Love Lies Bleeding

Prologue

Prologue

‘Look at that daft mare.’

DI Joe Rafferty's chin narrowly missed connecting with the reception counter as Constable Bill Beard grabbed his head-propping arm and inadvertently pulled it from under him.

At the best of times, Beard, the station's self-appointed grey-sage, treated the younger officers who had attained superior rank with an over-familiar lèse-majesté. But this, thought Rafferty indignantly, even for Beard, was a lèse too far.

But he had hardly got the first word of his protest out before Beard waved his complaint aside much as he might swat away a particularly annoying probationer, pointed the podgy forefinger of his other hand across the reception desk of the police station's entrance and voiced the inviting suggestion, ‘Fancy being out of your head at nine in the morning.’

Cajoled away from his annoyance by Beard's proposal, Rafferty murmured, ‘Mm,’ and expectantly awaited the pleasant c***k of bottle against glass.

Chance would be a fine thing, he realised moments later as c****s came there none. Instead, the unpleasant clunk of a cold Monday morning on sober duty impinged on his unwilling psyche.

Breathing out on a disappointed sigh, his gaze followed Beard's pointing digit and he peered, squint-eyed, through the rain-lashed glass. He picked out the fate-favoured young woman who had attracted Beard's interest just as she stepped off the opposite pavement.

Bill was right—the young woman's gait did seem uncertain. Her road sense was even more so, he realised with a wince moments later, as the furious blast of a horn followed the screech of brakes. Without looking, she had lurched into the road in front of a white van. Fortunately, she had stepped off the pavement just a couple of seconds after the lights at the pelican crossing changed to green, so the van hadn't had a chance to pick up speed.

As with many drunks, she appeared to have a guardian angel on twenty-four-hour standby, for the van juddered to a halt on bouncing springs just inches from her body. The driver, an unshaven youth of around nineteen, lowered the grimy side window. Through the gap, he thrust a face that shock had turned a paler shade of white than his grubby van and directed a tirade of abuse after her.

But the young woman continued on her unsteady path across the road, accompanied by the screech of more brakes from the oncoming traffic on the other side, seemingly as oblivious to these as she was to the van driver's curses and to the fact that she had narrowly avoided a close encounter of the deadly kind.

Though a tiny part of him admired her disregard for the conventions that one shouldn't be the worse for drink before the hour had even hit double figures, Rafferty acknowledged that Bill's phrase ‘daft mare’ hit the spot. Although it was pouring with rain all she wore was a thin multi-coloured summer dress and a crimson, crocheted cardigan of more style than substance, which she clutched across her dress with a taut fist. She had no umbrella and the torrential downpour had plastered her hair to her skull.

Bill gave the long-suffering sigh of the endlessly put-upon. ‘What do you bet but she's another one of those sad souls from the psychiatric hospital? Get 'em in my reception regular, I do. One old dear is always begging for a shilling, as if decimalisation had passed her by entirely.’

Rafferty, having endured plenty of stints on reception in his younger, uniformed days, knew better than to accept the bet. Instead, he was about to rush out, do his shining-knight act and rescue the clearly oblivious damsel from further death-defying acts as she continued on her unsteady, if determined, path across the road. But before he had taken two steps, she reached the pavement on this side without further near-misses.

Rafferty realised he had been holding his breath. He exhaled with relief even as he wondered whether Bill's guess as to her current abode was correct.

The asylum had been built in the middle of open countryside half a mile or so beyond the market town of Elmhurst, in keeping with the Victorians' belief that insanity should be kept at a decent distance from respectable normal citizens.

But gradually the town had crept up to the hospital's gates, a process hastened in recent years as the large, once self-sufficient asylum sold off large plots of its land to developers and sent most of its patients out to receive the dubious benefits of ‘care in the community’.

As Beard had said, it was a regular occurrence to see the remaining patients wandering aimlessly in the town. Often, as if drawn by some unseen cord, they made their way to the police station, perhaps believing that its reassuring blue lantern would offer them sanctuary from life itself.

Experience had brought a shoulder-shrugging detachment to Beard and he confided matter-of-factly, ‘I have another regular — young girl she is — about the same age as that one. Early twenties, I'd guess, or thereabouts, who carries a doll around with her everywhere she goes. God knows what brought that about. I could understand it if she was an old un, as it was the normal thing back in their youth that their babies would be taken from them if their bun in the oven was put in at the wrong regulo, but—’

Bill broke off, grabbed Rafferty's arm again and said with weary triumph as the girl reached the door to the police station, ‘There, what did I tell you? She is coming in here.’

As the slender young woman tried to push the heavy door, she must have realised it needed both hands and all her weight to open it, for she released her firm grip on the cardigan. No longer tightly clutched, the cardigan fell open. Even through the drenching it had received, the bloodstains on her thin summer dress were clearly visible. The entire upper area of the bodice was so stained with blood that the dress's pattern was entirely obliterated.

Rafferty's mouth fell open. Believing she must have suffered some dreadful injury, he again stepped forward to offer assistance. But the comment Bill snorted in his ear made him pause.

‘Bet you this one's come in to report she's just murdered her husband.’

Rafferty hesitated. After almost thirty years in the force Beard had seen everything there was to see. Nothing fazed him; certainly not damsels in distress, even if they were as beautiful as Rafferty now saw this one was.

Forestalled by Beard's comment and the belated realisation that anyone with chest injuries that had bled so profusely would hardly still be walking around, he waited, his previously sleepy pulse now racing as the dazed-looking young woman, her shoes click-clacking irregularly in tune with her unsteady steps, crossed the black and white mock-marble flooring.

It seemed to the waiting Rafferty to take her an age to reach the desk. While he waited, he studied her appreciatively. For, in spite of being drenched by the chill rain of an unseasonably cold August morning, the weather had been unable to damage the beauty of her delicately boned face and deadly pale but flawless skin. Slender as a fairy's wand that could be blown over by the merest puff of wind, she swayed slightly before their mesmerized gaze as she fixed the uniformed Beard with large, grey eyes luminous with a tragedy curtained only by swooping dark lashes.

Rafferty, overcome by her beauty, took a gallant's step forward and offered a hand to assist her. To his chagrin, she didn't seem to see it, or him. As if her life depended upon it, her gaze remained firmly fixed on the reassuringly uniformed bulk of the older man. Finally, she reached the desk. With both hands, she clutched the varnish-worn wood in a death grip, again ignored Rafferty, and with a yearning desperation in her face gazed across the desk that separated her from Beard and in a voice that cracked with horror, whispered, ‘I think I've just murdered my husband.’

Rafferty had time to notice only Bill's exhalation of satisfaction at being proved right twice in one morning, before she collapsed at his feet.