Sean squares up to him again. ‘Oh, yeah? You going to do that, are you? You going to teach me a—’
Franklin feels he has wasted enough time on this loveless degenerate. He whips his right arm round from behind his back and swings it in a wide arc at Sean’s head. In his hand is a beer bottle he picked up a minute ago from the ground next to the concrete pillar. There is a loud cracking noise as the bottle collides with Sean’s skull, and Franklin isn’t sure which of the two has broken, so he uses the bottle as a club for a second time, and now it smashes, and Sean drops to the pavement amid a cascade of glass fragments. But Franklin hasn’t finished, and what he does is to jab the open jagged end of the bottle into Sean’s face and the hands that are trying to protect that face, and he ignores the screams, but just keeps on jabbing until Sean’s prior good looks have been macerated into a sea of red, raw flesh, and for good measure Franklin aims a few kicks at Sean and then jumps on his chest a couple of times, splintering his ribcage.
Franklin looks down at the wheezing figure, pink froth bubbling out of his shredded lips, and then he uses his sleeve to wipe his fingerprints from the bottle before dropping it on the head of the man, causing him to eject another moan.
Franklin turns and crosses over to the garage. The girl has moved from the ground and is now sitting on a low wall, cradling her shattered face in her hands as though to hold it together.
‘Hey,’ he says to her. ‘You okay?’
In her drunken, battered state she seems not to notice his question. She sobs and sniffs, blood trickling through her fingers and down the back of her hand.
‘Let me take a look at that,’ he says.
When she still doesn’t acknowledge his presence, he touches her gently on the top of her head.
‘Come on, let me see.’
She lifts her head, lowers her hands. Mascara-laden tears have dribbled down her cheeks and mingled with the crimson around her mouth. Her jaw juts to one side at an unnatural angle. One of her front teeth is hanging from its socket by a flimsy glistening thread.
‘He did quite a job on you, didn’t he? You’re going to need a trip to the hospital.’
‘No,’ she says, her jaw all over the place as she speaks, ‘I don’t need to go to—’
His punch is sudden and powerful. It hits the girl on the bridge of her nose, crunching the cartilage and spreading the now unsupported bulge of flesh across her cheeks. She falls backwards off the wall and her head cracks against the concrete. She lies twitching on the forecourt, her eyes rolled back into her skull.
‘Yes,’ Franklin says. ‘You definitely need a hospital.’
She had to take her share of the blame, Franklin thinks. She wasn’t as innocent as she made out. Her denial about kissing someone else didn’t entirely ring true. You can’t treat love like that. You can’t act as though it doesn’t matter – not unless you’re prepared to face the consequences.
Franklin yawns loudly. All this exertion has made him even more tired. He resumes his stroll homeward. As he walks, he whistles the tune that the hen party girls were singing earlier.
All You Need is Love.
3
Where Is the Love?
– Black Eyed Peas
DC Megan Webley often thinks about how she ended up like this.
She was brought up in the suburb of Walton, the daughter of a plumber, with no real life plan but possessed of a strong sense of right and wrong. She drifted through school and tried a string of poorly paid and soul-destroying jobs before a friend suggested that her innate hunger to combat injustice would be best served by a role in the police force. In a last-ditch attempt to find something she might actually stick at, she joined up.
She has no regrets – not about her career choice, anyway; her taste in men is a different matter altogether – but occasionally it all seems a bit surreal.
Like now, for example.
The house is a secluded and detached property in the village of Caldy. From Liverpool, if you cross the Mersey through either of its tunnels and keep on going, you eventually hit Caldy on the western edge of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the River Dee. It’s an exclusive area. Massive houses with massive gardens. Lots of sandstone walls. Rafael Benítez made it his home when he was managing the Liverpool team. Webley suspects there aren’t many police officers who could afford to live around here. It’s certainly nothing like the part of Walton in which she grew up.
She’d love a bedroom like this. Spacious, with a formidable oak door. A bed big enough to take a whole family. Built-in wardrobes with mirrored doors. An en-suite bathroom with lots of marble and a bidet. A deep-pile carpet that probably feels like walking on sponges.
Probably.
Because that’s one of the surreal things here. Webley didn’t get to the middle of this room by walking across the carpet. Nor did she hover with the aid of anti-gravity pants. She got here via the metal stepping plates leading from the doorway. And she didn’t come here simply to admire the furnishings and the decor. She came to view the person on the bed.
The dead person.
In most jobs, you don’t get to do this. You don’t drive to work, walk through the door and expect to find a corpse. In most jobs, that would be an unusual turn of events. Noteworthy, even.
For Webley, though, corpses are her bread and butter, so to speak. It’s in the job description for members of the Major Incident Team. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always make death any easier to deal with.
The woman on the bed is beautiful. Was beautiful. There are enough photographs of her smiling face on the walls to attest to that. Webley would go as far to say that her looks were stunning.
Not now, though.
Hideous would be a more apt description now.
The dead woman’s name is Alexa Selby. She is wearing a short silk nightie. It has ridden up over her hips, exposing her nakedness beneath. Her legs are long and smooth, her toenails meticulously pedicured and painted. On the pillow next to her is a brass lamp. A corner of the lamp is coated with her blood, presumably from the wound to her head. The flex of the lamp is wound tightly around her neck – so tightly that it has sunk deep into her flesh, taking with it part of a gold necklace that carries a pendant formed from the intertwined letters A and O. Above that, Alexa’s face is swollen and purple. Her eyes and tongue bulge from her skull like over-ripe fruits. It is as though a gargoyle’s head has been clumsily transplanted onto the body of a princess.
Webley sighs, and is thankful for the forensic face mask that hides her expression from her colleagues. Sometimes the sadness and waste of murder manages to penetrate her professional veneer.
She realises that today is the first day of April, and she would like to imagine that this is some kind of elaborate Fools’ Day hoax – that Alexa Selby will suddenly leap from the bed and proclaim her success in hoodwinking them all.
But that’s not going to happen. Alexa’s time for pranks is over. And besides, it’s against the law to commit April Fools’ Day stunts after twelve noon.
Webley takes a look at the people around her, at the various experts simply getting on with the job at hand, and she wonders why she can’t be more like them today. All she wants to do is slide Alexa’s nightie back down over her hip, to afford her a little dignity. She resists the impulse, because it has been drummed into her not to interfere with a crime scene. The dead are not entitled to dignity.
Just outside the room, DS Nathan Cody is deep in conversation with his boss, DCI Stella Blunt. They are also dressed in white protective crime scene suits. Webley has thought a lot about Cody lately and wishes she could keep him out of her mind. It was always going to feel a bit weird working alongside her ex-boyfriend, but if that’s all there was to it, she knew she could push through it and come out unscathed.
