Chapter 27
“Well, well, well, you’re a hard man to find,” said Billy the Donk as Orrible’s head slammed into his desk with such force
that Billy’s Lotus Biscoff biscuit jumped off his saucer. Billy slid the Daily Trumpet toward him so the eye not currently having a close-up view of the inlaid leather could read the entry in the paper.
“I must say, Orrible, you’re looking pretty good for eighty-three. I’d have put you at least ten years younger. Let him go,
Square. I want to ask him what face cream he uses.”
Square hoisted Orrible to a standing position where he withered, making himself look as small as possible—a primal defensive
move—and reverently averted his eyes from gaining contact with Billy’s. Instead they roved around his office walls, taking
in the photos of his daughters, his mother, and his surgically enhanced wife with her rubber-tire lips, and all the donkeys
he sponsored in a sanctuary, and then the huge oil painting of the Kray twins taking up half the wall behind him.
Billy’s mother was rumored to have had an affair with Reggie, and Billy himself was the product of their many liaisons.
The dates tied up and it was a story Billy chose to believe.
Then again, when this information was eventually relayed to him by his mother, she’d been going a bit doolally and also told him she was Catwoman in the original Batman series with Adam West and had invented the Crispy Pancake.
Given his mother could burn water in a kettle, Billy was selective about her culinary claims, but the Kray connection suited him, and enough people believed it, which greatly enhanced his hard-man reputation.
Despite moving up to Whitby many years ago, Billy’s accent had never lost its East London inflection, and the tenor of his voice was soft, like theirs, but no less menacing for that.
“Now, Orrible, what part of ‘keep a low profile’ are you not getting, you muppet?”
“I’m sorry, Billy,” said Orrible, shrinking even further. “I was only throwing stones. Not at anything, just chucking them.
For a laugh. I didn’t know that there was birds nesting. Ocelots or sumfink.”
Behind him Square snorted and Big Charlie made the comment that David Attenborough better watch it or he’d be out of a job
soon.
“Orrible,” said Billy with his smile, the one that made Orrible’s bowel clench, “do you know what the love of my life is?
Apart from my girls? And my donkeys?”
Orrible ruminated, desperate to get the answer right. “Cigars?”
“Nope.”
“Fine... Scotch? Oh no, I know... Cognac?”
“Cognac,” Big Charlie said with a snort, trying to hold it together.
“I’ll give you a clue: Think wings,” prompted Billy.
Orrible thought about it for a long moment, then grinned in triumph. “Got it—Paul McCartney?”
“Oh for fu—. Birds, Orrible, birds .” Billy nodded in the direction of the left wall where there was a massive framed photo of himself with a Steller’s sea eagle
perched on his arm, gigantic talons gripping his falconer’s glove, wings extended, all two and a half meters of them.
“Oh, birds. Wow, he’s a biggun, inne?” said Orrible. Luckily he stopped himself saying he bet it would feed a family of six
at a Sunday lunch.
“That’s Tiny,” said Billy.
“He’s not, Bill, he’s frigging massive.”
“That’s his name, you moron. Dear God, where were you when they were giving out brains?
Scatterbrook Farm, having tea with Aunt bleedin’ Sally?
Let’s start again. You might learn something even though your gray matter is about as spongelike as a slab of concrete.
Tiny there has claws capable of crushing a man’s skull like an egg,” said Billy.
“Bit like me,” said Square with a grin that would have turned milk sour.
“However, unlike you, Square, birds are among God’s prettiest creatures. And to think that anyone would throw a stone at one
of them breaks my heart. There they are, flying around being beautiful and majestic, minding their own business, and some
lowlife with a rock decides they’re target practice. Do you know how angry that makes me, Orrible?”
Orrible coughed. “Very, I would imagine. But—”
“Especially when the person chucking rocks is someone I’ve told to keep a low profile. Because who knows what that person
might say to get out of trouble if apprehended by the law? Who knows whose name he might just drop into a policeman’s awaiting
ear?”
Orrible saw now where this was going. “Billy, I wouldn’t—”
Billy cut him off. “I haven’t finished speaking, so you stick a peg in your lips, you gimp. Now not only does this idiot get
himself arrested and bound over and featured in a county-wide paper in the space of days, but Square here, yesterday, was
taking a leisurely stroll along the beach with his lovely Helena, and who should he see in the distance throwing rocks up
at the cliff?”
Orrible gave a nervous laugh, jiggling his shoulders up and down in a very unconvincing “no idea” gesture.
“I’d have said hello, but you ran off,” said Square. “Don’t even try to say it wasn’t you, Orrible. I could recognize you
if you stood at the Kent end of the Channel Tunnel and I stood in France.”
“Now, Orrible, can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t come down on you like a ton of bricks?” asked Billy. “You’re
a liability. And you know I don’t like liabilities. I don’t need liabilities. Or animal abusers.”
“I wasn’t chucking stones at birds, honest, Billy.” Orrible sniveled.
Billy slammed his spade-like hands down on the desk and bellowed, “Then what were you doing, and why are you continuing to
do it?”
“I was trying to get a handbag,” Orrible cried. He couldn’t remember what story he’d told Billy, but it didn’t matter anyway;
he just needed to get himself out of this present scrape—and only the truth was going to do that. “That woman whose car I
nicked at the beauty spot, her handbag fell over the cliff, but it snagged on a sort of tree thing and it’s too far down to
reach from the top, but I thought if I threw rocks I just might be able to dislodge it.” He slumped then, as if telling the
whole truth and nothing but the truth had emptied him.
“Right, I see. This is the unconscious woman your uncle Benny helped get to the hospital. The woman his nephew robbed and
assaulted. I’m presuming Benny doesn’t know this, does he? Not sure he’d be too pleased about that for pretty much the same
reasons I’m not.”
Orrible grinned. “I meant to tell you, Billy, she hasn’t got any memory. She wrote Uncle Benny a note and shoved it through
the window of his van. She can’t remember anything about how she got there or how she ended up in hospital.”
“Well, aren’t you a lucky boy then?” said Billy. “But memories are funny things, aren’t they? They can be brought back by
triggers. What if she looks in the newspaper and sees a photo of a scruffy twat who looks like he just walked out of Ten Acre
Field, who’s been nabbed for chucking stones at an ‘ocelot’s nest’ and she rec-og-niz-es you and it all comes flooding back to her?”
“It was a really old photo, Billy. I had all my teeth then—”
“You won’t be able to compete in the Commonwealth Games with broken arms, will you, Orrible? I think your chances of a put-shotting gold medal would be slightly scuppered. I could, however, leave your arms alone and let Charlie here loose on you. I do believe
they’re looking for sopranos in the Shoresend ladies’ choir.”
A damp patch started to appear on the front of Orrible’s trousers and Billy made a face of disgust.
“Jesus, get him out of here before he stains my Wilton. I’m warning you, son, I want you as invisible as Harry Potter with his magic cloak on. Leave that handbag where it is to rot on the cliff, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Billy. I hear you loud and clear.”
Outside, Orrible straightened his clothes. Every time he went in there, he thought there was a big chance he wouldn’t walk
out again, but he always did, and the resulting relief felt like a shot of joy administered directly into a major vein.
He sauntered off in the direction of home and Tina, but that big fat handbag hanging on the cliff would not leave his mind.
He’d been obsessing about it since he’d seen it snag on the branch. He fantasized about it in bed at night, opening it, reaching
inside and pulling out all the rich pickings: gold, cash, cards, diamond jewelry, the latest iPhone. There was real treasure
in it, he knew, and he had to get it before someone else did, no matter what Billy said.