Angel Hunt by Mike Ripley Page A

hi-fi cabinet I found, sandwiched between an old Ramones LP and the new Tommy Smith, the few printed sheets I possess. In there were ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’, ‘So This Is Christmas’ and, of course, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
    I love the traditional carols, don’t you?
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    I had a feeling that this jam session on the back of a truck with Bunny was going to end in tears, even before I left the house. If Bunny had organised it, it usually did. But even I couldn’t blame him for the phone ringing just as I was at the front door.
    It was a police person telling me that the inquest on Billy Tuckett would be at ten o’clock the next day at Queen’s Road mortuary, where there was a Coroner’s Court. Detective-Sergeant Prentice had specifically requested my presence and left instructions that I was to go to Queen’s Road and not Whipps Cross Hospital mortuary. It appeared that the roof Billy had fallen off was in one coroner’s jurisdiction, but where he’d landed was in another’s. Billy never could do anything right.
    I said I’d be there, and no, I didn’t need fetching. Me being carted off with the sirens going would just about put my street cred in overdraft.
    This close to Christmas, the wild West End was a militarised zone for private transport, even taxis. So I bus-hopped into the City and took the Central Line as far as Bond Street. I had my trumpet case on my knee and half a carriage to myself, so I pulled out a paperback of Gore Vidal’s latest essays and read the one where he thinks he gets confused with Anthony Burgess. Funny, that; one’s so much taller than the other.
    I emerged on to Oxford Street, where the decorations festooned the streetlamps and even the Wimpy bars had spray-snowed their windows. The crowds weaved around the barrow boys selling Christmas wrapping paper and ribbon and those party-popper things that go bang and send streamers of shredded Hong Kong daily newspapers across the room. (Not the other sort that contain amyl nitrate, are marketed – legally, so far – as ‘liquid incense’ and can be bought in the sex shops on Tottenham Court Road for £5.95. Or so they tell me.)
    I had a back pocket full of readies, as I planned on doing some Christmas shopping while up West and I had no intention of joining the Christmas Eve rush to the lingerie departments of the big stores, so the first thing was to get away from the temptation of the HMV shop. I did that by averting my eyes and crossing the road quickly, almost tripping over a chestnut-seller at the entrance to St Christopher’s Place.
    I knew a self-employed barman by the name of Kenny who, the Christmas before, had thought up the wicked scheme of telling the chestnut-roasters that they had to be licensed street vendors. He even ran up some fake City of Westminster chestnut licences, and it would have been a laugh, but he tried to charge for them. They’d ganged up on Kenny, and afterwards he looked as if the mean streets had come up to meet him face first. Never mess with anybody who really does know how to roast nuts.
    Martin had almost certainly made the rendezvous first, because he was keen. And because he was a good trombonist, I was quite happy to rescue him from Chase, Bunny’s tuba playing friend. Let’s face it, I’d rescue Martin Bormann from Chase, the one man I know whose conversation makes Mogadon an upper.
    â€˜Wotcha, Marty. Hello, Chase,’ I said, spreading the smile thinner as I went. I’m not a racist, but (have you noticed, there’s always a ‘but’?) I hate tuba-players. ‘Any sign of a truck?’
    â€˜Not yet,’ said Martin, all eager, ‘but we’re early.’
    I looked at my watch: one minute to 11.00. All over London, the bolts on pub doors were tensing themselves for their daily bid for freedom.
    We were roughly in the middle of St Christopher’s