The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (33 page)

“Dunno—honest.”

“He’s been staying with your mums, though. Right?”

Fear washed over the boy’s face. “Not staying. One night.”

“Like a boyfriend or something?”

“Dunno.”

“Is it to do with her some way or another?”

“Dunno—”

“Come on, younger. There’s no need to worry. Nothing’s gonna happen to you or your mums, I just need to know what’s going on so I can make sure he don’t do no more damage than he’s already done. Is he helping her?”

“I think maybe she asked him to keep an eye on me. I ain’t told him nothing, though, I swear. I don’t want nothing to do with him.”

“A’ight, younger. That’s all I needed to know. That’ll do for now. Stop the car, Mouse—we’ll let him out here.”

They were near Bethnal Green now, nowhere near where they had picked him up. Another big group of hooded kids had gathered, heading along Mare Street towards Hackney’s High Street. They passed the blacked-out windows of the Beamer, some of them staring, fire in their eyes. The busses weren’t running; JaJa was going to have to walk home. Bizness didn’t care about that. He picked up his phone and shuffled through his contacts for the number he wanted. He watched Elijah shuffling away with his head down as the call connected.

“You there?” he said.

“Yeah, man,” Tookie said.

“Do it.”

MILTON STOPPED to fill up with petrol and then drove across to Blissett House. The traffic was heavy, and it had taken him longer than usual. A large crowd of teenagers, their faces covered by bandanas and hoods, suddenly swept across the street, bringing the traffic to a halt. Milton clenched his jaw as he sat waiting for them to clear out of the way. An Audi was three cars behind him; Milton watched in the rear-view mirror as bricks started to bounce off the roof and bonnet. The windscreen caved in, a missile landing square in the middle of it. A police Matrix van was behind the Audi, the officers inside it powerless to do anything. A kid, his face wrapped in the purple bandana of the LFB, ran up to it and swung the golf club he was carrying into the side of the van, swinging it again and again and again until the wing was crumpled and bent.

He banged his fist against the dash. The stakes had been raised, and he was suddenly very afraid. He had not expected Bizness to back down, but neither had he expected him to do what he had done. He operated without compunction, with no regard for restraint. Milton was concerned that he would do something else, something worse.

He took his mobile and called Aaron. The phone rang five times, then six before the call connected.

“Hello?”

Milton did not recognise the voice. “Can I speak to Aaron, please?”

“Who is this?”

He hesitated. “I’m a friend of Aaron’s. Who are you?”

“Detective Constable Wilson, Stoke Newington CID. Who is this, please?”

“Where is Aaron?”

“I’m afraid Aaron has been shot, sir.”

“Is he all right?”

“I’m sorry. No, he’s not—he’s dead, sir. Please—”

Milton cut off the call and bounced his mobile across the passenger seat. The lights were still red. He felt a tightening in his gut, a cold knot of fear and dread. He slammed his palms on the steering wheel.

Come on, come on, come on!

The lights changed, and he stamped on the accelerator, the rubber shrieking as he took a hard right turn. The traffic thinned out a little, and he was able to make better progress, pulling out and bullying his way along the opposite lane whenever it slowed.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he reached the Estate. A thick plume of smoke was rising into the darkening sky. As he got closer, he saw that it was wreathed around the side of the block, lit by the spotlights on the corners of the building as it crawled up and pitched into the sky as a dirty, clotting cloud. He swerved the car onto the forecourt. A crowd had gathered around the foot of the building, their eyes fixed on the sixth floor. Thick smoke was gushing from one of the flats. A window shattered and more spilled out. Milton stared into the source of the smoke and saw the orange-red of the fire.

Sharon’s flat.

He sprinted across the forecourt to the stairwell, shouldered the door aside, and took the stairs three at a time. He reached the sixth floor, slammed through the door and onto the walkway. He recognised Sharon’s neighbours among the group that had gathered at the end of the walkway. He grabbed one, the old lady who lived next door, and tugged her to one side. “Is she still in there?” he asked.

“I haven’t seen her come out. Her boy, neither.”

Milton released her arm and ran down the corridor. The heat climbed until it started to singe his eyebrows, a solid wall that washed over him and made it hard to breathe. He took off his coat and wrapped it around his hand, reaching out to the red-hot door handle and twisting it open. The room beyond was an inferno: the carpets, the furniture, even the walls and the ceiling seemed to be on fire. The flames lapped across the ceiling like waves. The smoke was dense and choking, and the sound of the hungry fire was threatening.

Milton heard a single scream for help, quickly choked back.

He draped his coat over his head and shoulders and stepped inside.

RUTHERFORD LEFT THE HOUSE, locking the door behind him. It was another sultry, sticky night. The sound of sirens was audible in the distance, an up-and-down ululation that seemed almost constant and seemed to be coming from several directions at once. He paused at the door of his car, took off his jacket and tossed it onto the passenger seat. There was something else in the atmosphere tonight, an almost tangible edge. He could not define it, but it made him uneasy. This part of Hackney often had the hint of menace to it, especially at night, but this was different. Something was wrong.

Milton had called him five minutes earlier. He had sounded anxious. Rutherford hardly knew him, but he was not the sort of man that he would have associated with worry. He had explained that there had been an accident, and that Elijah’s mother was in Homerton hospital. Rutherford asked what had happened, but Milton had ignored the question, asking him to find the boy and bring him to the hospital as quickly as he could. Rutherford had been eating a takeaway curry in front of a film, but he had put the plate aside at once and put on his shoes.

Rutherford opened the door and settled in the driver’s seat. He had asked Milton where he could find Elijah. Milton said that he wasn’t at home, but save that, he had no idea. That wasn’t helpful, but Rutherford said that he would do his best.

He started the car, put it into gear, and drove west.

There were more kids on the streets than usual, gathered in small groups on the corners and outside shops. They wore their hoods up, and some had scarves and bandanas around their faces.

He reached for the radio and switched it on. Capital FM would normally have been playing chart music at this hour, but instead, there was a news bulletin. There were serious disturbances across London, and Hackney was said to be especially bad. Rutherford had read the reports in the newspaper about the gang banger who had been shot and killed, and it seemed that the protests in Tottenham and Enfield had spread, metastasizing into something much bigger and more dangerous.

As he turned off the main road, a bus hurried towards him from the opposite direction, driving quickly and erratically. As it rushed by, Rutherford saw that it had no passengers. All of its windows had been shattered. He drove on until he reached Mare Street; he had to slow to a crawl as the crowd on the pavement started to drift out into the road. Ahead of him, the crowd was a solid mass. He stared in stupefaction as a group of teenagers smashed the window of a parked police car. One of them reached in with a black bin bag and spread it across the passenger seat. He lit the bag, the flames taking at once, the upholstery going up and flames quickly curling back down again from the ceiling. The crowd cheered jubilantly. The windows that had been left intact blackened and then started to crack. Someone marshalled the crowd to stand back and then, on cue, the petrol tank exploded. A hundred mobile phones were held aloft, videoing the scene.

Rutherford had seen shit like this before in Baghdad, but this was London.

He found a side road and reversed the car into an open parking space. He set off, walking briskly. He didn’t know where Elijah was, but he did know what youngers would be like with something like this happening on their doorstep. They would be drawn to it like cats to free crack. His best chance was just to follow the mayhem.

Shop owners were closing their businesses early, yanking down the metal shutters to cover the doors and windows. People looked up and down the street anxiously.

Rutherford stopped at the stall where he liked to get his coffee in the morning. “You know what’s going on?” he asked the owner.

“Trouble,” he said. “It’s already crazy, and they say it’s going to get worse. I’m closing up.”

Rutherford and the man turned and watched as a young boy, no older than twelve, sprinted down the pavement towards them. He was struggling with a large box pressed against his chest. The youngster ran past, screaming, “I got an Xbox, bruv, believe it! There’s bare free stuff down there.”

Rutherford made his way further up the road. The shops were all shut now.

A large crowd had gathered in the high street. Forty or fifty of them, their faces covered with bandanas or hoods, were attacking the shuttered windows of the shops. Another two or three hundred were watching, laughing and pointing at what they were seeing, on the cusp of getting involved themselves. A large industrial bin had been wheeled into the centre of the street, next to the bus stop, and set alight. Thick black smoke gushed out of it as the rubbish inside caught fire. The crowd whooped and hollered as young men took it in turns to launch kicks into the window of a Dixons. The glass was tough and resistant, but kick after kick thudded into it, and it gradually started to weaken. A spider web of cracks appeared and spread, the glass slowly buckling inwards. “Out of the way!” yelled one of the crowd, a fire extinguisher held above his head. He ran at the window and threw the extinguisher into the middle of it. The glass crunched as it finally cracked open, the fire extinguisher tumbling into the space beyond. The crowd set on the wrecked display like jackals, kicking at it and clearing away the shards with hands wrapped in the sleeves of their coats. The televisions inside were ferried out, some of them put into the back of waiting cars, others wheeled away in shopping trolleys. The looters climbed into the window and disappeared into the shop beyond. Others moved on to the next one along.

Rutherford’s attention was drawn to a scuffle at the mouth of an alley fifty yards ahead of him. Four larger boys were surrounding a fifth person; his face was obscured by the T-shirt that had been put over it like a hood, and he was identifiable as a police officer only by his uniform. The boys were dragging him into the alley, occasionally pausing to kick or punch him. Another one was tearing a fence down for the planks of wood it would yield; Rutherford knew what they would be used for. He changed course to head in their direction, shouldering people out of the way as he picked up speed.

“Oi!” he shouted to them. “That’s enough. Let him go.”

One of the boys turned, an insolent retort on his lips, but his expression changed as he saw what he was facing. Rutherford was big, and there was fire in his eyes. He called out to the others, and they all faded back into the crowd.

Rutherford pulled the T-shirt from the officer’s head. He could only have been in his early twenties: a new recruit tossed into the middle of the worst disturbances London had seen for years. His nose was streaming with blood, and Rutherford used the shirt to mop away the worst of it. “You all right, son?”

The man wore an expression of terror. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said, his voice taut with hysteria. “They’re like animals.”

Rutherford took him by the shoulders and looked right into his face. “You don’t want to be here,” he said, loosening the straps that secured his stab vest. “Ditch your gear and get back. It’s not going to take much more for it to get worse. Lynching, you know what I mean? Go on—breeze, man.”

People buffeted Rutherford as he was swept further up the street. He had never seen anything like it. There were no police anywhere, and the crowd continued to grow and swell. The atmosphere was manic, and the riot seemed to be gathering momentum, a life all of its own. Glass smashed and shattered, shards tumbling into the street to be trodden underfoot. Alarms clamoured helplessly, the sirens swallowed by the deafening noise of the mob. At the far end of the High Street someone had set fire to another bin, and plumes of dark smoke billowed upwards into the dusk. A police helicopter swooped overhead, hovering impotently, its spotlight reaching down like a finger to stroke over the mob.

He was tall enough to look out over the top of the crowd, but there was no sign of him. A teenage girl slammed into him and turned him to the left, and there he was: with a group of boys, each of them taking turns to shoulder-barge the door to a newsagent’s.

“Elijah!”

He turned. His face was full of exhilaration, but it softened with shame as he recognised him. “What you want, man?” he said, the false bravado for the benefit of his friends.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Nah. Don’t think so.”

Rutherford reached out and snagged the edge of his jacket. “You need to come with me.”

“Get off me!” He saw Rutherford’s face, and the sudden anger paled. “What is it?”

“It’s your mum.”

“What about her?”

“Better come with me, younger.”

Elijah’s face blanched. Rutherford made his way back through the angry crowd, holding the edge of Elijah’s jacket in a tight grip. The boy did not resist.

RUTHERFORD PARKED his car in the car park and led the way to the entrance of the hospital. Elijah had asked what the matter was as they made their way to the car. Rutherford had explained that he didn’t know, that he had received a message from Milton and that was it. The boy had been quiet during the ride, and he remained silent now. Rutherford reached down and folded one large hand around the boy’s arm, just above the bicep, his fingers gripping it loosely. Elijah did not resist.