7
There’s a manual the size of an old-fashioned telephone book about policing large public events, but Nightingale told me to put it away. He said that given the special nature of the participants, the fewer actual police on the ground the better.
‘You don’t need to concern yourself with breaches of the peace inside the bounds of the Court,’ said Nightingale.
‘You don’t think there’s going to be any trouble, then?’
‘Think of it as being like a 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. The buildings may have burnt down, but the people had survived and they weren’t going to give up their rights without a fight. Or at the very least a hefty wodge of cash. Since Charles II, despite being the king of bling, was famously short of readies and already had a war going with the Dutch, London got rebuilt with its donkey tracks intact. And Wren had to be content with the odd church dotted around the place.
In the 1970s a group of developers had similar grandiose plans for the strip of the South Bank between the London Studios and the Oxo Tower. Although, unlike Wren and his merry band of wig-wearing social improvers, their plans were ambitious only in monetary terms. Architecturally, the best they could come up with was a couple of glass boxes plonked down amongst windy concrete squares. It was indistinguishable from hundreds of similar schemes that had been inflicted on the inhabitants of London since the end of the war. But this time the locals weren’t having it, and you really haven’t seen aggro until you piss off a working-class community in south London. They fought the plans for years until finally they wore down the developers through a combination of organised protest, savvy media skills and cockney rhyming slang. Thus was born the Coin Street Community Builders whose unofficial motto was Building houses that people might actually want to live in. It was revolutionary stuff.
Another radical notion was the idea that people who lived near the river might actually want to walk along the riverbank. So they threw in a rectangular park that ran from Stanford Street down to the Thames Path. It was in this park, named after local activist Bernie Spain, that the God and Goddess of the River Thames planned to hold their Spring Court.
‘But why there?’ asked Lesley.
Nightingale, even after an afternoon in the library, couldn’t answer that.
We’d recruited some PCSOs from the local Safer Neighbourhood Team and they were already closing off Upper Ground Street when we arrived late in the morning. It had been bucketing down the day before. But that had let up overnight, to give way to one of the luminous pearl-coloured days which would be almost pretty, if the persistent drizzle wasn’t leaking down the back of your collar. We’d considered wearing uniform but Lesley said, what with her mask and everything, she’d look like a plastic cop monster from Doctor Who. I managed to restrain myself from telling her their real name.
As the highest ranking non-plastic policeman, Nightingale went off to marshal the PSCOs and their handlers while me and Lesley dealt with the stallholders who were beginning to arrive along Upper Ground. Next to the park was Gabriel’s Wharf, a sort of permanent retail fair with cafes, pizzerias and a couple of upmarket restaurants. Lesley handled that side while I made sure that the booths were being set up in the correctly allocated spaces — ticking them off on my slightly damp clipboard as I went.