Windows shattered all along the street—the first targets were the shops selling booze—and the air quickly filled with shrieking sirens and clattering bells of burglar alarms, mingling with screaming and shouting and mad laughter and the roar of car engines as drivers trapped in the middle of the maelstrom tried to pull out of the stalled lines of traffic and somehow get out of there. One or two succeeded, bumping over traffic islands and even up along the pavement in their haste, while other drivers simply abandoned their cars in the street and ran. The mob—blokes of any and every race, most of them in their twenties, plus a scattering of women, plus scores of kids barely into their teens—swirled and clustered and scattered again, seeking targets, egging each other on, swarming over the abandoned cars, dancing on their roofs, raking the interiors for anything stealable—GPS units, sunglasses, CD players—only to dump their loot in the street and run on to their next target. One big shiny four-by-four, brand-new by the looks of it, the looters didn’t even bother to ransack—they just ripped off its wipers, snapped and smashed its wing mirrors and crazed its windows and hacked at its bodywork with rocks and bricks and broken bottles and anything hard that came to hand.
