphic violence and gratuitous sex.”

  “In Laos?”

  “It happens.”

  “It wasn’t happening when I went there.”

  “Ah, you must have been there on a Tuesday. They have Tuesdays off.”

  “So, how does the axe research fit in?”

  “We really don’t have to—”

  “I’m interested.”

  “I warn you, talking about violence gets me very excited.”

  “So … the axes?”

  “Right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. I mentioned, I think, that the axe book is a one-off. I know there are a lot—I mean, an exorbitant number—of crime books featuring axe murderers. The axe has become a cliché in the genre.”

  “So you want to write another one.”

  “The axe and the murderer always take a backseat to the victim. Readers like the blood. The axe murderer is invariably anonymous, which adds to the tension because you never know what the maniac is capable of. But what of the skill? The training that goes into handling an axe correctly?”

  He was getting excited telling me this. I mean … he was getting excited, which was a little worrying, but I could handle it.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, we never see the axe murderer from his point of view. We only get into the killer’s head in the last chapter when he—”

  “Or she.”

  “Or she explains all the events that led up to the arrest. We rush through his—”

  “Or her.”

  “Or her background and uncover the awful childhood she had when the stepfather made her chop the heads off live chickens or whatever. But it’s too late then. I want to know the killer from page one. I want to experience this awakening in him. That moment when he makes his first kill. When he realizes how the right weapon can make easy work of both murder and dismemberment. Make it fun, even.”

  I’d stopped adding “she” by this point.

  “How the hacking becomes therapeutic,” he went on. “How the clunk of the blade against the bone and then the finale as it hits the concrete floor almost sounds out a timpani of revenge for all the horrors he experienced in his life. I want to get to the end of the book and for the readers to ‘feel him.’ Feel for him to the point that his kill becomes theirs. That they stop seeing only the blood and the horror and begin to see the justice of it all through his eyes.”

  Well, I suppose I had asked. He’d become animated. He was speaking louder. He was as awake now as me. There was a fire in his eyes. I recognized it as the passion that authors, I mean, real authors, have to feel in order to be truly great. I smiled and for a few seconds he hovered over me not knowing where he was. He’d entered that fiction/reality realm where the characters were more real than the woman in his bed. I could never force myself to be excited about making things up. Not when there was so much in the real world to be horrified by—to dedicate myself to.

  “So,” I said, “you decided you couldn’t introduce this element of your personality into those gentle Lao books.”

  “What?”

  “Laos?”

  He was back in the bedroom with me. He lowered himself to the mattress and let his head sink into the soft pillow. He smiled and ran a hand through my short, wild hair like the hairdressers on TV who point out there’s no hope for such a thatch.

  “Right,” he said. “I sent a plot outline for the latest Lao book to my editor. In it, the entire cast is wiped out in an axe attack. The marketing people suggested it might tarnish the franchise.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “I think that was why they agreed to the one-off. They thought I was going mad, afraid they wouldn’t get any more of their beloved Lao books. They made one proviso, that I had to write under a pseudonym. And, Jimm, do you know what? Suddenly having that new name was an excuse to be a different person. It was like my evil twin had made a belated exit from the womb.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Myster Egal.”

  “Mister as in the adjective?”

  “No. It’s a first name. Myster. The marketeers loved it. Short for mystery. The surname sounds like ‘Eagle.’ But could, in this enlightened age of the international crime novel, be a translation of the work of a Lithuanian writer. And anyone hearing it would assume it was just ‘Mr.’ and say, ‘That’s really cool.’ They’d never forget it. It has everything. It’s brilliant.”

  “And your idea, of course.”

  “Of course. Marketing people don’t come up with new ideas. They just steal other people’s.”

  “And is Mr. Eagle around right now?” I asked, running my hand down his chest. “I could use a little … evil.”

  “He’s out of the office at the moment,” said Conrad. “But if you give me a few hours’ sleep, I’ll see what I can come up with. I think he’d be delighted to meet you. You’re exactly his type.”

  I’m sure he was asleep even before the end of the ensuing kiss. I was almost unconscious as well when A, the maid, crept stealthily into my mind—with a knife. Nobody locked their doors down here. It would be the simplest thing for her to sneak into the master bedroom and dice my intestines. With that thought firmly in place, there was no hope of me getting back to sleep. I left the bed and walked around the house—wondering where a maid might leave bodily traces. The place was lit by the moon skipping from cloud to cloud. When it was eclipsed, it was so dark I had to stop and wait. I used those moments to gather my thoughts. I doubted she’d use the bathroom to groom herself, so hairs on the brush wouldn’t work. I looked in the kitchen for onion-cutting, finger-nick blood-stains, but it was spotless. I was starting to think I might have to go down to the temple and clip a toenail as she slept. But then I remembered the day of the watermelons. She’d been wearing a silly hat with a neck flap. There had to be a shed for the hoes and the hoses and the hats.

  It was disappointingly easy to find. The garden apparatus was in a small alcove behind the laundry. There was no window, so I shut the door and flicked on the light. A’s hat was on a hook on the wall. At first glance it appeared to be devoid of forensic evidence. But there was an inner toweling sweatband, the kind you’d sew in yourself if you were anal. Tucked in the crease of that was a hair about three centimeters long. It had to be hers. I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in the pocket of my yukata. I turned off the light and went back into the living room, with the intention of returning to bed and the anticipation of meeting Mr. Eagle the next morning. But, for a moment, I sat on the vast comfy sofa and looked out at the Gulf. I could see Captain Kow’s squid-boat light, still the only one on the horizon. The moon, appearing sheepishly from the next cloud, leaked a carpet of yellow light across the sea. It was better than cable. I decided to go to the fridge and get myself a beer and watch the show. The moonlight on the designer forest exposed all
the creepy shadows and nooks in which any psychopathic maid might lurk.

  I was on my second gulp of Heineken when the moon vanished again. But just before the cloud swallowed it, I thought I saw movement in the garden. A figure stepped out from behind a candlestick bush, then disappeared in the blackness. I might have seen its shadow pass in front of the glass doors, right to left, but, in truth, I probably didn’t see anything. I walked to the doors and stood close enough to the glass to feel my breath bounce back at me. I remained as still as I could, wondering whether I’d been visible to the intruder. The beer was in my hand, but I didn’t dare take a sip in case the figure on the other side of the glass saw me. That stalemate and the accompanying knot in my gut, continued for … I don’t know … some very long minutes. And then, that quirky old moon peekabooed from its hideout and the garden was illuminated like a stage show—there was nobody there. But still I couldn’t move. The room all around me was clear as day, but I couldn’t tell what effect the reflection on the tinted glass might have from the outside. I was either spotlit by the moon or masked behind a mirror.

  I counted my breaths.

  There were lots of them.

  Then, I saw him. Left to right now. Walking confidently. Shirtless. Sweat gleaming on his dark skin. A’s husband, Jo, still retained that boyish grin, even though in one hand he held a machete. It’s hard to pick out colors at night, but the blade dripped with something dark. Something fresh. And in his other hand he held a small sack by the neck. It was half full. He stopped about three meters from where I stood and turned his head and looked directly at me. I was a statue. All my oxygen had been used up and I felt I was turning blue. If he could see me, I must have looked really stupid. My robe had fallen open to reveal a long strip of naked me. I wondered if waving would help. I mean, I wasn’t exactly doing anything wrong.

  But Jo turned to face the window and flexed his muscles, as if in a mirror. I was used to it. Arny did it all the time. Men were so vain. Jo couldn’t see me. He smiled at himself and walked on. When he was out of sight, I returned to the sofa and chugged my beer. What gardener worked at two a.m.? What could he possibly be cutting down…? Or chopping up?