Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [115]
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 untouched – 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