Broken Homes

football match,’ he said. ‘We only need to be concerned with the crowd, not the players. What happens on the pitch is not our concern.’ Which just went to show how long it was since Nightingale had policed a football match.
    He did let me arrange for the TSG to be deployed in the area on standby even if he did balk at the chunk it took out of our operational budget.
    ‘Why is it necessary to have three whole vans’ worth?’ he asked.
    I explained that the TSG always deploys as a full serial and that’s three carriers’ worth. Anyway, that’s the thing about the Tactical Support Group, you only really need them when the wheels come off. Which means you’re going to want them in quantity or not at all – and you won’t want to be waiting around for them to arrive, neither.
    The TSG would need to be parked up nearby, as would a maddeningly vague number of trucks, caravans and, I suspected, funfair rides – preferably as far from the TSG as possible. Parking on the South Bank is a tangle of jurisdictions involving everyone from the Coin Street Community Builders to the GLA and the Borough of Southwark. Organising it would be a bloody nightmare that I wouldn’t dump on my worst enemy so, in the best traditions of policing, we passed the problem over to the Goddess of the River Tyburn.
    She wasn’t best pleased, but what could she say? As self-appointed fixer-in-chief for her mum, she had to prove her superiority.
    ‘Leave it with me, Peter,’ she said when I called her. ‘And just let me say how much I’m looking forward to hearing your father’s band.’
    ‘We knew you wouldn’t mind,’ said my mum once I’d phoned her and waited the requisite hour and a half for her to finish chatting to whoever it was in Sierra Leone she was currently still talking to – and call me back. ‘And it was beaucoup money,’
    What could I say? Of course it’s beaucoup money. It’s being paid for by the God and Goddess of the River Thames, no relation, who peddled influence and soft power the same way they breathed in and out and, presumably, regulated the waters of the river. And there was a good chance that they were just using Dad to get some traction on me.
    ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just don’t let Abigail know where you’re going.’
    ‘Why do you not want Abigail to come?’ asked my mum in a tone of voice I remembered from such conversations as But I thought you didn’t like that jacket and Well, I’ve paid the shipping costs already . ‘I thought she was in your police club?’
    I added Warn Abigail to behave to my to-do list. It was a long list.
    One person I didn’t have to worry about was Molly – who refused to leave the Folly.
    ‘Why don’t you join us?’ Nightingale had asked her while she was busy brushing lint off the shoulders of his suit. ‘It would do you good to get out.’
    Molly froze and then skipped backwards as if to make sure she was safely out of his grasp.
    ‘You would be perfectly safe there,’ he said. ‘The Rivers have declared their pax deorum and no power on earth would be foolish enough to challenge them when they are all arrayed in their majesty on the banks of the Thames.’
    Molly hesitated then shook her head emphatically before vanishing off towards the back stairs. She stayed in hiding until after we’d left for the South Bank and we had to make our own coffee that morning.
    ‘What’s she so afraid of?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘I wish I knew,’ said Nightingale.
    In 1666, following an unfortunate workplace accident, the city of London burnt down. In the immediate aftermath John Evelyn, Christopher Wren and all the rest of the King’s Men descended with cries of glee upon the ruined city. They had such high hopes, such plans to sweep away the twisted donkey tracks that constituted London’s streets and replace them with boulevards and road grids as formal and as controlled as the garden of a country estate. The city would be made a fit place for the gentlemen of the enlightenment, those tradesmen they required to sustain them, and the servants needed to minister to them. Everybody else was expected to wander off and do whatever it is unwanted poor people were expected to do in the seventeenth century – die presumably.
    But, alas, it was not to be. Because, before the ashes were cool, the inhabitants of the city moved back in and staked out the outlines of their old properties. London became a shadow city marked out in string, shanties and improvised fences.