Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [113]
The Last Resort
Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead, dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance, from farmers with truckloads of manure, to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.
I was pretty sure that a smart Londoner like Beverley would have the brains to bail out of her car before the mob torched it, but I knew her mum wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t check. I ran out, yelling my head off in the hope that everyone else would mistake me for a rioter too.
The noise hit me as soon as I was out the door. It was like an angry pub crowd but on an enormous scale, all strange half-chants and animal hooting noises. It wasn’t like a normal riot. In one of those, most of the crowd does nothing except watch and occasionally cheer. Show them a broken shop window and they’ll cheerfully liberate the contents, but like most people they don’t actually want to get their hands dirty. This was a mob of ringleaders: everyone from the suspiciously well-dressed young man to the matron in an evening gown was mad as hell and ready to break something. I got as close to the burning Mini as I could, and was relieved to see no sign of anyone in any of the seats. Beverley had sensibly legged it and I should have followed suit, but I was distracted by the sight of the helicopter hovering directly overhead.
The helicopter meant that GT, the Met’s Central Command, had taken direct operational control of the disturbance. This meant that dozens of ACPO rank officers were having their dinner parties, nights in with a DVD and evenings out with the mistress interrupted by urgent phonecalls by non-ACPO rank officers who were desperate to make sure that they were in no way responsible for anything. I’ll bet that GT knew early on that the wheels were coming off the wagon, and that as soon as the riot was over a grand game of musical inquiries would start. Nobody wanted to be the one without a chair when the music stopped.
It was that thought which, ironically, distracted me enough for Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom to be able to sneak up behind me. I turned when he called my name and found him stalking towards me. His conservative suit jacket – pinstripe, I saw now that he was close up – had lost a sleeve and all its buttons. He was one of those people whose faces twitch when they’re angry; they think they’re all icy calm but something always gives them away. In Folsom’s case it was a nasty tic by his left eye.
‘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