Chapter 16
Will could tell from Shauna’s face when she came downstairs that she’d found a knife to stick into Polly.
“I’m sorry to tell you, Dad,” she began, in a voice that said she was anything but sorry, “she’s a total slag.”
All eyes turned to her.
“I found this in her things. Right in the middle of a bunch of other stuff—hidden away,” said Shauna, lifting up a single
sheet of A4. “Let me read it to you.” She cleared her throat and then began, with badly disguised glee.
“My darling, I cannot live a lie any longer. I have to come to you before my soul fades away and I am nothing. I am yours
and yours only. You are the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins. You are essential as air. If I have you, I need nothing
else; no one else means anything to me. I—”
Chris leaped up from his chair and snatched the letter from his daughter. It was typed, but in a scrolling, romantic font.
There was no address at the top, only a date of three months ago. He read on silently from where Shauna had been forced to
break off: “You are my oasis in the desert. Every night away from you is torture. I may sleep in bed with another, but it
is you I think of...”
There was more, but he’d seen enough, so he skipped to the end. “My raison d’être, my heart, my everything. XXXX”
Camay wrested it from his hand, took her glasses out of her bag, and read it herself.
“Goodness me,” she said, her chins wobbling with indignation. “Well, there you have it, Christopher—proof of what she was
up to. Now if anyone wants to snigger at you, you can tell them exactly what she was doing behind your back. Who’ll be laughing
then, eh?”
“Cuckold,” put in Ward, for some reason thinking the word would help. It didn’t.
Chris’s thoughts swirled inside his head as if they were in a spin-dryer on the top setting. The way his sister was grinning
would intimate that Polly shagging another man was some sort of good news; his ego was saying it was anything but. He had
not seen this coming. Anger was rising up within him like a vortex, cleansing everything in its path but itself.
“And there’s me sitting here worrying about her,” said Chris, which made Will cast him a look. “Well, that’s it. I wouldn’t
have her back now if she begged.”
“And she will, darling,” said Camay, putting her pudgy arms around his neck. “She’ll come crawling back on her hands and knees
and you will tell her to sling her hook. You’ve had a very, very lucky escape. And so say all of us.”
Will picked up the letter and read it himself. Was it a rough draft of a letter sent, or was it sent to her? He hadn’t seen
that coming either. He might have had sympathy for Polly, but he couldn’t condone her having another man. He didn’t want to
believe she was doing that behind his dad’s back; he’d thought she was better than that and stood on a moral higher ground.
He felt let down, but try as his brain might, there was no other way of interpreting it, especially given that Polly was packed
up ready to go. With all these clues, it was a convenient truth to think that she must have someone else. And for now, that
was all the truth they had.
Polly’s alarm bells started to tinkle a little when she realized the man wasn’t heading for the van but for her.
The closer he got, she could see how scruffy he was, rangy in appearance, his walk strangely lolloping and wearing a sort of floppy hat that made her scalp prickle.
She couldn’t have reached her car before he did, even though her instincts were screaming at her to try.
She opened her bag and foraged around inside it for something she might use as a weapon.
There was only the shaft of her car key or a pen.
The trouble was, she’d have to be pretty near to him to cause any damage with either.
“Lady, lady,” the man was calling.
She saw he had string in place of a belt and she shuddered.
She got up from the bench and backed away.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Don’t you come any closer.”
He slowed down but didn’t stop. He held up his hands, though, and said, “It’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.”
He smiled and she wished he hadn’t, because it wasn’t a pretty sight. “Is that your car?”
“Yes,” said Polly, clutching her bag close to her.
“I’m going to need to take it,” said Orrible. “I’m really sorry.” Remarkably, he looked it too.
Polly’s eyebrows rippled in disbelief. “I’m afraid you aren’t,” she said.
“I need it. Look, you can get your money back on the insurance. Just throw me the keys, please, and this will all be over
really quickly.”
It had been a big mistake thinking this day couldn’t get any worse.
“Oh, and can you chuck me your handbag as well?” asked Orrible, hopeful smile pinned on his face.
Billy the Donk would have the car, but he needed something for his trouble.
Polly’s adrenaline levels were through the roof.
Under normal circumstances she would have just let him take the lot, but these exceeded even the farthest ultraviolet spectrum end of normal.
The car he could have, because it was just a lump of metal, but her whole world was in her handbag; it was her survival pack.
This horrible little man would rip the back side out of her cards before she had a chance to report them, as well as spend the thousand pounds she had in cash in her purse.
Her brain was spinning. She looked around in the hope that someone had left a convenient iron bar on the grass. Or a full can of pepper spray.
“Come on now, let’s have the bag, lady,” said Orrible. Polly was all too aware she was at a cliff edge, and scrawny as this
man was, he had more moves than she did because she didn’t have any. He could, at a push, force her through the bars of the
fence and tip her over the edge. People robbed you for pence these days.
She took the key fob out of her bag. “Look, take my car but I’ve got all my clothes in the trunk. There’s nothing else but
clothes, I promise you. Just please, let me have them and drive off.”
She threw the fob onto the grass and Orrible moved to retrieve it. This was the easiest job he’d ever had. But she didn’t
fool him. He smiled again and wagged his finger.
“You’ll ring the police as soon as I’ve gone—I’m not daft. Please give me the bag, lady.”
“I swear to you on my life I won’t, but I really can’t give you my bag. Just take the car and go. Please.”
He didn’t believe her. And she had something valuable in that bag or she’d have given it up with the ease she’d given up her car.
He calculated that all that was separating him from the bounty it held was a minor tussle at most. She was scared stiff; she’d let go as soon as he touched it.
He had never mugged anyone before and he really didn’t want to start now, but Billy the Donk was one bad MF and.
.. needs must. He stepped forward and made a grab for it, but he’d underestimated Polly’s desperation.
She twisted and elbowed him in the rib. He folded, but it wasn’t enough to make him give up.
He stretched out his hand again and this time his fingers gained full purchase of it; Polly grabbed it back with a mighty pull.
Orrible threw himself forward, and Polly dropped it on the ground in her haste to remove it from his reach.
They both made a dive for it, but Orrible tripped over Polly’s foot, kicking the bag as he struggled to right himself, and they both watched it skid to the end of the cliff and tumble over the side.
They yelled, “Noooo!” in unison, leaning over the barrier to witness the bag slide down the rocky edge, then come to a sudden
stop as it snagged on a sticky-out plant branch that only an osprey could have gotten to.
Angry now, upset and cheated, Orrible grabbed Polly by the shoulders and shook her in frustration.
“You stupid... flipping... twerp,” he yelled, pushing his face into hers. She inhaled his rank breath, saw his blackened
teeth, his beady little eyes, his flippy-floppy hat nodding on top of his living, breathing scarecrow head, and panic drenched
her like an Arctic wave. She felt her heart race, her lungs empty of air and struggle to pull more in to replace it. Her head
felt light through lack of oxygen, it started to spin, her legs crumpled from beneath her. Orrible let go and watched the
woman’s face bounce into the metal railing before she hit the ground, and he winced for her. She lay there still on the grass
and Orrible thought she was playing dead until he tried to lift her up by her arm with a rousing “Lady, lady, lady,” before
realizing she was totally out cold.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he said, looking around for witnesses and then up for a drone. People sometimes used them around here,
but the skies were clear of everything but smoke-gray rain clouds preparing to burst.
He rolled her into a rough version of the recovery position because he didn’t want to be responsible for her choking to death.
Then, noticing she had a nice watch on and three rings on her fingers, he decided to relieve her of them. He couldn’t go to
hell any more than he already was. It would offset some of the pain of having missed out on the bag.
He legged it to the black car. There were some cases in the trunk, but he didn’t have time to look through them now and confirm
that they had only clothes in them as she’d said. Sorry, lady. He started up the car and rejoined the road, concentrating on nothing but presenting his spoils to Billy the Donk. It was dog eat dog in his world. Even if he was a scruffy mongrel serving the pedigrees.
The heavens opened five minutes later, and twenty-five minutes after that, a very sex-satisfied Uncle Benny of “Benny’s Burgers”
walked jauntily back to his van to find a sodden unconscious woman on the grass. She looked as if she’d had a bash to her
face. If he’d seen someone attacking her, they’d have been lying at the bottom of the cliff now. He checked for a pulse in
her neck and thankfully found a strong one throbbing. Then he took out his phone and called an ambulance.