Shredder (17 page)

Zoe was standing behind him, panting, tears of anger making tracks down her soot-stained face, her ripped dress hanging off her bare shoulder, Swarthy's gun smoking in her shaking hand. Roly-Poly was lying slumped and dying, three holes in his back bubbling blood as air escaped from his punctured lungs. Zoe tossed the gun to the ground beside him and hurled herself at me so hard she nearly knocked me off my feet. I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her scent, hardly daring to believe I was holding her again. When she grabbed my hair and hauled my face to hers and kissed me I knew it was true—and that we had to hurry. I pulled away, grabbing her hand to tug her after me.

“We can take their car,” she said. “I can drive—”

“There's something we need to pick up,” I said.

We were just in time. The Dumpster truck had nearly burned out, and through the thinning pall of smoke I saw blue lights flashing off helmets and riot shields. The cops were massing for an assault on the mob, and the mob knew they were coming. With the shops just about stripped bare and nothing left to destroy, they were starting to disperse, running off in hooting knots of six and seven, a few of them still lugging battered cardboard boxes. One guy was pushing a supermarket trolley loaded with cigarettes and booze down the street, but like a typical supermarket trolley one of its wheels had gone wonky. It veered off at an angle towards the curb, caught on a brick and went toppling over, spilling his booty all over the road in a soggy heap. The looter abandoned it and ran.

And that bloody kid with the bandanna was up again, rooting through the litter bin where I'd dumped the laptop. He must have seen its edge protruding from under the garbage, and now he tugged it free and wiped the grease off its lid with the sleeve of his grotty tracksuit top.

“Oi!” I shouted, and he ran for it. But he wasn't much of a sprinter and I was on him in six paces. I
grabbed his greasy hair and hauled him backwards, yowling. He swung at me with the laptop, and I seized it with my free hand, ripped it out of his grasp and sent him on his way with a kick.

“You thieving prick,” he spat. Then he ran for it.

And so did we.

The nearest Underground station had closed early, metal grilles dragged across its entrance and locked with heavy chains, either to protect the staff or to prevent more rioters turning up by tube to join the party. I bashed the cage pointlessly in frustration, and we ran on.

Night was falling properly now and the rain had stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the roads shining under the sodium streetlights and huge filthy puddles along the gutters where the drains had been overwhelmed. News of the rioting must have spread because the streets had emptied of traffic—no buses, no trucks, and only a few cars. One of those came past us at a crawl, crammed with middle-class kids pressing their smartphones up against the windows in the hope of catching footage of an actual riot—like tourists in an urban safari park.

Zoe kept her hand in my mine and followed me wordlessly, never asking where we were going or what had happened to me. I was glad, because I had no idea where we were headed—I just wanted to put as much distance as I could between us and that havoc I'd unleashed.

But that wasn't so easy. There was a weird electricity in the air, a diffused version of the tension I'd sensed leading up to the riot. Knots of youths were gathering on every corner, wondering when it would all kick off in their area, unaware of how riots worked. It's not like a football match: nobody blows a whistle—one yob will try something on, another will take it further, a few of the more timid types will ape them, until everyone's at it and no one knows how it really started. Everyone just suddenly understands that policing only works as long as the people being policed go along with it. The line separating law and order from anarchy is in our heads; it's less substantial than the plastic tape cops use to cordon off crime scenes.

We passed one kid with his ear glued to a mobile phone, shouting to his mates that Camden and Walthamstow and Ealing were burning, that the cops were overwhelmed and couldn't keep up. I tried not to think about how much of that was my fault, how
many businesses were being destroyed, how many innocent people were being hurt, just so I could save one person—Zoe. And when I thought about it like that, I knew I'd do it all over again if I had to.

Zoe glanced behind her and abruptly changed direction, dashing out into the road with her hand still clamped in mine. She tugged me backwards so hard I nearly dropped the Turk's laptop before I turned to see what she was up to.

A lone black taxi was heading our way, its yellow light gleaming in the dusk, the rattle of its diesel engine reassuringly normal—except it was hammering along at about thirty, rather than the leisurely trundle of a driver scouting for business. Zoe had realized that as well, and she'd dashed into the road right in front of it—waving to the driver from the curb would never have worked. The cab slowed a little, and I saw the driver think about swerving round her, but then he seemed to change his mind, and hit his brakes. There were only two of us, after all, and we looked like an ordinary couple, and besides, Zoe's dress was ripped and wet and clinging to her body, and that would have been enough to distract any London cabbie—the straight male ones, anyway. All the same this driver didn't quite halt;
he slowed to a crawl and rolled down his passenger window to hear where Zoe wanted to go before he'd commit himself and unlock his doors.

“Can you take us to Richmond?”

“Which bit, love?” He was sixty-something, with a sunburned face wrinkled by too many cigarettes, and thick white hair slicked back. I could guess why he was on the streets when all other public transport had been suspended—he'd been in the cabbing business forty years, he'd seen everything, the odd riot didn't bother him. And he needed the money.

“Richmond Hill,” said Zoe, and she tugged at the passenger-door handle. The cabbie hesitated half a second; then he stopped the cab properly and jabbed a switch on his dash to release the rear door locks. His eyes kept checking his mirrors as we clambered aboard, watching for any sudden burst of activity on the street behind us, and the instant I'd slammed the cab door shut he floored the accelerator, throwing me backwards into Zoe's lap. She yelped and squirmed out of my way, giggling, as if we were running off for a dirty weekend rather than fleeing from gangsters and anarchy and slaughter.

“If you'd said Hammersmith, or Croydon,” the driver's voice came over the speaker system, “I
would have told you to sling your hook. Half the bloody city's gone up—it's worse than last time. I mean, all the people they threw in jail back then, the ones who nicked stuff and set fires everywhere, and called in all their mates on mobile phones—they're at it again! A lot of good prison did them. They should cut these people's hands off like they do in Saudi Arabia….”

Zoe lifted my right arm and snuggled under it, up close to me, while the driver babbled on like one of those talk-station DJs, or rather like one of the clueless guests that ring up talk-station DJs to spout half-baked opinions based on gossip they'd heard in the pub. But after all the fear and madness his patter seemed normal and reassuring, and the taxi, kicking up massive waves of spray as it sped through the empty streets, felt like a lifeboat ferrying two shipwrecked survivors to shore.

I glanced at the purple digits on the dashboard in front, jumping up by thirty pence every twenty seconds, and a worrying thought occurred to me.

“Have you got any cash?” I said to Zoe.

“Think so,” she said, and she raised her backside from the seat and fumbled underneath for a moment before producing a crumpled wad of twenties. She saw me staring at it in confusion.

“Was that in your knickers?” I said.

“I lifted it from Nico's wallet just now,” she said. “The guy you took down with the ricochet.”

“You robbed him?” I said. “Who taught you that trick?”

“You did,” she said.

The cab dropped us off twenty-five minutes later on the north side of Richmond Bridge, at the foot of a hill lined with huge houses. I'd heard of Richmond Hill; tax-exiled rock stars owned properties here, for the few times a year they visited the UK. The reek of money reminded me of the Guvnor's neighborhood, but these weren't big tarty palaces with fake plaster columns—they were elegant white-painted Georgian mansions, hiding coyly behind elms and cherry trees. It was respectable, fashionable money round here, the sort that bought class and calm.

This neighborhood seemed a world away from burning high streets and mobs with arms full of loot, and I wondered what two scruffy, exhausted fugitives like us were doing here. Zoe led the way, taking a left turn, then a right, into a narrow cobbled backstreet running parallel to the Georgian avenue. Here the houses were much smaller. A mews terrace, I realized—the stables where the big houses
had kept their horses years ago, and which had long since been converted into homes for servants. Not that many servants lived there now; these were what estate agents called pieds-à-terre, cottages owned by people with business in the city and proper homes in the country. Through the tiny windows I glimpsed cozy sitting rooms with artfully placed antiques and works of art above snug little marble fireplaces. More than one cottage had a steel lattice on the inside of every window: a sight that always made me wonder why so many rich people are prepared to let their homes look like prisons. Is it worth being that wealthy, having all those exquisite possessions, if you live in constant fear of getting robbed?

At the furthest end of the terrace was a glossy black door wreathed in ivy. Like all the other cottages, its three sash windows faced onto the street, one directly above the front door. In this one all the curtains were half drawn, which suggested the owners were away and thought this arrangement would fool prowlers into thinking they weren't. Zoe was fumbling under the ivy on the doorframe, looking for something. When she found it she tugged the leaves away to expose it—a small metal box screwed to the wood, with twelve silver buttons in a grid, like an entry panel.

Zoe punched in six numbers. Nothing happened. She cursed under her breath. She punched them in again; still nothing. Then I heard her gasp “Oh!” at her own stupidity, and she hit the button at the bottom left, marked with a star. The panel popped loose and swung open, and Zoe pulled it back fully to reveal a single silver key hanging on a hook. It was like no other key I'd seen—a long tongue of metal with a pattern of drilled dimples—but it slipped into the front lock like any other key, and Zoe pushed the door open and stepped inside.

A burglar alarm buzzed, and in the cupboard-sized porch it was deafeningly loud. Zoe marched into the living room—there was no hallway—found the alarm panel and once more punched in six numbers. The buzzing stopped.

“That's a relief,” she said. “I thought she might have changed the combination. Do want a drink of something? There's bound to be some booze.”

“Whose house is this?” I asked as I followed her into the living room. I was scared to sit down; like the other houses in the street, this one was crammed with antiques—here they were mostly hand-painted porcelain figurines, the sort so delicate they'd explode if you so much as brushed against them. There was a tiny little chintzy sofa and a single, compact
armchair, both of them immaculate—if a little dusty—and I stood among them awkwardly, aware I was still soaking and filthy and bloodstained in places.

“My aunt,” she said. “My mother's sister. She spends most of her time in Italy. I haven't been here in years.”

“Will she mind us being here?”

“I don't really give a toss,” said Zoe. She was checking out the tiny kitchen next door—smaller than the kitchen in my dad's house—and I saw over her shoulder that the fridge was empty and switched off.

“If you had this place, why…?” I said. Then I realized I didn't want to know the answer to the question I had in mind, and dropped it.

Zoe turned to look at me. “If I had this place, why did I call Patrick?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Because my aunt is a toxic bitch,” said Zoe. “And I trusted Patrick.”

“I knew he was a prick,” I said. “I should have said something.”

“I knew what you thought,” said Zoe. “You're not very good at hiding your feelings. Actually I
thought he was a prick as well…I just didn't know how big.”

“Are we talking about the same thing?” I said.

Zoe started checking out the cupboards, found a few packets of flavored instant noodles and examined the packaging to see how out-of-date they were.

“I knew he wanted to get into my knickers,” she said. “I just thought it was for the usual reasons. Guys like him think they can have any girl they see…. I didn't know he was only chasing me because the Turk had told him to. That's what's really insulting.”

“I'm sure that wasn't the only reason,” I said. “Who wouldn't want to get into your knickers?”

“You don't,” said Zoe. She tossed the packet onto the counter and turned to me. “Ever since I shopped you to the Guvnor's people, and nearly got you killed. In fact, I don't know why I'm having a go at Patrick. I'm no better than he is.”

“You apologized,” I said. “I got over that a long time ago.”

“Does that mean you do?”

“What?”

“Want to get into my knickers.”

“I can't be that bad at hiding my feelings, then.”

“Carpe diem,” said Zoe, walking over to me.

“I don't know what that means,” I said.

She coiled her arms around my neck. “It means come and get it,” she said.

After what Zoe had been through, I thought she'd want to take things gently, and I kept meaning to stop and ask if what I was doing was OK, but she made it pretty clear she didn't want me to ask questions or slow down or stop for anything—not even when a porcelain shepherdess took a dive off the mantelpiece and shattered into a hundred razor-sharp fragments that ended up embedded in my backside. Maybe Zoe needed to wipe away the fear and degradation she'd been through—she wasn't going to be anyone's victim, and refused to behave like one—but at that moment I needed her as much as she needed me. We threw off the guilt and the torment and the terror with our clothes; we were safe together, for a little while at least, in this little doll's house nobody knew about. London could have burned to the ground around us and neither of us would have noticed till the roof fell in.

The antique carpet was coarser than it looked and its weave was biting into the skin of my back, mostly
because Zoe was lying on top of me with her hair tickling my face. It was suffocatingly hot and stuffy in that tiny sitting room and my backside was bleeding and I was ravenous and I hadn't felt so happy in months.

“I saw you,” said Zoe. “As soon as they dragged me out into the street. That's when I knew everything was going to be all right.”

“It nearly wasn't,” I said. “That fat guy nearly had me.”

“You would have taken him,” said Zoe. “Eventually.”

“Then why did you shoot him?” I said.

She grimaced at the memory, then shrugged. “I was in a hurry,” she said.

When I laughed I realized how much my ribs ached, how much everything ached.

“How did you find me?” said Zoe.

“I asked Patrick,” I said.

“And he told you?”

“He didn't want to,” I said. “But he got the impression I'd break his neck if he didn't.”

“I wish you had.”

“He would never have given me a lift down here if I had.”

“He drove you all the way from York?”

“It was fun,” I said. “We listened to his CDs. Talked about you.”

“Drop dead.”

“We barely said a word the whole way down. I ended up wishing I'd taken the train. But he dropped me off up the street from where they had you, and pointed to the door. I got out, and he drove off.”