Free All the Lonely People by Martin Edwards

invaders finally left, abandoning him to the flat’s solitude.
    He slumped on the sofa whilst the events of this dreadful morning swirled around in his head, defying his attempts to impose the discipline of rational thought. Eventually he made himself a black coffee. Too bitter. Pushing the cup to one side, he forced himself up and into the stinging chill of the outside world.
    Liz is dead. Repeating the words over and over would not, he knew, explain anything, but perhaps doing so would help his protesting brain to assimilate the truth.
    Liz was dead. That lovely selfish woman whom he had adored. No more would she tease or taunt. The great green eyes wouldn’t captivate again. That disconsolate pout when she failed to win her way belonged to history. Liz was dead and his hopes of a reconciliation had died with her. For at last he was beginning to acknowledge the truth: he had spent the past two years as a sleepwalker, dreaming that one day she would return to share with him the silly moments that had made existence seem worthwhile. And there had been many such moments. Making love beneath their own Christmas tree, the December after they were married, her slender body basking in the soft glow from the fairy lights. The Rhine cruise of their honeymoon, their hands clasped as they sailed around the Lorelei. Skiing in Austria and her radiance as she exclaimed for all the world to hear, “I feel so free!”
    Liz was dead. And a primitive rage started to burn within him. Someone in this city owned the hands that had crushed out so much life. Perhaps a mugger or a maniac, but possibly the man of whom she had expressed so much fear: Mick Coghlan. Might her murder so soon after she had begged for shelter from her lover’s wrath be nothing more than a macabre coincidence? Harry’s mind rebelled against the idea. It was not simply that he didn’t believe in such quirks of fate, but more that nailing Coghlan with the guilt had about it a rightness and classical inevitability. That the man who had wrecked his marriage should be responsible too for the final act of brutal destruction seemed as logical to Harry as his own rapidly rising hunger for revenge.
    The wind from the Mersey chewed at the bare flesh of his face. The riverside walkway was deserted save for a couple of elderly dog-walkers kitted out in anoraks and fur-lined boots who glanced at him nervously before scurrying on. The noiseless moving of his lips might have disturbed them, or it may have been his wild appearance. Lacking a jersey or coat to guard against the bitter cold, with his patched jeans and thin shirt he must have looked like a ravaged scarecrow, but he didn’t care.
    Harry kicked a pebble over the side and heard it splash into the waves that slapped against the breakwater. They used to call this the Cast-Iron Shore, where granite warehouses towered above iron quays and the world traded through the port of Liverpool. Jesse Hartley, the no-nonsense architect who had built the Albert and Empire Docks, was said to have had a contempt for beauty, but the austere grandeur of his monuments remained now that the buildings had out-lived their original usefulness to become traps for tourists and the leisure cult. Times had changed. Gone were the days when the Mersey was crowded with big square riggers arriving on every tide, bringing cargoes of cotton from the New World. The only vessels to be seen this morning were the two river ferries, chugging back and forth from the Pierhead to the landing stages at Seacombe and Woodchurch.
    After passing the Tate Gallery, he stopped as he always did at the sight of the Liverpool waterfront, with the Cunard, Dock Company and Liver Buildings towering above the stick men and women who strolled around. Why, he wondered, did he love Liverpool when behind the Victorian splendour of the Pierhead there was so much about the place to hate - the dirt and the poverty and the crime? It occured to him that, as with