London Large: Blood on the Streets Read Online Free

first?’.
    ‘Bad.’
    ‘Well, the media’s still up
in arms. London-as-Syria is a common theme. Law and order in meltdown. That
sort of thing. Where are the police, what is to be done? They’re calling for
someone’s head. And you’re mentioned by name here and there. My guess is you’ll
be trending on Twitter by this afternoon.’
    H let out his second groan of
the morning, like a shattered old dog waiting to be put out of his misery. The
‘T’ word. Nothing wound him up, or got him down, like this mindless digital mob
rule. He didn’t know how Twitter worked, but he knew two things: he was clearly
accumulating more and more enemies, and he couldn’t name or put faces to them.
Give him a cornered villain brandishing a crow bar any day. Any fucking day.
    ‘Why? What now?’
    Joey Jupiter is all over you
again. He’s recirculating the ‘slag’ clip. And this time it’s had a lot more
views.’
    ‘You mean more people have
watched it?’
    ‘Yep. Over 200,000 on
Youtube. You’ll be famous soon at this rate.’
    Six weeks before H had been
blissfully unaware of this ‘celebrity blogger’, as Amisha called him. Now the
‘jumped up, soppy little two-bob wanker’, as H called him, had become his
nemesis. And for what?
    A few years before, on a
bender with a few of his old muckers from the Falklands, someone had filmed H,
in full flow, on the subject of his ex-wife. H thought it was just pictures
being taken. Next thing he knew he was on Youtube, ranting good humouredly but
out of context about ‘harridans’ and ‘slags’ and ‘ducking stools.’ All a bit
drunkenly embarrassing, but soon forgotten.
    Until six weeks ago, when the
clip turned up on Joey Jupiter’s blog. ‘Is this’, wrote Jupiter, ‘really the
sort of man we want “protecting” Londoners in the 21 st century? How
can this dinosaur be expected to treat the female half of the population with
any respect?’
    And so it began. For the last
month H couldn’t scratch his arse in public without Jupiter, and his quarter of
a million ‘followers’, getting on his back. And now, with these Eastern
Europeans running riot and turning the streets of the metropolis red with each
other’s blood, it seemed like Jupiter and his minions were on H-watch twenty
four hours a day, blogging-tweeting-texting-messaging for all they were worth
about his shortcomings - as a man, and as a detective.
    ‘I’ll rip his bollocks off
for him if he ever gets round me’, said H.
    ‘I don’t doubt it for a
second, guv. Will you be saying that at the press conference this afternoon?
Shall I feed it through to the PR people?’, Amisha asked.
    ‘Turn it in Ames, I’m not in
the mood. Finish your coffee.’
    Two minutes later they were
in the car, H behind the wheel, and heading north out of Eltham towards
Bermondsey and their meeting with Confident John Viney. It seemed, for a while,
like it was going to be another ‘normal’ day of fear, loathing, blood, guts and
Eastern European corpses.

6
    ‘I don’t know why
Olivia always calls me your driver. You haven’t let me behind the wheel in six
months’, Amisha said in mock exasperation.
    ‘I don’t need to be driven
around just yet, thanks, nor wheeled around in a buggy nor spoon-fed porridge
nor have my arse wiped because I’ve shat my nappy. There’s still a little bit
of lead left in
this
old pencil, don’t worry about that. Focus on your
screens. What’s happening? Any good news from Joey Jupiter?’ As much as he
hated him it was difficult for H to ignore Joey and company.
    But Amisha had already tuned
out of the conversation, her face now rapt and trancelike in the backlit glow
of her phone and tablet, her eyes scanning the never ending streams of
information. It seemed to make her happy. It seemed to make them all happy, as
far as H could tell. ‘Good, that’ll keep her quiet’ he thought, as he gunned
the car towards Bermondsey.
    Bermondsey. Last of the
old-school London manors, bastion of