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 friendly manner, just how unwanted you were.’
I seriously considered rushing the guy – anything to make him shut up.
‘And don’t think your relief inspector would have helped,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t have been able to spell “racial discrimination” on his report, if there had been a report …’
I feinted at him to back him up and then darted to my right, away from the burning car and the rest of the riot. It didn’t work. Folsom didn’t back up, and as I went past he gave me a backhander that was like being slapped with floorboard. It knocked me right back on my arse, and I found myself staring up at a seriously enraged senior officer looking to give me a good kicking at the very least. He’d just managed to land one of his size tens on my thigh – I ended up with a purple heel-shaped bruise for a month – when someone clubbed him down from behind.
It was Inspector Neblett, still dressed in his impractical uniform tunic but carrying an honest-to-God wooden riot truncheon of the kind phased out in the 1980s for being slightly more lethal than a pickaxe handle.
‘Grant,’ he said. ‘What the hell is going on?’
I scrambled over to where Folsom lay face down on the pavement. ‘There’s been an irretrievable breakdown in public order,’ I said, while tugging Folsom into the recovery position. My head was still ringing from his backhander, so I wasn’t that gentle.
‘But why?’ he asked. ‘There wasn’t anything scheduled.’
Riots are rarely spontaneous. Crowds usually have to be assembled and provoked, and a conscientious inspector keeps a weather eye out for problems. Especially when his patch contains a riot magnet like Trafalgar Square. The only half-convincing lie I could think of was that somebody had attacked the Royal Opera House with a psychotropic aerosol, but I figured that might raise more questions than it answered. Not to mention trigger an inappropriate military response. I was just about to risk the truth, that a kind of vampire ghost had put the influence on the entire audience, when Neblett twigged exactly who it was he’d just smacked in the head.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, squatting down for a closer look. ‘This is Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom.’