Ventriloquists Read Online Free Page B

deliberately not brought cash with him this Monday morning. Only now – with a bell tinkling above the door as they entered, and Yasser’s sphincter muscle ceasing its endlessly curious gulping – did he start to wonder if he’d overplanned.
    ‘Bid!’
    ‘Mags! Hang on a mo,’ said the young woman standing at a table on which a West Highland Terrier stood proud but snuffling under the influence of some sort of canine chill. ‘I’ve just got his gonads to go around.’ With which she flicked a switch, and the electric razor that she carried fired back into life.
    The dog did not so much as blink as Bridget reapplied the tool of her trade to the tools of his. The dog was no fool.
    ‘This is Yasser,’ said Maggie.
    ‘Well, I didn’t think it was Stevie Wonder,’ Bridget responded. ‘Put the kettle on, Mags, and for fuck’s sake let the teabags drown. Enough of your cat piss. I can afford a couple of teabags.’
    Yasser waited near the door for further instruction. One question in his mind among many was this: What the hell have I got myself into?
     
    6.
    ‘Pamona was taken from us about three months ago,’ said Bridget.
    ‘Two months and twenty-three days,’ Maggie interrupted.
    ‘ –and it’s all my fault.’
    ‘No it’s not, Bid.’
    ‘Yes it is.’ To Yasser she said: ‘I hold myself utterly responsible. It was a shopping centre – the one in Aylesbury.’
    Yasser was frowning. ‘And the police couldn’t trace the CCTV?’ he wondered.
    ‘There were no police.’ This was uttered as a Maggie and Bridget duet.
    Yasser continued to frown. ‘You didn’t report it?’ he asked, incredulous.
    ‘Report what?’ Bridget sounded angry. ‘Another Pikey kidnapping?’
    ‘No we didn’t,’ Maggie said simply.
    Bridget sipped her tea (it had been deepened appropriately dense as a brew) and said: ‘I had a stomach upset. At any one time I was one fart away from disaster, Yasser. I had a bowel like a depth-charge .’
    ‘I get the picture.’
    Bridget shook her head. ‘I went into the Ladies. I left her outside in her pushchair. And it was the last time I saw Paloma.’
    Maggie copied Yasser’s frown. ‘I won’t have you giving up on her, Bid, I’ll give you that for a starter right now.’
    Bridget sighed. ‘I’m not giving up, Mags,’ she said, straight but quiet.
    Seconds drifted past. It was Yasser who broke the silence.
    ‘I thought you said she disappeared in Hockliffe,’ he said to Maggie.
    ‘I did,’ Maggie started to say.
    ‘She was seen here afterwards,’ Bridget explained. ‘I was frantic. Frantic . I didn’t know what to do. I went from shop to shop, searching. I remember screaming. God knows how I drove back here – I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, so I get it into my head – this is stupid, I know it – but I got it into my head she’d got home here. On her own. Somehow. She’d either been picked up and collected, or... or I don’t have a clue what. She didn’t bloody fly .’
    Yasser nodded. ‘Who saw her here?’ he asked.
    ‘Lulu. Louise,’ said Bridget. ‘She works for me. She swears blind she saw Pamona walking through the door.’
    ‘Walking?’
    ‘I know ! She’s barely at a crawl, but Lulu’s adamant. What do you call it? A visitation?’
    ‘I suppose. A haunting.’
    ‘She was here, Yasser,’ Maggie said quickly. ‘I don’t doubt it for a second. Not that I can explain it but I believe it.’
    ‘Okay.’ Yasser breathed deeply. ‘Okay...’
    Maggie repeated, ‘She was here...’

 
    The Moron and the Nurse’s Dog
    1.
    Connors stared at Dorman in disbelief.
    ‘You’re having me on.’
    ‘Nope.’ Dorman was eating chicken from a bucket: one drumstick, one slurp, one chew, and down it went; on to the next, the bone discarded into a small paper dish. There were already a lot of wet bones; and on the table, only the coleslaw remained untouched: Dorman believed coleslaw was the Devil’s work.
    Connors persisted. ‘There’ll be law