Free No Cure For Love by Peter Robinson

about her own childhood and how she began playing parts to escape the grime and the coal dust, the suffocating aura of defeat, poverty and broken dreams all around her. She remembered the time she organized a couple of her friends and, with sheets borrowed from the washing-line, they improvised the story of Ruth among the alien corn that they had learned in Sunday school the previous week.
    Sarah’s mother had been livid. Not only had her daughter been participating in the trivialization of a Bible story, she had also dirtied freshly washed sheets. In her mother’s mind, Methodism and theatre weren’t as close as cleanliness and godliness.
    Sarah hadn’t run more than a quarter of a mile when she noticed something about a hundred yards ahead of her in the sand. It was an odd, humped shape she couldn’t quite make out. Probably driftwood.
    It had been an odd relationship, she thought, the one she had had with her mother. Alice Bolton’s religion had been deeply enough ingrained to make her theologically opposed to most forms of human artistic endeavour, even if they were dedicated to the praise of God, yet she had been proud of her daughter. More so than her father. If only—
    Sarah stopped dead in her tracks as another childhood memory thudded into her mind with the force of a hammer blow.
    Let’s bury Daddy in the sand.
    It was a game they used to play on seaside holidays in Blackpool, on the rare warm days. She and her older sister, Paula, would dig a hole in the sand and Daddy would lie down in it, then they would cover him with sand and pat it down. In the end, only his head would be showing. He would stay there for a while, then all of a sudden he would jump up and chase them, as they giggled and screamed, into the cold, grey Irish Sea.
    The figure that lay in front of her now hadn’t been quite so well buried. The hands and forearms stuck out, as did the feet. The face was above the surface, but it was covered with a light dusting of sand, as if blown there by the breeze, and she couldn’t make out the features. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.
    Sarah stood and stared, hands on her knees, panting for breath. She didn’t know what to do. In panic, she looked around but there was no one in sight. There never was at this time. Only the gulls screeching and squealing overhead in the pale morning light. Was the person dead? She thought so. Should she run back to the house and phone an ambulance? Maybe she should make sure first?
    Gingerly, she leaned forward and grasped one of the hands. She braced herself for the weight, but as soon as she exerted the slightest pressure, she fell back on the sand.
    Then she saw it. In her hand, she held a human arm, severed just above the elbow, where she could see the dark, clotted blood and tissue matted with sand. She dropped it and got to her feet. Blood roared and waves pounded in her ears.
    Just before she turned away to run back to the house, she saw something else, something that made her blood freeze.
    The image looked as if it had been drawn in the sand with a sharp stick. It showed a heart pierced by an arrow, like the ones teenage lovers used to carve into trees or chalk on walls. Inside the heart was her name: Sally.
    Sarah put her hand to her mouth and staggered back a few paces before turning to run back to the house.

Part Two

10
    Judging by the expressions of delight and surprise when the captain announced that it was a clear and sunny day in Manchester, with a temperature of fifty degrees, Californians had just as many illusions about the English weather as the Brits had about theirs. Either that or global warming was messing everything up. No one took off their jackets, though; fifty was still too cold for an Angeleno in December.
    As Sarah had a British passport, she avoided the long queue at immigration. Her one large suitcase, packed with Christmas presents, arrived quickly at the carousel, and though one of the officers gave her a second