Ten Days (15 page)

‘Are you receiving?' A voice sounded over the high-pitched whine that seemed to slice through his ears. ‘Billy, are you receiving?'

Oh, right: they'd been wanting to tell him something. ‘Yes.' So overwhelming was the buzzing in his ears, he couldn't tell if he was shouting. ‘I'm receiving you.' Bright striations of light were all he could see, and beyond them, black.

‘It's the Lovelace,' he heard. ‘We're picking up rumours of a hostile build-up inside the estate.'

The Lovelace was a no man's land for the police on a normal day. In this situation, it was every policeman's worst nightmare.

‘We can't have a repeat of ‘85 . . .' which Billy knew was shorthand for the horror of PC Keith Blakelock's death at the hands of a mob in Broadwater Farm ‘. . . but we do need you to check this out so we can either dismiss or confirm the rumour.'

And if it was confirmed, he thought, then what? But this thought he kept to himself, saying only, ‘No problem. I'll have India 95 do a full heat survey – see if there are any legs to the FWIN.'

3.25 a.m.

More than anything, where Jayden wanted to be was home. Not immediately – first he'd knock at Lyndall's to make sure she was safe.

Her mother wouldn't like him knocking in the early hours, but her mother was not like his: she'd know that he had only done it out of concern. She'd probably be up anyway: not easy to sleep in this racket.

And after he found Lyndall was safe – she would be, wouldn't she? – he'd cross the landing and let himself into his flat. Quietly, so his mother wouldn't hear. Good chance of that. Of all the people in the Lovelace, she'd be the only one flat on her back and snoring loud enough to shake the windows. And even if she was awake, then even she, who got so angry when she was frightened, couldn't blame him for being late. Could she?

First, though, he had to get home. He'd been trying, but every corner he'd turned had been blocked either by rioters or the police. He didn't know which was more dangerous: probably both. And now again, he cut off left, meaning to go down a shortcut he knew, but saw something burning at its end. He couldn't go near. Couldn't risk getting involved. Or arrested.

No choice but to find somewhere out of the way where he could wait until the path was clear. Turning away from the site of the riots, he sloped off down the road.

3.30 a.m.

Pius was hunched so far over the steering wheel that his nose was almost touching the windscreen. Lyndall was in the back and also leaning forward, in her case so she could lay a hand on her mother's shoulder and keep it there.

The hand felt hot and oppressively heavy. Cathy had to use willpower not to move away from it. Her nerve ends were thrumming, making the confinement of the car almost too much to bear; it was all she could do to stop herself from wrenching open the door and jumping out. If she had, she wouldn't have been hurt: the car was crawling along so slowly a brisk walker could have overtaken it.

The night was inky black, not from clouds but from smoke. She could see the swirls it made around the street lights and how layers of it kept drifting through the car's full beam. She dreaded to think about the lives that might have been lost in the fires that had made that smoke.

She wouldn't think of it.

She would keep her mind occupied by planning what she was going to do when they eventually did reach home.

She'd have a shower, she decided, even before a cup of tea. She'd stay in the shower for as long as it took to get rid of the stink of smoke that seemed to have saturated not only her clothes but also her skin. And after that, she'd throw her clothes into the washing machine. No – she wasn't going to wash them; she was going to chuck them out. Not in the kitchen waste – too close. She'd take them downstairs to the communal bins. And then? Banji, she thought, I'll ask him to come over. In fact, she reached into her pocket, why not ask him now?

Her phone was so black it didn't even look like hers. She wiped the soot on the skirt she was planning to throw out and tried to switch the phone on. But either the fire had damaged it or else its battery was dead. She thought about asking Lyndall for hers, but she didn't think Lyndall had Banji's number. And besides, she now remembered, Banji had lost his phone. He'd told her so what felt like weeks ago but was probably only yesterday.

‘What day is it?'

‘Sunday,' Pius said, adding absently, ‘I must remember to prepare my sermon,' as if this were something he often forgot. He had moved even closer to the steering wheel and also turned on the windscreen wipers.

It isn't raining, she nearly said, but then she realised that he was using the wipers to sweep away a film of grey ash that was obscuring his vision. ‘How many buildings have they set light to?'

‘Two when last I was there. And cars as well. And tyres as . . .oh dear.' Pius braked so abruptly that she was thrown forward and would have hit the windscreen if not for the dual restraint of her seat belt and Lyndall's hand. ‘What on earth?' His exclamation was more an expression of disbelief than a question.

Something had stepped into the road in front of their car and then had stopped.

Not something. Someone. A tall, thin white man.

A tall, thin, naked white man.

‘A streaker!' Lyndall lifted herself out of her seat to get a better view.

The man raised both arms up, high, in a V, his fingers splayed as if he were trying to touch the sky. His mouth was open, his lips stretched to inscribe an O, although the scream he seemed about to let loose was never delivered. He stood like this, motionless for a while, making sure, presumably, that they took in the whole sight of him, before dropping his arms, closing his mouth and ambling the rest of the way across the road, over the pavement and to a low wall. He put his hands on the wall and pushed down, leaping up and over, treating them to a last glimpse of a pale bottom before he vanished from sight.

‘Needs to spend more time in the sun,' was Lyndall's comment.

‘Poor man.' Pius, who had turned the engine off, now sparked it back on. But instead of driving off he steered the car over to the kerb. ‘We're close to the trouble,' he said, ‘and the church can't afford to lose this car. I'll walk you the rest of the way home.'

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL FOR INQUIRY USE ONLY

Submission to the internal inquiry of the Metropolitan Police into Operation Bedrock

Submission 9992/D/67: photographic evidence gathered by Air Support Unit 27AWZ, call sign India 95, between 03:23:14 and 03:28:18 on
                              

Camera stills D/67/a–t

location: Rockham police station and Rockham High Street

subject: demonstration

Images 67 a) to c) show a number of fires that had been set in the vicinity of the police station and Rockham High Street. As can be seen from the dark shadows caused by the fires, burning tyres were involved. Images 67 d) to h) show a crowd gathered around the fires.

At the request of Bronze Leader Chief Inspector B. Ridgerton, the Air Support Unit then took a series of thermal images over the Lovelace estate.

The images l) to t) show a temporary build-up of people on the outskirts of the estate who, over the course of several minutes, began to disperse. At 03:26:43, Air Support Unit 27AWZ, having transmitted to Bronze Leader the assessment that the Lovelace was calm, passed, on further instructions, over the estate before heading in a north-easterly direction towards the solvent refinery and then northwards to trace the spreading disruption.

3.30 a.m.

When Lyndall asked ‘What's that?', Cathy followed her pointing finger over the burning barricade to see something moving in the dark. Her first thought was that the air had turned to inky water along which waves were travelling. But what she was looking at was too fragmented to be waves; it now seemed more like the beating of wings. Birds, she thought, except these shapes were smaller than any bird. Bats then? No, not bats either. This fluttering was weightless and inanimate, dark flecks twisting like leaves on a rising current of air. As they flickered past a street light, she saw that these leaves were black. Like leaves of a nuclear winter, she thought, or a volcano. ‘It's ash,' she said.

Which now floated down, feathery specks settling on their heads and shoulders and fragmenting in their hands when they tried to brush them off.

‘I want to go home.' As soft as Lyndall's voice was, her unease was unmistakeable.

‘We're not far,' came Pius's equally tense reply.

3.30 a.m.

From the dark stillness of the city viewed through Peter's office window, it was almost impossible to credit the reports that other parts of London were going up in flames. But should he glance over at the flat screen on the wall behind the conference table he would be bound to catch another glimpse of a woman so desperate that she had pitched herself and her young child out of the window of her third-floor flat. It was a miracle that neither of them was badly hurt. Given the reports coming in, it would be another miracle if they managed to get through the next few days without fatalities.

That the thin veneer of civilisation could be so easily ruptured was alarming, Peter thought. And then that equally alarming follow-through thought that, with the PM away, it fell on him to try to patch it all back together again.

He glanced at his watch: 3.30 a.m. The PM would soon be ringing back. He sighed – so loudly that the three male members of his staff who were working at the conference table all looked up. Not so Patricia – more accustomed to his noises, he supposed, as he registered the intensity of her concentration while she tracked the progress of the disturbances through social media on three separate screens.

He looked away.

What to do? That was the question: what to do?

He breathed in, about to let out another deep sigh, but instead he sniffed the air. He smelt coffee and not the over-brewed office muck that they tried to pass off as coffee: real coffee, as sweet and nutty as he liked it. What he wouldn't do for a cup, so much so that his imagination must have conjured up its scent.

‘Coffee?'

He turned to find Frances standing in the doorway.

She'd insisted on coming with him to the office. When he'd told her he'd be tied up, she'd said she'd be sure to find some way of making herself useful. He'd been vaguely conscious of her bustling about in the background but had been too preoccupied by the ghastly news filtering in to worry about what she was up to. Now, seeing her holding a tray that contained not only a steaming cafetiere and some cups but also sandwiches, he realised that the huge bag she had carried into the car must have been stuffed with goodies.

How magnificent she was, especially in a crisis.

‘Darling!' He was about to go over and kiss her when he saw her gaze concentrated on the members of his staff. ‘The Minister could do with a break,' she said.

That's all it took for them obediently to rise.

‘I've laid coffee and sandwiches for you on the table outside,' she said. ‘Do help yourselves. And let me know if there's anything else you'd like.'

By the enthusiastic chorus of thanks and the speed with which they made a beeline for the door, he wasn't the only one who'd been desperate for something decent to eat and drink.

Patricia had also got up and was leaving with the others, but as she came abreast of Frances, Frances said, ‘I've got three cups. Why don't you stay here with us?'

So fleeting was the uncertainty that crossed Patricia's expression, only somebody who knew her as well as he did would have noticed it. ‘Thank you, Mrs Whiteley.'

‘Please, call me Frances.' Frances threw a quick glance back at the three men who were piling sandwiches onto plates: ‘Napoleon was only able to say that it was an army that marches on its stomach,' she kicked the door shut with her foot, ‘because he'd never come across our civil service.' She then laid down her tray. ‘We need to work out how you're going to play things with the PM.'

3.35 a.m.

They were almost home.

Almost home and dry is how Cathy thought of it. She wanted so much to be inside the flat with all the doors and windows locked. Which is how they would remain despite the heat.

The estate was hushed, especially when compared to the pandemonium they had just passed through. They walked in silence. As they drew abreast of the community centre, they stopped – again without a word – and stood silently in front of the bank of flowers badly wilted by the heat.

A lonely sight. It made Cathy realise afresh that she would never see Ruben shambling across the road or be warmed by one of the smiles that were so much more rewarding for being so rare. She swallowed, overcome by a legion of feelings distant from the ructions in the High Street.

When eventually Pius broke the silence to say, ‘His parents will be terribly upset,' they knew he wasn't talking about the dead flowers. ‘They wanted answers,' he said. ‘Not this.' He waved his hand in the direction of the High Street from which the sound of police sirens, swelling and dying away, was intercut by shouting. ‘And look what they've done there.' He meant the abandoned building beside the community centre whose brick walls, formerly clear, were now covered in ugly black scrawls. ‘How could Rockham do this to itself?'

Lyndall, who had moved over to look more closely at the graffiti, said, ‘It's not Rockham. These are the tags of the Zed7s whose base is two miles away. Wouldn't usually risk being in Lovelace territory.'

‘So this is what we've come to,' Pius said. ‘A lawless free-for-all bringing the gangs together.' He blinked away a tear that was not provoked by smoke. ‘It's a travesty of everything we ever hoped for.'

3.39 a.m.

Joshua hoped that Billy's opinion, backed by the heat survey, that the Lovelace was peaceful and likely to remain so, was correct. Because if it wasn't, and the Lovelace went up, the casualties would be horrific. But Billy was one of the best, and he had prior knowledge of the area, so they had taken his word for it and diverted India 95 towards the solvent factory – what idiot had given permission for that? – and beyond, following the trail of spreading trouble.

It had swept across the river and was moving north, and as it did, the incoming reports grew ever more diverse: of a rave raided, for example, not in order to steal from the ravers but to recruit them into the looting from nearby shops; or of the burning of another police car – what the fuck had they been thinking of to leave it unattended? – which had forced the evacuation of an apartment block in St John's Wood; or of the sprinklers set off in a major department store after some rioters decided to have a barbecue in the food hall. Meanwhile, word from outside London was just as bad. The phones requesting aid were ringing off their hooks.

One call, though, was conspicuous by its absence. The PM's call, which Joshua had long expected to receive.

And all the while Rockham continued to burn.

3.40 a.m.

‘Yes, Prime Minister. Of course I will. Goodnight.' Peter put down the receiver.

‘Not coming?' Frances was smiling widely.

‘He thinks it would be better not to break off negotiations if it can be avoided. I am to chair the first COBRA meeting.'

‘Good.'

‘Is it, though?' Peter had been thrown by how readily the PM had agreed to his strategy. Had he, he wondered, been outmanoeuvred? ‘The country's going up in flames, and he's not flying back? What's he playing at?'

‘At politics, my dear.' Frances smiled. ‘He's done a risk analysis – just as we did – but come to a different conclusion. He thinks that if you're in the hot seat and you calm things down, he can spin it as never having been as bad as you've said it is. That's the risk he's taking. But if things go pear-shaped, he reckons he can come riding in on his white charger to sort the country out. That's the risk we're taking. I'm going to keep betting on us, especially given the PM's tin ear for what's really going on.'

Patricia nodded enthusiastically at Frances's every word.

His two women working together. Interesting, if a little disconcerting. But not something he had time to worry about. They could advise him, and they could examine and develop each other's theories to their hearts' content, but he was the one who had to prepare himself to chair COBRA.

3.50 a.m.

Pius left them at the bottom of the walkway. Pressed by them, he promised to go directly home, thus provoking Lyndall to remark, as he walked off, that ‘Even pastors sometimes lie.'

The barriers that lined the walkway had also been newly covered in graffiti. And would remain so, Cathy thought, until the Lovelace was no more. She reached out for Lyndall's hand.

The walkway was quiet. Eerily so. Now and then she caught a glimpse of a face in one or other of the darkened windows, but either she was imagining these or else the occupants of the flats shrank out of sight as soon as she as much as glanced in their direction. They're as afraid as I am, she thought, forcing herself to say, and in a cheerful voice, ‘Almost there.'

Only one more ramp to go. Up they went and rounded the last bend. Already imagining herself in that shower, Cathy was just feeling the tension drain away when the people who must have been watching them from the shadows stepped out.

They had handkerchiefs obscuring their faces so that the only visible sign that they were human was their glinting eyes. They were young men – that's all she could tell. They stood unmoving, and they stood in the way.

She acted instinctively, pushing Lyndall behind her: ‘What do you want?'

‘Mum.' This from Lyndall.

Cathy raised her voice. ‘I don't have much money,' she told the trio of highwaymen, ‘but you can have what there is.'

‘Mum!'

She tightened her grip on Lyndall's wrist, half twisting her away so that if it came to running, Lyndall would have a head start. The other hand she pushed into her pocket. No money. Only her blackened phone.

‘Here,' she offered it to the leader of the threesome.

He backed off, saying, ‘We don't want your phone, Mrs Mason,' and untied his handkerchief to reveal a familiar face. ‘Or your money. The Zed7s are about. We're making sure they don't cause no more trouble on our turf.'

‘I told you, Mum.' In the half-light of the landing Cathy could see that Lyndall had turned beet-red.

‘Oh.' She felt so foolish.

‘Come on.' Lyndall put her arm around Cathy. ‘Let's go in.'

10 a.m.

The streets of central London were quiet. Not unusual for a Sunday. And yet as Joshua's Range Rover, its lights flashing but its siren off, raced to Whitehall, there was something about the quality of the silence that seemed to speak of breaths in-held.

Last night's disturbances had petered out around dawn, but from what they'd gleaned via BBM chatter and the Twitter-sphere there was every likelihood of the disorder returning – and country-wide – once darkness fell. Thus the COBRA meeting to be chaired, in the PM's absence, by the Home Secretary.

Not a meeting Joshua was looking forward to. His job was to keep a city and – given that where London went others often followed – a whole country calm. In contrast, Whiteley seemed to be using the riots to further his bid for power. This he had demonstrated in a series of early-morning interviews whose running thread had been his barely concealed criticisms of the police and therefore, by inference, of the PM's choice of Commissioner. Having already claimed the scalp of one head of the Met, Whiteley was out for another. While he had no intention of providing his, Joshua's first priority was to stop the riots, and for this he had to find a way of working with Whiteley.

There were so many factors that militated against success, not least the weather. A heat haze was already hovering over Whitehall, some of it brown smog. It was going to be even hotter today than yesterday; by nightfall, anybody who didn't have a garden would be out in the streets.

So much to keep tabs on, although at least Chahda had relieved him by going ahead to the Cabinet Briefing Office room to set up communications in the suite in which they'd sometimes need to hunker down in the event that the area of upheaval kept expanding.