The covered market at Covent Garden has four parallel rows of shops under its iron and glass roof. Originally built to house open-fronted fruit and vegetable stalls, they’d been retrofitted with windows and power but they were still less than three metres across. Into them were shoehorned specialist craft shops, cafés and bijou versions of high-street chain boutiques, which weren’t going to let a little thing like inadequate floor space get in the way of gleaning some of that high-spending tourist action. As a result, our haven was crowded with manikins of the tastefully abstract silver and black kind, wearing distractingly skimpy bits of satin. I hoped the manikins would make us less obvious to anybody who glanced inside.

That was tested when a number of rioters slunk past the windows. Judging from the torn suit jackets and dirty white shirts, these were members of the audience, not the cast. I held my breath as they paused outside, calling to each other in their guttural stockbroker accents.

Strangely, I found I wasn’t frightened. Instead I was embarrassed – that this nice family of Von Trapp impersonators had come to my city, and instead of being gently relieved of their money they were facing violence, injury and bad manners at the hands of Londoners. It pissed me off no end.

The stockbrokers loped off towards the west.

‘Right,’ I said after a minute, ‘I’m just going to check the coast is clear.’

I slipped out of the shop door and looked around. On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire. I ran a little way towards the closest exit but I got no more than a few paces before the heat started singeing my nostril hair. I quickly ducked back into the shop.

‘Beverley,’ I said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’ I told her about the fire.

The mother frowned. She was the linguist in the family. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.

The flames were clearly reflected in the shop windows and the blank silver faces of the manikins, so it seemed pointless to lie. She looked at her children and then back at me. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

I looked at Beverley.

‘Can’t you do any magic?’ she asked.

It was definitely getting hotter. ‘Can’t you?’

‘You got to say it’s okay,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘That’s the agreement,’ said Beverly. ‘You’ve got to say it’s okay.’

One of the window panes cracked. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Do what you have to do.’

Beverley threw herself down and pressed her cheek to the floor. I saw her lips moving. I felt something pass through me, a sensation like rain, like the sound of boys playing football in the distance, the smell of suburban roses and newly washed cars, evening television flickering through net curtains.