Extract

Prologue

The kitchen was pristine; its surfaces wiped and disinfected and its stainless steel buffed to a dull gleam. A tap dripped with measured solemnity into a solitary cup, steadily filling with water. A bumble bee passed through the open door, explored with absent-minded disinterest, butting into the glass fronts of the display cupboards, moving on to the brightly coloured picture tiles dotted about the walls, and bumbling out the way it came, ignoring the still form of a woman lying on the floor.
   For a while - perhaps an hour - after she had first fallen, bleeding, to the floor, she had heard the tick-tick-tick of the tap, and had mistaken it for her own blood pulsing in her throat, pooling on the floor beneath her. As the dripping of the tap slowed, she had felt her pulse diminish and falter, fluttering as if her heart had forgotten the rhythm, but she could not find the strength to save herself: she had used it all in saving him.
   A sudden rapid, shallow clamour of systolic contractions, quickening as if to finish the job, to end her suffering. It ceased. The pool around her head and neck stopped growing and began to congeal, and the tick-tick of dripping of water had become a deeper, viscous splosh.

Chapter 1

They ran, laughing like lunatics, screaming through the night, their shoes echoing in the empty streets like the clamouring footsteps of killers in a forties film. A few muffled barks went up - half-hearted yelps mostly - the dogs' fury tempered by the physical barriers of locked doors and high garden walls of the wealthy.
Lobo saw a light go on and yelled up at the window, 'What're you lookin' at, nosy 'ole?'
   Lee-Anne grabbed his arm, still laughing, gasping for air. 'You'll get us done, you mad-arsed bastard!' She bent, both hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. Which gave Lobo an idea.
   He pulled at his trouser belt and dropped his pants, mooning at the alarmed house owner.
They ran all the way down to Aigburth Road and flagged a taxi. Fell into it, still giggling.
   'I couldn't believe it when you dropped your kecks! I thought the old biddy'd have a heart attack!'
   Give her somethin' to look at, didn't I? Nosy fucking bitch!'
   Lee-Anne hiccuped. 'God, Lobo, I think I'm gonna spew.'
   'Ey! 'ey!' The taxi driver had been watching them in his lower mirror, but hadn't yet spoken. 'Don't go pukin' in my cab.'
   'Why?' Lobo said. 'Isn't her puke good enough for yer?' He'd seen that on Harry Enfield - The Scousers. He was boss, him.
   Lee-Anne made retching sounds and the driver went 'Ey, ey,' again.
   They imitated him, and then cracked up. It was ace how they had the same sense of humour.
   Lee-Anne looked up, tears running down her face with laughing. 'Don't worry, mate,' she said. 'I'm not gonna spew any more. I think I'm gonna piss meself instead!'
   Pure comic genius, that. She should be on the telly, Lobo thought. Suddenly, he wanted her. 'Ey, come on, mate,' he said. 'Stop arsin' about. We want to get 'ome tonight, you know.'
   'It might help if you told me where you wanna go,' the driver said.
Lobo gave an address a quarter of a mile from their flat and fumbled at the door of someone else's house until the cab driver disappeared - they didn't want the police tracing them to the right place, did they? And Lobo was easily remembered: dark, almost black hair that spiked aggressively, uncontrollably in all directions from his scalp, a wide, red mouth and a mad-eyed stare that he had been working on since his school days. Lee-Anne was small, red-haired - hard-looking, but still easy on the eye. Put the two of them together and people were bound to recall the mad, bad lad and the skinny girl.
   As the taxi rattled around the corner, Lobo stuck his hands in his pockets and started the trudge home, then stopped when he realized Lee-Anne wasn't following. She was leaning on the wall of the house the taxi had dropped them at.
   'I really am gonna spew,' she said, miserably.
   She did look green. Lobo tugged at her shirt, and glanced over his shoulder.    'Come on,' he said. 'It's done now.'
   'The state of her, Lobo. You should've never took me there. I wish we never - I never wanna see nothin' like that again. Never. ' Instead of throwing up, she surprised him by bursting into tears.
    'Come 'ead,' he said. 'We'll go the cash till. See if any of them numbers work. That'll cheer you up.'
   She kept on bawling and he started getting rattled: anyone who saw her like that would make connections when they saw it on the news. He could see that talking would do no good, so he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her down the street, crying. The barking in this part of town had a sharper edge, like the dogs really could get out of their back yards, given a plank of rotten timber and a bit of luck, and this gave Lobo an acid tingle of excitement in the pit of his stomach.