Ears of the City - Excerpt from Chapter One Matt Scrufford's ears were posted to his father in a Jiffy bag. Not something that you'd want to open first thing in the morning over your Shredded Wheat. The rest of him turned up a few days later at the bottom of the Huskisson Dock. I first read about it in the Daily Post whilst I was having breakfast at the ground floor cafe in the Royal Liver Building. They call it The Diner. It's a handy place for me, just down the road from my flat in Waterloo Dock. I can be there quicker than burning my own toast. Not many people know about the cafe but they do an excellent bacon sandwich and when you look through the tinted vaulted ceiling at the glass-sided offices shimmering into the sky, you'd swear you were in New York not Liverpool. The ears were the front page headlines in the Post. I was curious. Scrufford wasn't a common name but I'd known a Mally Scrufford back in the Sixties when we'd played together in a group called The Cruzads, hoping to be the next Beatles. He was the lead singer and the one all the girls fancied. Could he be any relation? I read the article. The ears had arrived at the father's house last Saturday morning although the paper didn't say whether they had been accompanied by a ransom note which I would have thought was the likeliest scenario. But how would that explain the body turning up five days later? Had they called the police who had botched the job? Had they refused to pay the ransom? Worse, had they paid it and the kidnappers reneged on the deal? I walked across to the counter and took a second pot of tea back to my table near the fountain. A couple of office girls next to me were discussing their night out at the Multiplex. One of them had found "Striptease” a very boring film. "Although there were fellas in the audience giving it plenty of mouth," she said. "Mind you, I don't know why, cause that Demi Moore's nothing special to look at." I'd seen it myself and I tended to agree with her as I'd fallen asleep midway through. I often do that with slow films but I hadn't had a wet dream so it can't have been that sexy.
