Free Lady Bag by Liza Cody

Smister’s bag. She lay down and went to sleep in my wheelie case, snuggled up in Natalie’s towelling bathrobe. She’d had a traumatic outing, poor thing.
    I sat on the bunk bed with a bottle and the turkey baster and wondered how I’d let myself be bullied by Nan and her feral granddaughter. It was the handbag, I decided. Far from protecting me, the sight of it had set me up as a mark. It was a badge of prosperity and I was foolish to cling to it. But it was a lovely bag even banged about and soaked with rain water.
    The other clue nestled on page four of the Standard: a picture of me, unconscious, bandaged, bruised, swollen, lumpy and drooling because of a tube in my mouth—a portrait of the archetypal victim. They said I was Natalie Munrow who worked for a firm of corporate investment sharks called Goodall and Jett. I was thirty-eight years old, divorced, and living in a trendy area of South Kensington. The other victim had not yet been identified. The neighbours were shocked out of their socks. An Australian au-pair claimed to have seen three or four suspicious characters in the mews earlier in the afternoon.
    You’d think that someone would’ve noticed the difference between high-flying Natalie and bottom-crawling me. But as I say, it was the portrait of an archetypal victim. A woman beaten beyond all recognition is, after all, beyond recognition. The paper didn’t say so but I had to assume that the other victim had been beaten too. She, Natalie, must have been unrecognisable too. The only reason anyone mistook me for her was because of the bag. I asked the ambulance lady for my bags and bedroll, but my mouth was too broken and she brought me Natalie’s bag instead.
    I squirted more red wine into my smashed mouth and tried to think.
    It was Joss and Georgie. Natalie caught them burgling her house so they beat and kicked her to death. They were going to do the same to me because I was a witness but Georgie panicked and ran off.
    I sucked more red out of the turkey baster and tried to get my head around the idea that my friends were killers. Joss always went mental when he thought he was being ripped off. He had, reputedly, kicked a guy half to death and then stuffed him headfirst down a manhole. The guy would’ve drowned in sewage except his beer belly stuck in the hole and three firemen had to rescue him.
    Georgie had better people skills but once you got to know him you discovered that he was sly and annoying.
    They sometimes shared booze and smokes and that counts as friendship in some levels of society. Not for me though. Giving me a few ciggies and a swallow or two of beer did not make up for my teeth, my concussion or my ribs. Plus I was still a witness. They were a real danger to me because I was a danger to them. I could send them down for murder if I ratted on them.
    They’d be locked up for life or at least ten years. Then I’d be safe.
    Except I wouldn’t be. People who rat are never safe on the street. But you know what? Street law’s as mad as a bag of weasels if it’s okay for Joss and Georgie to kick the living shite out of me and Natalie but it’s not okay for me to rat them out for it. I should call the cops. But I’d have to do it anonymously. The Dogs of Law would take me away if I ever told them my real name.
    ‘Not you,’ I whispered to Electra and laid my hand on her tabby-striped haunch. ‘You aren’t a Dog of Law. You’re my one true friend.’
    She opened a twenty-four carat gold eye and said, ‘I’ll be your untrue fiend if you don’t let me sleep. Put that stupid bottle away—you’re not making any sense. Again.’ She sighed a tragically disappointed sigh and settled down with her back to me.
    ‘If I don’t drink I’ll feel hungry,’ I said. ‘And if I don’t talk I’ll feel lonely.’ But she ignored me.
    If we were in the West End now, I thought, someone would give us some money and we’d amble off and share a burger. We’d have a little drink and wander