Waiting for Wednesday

‘Billy Hunt.’
    ‘You know him?’
    ‘We all know Billy.’
    ‘Does he have a record?’
    ‘Robbery, possession, this and
that.’
    ‘Violence?’
    ‘He’s a bit of wimp, our
Billy,’ said Curzon, ‘but he may have gone downhill. I mean even further
downhill.’
    Karlsson put Riley on to it. Curzon
didn’t have an address or a number for Billy Hunt but there were a couple of
officers who’d been dealing with the local drug scene. They’d probably know,
said Curzon. They hadn’t seen Hunt for some time but one of them remembered
he’d once worked on a stall in Camden Lock. Selling implements made out of wire.
Candlesticks. Little dogs for the mantelpiece. The stall was gone but a woman
who’d worked on it was now at the other end of the market, near the canal, selling
hot soup. She didn’t know Billy but the guy who used to run the wire stall lived
ina flat in Summertown. He was out at night mostly and slept during
the day. It took repeated banging at the front door (the knocker was missing and the
bell didn’t seem to make a sound) before a woman appeared and, at their request,
went to wake him up. He hadn’t seen Billy for a couple of weeks, but he used to
drop by a café in the high street or the pub next to it when he had any money.
    Nobody seemed to know him in the café, but
when Riley showed his badge to the pale young woman behind the bar in the pub, she
pointed him to two men sitting drinking at a table. Yes, they knew Billy Hunt. Yes, one
of them had seen him today. What had they talked about? Nothing much. Just to say hello.
Where was he? That other pub. Which other one? The one up Kentish Town Road, the Goth
one, the one with the skulls.
    Riley walked up Camden High Street and found
Munster parked outside Camden Town tube station. He got into the car beside him.
    ‘What’s the plan?’ he
said.
    ‘Plan?’ said Munster.
‘Find him. And then talk to him.’
    ‘Are we bringing him in?’
    ‘We’ll talk to him
first.’
    The car pulled up before reaching the pub.
Munster gazed up at the black façade and shook his head with distaste.
    ‘I used to like heavy metal when I was
a kid,’ said Riley. ‘I’d have loved this place.’
    ‘When you were a kid?’ said
Munster. ‘Right. Do we know what he looks like?’
    Two young women, dressed from head to foot
in black leather, both with shaved heads and multiple piercings, were seated at a table
outside.
    ‘Well, they’re not Billy
Hunt,’ said Riley, cheerfully. ‘Unless Billy’s a girl’s
name.’
    At the other table a man was sitting alone,
with a half-drunk pint of beer and a cigarette. He was thin and pale, with tufted dark
hair, wearing black jeans and a rumpled grey jacket.
    ‘That might be him,’ said
Munster.
    They got out of the car and approached him.
He didn’t notice them until they were a few feet away.
    ‘We’re looking for a William
Hunt,’ said Munster.
    ‘Only my mum calls me William,’
the man replied. ‘And then only when she’s angry with me.’
    The two detectives sat at the table.
    ‘Billy, then,’ Munster said.
‘We’ve been talking to a man named Jeremy Burgess. He runs a jewellery store
just up the road from here.’
    Hunt stubbed his cigarette out on the table,
took another from a packet and lit it with almost feverish concentration. ‘I
don’t know him.’
    ‘William,’ said Munster.
‘Now
I’m
getting angry with you.’ He took a printout from his
pocket and spread it on the table. ‘He told us that you came in with this and he
bought it from you.’
    Hunt turned the paper around and looked at
it. Munster saw that even his hands, even his long fingers, were thin and pale. The
nails were bitten short but even so they were dirty and stained. ‘I don’t
know,’ he said.
    ‘What do you mean, you don’t
know?’ said Munster. ‘Is all this Georgian silver becoming a bit of
blur?’
    ‘Are you going to buy me a
drink?’
    ‘No, I’m not going to buy you a
drink. What do you think this is?’
    ‘If you’re looking for
information, there should be something in it for me.’
    Munster turned to Riley, then back to Hunt.
Riley wassmiling. Munster wasn’t. ‘You’re not a
potential informant. You’re a suspect. If you don’t answer questions, we can
take you straight into custody.’
    Hunt ruffled his hair so that it stood up
even more than before. ‘Every time there’s some bit of property goes
missing,’ he said, in a whine, ‘people like you come and hassle me about