Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead, dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance, from farmers with truckloads of manure, to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.

I was pretty sure that a smart Londoner like Beverley would have the brains to bail out of her car before the mob torched it, but I knew her mum wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t check. I ran out, yelling my head off in the hope that everyone else would mistake me for a rioter too.

The noise hit me as soon as I was out the door. It was like an angry pub crowd but on an enormous scale, all strange half-chants and animal hooting noises. It wasn’t like a normal riot. In one of those, most of the crowd does nothing except watch and occasionally cheer. Show them a broken shop window and they’ll cheerfully liberate the contents, but like most people they don’t actually want to get their hands dirty. This was a mob of ringleaders: everyone from the suspiciously well-dressed young man to the matron in an evening gown was mad as hell and ready to break something. I got as close to the burning Mini as I could, and was relieved to see no sign of anyone in any of the seats. Beverley had sensibly legged it and I should have followed suit, but I was distracted by the sight of the helicopter hovering directly overhead.

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.’

Our eyes met across the twitching form of our senior officer.

‘He didn’t see you, sir,’ I said. ‘If you call an ambulance we can have him off the scene before he regains consciousness. There was a riot, he was attacked, you rescued him.’

‘And your role in this?’

‘Reliable witness, sir,’ I said. ‘As to your timely intervention.’

Inspector Neblett gave me a hard look. ‘I was wrong about you, Grant,’ he said. ‘You do have the makings of a proper copper.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. I looked around. The riot had moved on – down Floral Street and into the Piazza, I reckoned.

‘Where’s the TSG?’ I asked.

The TSG are the Territorial Support Group. These are the guys that tool around in Mercedes Sprinter vans with equipment lockers stuffed with everything from riot helmets to tasers. Every borough command has a couple of these buzzing around their operational area, especially at closing time, and there’s a reserve force held on standby just in case of unexpected events. I suspected that current events counted as unexpected.

‘They’re staging on Longacre and Russell Street,’ said Neblett. ‘It looks like GT’s plan is to contain them around Covent Garden.’

There was a crash from the direction of the Piazza, followed by ragged cheering. ‘What now?’ asked Neblett.

‘I think they’re looting the market.’

‘Can you get the ambulance?’ he asked.

‘No sir, I’ve got orders to find the ringleader,’ I said.

A Molotov cocktail makes a very distinctive sound. A well-designed one goes crash, thud, whoosh – it’s the last, the petrol igniting, that’s going to kill you if you let it. I know this because before you graduate from Hendon you get to spend a fun-filled day having them thrown at you. Which was why Neblett and I both instinctively ducked when we heard them smashing into the tarmac less then fifteen metres down the road.

‘It’s kicking off,’ said Neblett.

Looking south, I could see a mob of rioters on the crossroads where Culverhay met Bow Street. Beyond them I saw flames reflected off blue riot helmets and grey shields.

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 had pushed to the front of the crowd, still wearing her Punch face. She held up her hand and the company paused.

‘Run,’ I said to Beverley.

‘Good idea,’ she said and, grabbing my arm, pulled me backwards so hard I almost fell over. Beverley darted down one of the dim brick corridors that led into the heart of the covered market. With evening drawing in, most of the actual shops were closed but stalls serving drinks and generic ethnic food should have been doing a roaring trade fleecing tourists. But there was nobody in sight, and I was hoping this meant punters and stall holders had already run for safety.

Behind us I heard the company give a great howl, in good harmony, and above that, the high-pitched squeaking laugh of the avatar of riot and rebellion. There was a sudden ominous silence, and then the first of the firebombs hit the roof. Lesley had said she didn’t want me dead, but I was beginning to suspect that she may have been lying.

Beverley swung us round a corridor and into one of the covered courtyards, which is where we found the German family. There were five of them, a stolid dark-haired father, a sharp-faced blonde mother and three children aged between seven and twelve. They must have taken shelter behind a food stall when the riot broke out, and were just emerging when they looked up to find Beverley and me barrelling towards them. The mother gave a terrified yelp, the eldest daughter screamed and the man squared up. The father didn’t want to fight but by God he was ready to defend his family from dangerous stereotypes, whatever the odds. I showed him my warrant card and he deflated in relieved surprise.

‘Polizei,’ he told his wife and then, very politely, asked whether we might help them.

I told them that we’d love to help them, starting by proceeding to the nearest exit and evacuating the area. I was sweating suddenly, and I realised that it was from the heat of a fire on my back. The whole rear of the covered market was on fire – I put one hand on the father’s back and the other on his eldest son and pushed them in the other direction. ‘Raus, raus!’ I yelled, hoping it really did mean ‘get out’.

Beverley led the way towards the so far untouched south-west corner of the market, but we’d barely cleared the second row of stalls when she skidded to a halt and the German family and I slammed into her back. Ahead, a group of rioters were using the western façade of the market to engage in a running battle with police reinforcements.

‘We’re trapped,’ said Beverley.

The rioters had their backs to us, but it was only a matter of time before one of them turned round.

One of the nearby shops looked surprisingly unlooted, and while running into a building during a fire is generally considered a retrograde step I didn’t see that we had much choice. It wasn’t until we’d bundled inside and I found myself crouching behind a manikin wearing nothing but two wisps of silk that I realised we were in a branch of Seraglio. I persuaded the family to sit down behind the counter so they wouldn’t be visible from outside.

‘Please,’ asked the mother. ‘What is happening here?’

‘Beats me, sister,’ said Beverley. ‘I just work here.’

The covered market at Covent Garden has four parallel rows of shops under its iron and glass roof. Originally built to house open-fronted fruit and vegetable stalls, they’d been retrofitted with windows and power but they were still less than three metres across. Into them were shoehorned specialist craft shops, cafés and bijou versions of high-street chain boutiques, which weren’t going to let a little thing like inadequate floor space get in the way of gleaning some of that high-spending tourist action. As a result, our haven was crowded with manikins of the tastefully abstract silver and black kind, wearing distractingly skimpy bits of satin. I hoped the manikins would make us less obvious to anybody who glanced inside.

That was tested when a number of rioters slunk past the windows. Judging from the torn suit jackets and dirty white shirts, these were members of the audience, not the cast. I held my breath as they paused outside, calling to each other in their guttural stockbroker accents.

Strangely, I found I wasn’t frightened. Instead I was embarrassed – that this nice family of Von Trapp impersonators had come to my city, and instead of being gently relieved of their money they were facing violence, injury and bad manners at the hands of Londoners. It pissed me off no end.

The stockbrokers loped off towards the west.

‘Right,’ I said after a minute, ‘I’m just going to check the coast is clear.’

I slipped out of the shop door and looked around. On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire. I ran a little way towards the closest exit but I got no more than a few paces before the heat started singeing my nostril hair. I quickly ducked back into the shop.

‘Beverley,’ I said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’ I told her about the fire.

The mother frowned. She was the linguist in the family. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

The flames were clearly reflected in the shop windows and the blank silver faces of the manikins, so it seemed pointless to lie. She looked at her children and then back at me. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

I looked at Beverley.

‘Can’t you do any magic?’ she asked.

It was definitely getting hotter. ‘Can’t you?’

‘You got to say it’s okay,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘That’s the agreement,’ said Beverly. ‘You’ve got to say it’s okay.’

One of the window panes cracked. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Do what you have to do.’

Beverley threw herself down and pressed her cheek to the floor. I saw her lips moving. I felt something pass through me, a sensation like rain, like the sound of boys playing football in the distance, the smell of suburban roses and newly washed cars, evening television flickering through net curtains.

‘What is she doing?’ asked the mother. ‘She is praying for us, yes?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘Sshh,’ said Beverley, sitting up. ‘I’m listening.’

‘What for?’

Something flew in through the window, pinged off the wall and fell into my lap – it was the cover off a fire hydrant. Beverley saw me examining it and gave me an apologetic shrug.

‘What exactly have you done?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’ve never actually tried this before.’

The smoke thickened, forcing us face down onto the mercifully cool stone of the shop floor. The middle German child was crying. His mother put her arm around him and pulled him close. The youngest, a girl, seemed remarkably stoical. Her blue eyes were fixed on mine. The father twitched. He was wondering whether he should at least get up and try do something heroic, however futile. I knew exactly how he felt. The last of the window panes shattered, glass pattering down on my back. I breathed in smoke, coughed, breathed in more smoke. It didn’t feel like enough of a breath. I realised that this was it – I was going to die.

Beverley started laughing.

Suddenly it was a hot Sunday morning under unexpectedly blue skies. There’s a smell of hot plastic and dust as the paddling pool is rescued from the garden shed and the kids, dressed in swimsuits and underwear, are bouncing up and down with excitement. Dad is red-faced from blowing up the pool and Mum is yelling to be careful, and the hose is run in through the kitchen window and jammed onto the cold tap. The hose gives a dusty cough and all the children stare at its mouth …

The floor began to vibrate, and I had just enough time to think What the fuck when a wall of water hit the south side of the shop. The door was smashed open and before I could grab hold of something I was lifted by the surge and slammed against the ceiling. The air was blown out of my lungs by the impact, and I had to bite down on the instinct to draw in a breath. For a moment the flood cleared enough for me to catch sight of Beverley floating serenely amid the debris before the water drained out of the shop fast enough to slap me into the floor again.

The father, with more presence of mind than I’d shown, had wedged himself and his family against the counter. They assured me they were all okay, except for the youngest who wanted to do it again. Beverly stood in the middle of the shop and did the air punch.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Let’s see Tyburn do something like that.’

*

Beverley’s euphoria lasted long enough for us to get our German family to the nearest ambulance. As far as I could tell from looking around while we walked out, Beverley’s wave of water had started somewhere near the centre of the covered market and rolled outwards to flood the Piazza to a depth of ten centimetres. I reckoned that at a stroke Beverley had quadrupled the amount of property damage done that night, but I kept that thought to myself. She hadn’t managed to extinguish the fire on the roof, but even as we sidled away, the London Fire Brigade were moving in to finish it off.

Beverley got strangely agitated when she saw the firemen, and practically dragged me up James Street and away from the market. The riot seemed to be all over bar the media witch hunt, and TSG officers in full riot gear stood around in groups discussing baton technique and reattaching their ID numbers.

We sat down on the plinth of the sundial column at Seven Dials and watched the emergency vehicles roaring past, Beverley flinching every time a fire engine went by. Still soaking wet, we were beginning to chill despite the warm evening. Beverley took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m in so much trouble,’ she said.

I put my arm around her and she took the opportunity to slip one of her cold hands under my shirt and warm it against my ribs. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

‘Just shut up and think warm thoughts,’ she said, as if that were hard with her breasts brushing up against my side.

‘So you burst a few pipes,’ I said. ‘How much trouble can you be in?’

‘Those were fire hydrants I messed with, which means the cult of Neptune’s going to be pissed,’ she said.

‘Cult of Neptune?’

‘London Fire Brigade,’ she said.

‘The London Fire Brigade are worshippers of the god Neptune?’

‘Not officially, no,’ she said. ‘But you know – sailors, Neptune, it’s a natural fit.’

‘The Fire Brigade are sailors?’

‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But in the old days when they were looking for disciplined guys who knew about water, ropes, ladders and didn’t freak out at altitude. On the other hand, you had a lot of sailors looking for a nice steady career on dry land – marriage made in heaven.’

‘Still, Neptune,’ I said. ‘Roman god of the sea?’

Beverley laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair was wet, but I wasn’t complaining. ‘Sailors are superstitious,’ she said. ‘Even the religious ones know you got to have a little respect for the King of the Deeps.’

‘Have you met Neptune?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There’s no such person. Anyway, I feel bad about the hydrants, but it’s Thames Water I’m worried about.’

‘Don’t tell me,’I said. ‘Worshippers of dread Cthulhu.’

‘I don’t think they’re very religious at all, but you don’t piss off people who can release raw sewage into your headwaters,’ she said.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen your river.’

Beverley turned and made herself comfortable against my chest. ‘I’ve got a place off the Kingston bypass,’ she said. ‘It’s just a semi, but my garden goes all the way down to the water.’ She lifted her head until her lips were brushing mine. ‘We could go swimming.’

We kissed. She tasted of strawberries and cream and chewing gum. God knows where we might have gone after that, except a Range Rover screeched to a stop right by us and Beverley disengaged so fast I got lip burn.

A stocky woman in jeans got out of the Range Rover and marched over. She was dark-skinned with a round expressive face that was, on this occasion, expressing a high degree of annoyance. ‘Beverley,’ she said, barely registering my presence. ‘You are in so much trouble – get in the car.’

Beverley sighed, kissed me on the cheek and got up to meet her sister. I scrambled up myself, ignoring the pain from my bruised back.

‘Peter,’ said Beverley, ‘this is my sister, Fleet.’

Fleet gave me a critical once-over. She looked to be in her early thirties, built like a sprinter – broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted with big muscular thighs. She wore a tweed jacket over a black polo neck, her hair trimmed down to a thick stubble. Looking at her gave me a weird sense of familiarity, like you get when you meet a minor celebrity whose name you can’t remember.

‘I’d love to get acquainted, Peter, but now is not the time,’ said Fleet. She turned to Beverley. ‘Get in the car.’

Beverley gave me a sad little smile and did what she was told.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

‘You went to the same school as my kids,’ she said, and climbed back into her Range Rover. The door had barely closed before Fleet started yelling at Beverley. It was muffled but the phrase ‘irresponsible child’ was clearly audible. Beverley saw me watching and rolled her eyes. I wondered what it was like to grow up with that many sisters. I thought it might be nice to have someone pick me up in their Range Rover, even if they were going to shout at me all the way home.

It’s a funny thing about a London riot, but once you’re outside the perimeter, nothing seems to be different. On the minus side, Covent Garden had nearly burned down, but on the positive side there weren’t any major bus routes or tube lines affected. It was dark, I was soaked, the Folly was still out of bounds and I didn’t fancy spending another night in that chair in Nightingale’s hospital room. I did what everyone does when they’ve run out of options – I went back to the one place where, when you turn up, they have to let you in.

I made the mistake of catching the tube. It was crowded with people heading back from an evening out. Even that late in the evening it was warm and close inside the coach but wet, dishevelled and slightly ethnic as I was, I got more elbow room than anyone else.

My back and leg hurt, I was tired and I was missing something. I’ve never trusted the idea of policeman’s gut instinct. I’d watched Lesley at work, and every time she guessed right it was because she’d spotted something I’d missed, dug a bit further or thought a little bit harder about a case. If I was going to save her life, I was going to have to do the same.

More people got on at Goodge Street. It got hotter, but at least I was beginning to dry out. A guy in tan slacks and an off-the-peg blue blazer took the space by the connecting door on my right, close enough for me to catch the tinny backbeat from his iPod earpieces. I began to feel reassuringly anonymous again.

None of the references to revenants I’d read had provided a clear idea of how or why an ordinary ghost gained the ability to suck the magic out of other ghosts. My working theory about ghosts was that they were copies of personalities that had somehow imprinted into the magic residue that accumulated on physical objects – the vestigia. I suspected ghosts degraded over time in the same way that stuff recorded on magnetic tape degrades, unless their signal was boosted with more magic, hence the need to suck it out of other ghosts.

We must have picked up a ranting drunk at Warren Street, because after a brief wind-up he was in full flow by the time we reached Euston. There I was, distracted by a young woman in a pink halter with more cleavage than I thought physically possible who got on and leaned against the glass partition opposite me. I looked away before she caught my eye, and shifted my focus to the nearest advert. I felt the guy in the blue blazer shift position, and guessed he was doing the same thing.

A white boy with dreads lurched into my little corner of the train and I caught a whiff of patchouli, tobacco and marijuana. The woman in the halter top hesitated and then moved closer to me – apparently I was the lesser of two evils.

‘The dogs, the dogs,’ shouted the ranting drunk from somewhere down the other end of the carriage. ‘This country is going to the dogs.’ The happy train lurched into movement again.

Revenants had to be rare or there’d be no ghosts left for them to feed on, which brought me back to my question: what made a revenant? Psychological state at the moment of death, maybe? Henry Pyke had died a pointless and unjust death even by the lax standards of the eighteenth century but even so, his resentment at Charles Macklin and burning disappointment at the sad state of his acting career didn’t seem enough motivation to make him want to force poor Bernard Coopertown to beat his wife to death.

‘Used to be a fucking paradise,’ shouted the ranting drunk. He couldn’t be talking about Camden Town which, despite the markets, had never really aspired to much more than shabby respectability.

Camden tube station is where the Northern Line splits into the Edgware and High Barnet branches, and here loads of people got off and even more people got on. We all crushed up a bit more and I found myself staring at the top of the woman in the halter top’s head – she had blonde roots and dandruff. The man in the blue blazer got shoved in from the right, and between them they had me boxed against the door. We all shuffled about trying to keep our armpits out of each other’s faces – just because it’s uncomfortable, there’s really no excuse for not maintaining standards or making eye contact.

The ranting drunk welcomed everyone aboard. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the whole fucking world in here – why not?’

The smell of the white boy with dreads intensified, adding urine and excrement – I wondered when he’d last changed his fake combat trousers.

Less than a minute out of Camden Town, the train lurched to a stop. An almost subliminal groan rose from the passengers, especially when the lights dimmed as well. I heard someone chuckling at the other end of the carriage.

There had to be something else behind Henry Pyke, I thought, something much worse than a bitter failed actor.

‘Of course there is,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘That would be me.’

I craned my neck to spot the drunk, but my view was blocked by the white boy with dreads whose face now had an expression of dumb satisfaction. The smell of shit got worse, and I realised the boy had just relieved himself in his pants. He caught my eye and gave me a big smile of contentment.

‘Who are you?’ I shouted. I tried to get out of my corner but the woman in the halter top thrust herself backwards and pinned me to the wall. The lights dimmed further, and this time the groan from the passengers was anything but subliminal.

‘I’m the demon drink,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘I’m gin lane and your local crack house. I’m a follower of Captain Swing, Watt Tyler and Oswald Mosley. I’m the grinning face in the window of the hansom cab; I made Dickens long for the countryside and I’m what your Masters are afraid of.’

I pushed at the woman in the halter top but my arms felt heavy, useless as if in a nightmare. She started to rub herself against me. The carriage was getting hotter and I began to sweat. A hand suddenly grabbed hold of my backside and squeezed tight – it was the man in the blue blazer. I was so shocked that I froze up. I looked at his face but he was staring straight forward with the typically bored, abstracted expression of a seasoned traveller. The bleed from his iPod was louder and more irritating than it had been.

I gagged on the smell of shit and shoved the woman in the halter top enough to get a view down the carriage. I saw my ranting drunk – he had the face of Mr Punch.

The man in the blazer let go of my arse and tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. The woman in the halter top ground her hips into my crotch.

‘Is this,’ shouted Mr Punch, ‘any way for a young man to live?’

The white boy with dreads leaned towards me and with great deliberation poked me in the face with his index finger. ‘Poke,’ he said, and giggled. Then he did it again.

There’s a point where a human being will lose it, just lash out at everything around them. Some people spend their lives on the edge of that – most of them end up doing time in prison. Some, a lot of them women, get ground down to that point over years, until one day it’s hello, burning bed and a legal defence of extreme provocation.

I was at that point, and I could feel the righteous anger. How wonderful it would be just to fuck the consequences and let rip. Because sometimes you just want the fucking universe to take some notice – is that too fucking much to ask for?

Then I realised that was what it was all about.

Mr Punch – the spirit of riot and rebellion – does what it says on the tin. This was him, the guy behind Henry Pyke, and he was fucking with my mind.

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke, Coopertown, that cycle courier, lots of frustration – but that’s everyone in the big city, ain’t it, Mr Punch? And what percentage actually let you in? I bet you’ve got a piss-poor success rate – so you can just fuck off out of it – I’m going home to bed.’

At that point I realised that the train was moving again, the lights were up and the man in the blue blazer didn’t have his hand down my trousers. The ranting drunk was silent. Everybody in the carriage was studiously not looking at me.

I bailed at Kentish Town, the very next stop. Fortunately it was where I wanted to go.

From September 1944 to March 1945, that lovable Nazi scamp Wernher Von Braun aimed his V2 rockets at the stars and yet, in the words of the song, somehow hit London instead. When my dad was growing up, the city was dotted with bombsites, gaps in the neat rows of houses where homes had been obliterated. In the postwar years these sites were gradually cleared and rebuilt in a series of ghastly architectural mistakes. My dad liked to claim that the mistake where I grew up was built on a V2 impact site, but I suspect it was probably just an ordinary cluster of German high explosives dropped by a conventional bomber.

Still, whatever caused the two-hundred-metre gap in the Victorian terraces lining Leighton Road, the postwar planners weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to make mistakes on this scale. Built in the 1950s, the blocks of the Peckwater Estate are six storeys high, rectangular and constructed, as a final aesthetic touch, of a dirty grey brick that weathered badly. As a result, when the clean air act put an end to the famous London pea-soupers and they started sand-blasting the old buildings clean, the Peckwater Estate came out looking worse than it had before.

The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn’t grow up listening to next door’s live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of post-war planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits. My parents had a third-floor flat with a front door that opened onto an open-air walkway. When I’d been growing up, in the early 1990s, the walls had been covered in graffiti and the stairwell with dogshit. These days the graffiti was mostly gone and the dogshit got regularly hosed into the gutter which, by the standards of the Peckwater Estate, counted as gentrification. I still had my front-door key, which was just as well because when I got there I found my parents were out.

This was unusual enough to give me pause. My dad’s in his early seventies and doesn’t move about much. I figured it had to be a major occasion, a wedding or a christening, for my mum to dress him up and drag him out of the house. I figured I’d hear all about it when they got home. I made myself a cup of tea with condensed milk and sugar and ate a couple of supermarket own-brand biscuits. Thus fortified, I went to my old bedroom to see if there was room for me to sleep in it.

As soon as I’d moved out – and by this I mean about ten minutes after the door had closed behind me – my mum started using my bedroom for storage. It was full of cardboard moving boxes, each one stuffed to capacity and sealed shut with packing tape. I had to move several off the bed just to lie down. They were heavy and smelled of dust. On roughly a two-year cycle my mum collected clothes, shoes, cooking utensils and non-perishable beauty products, stuffed them into cardboard boxes and shipped them back to her family in Freetown. The fact that a great deal of her immediate family had already immigrated to the UK, the US and, strangely enough, Denmark never seemed to cause a reduction in the flow. African families are notoriously extended but from what I could gather, my mum was related to about half the population of Sierra Leone. I’d learned from an early age that anything I owned that I didn’t defend was subject to arbitrary seizure and deportation. My Lego, in particular, was the subject of a running battle from my eleventh birthday on, when Mum decided that I was too old for such things. In my fourteenth year it mysteriously vanished while I was on a school trip.

I prised off my shoes, climbed under the covers and was asleep before I could wonder where all my posters had gone.

I woke briefly some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed and the muffled sound of my dad’s voice. My mother said something which made my father laugh and, comforted that everything was all right, I went back to sleep.

I woke again, much later, with the morning sunlight slanting through my bedroom window. I lay on my back feeling refreshed, with a solid erection and the vague memory of an erotic dream about Beverley. What was I going to do about Beverley Brook? That I fancied her was a given, that she fancied me was pretty obvious, that she wasn’t entirely human was a worrying possibility. Beverley wanted me to go swimming in her river, and I had no idea what that meant except Isis had warned me against doing it. I had a strong feeling that you didn’t shag a daughter of the River Thames without getting out of your depth – literally.

‘It’s not that I’m scared of commitment,’ I said to the ceiling. ‘It’s just that I want to know what I’m committing to first.’

‘Are you awake then, Peter?’ said a soft voice outside my door – my father.

‘Yeah, Dad, I’m awake.’

‘Your mum’s left you some lunch,’ he said.

Lunch, I thought. The day was half-done and nothing achieved so far. I rolled out of bed, squeezed past a stack of cardboard boxes and headed for the shower.

The bathroom was as hobbit-sized as everything else in the flat, and it had only been by dint of some serious Polish retro-engineering that a power shower was shoehorned into the gap between the sink and the window. It was me that coughed up the cash for it, so I guaranteed I didn’t have to duck my head to get it wet. There was a new soap dispenser mounted beside the shower, the kind you find in the toilets of executive office suites, bought or liberated from a cleaning wholesaler. I’d noticed that the toilet paper and bath towels were much better brands than the ones we used when I was living at home – Mum was cleaning a much better class of office these days.

I got out and dried myself off with an enormous fluffy towel with ‘Your Institution Here’ embroidered into the corner. My dad was of the ‘real men don’t moisturise’ school of dry skin diseases, and all my mum had was a wholesale tub of cocoa butter. I’ve got nothing against using cocoa butter, it’s just that you end up smelling like a giant Mars Bar for the rest of the day. My skin taken care of, I nipped back into my old room where I cracked open some of the boxes at random until I had a change of clothes. One of my distant cousins was just going to have to go without.

The kitchen was a narrow slot that could have been used to train a mess crew for a Trident submarine. It was just big enough for a sink, cooker and a work surface. A door at the far end opened out onto an equally vestigial balcony which at least caught enough sun to dry clothes most of the year round. Curls of blue tobacco smoke drifted in from the balcony, which meant that my father was out there having one of his four precious daily roll-ups.

My mum had left groundnut chicken and about half a kilo of basmati on the cooker. I threw both in the microwave and asked my father if he wanted a coffee. He did, so I made two cups using instant from a catering-sized tin of Nescafé. I topped them up with a centimetre of condensed milk to mask the taste.

He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of his career, and my mum liked to keep him respectable: khaki slacks and linen jacket over a pale green shirt. I always thought of it as Empire chic, and it certainly did something for my mum. He looked suitably colonial in the sunlight, sitting on a wicker chair that was almost as wide as the balcony. There was just enough room left for a stool and white plastic end table. I put the coffees down on the table by the pub-sized Foster’s Lager ashtray and my dad’s tin of Golden Virginia.

From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours.

‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then.

‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’

‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it.

I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time.

As he described the music – he was hazy on the food, the clothes and the religion – my dad opened his tobacco tin, took out a packet of Rizlas and with great care and deliberation made himself a roll-up. Once it was finished to his satisfaction, he put the tobacco, Rizlas and the roll-up itself back in the tin, sealed it up and replaced it on the table. When he picked up his coffee I saw his hand was trembling. My dad would leave the tin on the table for as long as he could stand it before picking it up and putting it on his lap, then he might remake his roll-up or, if he couldn’t stand it any longer, smoke the damn thing. My dad had the early stages of emphysema. The same doctor who supplied him with his heroin had warned him that if he couldn’t stop smoking he should at least keep it down to less than five fags a day.

‘Do you believe in magic?’ I asked.

‘I once heard Dizzy Gillespie play,’ said Dad. ‘Does that count?’

‘It might do,’ I said. ‘Where do you reckon playing like that comes from?’

‘In Dizzy? That was all talent and hard work, but I did know a sax player said he got his chops from the Devil, made a deal at the crossroads, that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He was from Mississippi?’

‘No, Catford,’ said Dad. ‘Said he made his deal on Archer Street.’

‘Was he any good?’

‘He wasn’t bad,’ said Dad. ‘But the poor bastard went blind two weeks later.’

‘Was that part of the deal?’ I asked.

‘Apparently so,’ said Dad. ‘Your mum thought it was when I told her. She said that only a fool expects to get something for nothing.’

That sounded like Mum, whose principal saying was, ‘If it doesn’t cost something, it isn’t worth anything’. Actually her real principal saying was, at least to me, ‘Don’t think you’ve got so big that I can’t still beat you’. Not that she ever beat me, a deficiency that she later blamed for my failure to pass my A levels. Numerous university-bound cousins were held up as shining examples of discipline through physical violence.

My dad picked up his tobacco tin and put it in his lap. I picked up the mugs and washed them in the kitchen sink. I remembered the groundnut chicken and rice in the microwave. I took that out to the balcony, ate the chicken but left most of the rice. I also drank about a litre of cold water, which is a common side effect of eating my mum’s food. I seriously considered going back to bed. What else was there for me to do?

I stuck my head out onto the balcony to ask my dad if there was anything he needed. He said he was fine. As I watched, he opened his tin, took out the roll-up and put it in his mouth. He took out his silver-coloured paraffin lighter and lit the fag with the same deliberate ceremony with which he had rolled it. As he inhaled for the first time there was a look of bliss on his face. Then he started coughing, nasty wet coughs that sounded like he was bringing up the lining of his lungs. With a practised twist he snuffed out the roll-up and waited for the coughing to subside. When it had, he put the roll-up back between his lips and lit up again. I didn’t hang about – I knew how it went on from there.

I love my dad. He’s a walking caution.

My mum has three landlines. I picked one up and called my voice-mail service. The first message was from Dr Walid.

‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know that Thomas is conscious and asking for you.’

The broadsheets called it May Madness, which made it sound like a tea dance. The tabloids called it May Rage, presumably because it had one less syllable to fit across the front page. The TV had some good footage of middle-aged women in long dresses tossing bricks at the police. Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force explaining how the riot was caused by whatever socio-political factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society – if only we knew what.

There was a big police presence in UCH’s A&E department, most of them loitering in search of overtime or trying to get statements from victims of the riot. I didn’t want to give a statement, so I slipped in the back way by grabbing a mop bucket and passing myself off as a cleaner. I got lost in the upper levels looking for Dr Walid before stumbling onto a corridor that looked vaguely familiar. I opened doors at random until I found Nightingale’s. He didn’t really look any better than last time.

‘Inspector,’ I said. ‘You wanted to see me.’

His eyes opened and flicked towards me. I sat on the edge of the bed so he could see me without moving his head.

‘Got shot,’ he whispered.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was there.’

‘Shot before,’ he said.

‘Really, when?

‘War.’

‘Which war was that?’ I asked.

Nightingale grimaced and shifted in his bed. ‘Second,’ he said.

‘The Second World War,’ I said. ‘What were you in – the baby brigade?’ To have enlisted even in 1945 Nightingale would have had to have been born in 1929, and that’s if he’d lied about his age. ‘How old are you?’

‘Old,’ he whispered. ‘Turn century.’

‘Turn of the century?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were born at the turn of the century – the twentieth century?’ He looked as if he was in his bluff mid-forties, which is a neat trick when you’re lying half-dead in a hospital bed with a machine that goes ‘ping’ at regular intervals. ‘You’re over a hundred years old?’

Nightingale made a wheezing sound that alarmed me for a moment, until I realised that it was laughter.

‘Is this natural?’

He shook his head.

‘Do you know why it’s happening?’

‘Gift horse,’ he whispered. ‘Mouth.’

I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to tire him too much, so I told him about Lesley, the riot and being locked out of the Folly. When I asked him whether Molly could help me track Henry Pyke, he shook his head.

‘Dangerous,’ he said.

‘Has to be done,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to stop until he’s stopped.’

Slowly, one word at a time, Nightingale told me exactly how it would work – I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. It was a terrible plan, and it still left the question of how to get back into the Folly.

‘Tyburn’s mother,’ said Nightingale.

‘You want her to overrule her daughter?’ I asked. ‘What makes you think she’ll do that?’

‘Pride,’ said Nightingale.

‘You want me to beg?’

‘Not her pride,’ said Nightingale. ‘Yours.’