Ben Aaronovitch

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.”

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.

“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.