‘Then why have you brought me in?’

‘Come here…’

Norma turned her wheelchair around to gaze out of the window overlooking the junction of Allerton Road and Penny Lane, the curve of her back turned on her employee. As she did so, she recalled a time, over thirty years ago, before the accident, when she had no need of a wheelchair and what wet sand felt like on the soles of her feet and the pure magic of swimming in the Irish Sea off Crosby Beach.

‘I’m worried about you,’ said Norma. ‘These internet dating sites are a menace. Everything the IT specialist told me that you’d posted about yourself was accurate and true. Is everyone else, these men you’ve been communicating with, are they all above board and honest? I think that’s highly unlikely. Don’t you?’

‘I’m careful.’

‘I suppose the woman whose body was washed up in Warrington in the summer would have said she was careful too… You look puzzled. You didn’t hear about it?’

‘No.’

‘He scalped her and took the skin from her face. According to the police, she met him on an internet dating site, Pebbles On The Beach.’

The tense silence in the room was counterpointed by the hydraulics of a passing double-decker bus beneath the window, and in the sky above, rotating blades chopping the air as the police helicopter travelled in their direction down Church Road.

‘I heard a report on Radio Merseyside this morning on my way in to work. There’s another body been found closer to home. Otterspool Promenade.’

Norma watched the helicopter as it tracked a stolen car burning a red light and screaming across the junction into Penny Lane and in the direction of Sefton Park, sirens following and a trail of chaos in its wake.

‘I can instruct you not to use my IT equipment on my time to go on these sites, but I can’t do anything about what you do between the hours of five in the afternoon and nine in the morning when you’re at home. Fran, I would hate anything horrible to happen to you. Do not put yourself at risk like this.’

‘I’m sorry, Norma. Since Dad died and Patrick walked out on me… I’m OK when I’m selling properties… it’s just…’

Francesca looked at Norma, and the words poured from her.

‘There’s a Dad-shaped hole in one piece of your heart and a Patrick-shaped gap in another part,’ said Norma. ‘Come over here, Fran.’

Norma felt the side of Francesca’s thigh brush against her arm and drank in her sweet natural perfume.

‘You’re looking for a good man, Fran?’

‘There are good men out there, Norma. I just don’t seem to meet them.’

‘You think you’re going to find a quality man on Pebbles On The Beach?’