Free My Bloody Valentine (Alastair Gunn) by Alastair Gunn Page B

for the door handle. She got one foot over the sill before there was a tap on her shoulder. She turned.
    ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Mike wagged a finger. ‘Invalids are not to exit the car till personal transport arrives.’
    ‘Oh.’ Hawkins realized she still hadn’t become accustomed to dependency. She’d been so eager to get inside the cordon that thoughts of self-preservation had completely left her head. She sat back, accepting that she’d probably only have made it halfway to vertical before collapsing in a heap.
    ‘Fair enough.’ She closed the door. ‘Get the stupid chair, then.’
    Her comment earned a look somewhere between amusement and rebuke, but Maguire didn’t fire anything back. Hawkins waited until he got out before searching her bag for the painkillers, hurriedly washing down two of the industrial-strength tablets with swigs from the bottle of water she’d brought along for the purpose.
    The car rocked gently as Mike heaved her chair out of the boot.
    Hawkins sat impatiently, consoling herself with thethought that at least she had his support. Whether it was due to recent traumatic events bringing them closer together, she couldn’t say, but she and Mike had been tighter than ever these past weeks. They still bitched at each other like a pair of cantankerous pensioners, but since the attack there was something else underpinning their relationship, something below the surface; a deeper bond.
    Granted, the greater level of complication that would accompany the resumption of their physical relationship was still to be introduced. They’d never had issues in the bedroom before; in fact, that side of things had always been fantastic, which was probably why, in its absence, they were sniping at each other more than usual. But even though her rational side said Mike wouldn’t care about the ugly scars covering her chest, the stab victim’s view was that his libido might run a fucking mile.
    She’d considered a strategically positioned T-shirt to obscure the ugly marks. But surely that was akin to wearing a paper bag over your head.
    Thankfully, the doctors said modern cosmetic surgery could almost erase the scars. The only problem was that she’d have to wait until the healing process was more advanced before they could carry out such a procedure. Which either meant weeks of frustration, or a bullet-biting moment that could lead to permanent dysfunction on, and of, Mike’s part. Or paper-bag sex.
    For the moment, abstinence won.
    Shesighed and turned back to the paper in her lap. Mike hadn’t been exaggerating about the renewed level of public panic in response to the latest homicide, both reflected in and stoked by the press. The Sun ’s entire front page was dedicated to the Valentine’s Day murder: a large background image of the pressure groups already camped outside Westminster, overlaid with headlines about rampaging killers and impotent cops. And the national rags were more than happy to hearten terror by playing to the poorly informed risk-averse, constantly revisiting the one-man killing spree before Christmas; highlighting the prospect of another one now.
    Nobody seemed to care that you were a hundred times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer than you were at the hands of an indiscriminate maniac with a penchant for fame. Never mind common or garden murder, which happened on a daily basis in the capital; honour killings, gang violence, contract hits. The fact you had more chance of dying in a fight with your spouse barely registered in such a propaganda war. It wasn’t sexy news. So the media kept hammering the same paranoia home.
    YOU, DEAR READER, COULD BE NEXT.
    Even some of the broadsheets had gone straight for the sensationalist touch paper. Several publications were digging up Valentine’s Day murders from years past, looking for even tenuous connections that allowed them to pronounce this latest perpetrator of serial-killergrade. Not that Hawkins blamed