‘W-Why do you need to undress me?’
Franklin doesn’t answer. Instead, he focuses on his task. It occurs to Parker that Franklin could have removed his clothes while he was unconscious. The only reason for doing it now must be to instil fear.
‘Please stop. You don’t have to do this.’
‘Oh, but I do.’
‘Why?’ he asks again. ‘Why do you have to take my clothes?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Megan needs to realise what she’s missing.’
‘I don’t understand. Please… please stop.’
But Franklin keeps snipping away. He cuts through the trousers and the shirt, pulling the pieces away and dropping them onto the floor. When only the boxer shorts remain, he pauses for a second.
‘I’d stop wriggling now if I were you,’ he advises.
It takes only seconds to slice through the flimsy material of the shorts and remove them.
‘Oh,’ Franklin says. ‘I can see now why Megan went looking elsewhere. Never mind. We’ll just have to work with what we’ve got.’
Tears of humiliation sting Parker’s eyes. ‘Are you going to take photos of me, is that it? You’re going to send them to Megan?’
‘Wishful thinking. I’ve got a much better idea.’
‘What? What are you going to do?’
Franklin looks down at the floor for a while before he answers. ‘When I was a kid,’ he says, ‘– I think I must have been about nine or ten – my mother came into my bedroom one day. She was holding a pair of scissors just like these, and she ordered me to take all my clothes off – to get completely naked, like you are now. I stood there, ashamed and embarrassed, but I knew better than to defy her. She looked me in the eye and asked me if I knew about sex, about what men and women did to make babies. I said yes, and she said that I was never to do that to a girl. I asked her why, and she said because it was dirty and disgusting, and she wishes she had never done it to create me. She was basically saying that she never wanted me to be born. And then, just to make sure I got the message, she took hold of my penis. Gripped it tight and stretched it out so far, I thought it would snap. And then she opened up the scissors and held my penis between the blades.’ As he says this, Franklin raises his own scissors in the air, the razor-sharp jaws yawning open. ‘She told me that if I ever even thought about using my thing on a girl, she would cut it right off.’
Franklin closes his scissors with a sudden snap, causing Parker to jump on the bed. When Franklin looks down at Parker again, his eyes seem full of madness.
‘And you know what?’ he says. ‘To this day, I have never let her down. I think she would be proud of me, don’t you?’
He’s insane, Parker thinks. Completely bat-shit crazy.
‘So, are you going to take photos now?’ he asks. He doesn’t want to be photographed, but it’s far better than the alternatives coming to mind following Franklin’s dark little anecdote.
Franklin holds up the scissors again. Snips at the air a couple of times.
‘I haven’t finished with these yet,’ he says.
17
A Sunday Kind of Love
– Etta James
Sunday morning. Pretty much like any other day to Webley now. And although she loves her job, she does occasionally long for the way Sundays used to be. She misses the long lie-ins, the leisurely breakfasts involving bacon and eggs, the general unhurriedness and calm of the day. Perhaps a trip to the cinema or a drink with friends.
Many of her Sundays are about death now.
Take last Sunday, for example. On that day, Webley spent the morning interviewing a woman called Jean, whose husband had been found lifeless in their garden on Smithdown Road. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Jean claimed she was out enjoying a leisurely stroll in Sefton Park while her husband was having his skull caved in, although the police failed to find anyone who could corroborate her story. An additional problem for the cops was that they couldn’t prove she had been at home at that time, either. They could not locate or even identify the murder weapon, and there was no forensic evidence on Jean’s clothes linking her to her husband’s killing.
Webley pressed as hard as she could in the interviews. Against her solicitor’s advice, Jean was perfectly willing to answer questions, but all she did was to keep repeating that she had gone for a long walk and hadn’t the faintest idea what took place at home while she was absent.
After several fruitless hours, Webley was ready to give up. Her intuition told her that Jean was guilty, but gut feelings carry no weight with the Crown Prosecution Service. It looked like they were going to have to set the woman free until such time that they could gather more evidence against her.
On the verge of surrender, Webley put one final question:
‘Can you suggest anyone who would have had the means, motive and opportunity to enter your garden and murder your husband?’
Jean looked at Webley, then at her solicitor, who was shaking his head, then back at Webley. She could have taken her cue from her counsel and said ‘no’, and then the interview would have been over and the woman would have been sent on her way.
Instead, taking the room by surprise, she threw up her arms and said, ‘Look, yez are gonna find out anyway, so I may as well tell ya. It was Derek.’
Trying not to show how startled and elated she felt, Webley simply said, ‘Derek?’
‘Yeah. It was him. Little fella. Doesn’t look like he could knock the skin off a rice pudding.’
‘And who is Derek?’
‘Close mate of me husband. He talked to him most days.’
‘What’s Derek’s surname?’
Jean thought for a few seconds. ‘You know what, I never thought to ask that.’
‘Do you know where we can find him?’
