I was still humming that insurance advert song when I stepped into the lift on the thirtieth floor and pressed the button for the lobby. I held the door for an elderly woman walking as quickly as her designer shoes would allow. I smiled as she boarded and received a mistrustful glare in reply, as if I was some sort of dangerous lunatic out to steal her fillings. I sighed inwardly. You could pick old British money anywhere.

I stared down at the imitation marble floor of the elevator as we descended. Pondered on what my sister might be whipping up for her daughter’s birthday feast. Kaleigh was a remarkably bad cook. Impressively bad. She could be said to have reached her culinary limitations around about the time that she slipped the tray of soy nuggets into the oven, or called the local takeaway. However, she had a genuine talent for crafting desserts and sweets, and I wondered which recipe she’d be wheeling out for the kids today.

I spread my hands in front of me. Not a tremor. Never was. No post-meeting jitters. It was the calm after the storm. I made sure that my cravat was just so and shot my cuffs.

“Bugger.”

A spot—a half spot—of vibrant red marred the white of my pristine cuff. Already, it was fading to brown.

The lift doors opened. The sour old bat disembarked and I followed. I walked straight across the lobby, heedful not to hurry, careful not to catch anyone’s eye, my hands in my pockets. I exited the Amber Hotel & Luxury Apartments and strolled casually down Brook Street, past the bourgeois bastion that was Claridge’s, and turned right up Davies Street. Mayfair was as bustling as it ever was. At a hotel further down the block, a fifteen-foot tall aug was unloading freight into a service entrance. Controlled by operators who wore mo-cap exoskeletons, utilising negative feedback, the mechanised augs were a key labouring component of any major city. Most often used in the place of the long-outdated forklifts, augs had the strength to lift breakwater blocks or tear a cruiser in half—which was why they had soon found their way into the Metropolitan Police’s employ. Nothing broke up a riot over food prices like a couple of augs walking down the road.

In comparison to Brook Street Davies Mews was an island of solitude thanks to the orange road-working bollards that fenced either end of the skinny street.

The impressive, and vaguely adorable, respect that the generally fine and law-abiding British people had for the humble road-worker’s bollard, even when they were holographic, was the reason that I had managed to park my cruiser in an area of the West End where the ownership of a single parking space would set you back hundreds of thousands of pounds.

My BMW Helixen Competition, resplendent in Tanzanite Blue VI—or dark blue as all non cruiser-salesmen would see it as—was pulled snugly to the curb, just down from an art gallery and a pub that would charge you sixteen quid for a pint of lager.

My footsteps crunched on loose gravel as I kicked a couple of the projection discs the bollards were emanating from out of the way. As I strolled towards my cruiser, I realised that I should have asked Kaleigh just what in the devil I was supposed to get a seven year-old girl for her birthday.

I quickly checked my commtab to make sure my ignition key for the BMW was set to biometric rather than neuro-recognition. It was.

Do kids like gaming consoles anymore? Are they a thing? Maybe—

“Oi, oi! Here’s the flash geezer who owns the flash cruiser, lads!”

A lanky human detached itself from the shadows of a doorway. He had a tight long-sleeve shirt on, jeans and combat boots. I could see muscles strung along his long arms like knots in rope. He wore a cap pulled down low. Two more young men followed suit, standing up from where they had been sharing a leisurely epibatidine inhaler in the archway that fronted an antiques shop.

I say young men—they could have been anything between eighteen and thirty-five. They moved with a young man’s gait is what I think I mean. They walked like they were kings of a moment. Like their cocksure menace could in some way mitigate their obvious lack of experience; a lack of knowing that this one moment was just a fraction of time in a longer action. An action that started on one side of a life and finished on another—and they were all just passing through.

One wore a cloak in the new style with the hood raised and pulled up tight around his face. The other was dressed in a fucking hideous matching tracksuit, the wearing of which should have been, in my opinion, punished by fourteen days inside a correctional facility without the option of a fine. I felt embarrassed for him.

“Bit too much cruiser for a gent like you, don’t you reckon, mate?” the one in the tracksuit asked me. He had one of those bloody dreadful neck beards too, now that I came to look at him. He was really ticking all the boxes in my mental twonk check-list.

The bloke in the hoodie gave a whistle and another two delinquents appeared from around the corner of South Molton Lane. There was a short white chap with dreadlocks—a stylistic choice which always made me think of kids from privileged families spending a bit of time running with the wrong crowd—and a suede jacket-sporting gentleman who walked as if he had a five-litre beer keg tucked under each arm.

I couldn’t believe it, I hadn’t had any trouble in London for donkey’s years and now there was a veritable infestation of chancers coming out of the woodwork—and in Mayfair no less. Incredible, really.

“Have you lads just been waiting here for little old me to show up?” I asked.

“Don’t you worry what we’ve been doing, man,” Dreadlocks said.

“Yeah, bro,” the fit-looking man in combat boots said, “all you need to worry about is what we’re gonna do.”

“What might happen next,” tacked on Suede, helpfully clarifying.

There were a couple of appreciative sniggers at this. The five young men edged in closer. Eager smiles tugged at their lips. If they’d been wolves they would have had their hackles raised and teeth on show. All bristling fur, snarling and snapping, legs cocked for the spring.

But, they weren’t wolves. They only thought they were. They’d got confused somewhere. Wandered into the forest and got all mixed up.

“You’ve just got to think about whether you want to do this the hard way or the easy way, mate,” advised Tracksuit.

I noticed that he was holding a length of pipe. A stolen fray-cosh (as they were called on the street), I realised, on closer inspection. The batons that the Met used to incapacitate a person without causing serious harm or injury through the use of advanced stun technology.

“Obviously, you’re doing all right, ain’t you?” Tracksuit continued, pausing only to spit at my feet. “Pulling in plenty of the ready.”

“Yeah, man, just leave your commtab on the ground and tell us your biometric override for the cruiser then get the fuck out of here, yeah?” Dreadlocks said. “Get on the blower to your fuckin’ insurance fella and tell him that you’ll be needin’ a new beemer.”

I sighed. If you were going to mug someone in London, then you really wanted to be beaning them over the head with a bit of alacrity. You didn’t want to mess about. If you found yourself chatting to them, chances were you’d already bollocksed it right up. You didn’t want to gloat about it. Biff them, rob them, bugger off. That was the ticket. The thing was, you see, there were an estimated one to one and a half million legitimate panoptic surveillance scanners in England’s capital. With that sheer number of eyes out there, mugging out in public had become a bit of a—well, a mug’s game.

Still, just because doing something was stupid had never stopped anyone doing anything. Not since the first human had clambered down out of the trees.

But to do it under the murky, flat light of day…

Silly. Very silly.

I tried to point this out to the gang, but they were having none of it.

“How about you just give us access to the cruiser then, mate, eh?” said Dreadlocks. He was wearing some box-fresh new trainers.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Do seven year-olds go in for trainers? I wondered.

“Oi, the fucking override, bruv!” Combat Boots said. He was the tallest of the bunch and I could tell he was working himself up to something. Fluffing himself up like a fighting cock.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I said, quite cordially. “I’ve got to shoot off to my niece’s birthday party, you see. I’ll catch hell if I muck about.”

“Could be you’ll be gettin’ the magbus, mate,” interjected Suede Jacket, proving himself a wag as well a snappy dresser.

“Skirting the crater at this time of day. Can’t be done. It’ll take me close on an hour to get to Peckham,” I said matter-of-factly.

“We’re taking your runner, you posh prick, you better believe that,” Tracksuit snarled.

“You’ve noticed it’s the coupé, I hope,” I said affably. I pointed at the tall man in the combat boots. “You’ll have yourself a time folding him into the back seat, I’ll tell you that for free.” I looked appraisingly at the five men and then at the cruiser. “I honestly can’t see you all fitting in, chaps.”

“It’s got five seats, doesn’t it?” demanded Combat Boots.

“Well, on paper, but in practise I can barely fit my nieces in the back.”

“Hold on, hold on, hold the fuck on,” Dreadlocks said, trying to restore order to the meeting. “Let’s stop all the bleedin’ chin-wagging, aye?” He looked from his friends to me. “Give us your fuckin’ shit, you bastard, or we’re takin’ it!”

“Sorry, I need it,” I replied, making a chagrined face. I checked my watch. Time was getting on. “A little behind the eight-ball in the present-buying department.”

It was interesting to watch how some simple civility disconcerted my impromptu entourage. It was likely that they were more accustomed to run-of-the-mill panic from their clientèle than cool reason. They wanted to be angry, but they couldn’t help but see the plight I was in regarding the whole present-buying-for-niece-fiasco.

“Hey man, that wasn’t like, you know, a request,” Tracksuit growled, endeavouring to act as mediator and interpreter.

“No, no, I’m with you,” I assured him. “The threat was veiled in the offer. The shard of glass in the candy-floss. I got it.”

“Throw down your motherfucking essentials, man! Then back off!” the one with the hooded cloak pulled tight around his face demanded. He had remained silent up to this point. Thus, I had marked him as the brains of the operation. However, by the way he was looking around, I could tell that all this dilly-dallying had not been what he had envisioned when he had signed up for this particular bit of work. Doubtless, he had had a vision of being halfway up Finchley Road by now, with the M1 only a hop, skip and a jump away. He had a Brummie accent, hunched shoulders, and was moving agitatedly from foot to foot. His hand dipped into his pocket. Reappeared holding a clasp knife. He pulled it open and pointed it at my face. Weapons like that never went out of fashion.

“Steady on, you’ll have my eye out if you carry on like that,” I advised him.

“More than your fucking eye, pal. Cancel your biometrics. Now!”

The dull early afternoon light turned the blade of the knife white as Brummie turned it. The hard, flat London sky reflected in the hard metal. White to grey to white.

“Can’t do it, lads,” I said. “Nothing will be forthcoming.”

“You want to try and fight us,” the one with the fray-cosh chortled.

It was a rare day that I ever heard someone actually chortle. It pissed me off no end whenever I did.

“My old man told me you shouldn’t ever try and fight,” I said. “That wasn’t what smart folk did, he said. But, if you had to fight then… Well, then, he said, you’re best to fight like you’re the third monkey walking up the gangway to the ark and it’s just started to rain.”

“Got a couple of quids worth of advice on life, eh? I’m all fuckin’ ears, fancypants,” sneered Brummie.

He wasn’t for long.

My arm shot out to grab his wrist in my hand. I wrenched it upwards and away from me. He could have dropped the knife, of course, but it must have been a cherished possession or something because he clung onto it even as I swept his hand past his own face and nicked off his left ear as neat as neat.

He let go of the knife then.

Brummie screamed, though I didn’t give him long to show his vocal range. You couldn’t just have some lugless bloke wailing away in a Mayfair mews. That sort of thing would draw all sorts of attention—you’d end up on the neural net faster than you could say grievous bodily harm.

I brought my hand down in an overhead knife hand strike with all the force at my disposal, landing Brummie a corker of a blow on the carotid artery. He dropped to his knees—unconscious or merely stunned I couldn’t say—and I brought my knee up and cracked him hard in the face.

That brought all of them up short, especially Brummie, who was hugging the tarmac so sedulously that you couldn’t have gotten a rug under him.

Tracksuit swung the fray-cosh at me, but his heart wasn’t really in it. I dare say that he hadn’t really thought that a bloke dressed in a three-piece Savile Row suit would have the temerity to fight back. I stepped easily inside his guard and caught his right arm between my left arm and my body so that the stolen riot squad weapon was waving uselessly around behind my back, humming with impotent electromagnetic energy. Generating the power from my elbow, rather than my shoulder, so that I didn’t telegraph my punches, I struck Tracksuit hard in the throat with my open palm. He squawked, and I drove my elbow into his temple before bringing my foot around to stamp hard on his ankle with my boot heel.

As he fell away, I was already turning my attention on Combat Boots. He came in swinging just as I thought he would; a big clobbering haymaker without anything that even resembled technique. It might have stove my head in had I been looking the other way. And drunk. As it was, I had the melon turned in the correct direction and was, sadly, sober as a bird. I blocked the punch with an elbow and then hammered Combat Boots twice in the armpit. He let out a shriek that could have woken the dead and made the living wish they were not, and I brought my knee crashing into the side of his own kneecap.

Over his shoulder I saw Dreadlocks watching on in mute astonishment. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly ajar. It had all become very real for him.

I pulled Combat Boots off balance as he stumbled past me and he went sprawling. Then, I made a beeline for Dreadlocks. The key in a real-life fight is to press. Press and press and harry your opponents and don’t stop until they’re on the ground. You don’t stop to observe your handy work, slap yourself on the back or fire off some banal one liner—that’s strictly for the blokes in the fiction reels, and pissed yobbos.

Dreadlocks was back-pedalling even as I lunged at him and swatted his feeble punch aside.

He said, “Help,” as I closed with him, his eyes flicking over my shoulder. I shoved him hard in the chest to drop him on his arse and spun around just in time to have the bloke in the suede jacket crash into me. He bore me back towards the brick wall of the antique shop. His shoulder was in my chest, his arms locked around my waist. He was a chubby little shit and had a bit of weight behind him so, instead of trying to tussle it out with him like a couple of bar-room delinquents, I grabbed his belt and back-pedalled with him. My intent was to plough his head into the brickwork, but he must have been one of life’s philosopher’s and didn’t seem keen on this course of action because he pivoted and changed his heading at the last minute. I stepped to the side and he crashed ribs-first into the government-protected red brick, making a noise like a broken accordion. Holding him at arm’s length by his collar, I gave him a couple of tolerably juicy rights to the jaw to loosen him up and then elbowed him in the back of the head to fell him.

I walked back to where Combat Boots was pulling himself to his feet, moaning and swearing. He turned to look at me, clutching his armpit. I booted him hard on the side of head.

Unless they possess a singular strain of stupidity, a person whose head you’ve just kicked like a football usually stays down. They stay down even if they’re still conscious because, if they don’t, there is always the chance that you might do it again. The lad with combat boots, it transpired, was that rarest of breeds; I had to lay the boot into him twice more and shatter his cheekbone before he’d had enough.

All this took place within a minute, if my Baume & Mercier timepiece was to be believed, which I bloody well hoped it would be.

As I walked over to where the goop, Dreadlocks, was still sitting on his arse, I checked Davies Street and South Molton Lane for any pedestrians who might have stopped for a quick look at the contemporary street theatre being performed in Davies Mews. There were, fortunately, no obvious rubber-neckers. That just left the scanners that would no doubt be operating in the area.

I highly doubted that the rozzers would take too much interest in something like this, even if any of this woefully inept lot were to make a formal complaint to the constabulary. It’d look like what it was: five foolish lads jumping some suited and booted chap as he made his way to his fancy cruiser and getting their heads kicked in for their troubles. Self-defence of the most satisfying and abrupt variety. Street justice—the overstretched Mets favourite kind. If they ran the radio frequency identification tags on the BMW they’d come up with an address for a fictitious gentleman living in the Scottish seaside town of Banff, north of Aberdeen. Bit of a trek just to congratulate a man on sorting out some of the capital’s local dregs.

Besides, it was likely the police were going to have bigger fish to fry around the corner at the Amber Hotel & Luxury Apartments in a day or so.

Dreadlocks was still sitting in a sort of trance on the ground where I had left him. His hands were grazed where he had fallen backwards. His face was pale. He blinked as I cleared my throat and squatted down next to him.

“There’s your two quids worth, mate,” I said, jerking my thumb over my shoulder. “Now, if I were you, I’d be toddling back home and engaging in some intensive introspection, yes?”

Dreadlocks nodded mutely.

“Good man. The lesson here, I’d be so inclined to believe, is that there’s always a bigger fish.”

Dreadlocks reached out a trembling hand and clutched at my knee. I grabbed his wrist and locked it, prising his fingers off the tweed. Alas, there was a smear of blood on the custom material.

I sighed. It had been a trying afternoon and I still had to find a gift for my seven year-old niece, otherwise Kaleigh would have my guts for garters. I stood up. Looked down at Dreadlocks. I raised a boot.

“Forcing a man to stain his conscience is one thing, mate, but staining a man’s bespoke trousers…”