Pop Goes the Weasel

87

‘Looks like it was quite a struggle.’

Charlie and Helen stood together in the freezing cargo yard, looking at the carnage in front of them. A young man – mid-twenties and heavily tattooed – lay on the tarmac, a large pool of blood encircling his head. A deep cut in the centre of his face was being photographed by the SOC team, but what interested Helen was his torso. It had been slashed to ribbons in what looked like a frenzied knife attack, but his internal organs remained untouched.

Helen drew her eyes away from the grizzly sight in response to Charlie’s comment. She was right. There was blood all over the place, splattered against the crates where someone had landed heavily, smeared over the ground where the struggle had taken place and spread in short bursts along the connecting pathway as the surviving party had fled. The footprints were small and looked to have been made by high-heeled boots – Angel.

‘I guess she met the wrong guy this time,’ Charlie continued.

Helen nodded but said nothing. What had happened here? Why hadn’t she drugged him like the others? It looked like a desperate fight to the death. Perhaps Charlie was right. Perhaps Angel’s luck had finally run out.

‘A sailor. Probably foreign. Probably unmarried. An odd choice for her.’ Helen spoke out loud, as she surveyed the strange tattoos on the body of the corpse.

‘Perhaps victims are getting harder to find.’

‘But still she can’t stop,’ Helen replied. It was a sobering thought.

Charlie nodded but said nothing. The body was partially clothed and Helen examined it more closely now. Presumably Angel had been disturbed by the encounter and had been unable to go to town on her victim in the usual way. His chest looked like it had been hacked at – there was none of her usual precision here. Just a frenzy of brutality.

‘What have you got for me?’ Helen asked the chief SOC officer.

‘Deep laceration to the face. Virtually stabbed him through the eye. Death would have been instantaneous.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Looks like he was involved in some kind of sexual activity tonight. He’s got traces of semen on his penis and his hips are heavily bruised. Which suggests the sex was violent, possibly even rape.’

Unbidden, Helen felt a flash of sympathy for Angel. Even after all these years, nothing affected Helen like sex crimes and she only ever felt pity for the victims, however degraded they were. The aftermath of rape is like a slow death, a cancer eating away at you from the inside, unwilling to let you go, unwilling to let you live. Angel was unhinged, mad even, but an attack such as this would have plunged her further into the abyss.

She would be heavily bruised, perhaps badly injured too. Would she retreat from the world now and be lost from them for good? Or would she go out in one last blaze of glory?