Waiting for Wednesday

Individual officers have been reprimanded. But it would not be in
anyone’s interest to make a scapegoat out of …’
    Fearby thought that the message was very
clear. The police believed that Conley was the killer but had got off on a technicality.
What was more, they were making sure that everyone else in the room understood that. He
felt anger rise in him.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he called out, in a
loud voice. ‘I have a question for you.’
    Heads turned. There he was, Jim Fearby, the
one who’d been obsessed with the case for years. A journalist who’d been
around for decades, one of the old breed who got hold of a story and wouldn’t let
go. He was in his sixties now, stooped and silver-haired. He looked a bit like a bird of
prey, with his beaked nose and pale eyes, wind-blown and weather-blasted.
    ‘Mr Fearby,’ said the inspector,
smiling with no warmth. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Now that George Conley has been
released, an innocent man …’ he paused to let the words fill the room
‘… can you tell us what steps you will be taking to find out the real
perpetrator? After all, a young woman was brutally murdered.’
    The inspector coughed again, a hard and
hacking sound to give him time to prepare his answer. ‘At present, there are no
new leads,’ he said eventually.
    ‘At present?’
    ‘As I said. Any more
questions?’
    Fearby drove home through the gathering
dusk. Conley’s last prison, unlike his previous ones, had been quite close to
where he lived – in a small town just outside Birmingham. When Sandra had left him,
he’d thought he would perhaps go somewhere different – the Lake District, perhaps,
or even further north, where cold, clean winds blew off the hills. He could begin again.
But in the end he’d stayed, surrounded by his files, his books, his pictures, his
DVDs of old films. It didn’t matter so much where he lived; it was just a place to
sleep, to think.
    He went into his study and gazed at the
piles of notebooks and folders that were filled with the evidence of his obsession:
police reports, legal reports, letters sent and received, petitions … He
poured himself a large slug of gin because he’d run out of whisky and added water
because he’d run out of tonic. What sailors used to drink, he thought – a sad,
solitary drink to get you through the hours. He must have fallen asleep in his chair,
because when the phone rang it felt at first like part of a dream.
    ‘Is that Jim Fearby?’
    ‘Who is it?’
    ‘I saw you at the press conference. Are
you still writing about the case?’
    ‘What’s it matter?’ Fearby
still felt only half awake.
    ‘I want to meet you.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘You know a pub called the Philip
Sidney?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You can find it. I’ll be there
at five tomorrow evening.’
I tried to call you. When we see each
other, I’m going to give you a short lesson in how to use your mobile!
(Mainly, leave it turned on and have it with you.) Now it’s probably too late
to try again. You’ll be asleep. Or perhaps you’ll be stalking the
streets of London with that frown on your face. Speak soon and until then, take care
of your dear self. S xxxxx



THIRTEEN
    Karlsson sat opposite Billy Hunt. ‘You
must be the world’s worst burglar,’ he said.
    ‘So you saw I was telling the
truth?’
    ‘Busy Bees,’ said Karlsson.
‘Apart from the fact that it’s a nursery school that is being built for
little children, and that stealing from them doesn’t seem right, what the hell did
you expect to get from them? Stuffed toys?’
    ‘There was building work going
on,’ said Hunt. ‘I thought there might be some tools around.’
    ‘But there weren’t.’
    ‘No. I didn’t find
anything.’
    ‘On the bright side,’ said
Karlsson, ‘it was a building site, which meant there were plenty of CCTV cameras
and I saw the best images I’ve ever seen. You could have used some of them for
your passport photo.’
    ‘I told you I was there.’
    ‘But, as we know, you were also at the
murder scene. You need to tell us about that.’
    Hunt bit the side of his thumb. ‘If I
tell you everything, will you drop the burglary charge?’
    ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Karlsson.
‘I’m not even sure we’re dropping the murder charge. Just tell us
everything and stop messing me about.’
    Hunt thought.
    ‘I needed some cash,’ he said.
‘I owed someone. Look, I’ve told you all this before.’
    ‘Tell me again.’
    ‘I ended up on Margaretting Street. I
rang on a few