Chapter 38
It was a foul day, which was good, because nobody in their right mind was on the beach apart from a couple of hardened dog
owners, but even they’d make it quick. Through a practiced process of elimination, Orrible had worked out the optimum size
of rock he’d need to have any chance of hitting that handbag, which was still hanging tantalizingly. He’d come pretty close
to it recently, but today was the day; he was not going home until it was his. He arrived at the site with a bag for life
full of rocks and bricks that he’d collected and began chucking them until his arm gave up and he had to stop and roll his
shoulder. It was still aching from being twisted the last time he’d been the recipient of one of Square’s armbars. He was
meant to have it, he knew. It was fate that the owner of the handbag had lost her memory and hadn’t gone into Slattercove
police station and told them that the bloke who had nicked her car looked like someone who should have been dancing up the
yellow brick road with Judy Garland. She’d only have had to mention “floppy hat” and the rozzers would have been round at
his house faster than you could say “brain.”
The rain was getting stupid now; he picked up one of the rocks that had come tumbling back to him down the cliff face like a homing stone and pitched it, roaring as he did so as if that would help take it higher up, but it didn’t work, landing well south of its target.
It had become a battle of wills for him: man versus handbag.
It was the last thing he thought of at night and the first thing he thought of when he woke up.
It was a compulsion stronger even than keeping on the right side of Billy.
He was just straightening up from retrieving the rock at his feet when a seagull mistook his hat for something edible and
swooped, screeching at him.
“Oy, you bloody thing,” Orrible said as it soared upward, the hat in its beak. He lobbed the rock in his hand, which by some
miracle hit the seagull full on in the wing and drove it smack into the cliff wall, but luckily for the gull, the impact was
softened by the bag. And luckily for Orrible, the collision caused the branch it was caught on to snap clean off. Orrible
watched in joyful amazement as his hat, the seagull, and the bag fell down to the beach in a holy trinity. The seagull gave
its head a shake, righted itself, and flew off none the worse for its ordeal. Had it died, Orrible thought he just might have
given it a state funeral.
He lumbered up to the road to catch the bus home, though he could have floated there without the need of a vehicle, so euphoric
he was about winning this long-drawn-out campaign. He fully intended to save the whole surprise of what the bag contained
until he was sitting at the kitchen table with a celebratory can of cold lager, but he’d had a quick dabble inside and found
a fabulously fat purse and a passport. He recognized the woman’s photo in it. So, she was called Polly Potter then. He thought
she looked nicer without all that makeup that she’d been wearing up on the cliff top. He clutched the bag to him for the prize
it was and quickened his pace as the bus he wanted was just about to pull in and save him from the rain. Could this day get
any better?
The doors shhh ’ed open and he stood back while a woman alighted. She was carrying a black bin liner, and when she raised her head and her
eyes locked onto his, he knew her straightaway because he’d just been looking at her photograph in her passport. What are the blimming chances?
Sabrina registered the scrawny, scruffy man with the string for a belt and the floppy hat, holding a woman’s large handbag.
She’d seen him before. In a field where her uncle’s car had crashed many years before, the black eyes that took in everything,
the insects scratching inside him. Her uncle Ed, her auntie Rina. Would you like to come and live with us? Seagulls and the seaside, the old cat next door, the
crash, Benidorm. It’s for the best. Thoughts and feelings and sounds and words burst a dam wall inside her, totally drowning her brain. She couldn’t breathe.
She put one foot on the ground and her legs crumpled beneath her.
“Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, not again,” said Orrible.