Angel Touch Read Online Free PDF

knew he was grinning; I could see his beard move.
    Â 
    Tiger Tim turned out to be a dwarf with three guitars and two banjos, all on stands, upright and forming the points of a pentacle on his pitch near the corner of the entrance to the old market. He wore his hair long over a faded denim jacket and kept it out of his eyes with a red bandana tied pirate-fashion. He had at least six pentacles on chains around his neck and two on an amulet on his left wrist. I’d lay odds that he hadn’t been to a Round Tablers lunch for a while.
    I let Bunny do the negotiating, but I found a tenner, which was only fair as I was bank-rolling the band for Salome’s party.
    There was a large lunch-time crowd drifting round the flea market and out of the shopping plaza and it was a bright, sunny afternoon. Werewolf couldn’t resist it.
    He tuned up Tiger Tim’s banjo and produced an un-coloured bottle neck with the end ground down for safety, probably a souvenir of a Corona drinking session on his last California trip. He slipped the tube of glass over the middle finger of his left hand and tried a few chords before breaking in to the Boss’s ‘Spare Parts and Broken Hearts’.
    Tiger Tim jammed along for a few seconds, then gave up. The crowd had never heard bottle-neck banjo before, and Werewolf was what they wanted to hear.
    After half an hour, the regular buskers formed a committee and had a whipround. They elected a white-faced clown as their spokesman, which amused me because I thought he was going to do it in mime for a minute.
    The clown sidled up to me in the crowd and hissed through the corner of his mouth. ‘Get the mad Irish git aht of ‘ere and there’s a drink in it for yer.’
    I felt my hand being tapped, and I looked down to see a couple of ten-pound notes tightly folded. I took them from the clown. Fancy, being run out of town by a Cockney Marcel Marceau impersonator!
    I tipped Werewolf the nod and he finished with a flourish, packing up the banjo to the applause of the crowd (and cries of ‘More’ – although some of the other buskers muttered ‘Less’), who pitched another few quid into the banjo case.
    When we were in Armstrong heading back to Hackney, Werewolf laughed.
    â€˜Nicely done, Angel me old mucker. I reckon we’re a tenner apiece up on the day, even allowing for the rent of the instrument. We haven’t pulled that one since … when was it?’
    â€˜The Edinburgh Festival.’ That time we got paid to leave by a consortium of fire-eaters, two street-theatre companies, a bagpiper (you ever heard a synthesised bagpipe?) and an accordionist. ‘And you just couldn’t resist showing off, could you? One of these days, they’ll do you over rather than pay you off.’
    Werewolf laughed again.
    â€˜I’m terrible aren’t I? Some days –’ he was being philosophical; I could tell, because he’d put his feet up on the glass partition behind my head – ‘I just shouldn’t be let out of the house.’
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
Chapter Two
    Â 
    Â 
    Salome’s birthday bash was held in a pub called the Pavilion End, because it had been done out like a cricket pavilion. Apart from the cricket bores from the City who haunt it during the summer, it’s not a bad boozer. It’s just behind St Paul’s, on Watling Street, the old Roman road that connected the Kent coast with St Albans, though it beats me why anyone should want to go to St Albans.
    There was a downstairs room for parties and where the pub occasionally had a jazz trio or quartet, but there was little space, so I’d limited our ensemble to five: me and my horn, Werewolf and Tiger Tim’s banjo, a BBC producer called Martin who would take his trombone anywhere to get in a gig, and my regular co-conspirators Dod and Trippy. Dod is not only a passable drummer but he also has a van big enough to transport us all, and Trippy, when