Paul Cornell - London Falling

So, which window? That one. He went over to a lamp, and checked nobody was looking at him. He quickly moved the table the lamp was sitting on by couple of feet, and switched it on. He stood between it and the window, but was smiling and watching the telly again when Mick looked round at him. Then, when Mick turned away, Sefton raised one arm in a loop right up against the window, and touched the top of his head.

Costain was staring at the tiny O-shaped cavity of the end of the gun. Toshack’s hands were shaking, but he was aiming at Costain’s stomach: the certain shot, the lingering death. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘Did you take it away from me? Can coppers do that?’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’ Costain tried to make his expression convey to the other man that he hadn’t wanted it to go this way, that they were now being overheard, and that he had no choice. At any second, the Nagra tape would run out with a loud click, the stuff of UC nightmares, perhaps be the cause of his death now, if Toshack was startled by it. The wall clock said he had three minutes.

‘You say you want to help me?’

‘I want to. I so bloody want to. You’ve given me a home here, Rob — first proper home I ever had. I haven’t told them nothing, so far. I was planted here, and then I saw what sort of house you kept. So they was waiting for tonight. But if I can save you with what we talk about here, if I can use the resources these coppers have got, and get you into hiding-’

‘Grass, you mean?’

Costain got to his feet. ‘You’re the only boss left who cares about that honour shit! You see how London’s going, how the world’s going! The rest of them use grasses as just another weapon against each other. What’s the point of being noble, when nobody else is?’

‘“Noble!” The trouble is, you shite, that your mates would never believe me!’

‘They would if it came from me.’

‘What, they trust you, do they? Do they know about some of the stuff you’ve done while you were on my books?’

No, and you don’t know all of it either. But there was something in Rob’s look that said he was desperate enough to listen, that if Costain could find a way through in the next two minutes. . ‘Listen-!’

Just then, from downstairs, there came the slam of a door bursting open under the impact of a battering ram.

Rob stood there stock-still, horrified. The sounds of shouting and scuffling rose from downstairs. But no gunshots, which meant that the soldiers, who had never had to fight, were folding.

‘Give me something!’ shouted Costain. ‘Something that shows them you were willing to talk before you got nicked. For Martha’s sake!’

But now there were boots running up the stairs. All hope dropped instantly from Rob’s face. Costain leaped for him. Rob’s shot went wild. Costain hit the big man, and they both went down. As they fell he could hear ‘Gun, gun!’ from the Armed Response coppers thundering upwards through the house. When they got there, could he trust them? And who at Gipsy Hill was he going to be able to trust with that tape? It said that the nick had been breached; that there was someone who could give out info on UCs.

Rob fought to keep the gun. He slammed Costain to one side and then the other, but Costain managed to keep a grip on the hand holding the weapon. As they burst in through the doorway, Costain realized that Rob wasn’t trying to twist it round to aim at him, but was keeping his arm straight as if hoping to get a shot off at-

Costain rolled him aside and that shot went through the window. ‘Don’t you fucking shoot him!’ he bellowed.

Many hands grabbed for the pair’s wrists and suddenly the gun was gone, and they were being hauled to their feet, and Costain struggled, spat and swore at them as they heaved first him and then Rob towards the door. There were sounds, cries from the next floor, as more officers pounded up into the house. He could hear Martha starting to scream insults.

On the landing, they smashed his face against the wall. His wrists were hauled behind him before the cuffs bit into them. He was pushed back towards the stairs, Rob passing him, but not looking at him. Below, he could see Sefton, cuffed also, being shoved out of the door, in a line with all the soldiers.

Suddenly, at the foot of the stairs, Rob made his move. With a great cry, he surged forwards, out of the grasp of so many hands, his own still pinned behind his back, and propelled a uniformed copper into the wall, his forehead connecting brutally with the man’s throat and bringing him down. He bounced off the man, bellowing incoherently at all the others, his red face like that of an animal roaring at its fate, defiant to the last. ‘For you!’ he shouted. ‘For you, if you want, you sow!’ Costain didn’t know if he was talking about luck or about Martha or what, but it was magnificent to witness. He let out a bellow of coke-fuelled laughter, thrashing out again against the uniforms around him.

A kind of ecstatic yell of triumph rose from the rest of the uniforms gathered downstairs. They piled into Rob, some bursting in through the front door, or rushing back down the stairs, pushing past Costain. Rob was lost in the sea of them, crying out loudly under the blows.

Resisting arrest. All the abuse coppers took, people spitting in your face. .

Resisting arrest. Set off that powder keg.

Though, while in cuffs, it shouldn’t. Not these days.

Costain thought — as they heaved him down the stairs soon after, as he still heard the sound of blows and Rob’s cries of protest — of the four years he’d been involved in this. Of the six times during that period he’d been stopped and searched. A patrol officer in Kilburn, just a kid, had called him ‘nigger’ and slapped him on the cheek. The one time, too, that he’d had his warrant card on him, and they hadn’t bloody found it. He still had the young man’s shoulder number scribbled on a piece of paper in his wallet, and he thought of it at times like this.

Quill was fighting his way into the throng now, physically pulling coppers off Rob’s back. ‘Robert. . Stephen. . Toshack,’ he had begun yelling, ‘. . you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if. .’

From the television nearby, Costain heard the New Year’s Day celebrations beginning. A moment later there sounded, from the small of his back, a single loud click.

He was dragged out through the door, without any eye contact from Quill, and across the huge dark coldness of the morning, and thrown into the back of one of a string of police vans, like all the other soldiers in their beery suits.

And he let out a breath and closed his eyes, and felt a rush of fear at what was still only in his head and on that tape.

The police helicopter hovered above Bermondsey, every stroke of its blades swallowing the last available money out of its last operation, the coppers inside it watching not just the raid on the Toshack home but simultaneous assaults on the garages and front-room distribution centres and suburban brothels. They were fully intent on their last duties before they’d be on their way into oblivion. Like the rest of London , they felt — from on high tonight — bitterly. They were too intent, in fact, to notice that, through what seemed to be coincidence, every prisoner taken out of every building was being removed in a south-westerly direction.

The wheel that was London had started, ever so slowly, to turn once again.

In the early hours, Quill watched as the uniforms opened the back doors of each van in turn and led each prisoner into Gipsy Hill police station. Not everyone who’d been discovered at the house was here, because he’d had the prisoners divided up between the secure custody suites at Gipsy Hill, Streatham, Brixton and Kennington, partly to speed up the entire process, partly so that every major player was kept in a cell corridor on his own, and couldn’t get his story straight by shouting to his mates. Harry would be ready to do a bit of sleight of hand so that Costain could slip him the Nagra when he surrendered his personal items to the custody sergeant. Getting that part sorted might have been hellish had Quill not played snooker with said sergeant on a regular basis. Thank God they’d now moved on from Nagras, as a rule. Unless the current cuts meant they were now stuck with them again on a regular basis.