Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Do you know what I hate the most,’ he shouted. I could see that he’d rather be adopting a sinisterly conversational tone, but unfortunately for him the riot was too loud.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ I asked. I could feel the heat from the burning Mini on my back – Folsom had me trapped.

  ‘I hate police constables,’ he said. ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘Why, sir?’ I edged round to my left, trying to open an escape route.

  ‘Because you never stop moaning,’ said Folsom. ‘I joined up in 1982, the good old days, before the PACE, before Macpherson and quality-control targets. And you know what? We were shit. We thought we were doing well in an investigation if we arrested anybody at all, let alone the perpetrator. We got the shit kicked out of us from Brixton to Tottenham and, fuck me, were we bent? We weren’t even that expensive! We’d let some scrote go for two pints of lager and a packet of crisps.’ He paused, and for a moment a look of puzzlement crossed his face, then his eyes fixed back on me and the left one twitched.

  ‘And you,’ he said, and I wasn’t happy with the way he said it. ‘How long do you think you’d have lasted back then? A locker full of excrement would have just been a warm-up. Odds are, a few of your relief would have taken you to one side and explained, in a rough but friendly manner, just how unwanted you were.’

  I seriously considered rushing the guy – anything to make him shut up.

  ‘And don’t think your relief inspector would have helped,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t have been able to spell “racial discrimination” on his report, if there had been a report …’

  I feinted at him to back him up and then darted to my right, away from the burning car and the rest of the riot. It didn’t work. Folsom didn’t back up, and as I went past he gave me a backhander that was like being slapped with floorboard. It knocked me right back on my arse, and I found myself staring up at a seriously enraged senior officer looking to give me a good kicking at the very least. He’d just managed to land one of his size tens on my thigh – I ended up with a purple heel-shaped bruise for a month – when someone clubbed him down from behind.

  It was Inspector Neblett, still dressed in his impractical uniform tunic but carrying an honest-to-God wooden riot truncheon of the kind phased out in the 1980s for being slightly more lethal than a pickaxe handle.

  ‘Grant,’ he said. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  I scrambled over to where Folsom lay face down on the pavement. ‘There’s been an irretrievable breakdown in public order,’ I said, while tugging Folsom into the recovery position. My head was still ringing from his backhander, so I wasn’t that gentle.

  ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘There wasn’t anything scheduled.’

  Riots are rarely spontaneous. Crowds usually have to be assembled and provoked, and a conscientious inspector keeps a weather eye out for problems. Especially when his patch contains a riot magnet like Trafalgar Square. The only half-convincing lie I could think of was that somebody had attacked the Royal Opera House with a psychotropic aerosol, but I figured that might raise more questions than it answered. Not to mention trigger an inappropriate military response. I was just about to risk the truth, that a kind of vampire ghost had put the influence on the entire audience, when Neblett twigged exactly who it was he’d just smacked in the head.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said, squatting down for a closer look. ‘This is Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom.’

  Our eyes met across the twitching form of our senior officer.

  ‘He didn’t see you, sir,’ I said. ‘If you call an ambulance we can have him off the scene before he regains consciousness. There was a riot, he was attacked, you rescued him.’

  ‘And your role in this?’

  ‘Reliable witness, sir,’ I said. ‘As to your timely intervention.’

  Inspector Neblett gave me a hard look. ‘I was wrong about you, Grant,’ he said. ‘You do have the makings of a proper copper.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. I looked around. The riot had moved on – down Floral Street and into the Piazza, I reckoned.

  ‘Where’s the TSG?’ I asked.

  The TSG are the Territorial Support Group. These are the guys that tool around in Mercedes Sprinter vans with equipment lockers stuffed with everything from riot helmets to tasers. Every borough command has a couple of these buzzing around their operational area, especially at closing time, and there’s a reserve force held on standby just in case of unexpected events. I suspected that current events counted as unexpected.

  ‘They’re staging on Longacre and Russell Street,’ said Neblett. ‘It looks like GT’s plan is to contain them around Covent Garden.’

  There was a crash from the direction of the Piazza, followed by ragged cheering. ‘What now?’ asked Neblett.

  ‘I think they’re looting the market.’

  ‘Can you get the ambulance?’ he asked.

  ‘No sir, I’ve got orders to find the ringleader,’ I said.

  A Molotov cocktail makes a very distinctive sound. A well-designed one goes crash, thud, whoosh – it’s the last, the petrol igniting, that’s going to kill you if you let it. I know this because before you graduate from Hendon you get to spend a fun-filled day having them thrown at you. Which was why Neblett and I both instinctively ducked when we heard them smashing into the tarmac less then fifteen metres down the road.

  ‘It’s kicking off,’ said Neblett.

  Looking south, I could see a mob of rioters on the crossroads where Culverhay met Bow Street. Beyond them I saw flames reflected off blue riot helmets and grey shields.

  I still had to get Lesley, subdue her and take her back to Walid at the UCH. Transport shouldn’t be a problem, since half the ambulances in London were probably converging on Covent Garden right at that moment. That just left finding her. I decided to assume that she was still looking for revenge on Macklin, who’d once had a gin shop on Henrietta Street and was buried at the Actors’ Church. That meant getting back into the Piazza, which unfortunately meant either passing through the exciting civil disturbance to the south or running up Floral Street, which contained God knew what in the way of rioters and really bad things.

  Fortunately, when they rebuilt the Royal Opera House one thing they made sure of was that it had a lot of exits. Pausing only to wish Neblett good luck and give Folsom a surreptitious kick in the shins, I ran back inside. Then it was a simple matter to slip past the box office and the company shop and out the other side into the Piazza. At least it would have been, if someone hadn’t been looting the shop.

  The glass display window was smashed, and fractured glass littered the displays of DVDs, holdalls embossed with the Royal Ballet School logo and souvenir pens. Somebody had torn the silver-and-ivory-coloured manikin out of the window and flung it across the corridor with enough force to break it against the marble wall opposite. I could hear sobbing coming from inside, punctuated by the occasional crash. Curiosity got the better of me as I was creeping past, and I paused at the broken entrance to peer cautiously inside.

  A middle-aged man sat barefoot on the floor of the shop surrounded by hundreds of clear plastic wrappers. As I watched, he grabbed one of the wrappers and ripped it open to extract a pair of white ballet shoes. Carefully, the tip of his tongue emerging from the side of his mouth, the man tried to slip one of the shoes onto his big hairy foot. Unsurprisingly the shoe was too small to fit, no matter how hard the man pulled on the straps – until finally he ripped the seams open. The man held the ruined shoe in front of his face and burst into tears. When he flung them across the shop and reached for another pair, I left him to it – there are just some things that man is not meant to know.

  The back exit of the Royal Opera House emerges under the colonnade in the north-east corner of the Piazza. The Paperchase on the left had been gutted, and shreds of coloured paper were blowing across the stone flags and into the square. On the right the Disney Store was being enthusiastically looted, but the Build-a-Bear shop was bizarrely u
ntouched – an oasis of brightly coloured twee and peace. Most of the actual fighting seemed to be down by the church on the west side – that’s where I reckoned Lesley would be. I headed for the covered market, reckoning that I could use it as cover to get close to the church. I was halfway there when somebody wolf-whistled at me. It was a proper two-fingers-in-the mouth whistle and cut right through the noise of the riot.

  I zeroed in on the second whistle. It was Beverley, staring down at me from the pub balcony on the first floor – she waved when she saw me looking and ran for the stairs. I met her at the bottom.

  ‘They burned out my car,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘My lovely brand new car,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, and grabbed her arm. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ I tried to drag her back towards the Opera House.

  ‘We can’t go back that way,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I think there’s some people following you,’ she said.

  I turned. The principal cast were back, followed by what I recognised as the orchestra and some people dressed mostly in t-shirts and jeans who I took to be the backstage crew. The Royal Opera Company is a world-class institution dedicated to staging some of the biggest operas on an epic scale – they have a very large backstage crew.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Beverley. ‘Is that Lesley?’

  Lesley had pushed to the front of the crowd, still wearing her Punch face. She held up her hand and the company paused.

  ‘Run,’ I said to Beverley.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said and, grabbing my arm, pulled me backwards so hard I almost fell over. Beverley darted down one of the dim brick corridors that led into the heart of the covered market. With evening drawing in, most of the actual shops were closed but stalls serving drinks and generic ethnic food should have been doing a roaring trade fleecing tourists. But there was nobody in sight, and I was hoping this meant punters and stall holders had already run for safety.

  Behind us I heard the company give a great howl, in good harmony, and above that, the high-pitched squeaking laugh of the avatar of riot and rebellion. There was a sudden ominous silence, and then the first of the firebombs hit the roof. Lesley had said she didn’t want me dead, but I was beginning to suspect that she may have been lying.

  Beverley swung us round a corridor and into one of the covered courtyards, which is where we found the German family. There were five of them, a stolid dark-haired father, a sharp-faced blonde mother and three children aged between seven and twelve. They must have taken shelter behind a food stall when the riot broke out, and were just emerging when they looked up to find Beverley and me barrelling towards them. The mother gave a terrified yelp, the eldest daughter screamed and the man squared up. The father didn’t want to fight but by God he was ready to defend his family from dangerous stereotypes, whatever the odds. I showed him my warrant card and he deflated in relieved surprise.

  ‘Polizei,’ he told his wife and then, very politely, asked whether we might help them.

  I told them that we’d love to help them, starting by proceeding to the nearest exit and evacuating the area. I was sweating suddenly, and I realised that it was from the heat of a fire on my back. The whole rear of the covered market was on fire – I put one hand on the father’s back and the other on his eldest son and pushed them in the other direction. ‘Raus, raus!’ I yelled, hoping it really did mean ‘get out’.

  Beverley led the way towards the so far untouched south-west corner of the market, but we’d barely cleared the second row of stalls when she skidded to a halt and the German family and I slammed into her back. Ahead, a group of rioters were using the western façade of the market to engage in a running battle with police reinforcements.

  ‘We’re trapped,’ said Beverley.

  The rioters had their backs to us, but it was only a matter of time before one of them turned round.

  One of the nearby shops looked surprisingly unlooted, and while running into a building during a fire is generally considered a retrograde step I didn’t see that we had much choice. It wasn’t until we’d bundled inside and I found myself crouching behind a manikin wearing nothing but two wisps of silk that I realised we were in a branch of Seraglio. I persuaded the family to sit down behind the counter so they wouldn’t be visible from outside.

  ‘Please,’ asked the mother. ‘What is happening here?’

  ‘Beats me, sister,’ said Beverley. ‘I just work here.’

  The covered market at Covent Garden has four parallel rows of shops under its iron and glass roof. Originally built to house open-fronted fruit and vegetable stalls, they’d been retrofitted with windows and power but they were still less than three metres across. Into them were shoehorned specialist craft shops, cafés and bijou versions of high-street chain boutiques, which weren’t going to let a little thing like inadequate floor space get in the way of gleaning some of that high-spending tourist action. As a result, our haven was crowded with manikins of the tastefully abstract silver and black kind, wearing distractingly skimpy bits of satin. I hoped the manikins would make us less obvious to anybody who glanced inside.

  That was tested when a number of rioters slunk past the windows. Judging from the torn suit jackets and dirty white shirts, these were members of the audience, not the cast. I held my breath as they paused outside, calling to each other in their guttural stockbroker accents.

  Strangely, I found I wasn’t frightened. Instead I was embarrassed – that this nice family of Von Trapp impersonators had come to my city, and instead of being gently relieved of their money they were facing violence, injury and bad manners at the hands of Londoners. It pissed me off no end.

  The stockbrokers loped off towards the west.

  ‘Right,’ I said after a minute, ‘I’m just going to check the coast is clear.’

  I slipped out of the shop door and looked around. On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire. I ran a little way towards the closest exit but I got no more than a few paces before the heat started singeing my nostril hair. I quickly ducked back into the shop.

  ‘Beverley,’ I said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’ I told her about the fire.

  The mother frowned. She was the linguist in the family. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

  The flames were clearly reflected in the shop windows and the blank silver faces of the manikins, so it seemed pointless to lie. She looked at her children and then back at me. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

  I looked at Beverley.

  ‘Can’t you do any magic?’ she asked.

  It was definitely getting hotter. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘You got to say it’s okay,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the agreement,’ said Beverly. ‘You’ve got to say it’s okay.’

  One of the window panes cracked. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Do what you have to do.’

  Beverley threw herself down and pressed her cheek to the floor. I saw her lips moving. I felt something pass through me, a sensation like rain, like the sound of boys playing football in the distance, the smell of suburban roses and newly washed cars, evening television flickering through net curtains.

  ‘What is she doing?’ asked the mother. ‘She is praying for us, yes?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘Sshh,’ said Beverley, sitting up. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘What for?’

  Something flew in through the window, pinged off the wall and fell into my lap – it was the cover off a fire hydrant. Beverley saw me examining it and gave me an apologetic shrug.

  ‘What exactly have you done?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’ve never actually tried this before.’

  The smoke thickened, forcing us face down onto the mercifully cool stone of the shop floor. The middle German child was crying. His mother
put her arm around him and pulled him close. The youngest, a girl, seemed remarkably stoical. Her blue eyes were fixed on mine. The father twitched. He was wondering whether he should at least get up and try do something heroic, however futile. I knew exactly how he felt. The last of the window panes shattered, glass pattering down on my back. I breathed in smoke, coughed, breathed in more smoke. It didn’t feel like enough of a breath. I realised that this was it – I was going to die.

  Beverley started laughing.

  Suddenly it was a hot Sunday morning under unexpectedly blue skies. There’s a smell of hot plastic and dust as the paddling pool is rescued from the garden shed and the kids, dressed in swimsuits and underwear, are bouncing up and down with excitement. Dad is red-faced from blowing up the pool and Mum is yelling to be careful, and the hose is run in through the kitchen window and jammed onto the cold tap. The hose gives a dusty cough and all the children stare at its mouth …

  The floor began to vibrate, and I had just enough time to think What the fuck when a wall of water hit the south side of the shop. The door was smashed open and before I could grab hold of something I was lifted by the surge and slammed against the ceiling. The air was blown out of my lungs by the impact, and I had to bite down on the instinct to draw in a breath. For a moment the flood cleared enough for me to catch sight of Beverley floating serenely amid the debris before the water drained out of the shop fast enough to slap me into the floor again.

  The father, with more presence of mind than I’d shown, had wedged himself and his family against the counter. They assured me they were all okay, except for the youngest who wanted to do it again. Beverly stood in the middle of the shop and did the air punch.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Let’s see Tyburn do something like that.’

  *

  Beverley’s euphoria lasted long enough for us to get our German family to the nearest ambulance. As far as I could tell from looking around while we walked out, Beverley’s wave of water had started somewhere near the centre of the covered market and rolled outwards to flood the Piazza to a depth of ten centimetres. I reckoned that at a stroke Beverley had quadrupled the amount of property damage done that night, but I kept that thought to myself. She hadn’t managed to extinguish the fire on the roof, but even as we sidled away, the London Fire Brigade were moving in to finish it off.