London Calling - James Craig [69]
As a result, he got a date. She was due to meet him outside Leicester Square tube station in about seventeen hours’ time. London was their oyster. Now he had to come up with something, something damn good. He could not, under any circumstances, fuck this up. If he did, he was convinced that Helen Kennedy would never give him a second chance.
A monster burp from his partner tore Carlyle away from his thoughts. Having finished his roll, Slater went off in search of another. ‘Sure you don’t want one?’ he asked, waving an empty plate in Carlyle’s direction. ‘They really are excellent.’
‘Nah.’ Shaking his head, Carlyle turned away from his partner and stared out of the window in search of romantic inspiration. But in the middle of the night, on Trinity Street in SE sodding 1, there was none to be found. The rundown street was a mix of small shops and workshops, all of them closed at this time of night. The place was deserted. Not a single car was parked at the roadside, and no one had driven past for over ten minutes.
These were hard, unforgiving streets, streets with a history of violence and no future to speak of. More than eighty years earlier, during the General Strike, the police had fought pitched battles with the workers only a stone’s throw from where he was sitting. Barely two months ago, just down the road in Brixton, prison riots had left one person dead and fifty injured; more than two hundred were arrested. The trouble there had been sparked by the accidental police shooting of a Jamaican mother of six, who was left paralysed below the waist. North of the river, the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham was still under martial law after riots there resulted in the murder of a police constable, a forty-year-old father of three. Another policeman had been shot. Meanwhile, a local politician had crowed that the police had received ‘a bloody good hiding’. The shit never fucking stopped.
Carlyle had turned all this over in his head, time and again, as he walked his beat. It had been almost nine months since he had visited Dominic Silver. He hadn’t taken up the offer of a job, of course, but he couldn’t help remembering Dom’s words: ‘There will always be an “enemy within” … You’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Carlyle had to admit, if only to himself, that it was looking as if like Dominic bloody Silver was right.
Slater returned with his second bacon roll and a mug of tea, just as two white youths came into view, walking at a steady pace towards the café. They were big blokes, easily six foot plus, broad as well as tall. Stopping in front of the window, they stared at the two policemen inside. It was only then that Carlyle realised that one of them had a brick in his hand. A second later, the window exploded and he was covered in glass. Without letting go of his roll, Slater toppled backwards in his chair. Leaving him on the floor, and abandoning his helmet and radio on the table, Carlyle rushed out of the café door and gave chase.
He shouted for the youths to stop. Unsurprisingly, they ignored him. Trying to run in his standard police-issue boots was agony. Almost immediately, his chest felt tight and he was struggling for breath. You need to start exercising some more, Carlyle told himself. Breathing through his mouth, he kicked on, pushing himself harder. He wasn’t gaining on the two men, but they weren’t losing him either. Fifty yards down the road, he saw them duck into an alley to his right. Looking over his shoulder, he could