In the course of that morning five heavies I’d never seen before, plus one I had, came in and out of that street door, one at a time or in pairs, dropped off at the curb and picked up again by two more guys driving unremarkable but powerful Merc sedans.
The one heavy I recognized was Dean; the others who came and went I nicknamed so I could keep track more easily: Swarthy was skinny and dark, with stubble so thick and coarse you could strike a match off his chin; Roly-Poly was as beefy as a rugby player, with hairy hands and an open-necked patterned shirt that strained to hold in his big belly; Blondie was barely twenty—nearly albino, with colorless skin, thinning blond hair and invisible eyebrows. And Popeye, and Blue Shoes…Two of them wore suits, three of them jeans and blazers, and Dean wore a leather bomber jacket that had seen better days, with spotless stone-colored chinos.
Although he swaggered about like he was in charge, from the body language of the others it looked very much like Dean was an apprentice. For one thing, all the Turkish guys—as far as I could see—were armed. Four of them had a bulge under their left armpit and Blue Shoes a similar bulge under his right—he must be a southpaw…but although Dean had been packing in Trafalgar Square, he didn’t seem to be now. Clearly he hadn’t distinguished himself, if they’d taken his gun away.
I calculated I could take any of them one to one—close-up, so they’d have no time to pull a weapon—but this wasn’t one of those old kung-fu movies where the villains formed an orderly queue to have a go at the hero. Yeah, I could ring the doorbell, and maybe floor whoever answered it, but then I’d have to fight my way upstairs against five men, mostly armed, who knew I was coming.
Half an hour after noon I saw the door to the flat open again. This time no one came out. Instead another Merc pulled up at the curb—a sleek modern one with darkened windows—and a slight, smart figure emerged, crossing the pavement and disappearing inside within a second or two. The Turk. I had only caught a glimpse, but I was sure it was him, and the sight of Kemal’s massive muscular torso emerging from the car’s other side and following him in confirmed it. He carried a small briefcase, I noticed, that in his huge paw looked the size of a paperback.
Tell the Guvnor. Of course, I could call him right now, hand him the Turk on a plate. Taking on this many men would need an army, and McGovern had one—even if his had lost the last few battles. The Guvnor wouldn’t hesitate to use as much violence as necessary, and plenty more besides….
That was the problem. Even if I told him Zoe was being held inside, the Guvnor wouldn’t give a damn. He wouldn’t risk any men to save her—his crew would probably firebomb the place, and stand back laughing while burning goons jumped out of the windows, screaming. Zoe, tied to the bed, wouldn’t even get that far.
By the time I’d thought all that through, the street door opened again and the Turk strode briskly across the pavement back to his car, weaving through shoppers who barely registered his presence. When Kemal lumbered after him, though, passersby stopped in their tracks and parted to make way; he radiated such menace one or two even turned their heads to avert their eyes. The Merc’s doors shut again and the car moved smoothly off.
Just like that, the Guvnor’s chance had been and gone. Even if I’d called him he wouldn’t have had time to rally his troops, never mind get them down here.
A cold dark cloak of despair was smothering me: my options, if I’d ever had any, were fading fast. If I called the Guvnor I’d lose Zoe. If I called the cops, they’d nick me and ignore the Turk, because right now the government needed him more than it needed me or Zoe. I was back where I’d started, except now I’d wasted a day looking for a way out.
I’d never killed anyone—not on purpose, anyway. I’d never sat down and worked it out, never considered the million ways there are to stop a human heart, never chosen one, made the preparations. How would I kill the Guvnor? He was in his fifties, yes, but he was fit and strong, and now he was alert to the threat, and he trusted nobody. I couldn’t shoot him; even if I got hold of a gun, I’d never used one, and Trafalgar Square had taught me you could fill the air with flying lead and still miss your target. What about a knife? From his kitchen, maybe? When I’d been in that gang with Jonah, hanging out in that derelict house near the river, he’d told me a bit about knife fighting, about the cut to the thigh that could kill in seconds. I hadn’t been paying enough attention because the thought of it had made me sick. It still did.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill anyone in cold blood. Yes, McGovern had murdered plenty of innocent people himself, if you believed Amobi, but I wasn’t McGovern, and I didn’t want to become like him.
I was going to end up in that shredder. In fact, between the Guvnor, the Turk, the Russians and the cops, I was already in the shredder, clawing at the sheer sides, dancing on the camshafts while the toothed wheels snatched at my feet.
And after me it would be Zoe’s turn.
I’d missed lunch, I realized. One of the waitresses had said something to me, and I’d picked up a menu and stared at it, but the words made no sense and I had no appetite anyway. At one point three men in vests and bright orange trousers—street sweepers, I think—sat down to share my table and yammered away in Latvian or something for half an hour, while I watched the Turk’s men buzz in and out of the apartment across the road like sleek fat hornets, clutching sandwiches and coffee, laughing among themselves, exchanging cigarettes. I didn’t realize the Latvian street sweepers were gone until they wheeled their bin trollies past my window and went off in search of litter.
Four o’clock. New serving staff had arrived: an older, chubby bloke and a young willowy girl with clunky glasses and a faceful of piercings. I caught shards of conversation—the two shifts conferring about whether I was worth the effort of throwing out. They decided to ignore me, and I was glad; it meant I could put off the inevitable just that little bit longer.
Five o’clock. I had to do it. Somehow I had to kill the Guvnor, or Zoe would die horribly. And I would have to do it without getting caught, and without getting killed, because the Turk wouldn’t bother sticking to a deal made with a dead man. He wasn’t sentimental, and didn’t lie awake at night fretting about his personal honor, but if I did what he asked, Zoe would at least have a chance. Now I felt that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the adrenaline pumping through my system. My opponent was in the ring, waiting, slapping his gloves together, limbering up.
It was growing dark outside…already? But it wasn’t night falling—thunderclouds were gathering, shifting and towering overhead, thick and purple and heavy and menacing. I heard a distant rumble, then something else in the distance—a siren? London has sirens like most towns have birdsong, but this one was growing really loud, really quickly, not in fits and starts like ambulances do as they maneuver round traffic and slow down for red lights. Now the siren was mingling with the squeal of car tires and the roar of engines, and shoppers in the street were looking about, half excited, half scared, to see what the commotion was and where it was coming from.
Up the side street leading down to the mini-roundabout a shiny black hatchback swerved into view, going far too fast for this busy suburban precinct. It fishtailed along the middle of the road as if the driver didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on, then accelerated towards the traffic roundabout between me and the flat, clearly not intending to give way to anyone else. An instant later I could see why—a police patrol car came screaming round the same corner in the hatchback’s wake, sirens blaring, blue lights piercing the gathering gloom. It cornered smoothly, moving at speed but under perfect control, seconds behind the black hatchback.
Mere moments had elapsed since we’d first heard the siren, but already everyone inside the café had stopped talking and was jostling at the window for a better view of a real-life car chase. For an instant I thought the driver of the black car was going to lose control and come smashing through the plate-glass window where I sat, but he cornered hard on the roundabout, nearl
y clipping the curb closest to us, and I could see him hauling on the wheel the same way Patrick had when he’d driven away the night before. He threw the screaming hatchback into a U-turn and gunned it back the way he’d come, hoping to speed straight past the police pursuers, but the cop car veered across its path instead, and kept coming when the hatchback tried to swerve round it. The two vehicles collided with a metallic bang and an explosion of shattered headlamps, the hatchback skewing and rocking to the left, the cop car jumping up in the air momentarily before slamming down onto its wheels again. There was a vast collective gasp from everyone watching, a moment of stunned silence, and then the shouting and yelling began, and passersby came running to help.
The thin afternoon traffic had already seized up and car horns were blowing. A crowd of people—of all races and all ages—clustered around both cars, checking to see if any of the occupants had been injured. The doors of the hatchback were pulled open and I saw two people checking out the driver, a black guy, who from his bloodied mouth and nose seemed to have bounced his face off the steering wheel at the moment of impact. His three passengers, also black, hadn’t fared much better, judging by the way they were staggering groggily out of their wrecked hatchback. It clearly had no airbags, but the cop car did, and the cops had to struggle past the huge white sagging cushions before they could climb out of their vehicle.
The cops were young and lean and hard—one a shaven-headed white guy, the other a wiry Asian—and they seemed to expect the crowd to stand back while they arrested the four suspects. But that wasn’t happening; instead the crowd blocked their way—darting fingers at the cops’ faces and shouting angry defiance. From inside the café I couldn’t hear what was said, but it looked like the cops were being accused of risking people’s lives with a high-speed pursuit in a shopping precinct, of racism, and harassment and just being there. The cops had already pulled handcuffs from their belts, and it looked like they intended to make their arrests regardless of what the crowd thought, but sensing that the crowd’s involvement might offer them a chance to escape, their suspects refused to be arrested, snatching their wrists away from the cuffs and joining in the shouting and protests.
I felt another rumble resonate in my chest, but was that the thunderstorm approaching or something else? Even from inside the café I could sense the shift in the mood of the crowd as the confrontation built up, smell something in the air—an intangible toxic cloud of anger and frustration and indignation that was seeping into the pores of everyone watching, like nerve gas. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. I’d felt this before somewhere, years ago…. More passersby, who up until that point had been watching the confrontation from the pavement, muttering disgust and dissent, started drifting closer—not only young black men like the guys in the hatchback, but Asians and white guys and even a few women, all young and overheated and pissed off, seizing the moment and the safety offered by numbers to have a go at authority figures in uniform.
I jostled my way past through the café’s customers and staff, who by now were lined up at the window watching in a haze of fear and uncertainty, and hauled open the café door. Stepping outside, I slammed into hot wet air and tension as solid as a concrete wall, and with every second the furious buzz seemed to be drawing in yet more indignant twitching teenagers from streets away. The men the cops had been trying to detain had vanished, absorbed by the crowd, and now at last the cops saw that they were way out of their depth. With barely a glance at each other they started to back off, tucking their handcuffs back into the pouches on their belts and heading back towards their patrol car—not so fast that it looked like they were panicking, but not too slowly either.
Wrenching open the doors, they clambered back in, beating down the deflated airbags, clearly praying their vehicle hadn’t been too badly damaged by the collision to get them out of there. But before they could even start the engine the furious crowd had ringed them in, open palms and clenched fists slamming onto the bodywork. The angry voices were rising to shrieks, demanding apologies or explanations, or simply spouting threats and abuse. The cops fired up their siren and flashing blue lights, hoping to drive the crowd back with sheer ear-piercing racket and dazzle, but that seemed to aggravate the protestors even more.
From the fringes of the crowd I caught movement upstairs at the window of the Turk’s apartment: a net curtain twitched and was pulled aside. I couldn’t make out which of the Turk’s men was watching, but suddenly I saw a possibility—a gamble on odds so long it seemed insane. But they were better odds than any I’d faced so far. The blasts of the cop car siren were making my eardrums rattle, and beyond its whooping and the angry shouts of the crowd I could hear more sirens in the distance, shifting and phasing. Police reinforcements were weaving their way through the stalled traffic and the clogged-up streets to back up their colleagues. It was now or never.
I looked around for something to use and saw nothing except cemented-down signposts and plastic litter bins bolted to the pavement. But stranded in the traffic a few cars back from the junction stood a Dumpster truck, its horn blaring, its driver with his head out the window of the cab, banging on his door and shouting insults and complaints at anyone within range, demanding they shift their cars and get out of his bloody road. Turning away from the angry crowd at the junction, I ran down past his truck on his blind side to check out the contents of the Dumpster he was transporting, thinking, Please let it not be empty, please let it not be full of polystyrene blocks and flattened cardboard. I hooked one hand onto one of the massive pneumatic arms that hauled the loads on and off, planted a foot on the truck bed and heaved myself up, grabbing the lip of the Dumpster to look in.
It was loaded with hardcore rubble and scrapped scaffolding poles, piled so high the end of one pole nearly poked me in the face. I grabbed that one, twisted it and pulled. It didn’t budge. I chose a second, stubbier pole and tried again, heaving at it, and this time it shuddered and squealed in my fist, sliding out from under shattered bricks and lumps of concrete until it swung free and heavy in my hand. It was a steel tube about a meter long and twice the weight of a baseball bat, and it was just what I needed.
By the time I’d jumped down and started back for the junction other bystanders had already started to scurry down the street, away from the shrieking knot of chaos and the whooping police vehicle—pensioners hobbling along as fast as they could, mums with kids overtaking them in strollers, all of them clearly afraid that everything might get a lot worse at any second. I was hoping it would; in fact, I was planning to make sure it did.
I kept the scaffolding pole low, dangling it loosely from my hand as I pushed through the fringes of the crowd. By now the cops were reversing, slowly and steadily, straight towards me, trying not to run anyone over, but all the same forcing the protestors behind them to step aside. I stepped aside too, took a firm grip with both hands on the scaffolding pole, and slammed it into the cop car’s rear windscreen.
It imploded instantly, sending glass showering in silver crumbs into the car. I saw the cops inside duck instinctively and the car leap on its springs as the driver stamped on the brake, and the crowd roared around me, and I felt the massed adrenaline surge and catch flame. In that instant the crowd became a mob, and their shouts became a cacophony—the massed screeching of a demon with a thousand heads that had scented human blood.
The cop car’s engine roared, and it jolted forwards in a hard turn, this time knocking two people off their feet, but not stopping. I glimpsed the officer in the passenger seat screaming into his radio, head sunk into his shoulders and body hunched forward as from nowhere a brittle rain of bottles came down: milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles—some smashing, some bouncing off the roof and hood. Then a massive lump of concrete—from the Dumpster truck?—shattered the patrol car’s light bar, and soon rocks and bricks were thundering on the bodywork and bouncing off into the crowd, sending us scattering. As the mob fell back, the cop driving saw his chance, spun the wheel and gunned t
he engine.
At that instant beside me a stocky kid my age with a faceful of acne grabbed one fallen rock and pulled his hand back to hurl it through the crumbling ring of glass that had been the rear windscreen, right at the back of the Asian copper’s head. In the chaos no one saw me knock the rock from his hand and kick his feet out from under him. It was the least I could do—these stupid cops weren’t the target, as far as I was concerned.
That reek I’d smelled earlier—of frustration and resentment and sheer mindless fury—I remembered it now. It was the stink of a rabid, unpredictable monster that lurked under the city pavements, and now I’d set it free.
Riot.
A few years back, while the world prepared to visit London for the Olympics, buses had burned in the streets, shattered glass had piled up on the pavements like drifting snow, and looters—their attacks coordinated on smartphones—had carried their booty away in vans. Hordes of hoodied teenagers with scarves for masks had run amok, chucking rocks at anything that moved and setting fire to anything that didn’t. I remembered all of it, because I’d been there. Back then the cops, bewildered and outnumbered, had fled, sealing off the perimeters and waiting for the fury to burn itself out.
These cops were doing the same. The patrol car had pierced the gap in the crowd and was speeding away in the same direction it had come, trailing a battered rear bumper, its shattered lights flashing white and its siren blaring—only to very nearly collide head-on with a police van speeding round the same corner in the other direction, half full of blue uniforms but utterly unprepared for the frenzy that greeted them.
Both vehicles screeched and swerved to a halt, rocking on their springs for a few seconds, but in those seconds the mob roared and rallied and raced up the road towards the vehicles, hurling more bottles and rocks and bricks that showered down in a lethal hail, crazing two of the van’s side windows before the crew inside even had a chance to drop their wire-mesh windscreen protector. The fleeing patrol car swung past the van and sped away round the corner; the driver of the minibus slammed his vehicle into reverse and screeched backwards after them, away from the crowd and clear of the flying rocks, round the corner and out of sight, knocking the wing mirrors off two parked cars in his haste.
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