Rivers of London

My hand was shaking a little and the pin proved harder to pull than I expected—I guess that’s a safety feature on a grenade.

Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere, it’s better not to go there.

Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him slack.

Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.

She had the startled rabbit look that civilians get after five minutes of helping the police with their inquiries. If they stay calm for too long it’s a sign that they’re professional villains or foreign or just plain stupid. All of which can get you locked up if you’re not careful. If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.

Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I’m considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, “Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”

I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing.

“Your father,” I said. “What does he really want?”

“What any father wants,” said Oxley. “The respect of his children.”

I nearly said that not all fathers were worthy of respect, but I managed to keep my gob shut and anyway not everyone had a dad like mine.

I’m not a peacock, but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling. The rule being never wear something around your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with.

Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists.

“Have you ever been to London?” I asked.

“No,” said Ash. “I’ve never even been in town before. Our dad doesn’t hold with that sort of thing.”

“Don’t worry, it’s basically just like the country,” I said. “Only with more people.”

Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after having risen to the rank of commander. A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.

As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit.

There we continued the time-honored tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth.

“Lives to act, poor thing, it’s all he ever wanted out of life.”

“Except he’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” said Mr. Punch. “Isn’t the universe wonderful.”

“Do you have another plan?” I asked.

“No,” said Leslie. “I just want you to be careful. Just because you think you know what you’re doing doesn’t mean you actually know what you’re doing.”

“I’m glad we clarified that,” I said.

“I’ve been told to take the day off,” said Leslie. “Compassionate—don’t get on media’s radar—leave.”

That I could understand. A family annihilation involving charismatic rich people was going to be a news editor’s dream story. Once they’d picked over the gruesome details, they could extend the mileage by asking what the tragic death of the Coopertown family told us about our society and how this tragedy was an indictment of modern culture/secular humanism/political correctness/the situation in Palestine—delete where applicable. About the only thing that could improve the story would be the involvement of a good-looking blonde WPC out, I might add, unsupervised on a dangerous assignment.

It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.

Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force, explaining how the riot was caused by whatever sociopolitical factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society—if only we knew what.