A Lovely Way to Burn

Twenty-Seven

Outside was a commotion of black-uniformed police officers and dazed civilians scuffling in the weak, tobacco-coloured dawn. Stevie saw Django in their midst, tussling with a policeman. One of the bottles of beer slipped from his pocket and shattered, foaming against the pavement. He let out a roar and smashed a fist into the policeman’s neck. The roar turned to a scream and Django crumpled to the ground, Taser wires snaking from his thigh.

Stevie flattened her body against the wall of the pub and edged her way along the side of the building. When she reached the corner she broke cover and ran, bracing herself for the electronic sting of a Taser. Her limp had returned but she could see the Mini, parked where she had left it, on the other side of the road. Stevie took the key fob from her pocket and unlocked the car, still running. She threw herself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and turned the key in the ignition. The daylight dimmed, as if the engine’s grumbling start had leached power from the rising sun. She looked up and saw a policeman at her window. The policeman grabbed the handle of the driver’s door and pulled, but Stevie had already clicked the lock home and it held tight. She crunched the gearstick into first, swearing under her breath. Her foot hit the clutch too hard. The car bucked and stalled, dead.

The policeman banged against the window with a gloved hand. Stevie turned the key in the ignition again, slid through the gears and pressed her foot to the floor. The Mini accelerated forward, just as the policeman brought his baton down hard, against the glass. Stevie had queered his aim, but he caught the side window a glancing blow that cracked the glass like ice beneath a stone.

Stevie looked in her mirror as she sped away. The policeman had tumbled to the ground, but he was already getting to his feet and she hoped that only his pride was hurt. She wondered if it mattered that he had probably got her registration number, or if things had gone beyond that.

Somewhere deep in her bag her mobile phone started to ring. Stevie unzipped it and felt blindly inside, keeping her other hand on the wheel and her eyes trained on the road. The phone wasn’t in the side pocket where she normally stowed it, and her fingers scrabbled against her water bottle, hairbrush and make-up bag, things recognised and unrecognised, until eventually it stopped its jaunty tune and Stevie abandoned her search. She turned the car radio on, unsure of where she was going but determined to put as many miles as possible between her and the Nell Gwynne.

Classical music was playing, soft and sombre, on the radio. Stevie wondered if it indicated a new phase in the crisis, or if it was the kind of thing that always filled the airwaves in the early hours. She shifted through the stations until she found a news broadcast. The sweats had slipped from headline position and the news was dominated by riots that had spread across Britain’s southern cities and into the north as far as Newcastle.

She was back in suburbia. The houses scrolling past were neat-edged, the pavements beyond them punctuated by overflowing dustbins and piled with rubbish. The car’s windows were closed, but the smell of something rotten slipped inside, the scent of a fruit-market gutter at the end of a long hot day.

Shops had been looted, the radio announcer said in a distant voice, as if making clear that it was nothing to do with him; cars and buildings set on fire, people driven from their homes. Police resources had been stretched, he warned, but with the help of the Army, the authorities were re-establishing order.

The streets beyond the car windows were empty, the only movement the wind ruffling the trees and trembling the tops of privet hedges in need of a trim.

‘Re-establishing order,’ Stevie repeated under her breath. The impact of the policeman’s baton had shaken the whole car. Even if she managed to discover who had murdered Simon, Stevie wasn’t sure what she would do with the information. Save it, she supposed. Collect the evidence and store it until things returned to normal.

‘At least it was the police and not the Army,’ she said out loud to comfort herself.

Her words might have conjured the soldiers. Stevie turned the corner and saw four of them, standing in front of a barrier blocking the road. She considered turning back, but they were cradling machine guns and though Stevie couldn’t quite believe they would shoot her, she slowed the Mini to a halt and rolled down the window, hoping the shattered glass would hold.