Kingdom Come: A Novel

22 THE TRENCHCOAT HERO

THE HEATHROW TOWNS had cleared the runway, lifted their wheels and were learning to fly, borne aloft on the bosomy thermals of the bright August sun. As I left the motorway and approached the outskirts of Ashford I could see the tasselled pennants flying from an out-of-town hypermarket, transforming this ugly metal shed into a caravel laden with treasure. St George’s flags flew from passing cars, and floated from shops and houses. The livery of the local football and athletics teams decked the town hall and the multi-storey car park, giving a festival kick to the noisy air.

A sports parade headed down the high street, led by a pipe band and a troupe of majorettes, bare-thighed schoolgirls dolled up in Ruritanian tunics and shakos emblazoned with the logo of the sponsoring superstore. They strutted past, forcing the traffic to stop for them, followed by teams waving to their supporters who crowded the pavements and office balconies.

Behind them came the marshals and stewards in St George’s shirts, marching smartly in time to the brass band that brought up the rear. Everywhere classrooms and workstations were abandoned as the hot pulse of civic pride and enthusiasm swept through this nondescript town. Any drop in output, any shortfall at the cash registers, would be more than made up by a surge in productivity and a few hours of overtime.

I sat in the stalled traffic and waved to a group of supporters who had spontaneously formed up behind the marshals, joining the parade as it marched to the coach park near the railway station. From there they would be bussed to Brooklands, spend the afternoon shopping in the Metro-Centre and then cheer on their teams in the local league.

Feet stamped past me, arms grazing my rented Mercedes. But I liked these people, and felt close to them. Many were middle-aged, white knees rising and falling, vigorous and unrushed. Their crusader shirts were covered with stitched medallions, in effect scout badges for adults, another of the schemes I had devised. Each bore the name of a local retailer, and gave their wearers the look of Grand Prix drivers. David Cruise and I expected a certain resistance, but the medallions were hugely popular, reinforcing the sense that people’s lives were only complete when they advertised the consumer world.

A vast social experiment was under way, and I had helped to design it. The neglected people of the motorway towns, so despised by inner Londoners, had found a new pride and solidarity, a social cohesion that boosted prosperity and reduced crime. Whenever I left the motorway near Heathrow I was aware of entering a social laboratory that stretched along the M25, involving every sports arena and housing estate, every playground and retail park. A deep, convulsive chemistry was at work, waking these docile suburbs to a new and fiercer light. The orbital cities of the plain, as remote as Atlantis and Samarkand to the inhabitants of Chelsea and Holland Park, were learning to breathe and dream.

AS THE BRASS BAND moved away I waited for the traffic to clear, for once in no hurry to escape from London. Three months after first meeting David Cruise, I had sold my Chelsea Harbour flat to a young brain surgeon. Our solicitors had finally exchanged contracts, after cliff-hanging weeks bedevilled by the surgeon’s sharp-eyed wife. She had spotted me pacing around an empty bedroom as she poked and pried, and misread my last doubts about moving permanently to Brooklands. ‘Where?’ she asked, when I explained my reasons for selling up. ‘Does it really exist?’

She suspected a secret flaw, perhaps a zeppelin mooring mast on the floor above or a sewage outfall ten feet below. She endlessly circled the dining room, visualizing the eternity of dinner parties that constituted her dream of the good life. The future for her was an escalator of metropolitan chatter so lofty that it generated its own clouds. When she left I squeezed her hand suggestively, trying to elicit a microsecond’s passion, a hint of sexual mischief, a saving flash of amorality. Go mad, I wanted to say, go bad. Sadly, she walked off without any response. But that was inner London, a congestion zone of the soul.

All the same, I had certain doubts over moving to Brooklands. I was leaving behind my baffled friends, my bridge and squash evenings, a former lover I was still close to, and even my ex-wife, with whom I had a spiky but intriguing bi-monthly lunch. Then there were all the pleasures and discontinuities of metropolitan life, from the cast room at the V&A to the shit in the letter box. To my friends I was apparently giving up all this in return for an obsessive quest to find my father’s killer.

I was still determined to track down the gunman who had shot my father, but for the time being his death was no longer centre stage. The Brooklands police claimed that they had failed to trace the Jensen’s owner. I assumed they were well aware that the car belonged to me, but had their own reasons for not questioning me about the bomb. Perhaps they feared that I would embarrass them by referring to the unsolved mystery of the Metro-Centre shooting. As long as I could, I preferred to keep out of their way and think about my father. In a sense I knew him far better than at any time in the past, but had I redeemed myself in his eyes? I doubted it. Meanwhile, I had stumbled on a far more important means of restoring my faith in myself. A new future waited to greet me: forgiving, full of surprises, and ready to redeem all my failures.

THE TRAFFIC WAS still stationary in the high street, though the parade had gone and the police were reduced to playing some obscure game of their own. I rested my head against the window pillar, and looked up at the billboard above a TV rental store, advertising the Metro-Centre and its cable channels. There were now three channels, mixing sport, consumer information and social affairs, and they were popular viewing in the motorway towns.

The advertisement showed a grainy close-up of David Cruise, no longer the primped and rouged anchorman of afternoon television, but the fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film. He sat at the wheel of his car, staring at the open road and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him. An eerie glare lit the grimy windscreen and exposed every pore in his unshaved face. The chocolate tan had long faded. This David Cruise, though clearly the cable channels’ chief presenter, was closer to the desperate loners of trenchcoat movies, doomed men sleepwalking towards their tragic end.

How this gloomy scenario tied in with the infinite consumer promise of the Metro-Centre was unclear, and when I sketched out the scene for Tom Carradine and his public relations staff they had objected vigorously. But the director, set designer and even Cruise himself all instantly saw the point and carried the day for me.

Another Metro-Centre poster, almost the size of a tennis court, filled the side of a town-centre office block. It showed Cruise in a nightmare replay of a Strindberg drama, threatening and confused as he stared across a display floor of showroom kitchens, a husband who had woken into the innermost circle of hell.

The series of posters were stills from thirty-second commercials on the cable channels. They presented Cruise as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods—grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed. He would stare almost ecstatically at a battered dustbin, as if some revelation was at hand, or ring a doorbell at random and scowl at a startled housewife, ready to slap her or beg for sanctuary. In others he haunted the Brooklands racing circuit, the squeal of tyres like torture in his head, or followed a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse like a would-be child-abductor.

A surprisingly good sport, Cruise played the roles in a skilful and sensitive way, moving through a baleful consumer landscape of car showrooms, call centres and gated estates. The storylines were meaningless, but audiences liked them. Together they made sense at the deepest level, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their minds.

As Cruise’s media adviser, I had taken a gamble, but I was ready to spin the wheel and risk everything. Audience figures surged, and all over the motorway towns the first copycat posters soon appeared, playing on a suppressed need for the bizarre and the unpredictable. At the junction of Ashford High Street and the dual carriageway was a billboard advertising a local insurance company’s endowment policies. It showed a deranged young woman dragging a blood-spattered child across a deserted car park, watched by a smiling couple who picnicked beside a Volvo with a damaged wing.

I laughed generously at the clever in-joke. Like all the posters, it was advertising nothing except its own quirky waywardness. Yet the concept worked. Everywhere sales boomed, and the Metro-Centre activated two dormant cable channels. People from the Home Counties, and even from inner London, drove like tourists through the motorway towns, aware that these invisible suburbs were lit by a new fever. They cheered on the massed sports teams that strutted and wheeled around the Metro-Centre car parks, they straightened their shoulders as the marshals bellowed and stamped. They watched the disciplined files of marching athletes, the ceremonial hoisting of banners, the loyalty-card supporters chanting ‘Metro . . . Metro . . .’

Unknown to its busy executives and sales staff, the Metro-Centre had become the headquarters of a virtual political party, financed by its supporters’ clubs and gold-card memberships. It issued no manifesto, made no promises and outlined no programme. It represented nothing. But several St George’s candidates, standing on no platform other than their loyalty to a shopping mall and its sports teams, had won seats on local councils. Their chosen party political broadcasts were the thirty-second commercials I had devised for David Cruise.

To his credit, Cruise had done a superb job, justifying all my hopes for him. He agreed to every suggestion I put forward, eager to give everything to these tense if meaningless psychodramas. He coped manfully with the flood of valentines and marriage proposals, and never forgot that he was a talk-show presenter. His modest range was a large part of his appeal, and allowed every male viewer to think of himself in these haunted roles, and every female admirer to imagine herself as the heroine playing Jane to this neurasthenic Tarzan of the suburban jungle.

‘Years of failure,’ he often told me, ‘are the worst preparation for overnight triumph.’ And the best preparation? ‘Years of success.’

He was still affable and engaging, despite his sly pleasure in his new-found aggression. He would bully and abuse the self-immersed wives and dull husbands who appeared on his consumer programmes, yet without causing offence. His impatience with the dimmer guests, his clenched fists and evident stress, merged easily into the desperate characters he played in the noir commercials.

He remained the voice of the Metro-Centre, the ambassador from the kingdom of the washing machine and the microwave oven, but he was also the leader of a virtual political party whose influence was spreading through the motorway towns. Like other demagogues, he traded on the psychopathic traits in his personality. Yet he had emerged, not from the bitter streets and working men’s taverns of depression-era Munich, but from the hospitality rooms of afternoon TV, a man without a message who had found his desert.

THE LAST OF the coaches sped down the dual carriageway, carrying teams and supporters to Brooklands, police outriders with their headlights flashing. The waiting traffic moved forward, impatient to set off in pursuit.

I squeezed through the amber, saluted by a beaming constable who waved me on. Despite my role at the Metro-Centre, I was thinking of Julia Goodwin. We would meet later that afternoon, when she finished her shift at the hospital, and already I envied the patients she would be touching with her worn and tired hands.

A vague sense of unresolved guilt hovered between us, as if she had aborted our child without telling me. But at least this edginess showed her fierce honesty. I guessed that she had been involved with Geoffrey Fairfax, Dr Maxted and Sangster in an attempt to exploit the Metro-Centre shooting for their own ends. The three men tried again on the night of the bomb attack, hoping to seize power with their puppet Bonaparte, the reluctant David Cruise. They had singed their eyebrows and now kept their heads down, but Fairfax had destroyed himself, either setting the bomb in my car or trying to defuse it.

The coroner, perhaps prompted by Superintendent Leighton, brought in a verdict of death by misadventure, but Fairfax was quickly abandoned by his legal colleagues. I was one of the few mourners at his funeral, mourning my Jensen as much as this eccentric solicitor, part-time soldier and full-time fanatic. Geoffrey Fairfax belonged to the past and a Brooklands that had vanished, while I had committed myself to the Metro-Centre and the memory of my father, to Julia Goodwin and the new Brooklands of the future.

23 THE WOMEN’S REFUGE

THE TRAFFIC INTO BROOKLANDS was slowing again, delayed by police setting up steel railings and no-entry signs, part of the lavish preparations for the weekend sports rally and parade. Several key football matches would take place that evening, and there were hard-fought finals in the rugby, basketball and ice-hockey competitions.

Cricket, as I noted whenever Julia asked me for the test-match scores, was not played in Brooklands or the motorway towns. Contact sports ruled the field of play, the more brutal the better. Blood and aggression were the qualities most admired. The hard tackle was the essence of sport, the kind of violence that flourished in the margins of the rule book. Cricket was too amateurish, its long-pondered intricacies trapped in a cat’s cradle of incomprehensible laws. Above all, it was too middle-class, and unconnected to the kind of impulse buying favoured by Metro-Centre supporters. Julia told me that she had captained the cricket team at her girls’ school, but her interest in the game was a whimsical stand against the far harder stadium values that now dominated Brooklands.

We were meeting at three, when her shift ended at the hospital. She hated the sports rallies, the unending din of marching bands that drummed at the windows above the wail of ambulances and fire engines. Usually she would be on duty, dealing with the human wreckage stretchered into the A&E triage rooms. Thinking of herself for once, she manipulated the rosters to give us a rare free weekend.

I hoped that I would share at least part of it with her, but she had recently kept me at arm’s length. We had yet to make love again after the uneasy night together in my father’s bed. Sex with me had been an act of penance, expiating some unadmitted guilt. Whenever we met she watched me warily, hair over her eyes as if to veil any telltale signs. But I was always glad to be with her. I loved her moods and bolshieness, the cigarette stubbed out in a slushy sorbet, the adversarial relationship with her car, the handsome black cat who slept beside her like a demon husband. Everything between us inverted the usual rules. We had begun with sex of a fraught and desperate kind, followed by a long period of wooing. As far as I knew, I had never let her down, and I hoped that one day she would finally forgive me for whatever she had done to my father in the past.

Waiting in the traffic that approached the Metro-Centre, I watched the columns of supporters marching to their assembly points in the residential side streets. Lines of coaches were parked under the sycamores and beeches, decked with St George’s flags. Supporters now came from as far as Bristol and Birmingham, attracted by the martial mood that gripped the town, ready to stamp through the streets, cheer their lungs out and spend their savings in the retail parks that sponsored the events.

Twenty thousand visitors occupied Brooklands every weekend. In the comfortable driver’s seat of the Mercedes, I marvelled at how disciplined they were, obeying the brusque commands of the stewards steering them to the Metro-Centre, thousands of suburban crusaders emblazoned with logos and moving as one. At synchronized intervals, in an effort to keep the middle-aged blood flowing, phalanxes of ice-hockey or basketball supporters would snap to attention and mark time on the spot, arms swinging like blades in a human wind farm.

Impatient to get home, I checked my text messages, hoping that David Cruise had survived for forty-eight hours without me. There was a brief message from Julia, saying that she would now be working until six at the Asian women’s refuge. Brooklands High School had broken up for the summer, and Sangster had lent part of the school to Asian women and children so intimidated by sporting revellers that they refused to go home.

Impatient to see Julia, I turned into the empty bus lane and drove to the nearest side street, then set off through the residential avenues crowded with coaches. Marshals were controlling the traffic, forcing private cars to give way to the lumbering behemoths. Most of the middle-class residents detested the sports weekends, so I picked a St George’s pennant from the rear seat and clipped it to the windscreen pillar, then put on my St George’s baseball cap. At the next checkpoint I was waved through by the marshals, and exchanged vigorous salutes with them.

The cap and pennant were a disguise, but one that worked. I hated the self-importance of these pocket gauleiters, but the sense of an enemy sharpened the reflexes and lifted everyone’s spirits. Visiting league teams and their supporters were seen as friendly citizens of the new federation of motorway towns, the conference of the Heathrow tribes. Everyone in Brooklands was a friend, but out there somewhere was the ‘enemy’, constantly referred to by David Cruise on his cable programmes but never defined.

At the same time, everyone knew who the real enemy was—subversive elements in local government offices, the county establishment, the church and the old middle classes, with their jodhpurs and dinner parties, their private schools and anal-retentive snobberies. I sympathized with the marching supporters, and was ready to back them in any confrontation. They had seized the initiative and were defining a new political order based on energy and emotion. They had re-dramatized their lives, marching proudly and in step with the military enthusiasm of a people going to war, while staying faithful to the pacific dream of their patios and barbecues. All this might be part of a huge marketing strategy, but I felt revived by the strutting swagger, the discipline and rude health. There was a hint of arrogance that could be dangerous after dark, but a dash of Tabasco spiced up the dullest dish.

My father would have approved.

AVOIDING THE METRO-CENTRE and its gridlocked streets, I entered downtown Brooklands. Many of the shops were boarded up for the weekend, but I noticed a trio of sports-club stewards outside a Polish-run camera shop. They carried leaflets and recruiting literature, along with a selection of flags and bunting, but these were forgotten in their heated altercation with the young Polish owner. A pale young man with receding hair, he was frightened by the stewards but standing up to them, while his nervous wife tried to draw him back into the shop. Two of the stewards pushed the Pole in the chest, trying to manoeuvre him into provoking them.

I hesitated as the lights changed, tempted to get out and intercede, and sounded my horn. The stewards turned on me aggressively, then saw the Metro-Centre flash on the windscreen with its picture of David Cruise. They saluted, waved the Pole back to his wife and swaggered off down the street, kicking the steel shutters.

I drove on, embarrassed and a little guilty. Sports-club stewards were a plague in the motorway towns, intimidating Asian and east European shopkeepers, harassing small businesses until ‘voluntary’ contributions were paid. Those who refused were visited by drunken supporters who roamed the streets after dark. But these protection rackets were tolerated by the police, since the marshals and stewards did their job for them by keeping order in the towns.

I closed my mind to all this, thinking of the confident marchers on their way to the Metro-Centre. In time the thugs and racists would fade away. Besides, English sports fans were famous for their pugnacity. My conscience slept uneasily, but it slept.

TEN MINUTES LATER I drove into the staff car park at Brooklands High School, tossed the St George’s pennant into the back seat and stopped beside Sangster’s unwashed Citroën. Vandals haunted the school, and had broken several windows in the admin building. But the authority of a head teacher, even one as moodily eccentric as Sangster, offered some protection. Generously, he had offered the gymnasium and a block of empty classrooms to the frightened Asian women. Their husbands stayed behind, defending their burnt-out houses, trying to run their threatened shops and businesses.

As I arrived two Asian men were unloading suitcases from a paint-splashed car. Sangster and a group of students from the art college were strengthening the fence behind the gymnasium, blocking a side entrance with wooden stakes and barbed wire.

Sangster gave me a limp wave, then touched his forehead, doffing an imaginary hat in an almost feudal salute. I remembered his large figure in the rioting crowd on the night of the Metro-Centre bomb attack, and his odd behaviour, restraining the rioters but encouraging them at the same time. He knew that I was suspicious of him and tried to be patronizing. But he had failed, and I had succeeded.

THREE TIMES A WEEK an antenatal clinic was held in the gymnasium for the Asian women, run by Dr Kumar, my elusive downstairs neighbour. The last patient was gathering her bundles together. Her children sat on a bench by the parallel bars, watching me with their large, unblinking eyes. They ignored my friendly smile, as if good humour might signal a new kind of aggression.

Julia and Dr Kumar sat in the kitchen, sharing a cup of tea from a thermos. Seeing me, Dr Kumar stared angrily into my eyes, frowned and left without a word.

I held Julia’s shoulders and kissed her forehead. I waved to Dr Kumar, but she put on her coat and walked briskly away.

‘Fierce lady. Have I offended her?’

‘Of course. You never let her down.’

‘A shame. I’m on her side. She always avoids me.’

‘I can’t think why.’ Julia found a clean cup and poured the last of the tea, then sat back and smiled as I winced at the sharp tannin. ‘I keep telling her you’re decent, responsible and rather likeable.’

‘That doesn’t sound much fun. What a thing to say.’ I poured the tea into the sink and ran the tap. ‘Tell her to watch my commercials for David Cruise.’

‘I did. She says there’s a new one. Something about a man laughing in an abattoir.’

‘What did she think of it?’

‘She said you’re beyond psychiatric help.’

‘Good. That shows she’s warming to me. Why was she so hostile?’

‘Look in the mirror.’ Julia pointed to the nightwatchman’s shaving mirror above the sink. ‘Go on. Risk it.’

‘Oh, my God . . . no wonder the children were frightened.’

I was still wearing the St George’s cap. I placed it on the table and slapped my forehead. Julia snatched it away and tossed it into the nearby pedal bin.

‘Julia, I’m sorry . . .’

‘Never mind.’ Julia reached across the table and took my hands. I realized how tired she was, and wanted to embrace her, conjure away the dry skin and the unfamiliar bones pushing through her face. I tried to touch her cheeks but she held my wrists, as if calming a fractious patient. ‘Richard, are you listening?’

‘Dear . . . I haven’t seen you for days. Relax a little.’

‘I can’t. Things here are desperate. The school was attacked last night. Sangster drove them away but they broke a lot of windows. The Asian children were terrifed. One of the mothers had a miscarriage.’

‘I’m sorry. At least you weren’t involved.’

‘I should have been. I spent four hours at the hospital, stitching up a lot of drunken yobs. Why do they do it?’

‘Attack a school? All those years of boredom. A mysterious head teacher who frightened the wits out of them.’

‘It’s nothing to do with that. Attacks are going on everywhere—Hillingdon, Southall, Ashford. They want these people out.’

‘ “People”?’

Julia struck the table with her fist. ‘I’ll call them what I bloody like! Bangladeshis, Kosovans, Poles, Turks. They want them moved to a huge ghetto somewhere in east London. Then they can deal with them when they’re ready.’

‘Julia, please . . .’ I knew that she was bored with me for trying to raise her spirits. ‘Isn’t that a little . . . ?’

‘Apocalyptic?’

William Sangster stepped into the kitchen, his large bulk blocking the windows and throwing the small space into shadow. He took off his canvas gloves and dropped them onto the draining board, then slumped into a chair, counting his huge limbs as an afterthought. He seemed tired but at ease, as if events taking place around him confirmed everything he had expected. There was a growth of beard on his plump and babyish cheeks, like a faulty disguise.

‘Apocalyptic . . .’ I repeated. ‘A few stones? Just a little.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ Sangster tilted back his head and addressed the ceiling, as if preferring not to be reminded of his dim pupils. ‘In my experience, one stone through a window is a fairly accurate predictor that another stone will soon follow. Then two more. Hard stones make for hard data. Add a few frightened Muslim families into the equation and you can extrapolate in a straight line—all the way to a cluster of gateway towns on the Thames flood plain.’

‘Close to the container port at Rotherhithe.’ Julia glared at me meaningfully. ‘And that strange airport they want to build on the Isle of Dogs.’

‘So . . .’ Sangster shook the empty thermos, and laid a large hand gently on Julia’s shoulder. After a night of turmoil he was exhausted beyond mere tiredness, moving into a zone where any wild-eyed fantasy was probably true. ‘Do you think Julia is being apocalyptic? Richard?’

‘As it happens, I don’t. It’s ugly, very ugly. I’ll do what I can, talk to the marshals and find out which supporters came down here.’

‘Good.’ Sangster nodded sagely. ‘Julia, he’ll talk to the marshals. Maybe they’ll tell us when the next attack is. Richard, you could issue a bulletin. Like those old war films—target for tonight. Hillingdon, Ashford, alternate target Brooklands. What do you think, Richard? See it as a marketing campaign.’

‘Isn’t everything these days?’ Aware that they were both lightheaded with fatigue, I said: ‘Listen, I’ll talk to the police.’

‘The police?’ Sangster looked owlishly serious. ‘We didn’t think of that. Julia, the police . . .’

I let this pass. ‘Look, I hate the violence. I hate the racist attacks. I hate the protection rackets and the bully-boy tactics. But these people are a fringe.’

‘Only a fringe?’

‘A vicious fringe, admittedly. But very few people are involved. Wherever you find sport you find hooligans. Contact sports appeal to any riffraff looking for violence. Don’t judge what’s happening by what you see at night.’

‘Fair point,’ Sangster conceded. ‘Go on.’

‘Move around during the day. Disciplined crowds, everyone on best behaviour. I watched them an hour ago. Whole families out together—healthy, fresh, optimistic, keen to cheer on their teams. Friendly rivalry, heads held high.’

‘And the banners?’ Julia leaned across the table and gripped my wrist. ‘Have you seen them? Like Roman legions. It’s incredible.’

‘Right. Banners flying. There’s a new pride in the air, all along the motorway towns. People are more confident, more positive. The M25 was a backwater left over from Heathrow, a joke no one wanted to share. Dual carriageways and used-car lots. Nothing to look forward to except new patio doors and a trip to Homebase. All the promise of life delivered door to door in a flat pack.’

Sangster nodded, inspecting his deeply bitten nails. ‘And now?’

‘Revival! There’s a spring in everyone’s step. People know their lives have a point. They know it’s good for the whole community.’

‘And good for the Metro-Centre?’

‘Naturally. We provide the focus and fund the new stadiums and the supporters’ clubs. We use the cable channels to keep up the pressure.’

‘Pressure?’ Julia tried to unclench her fists, irritated by everything I said. ‘To sell your washing machines and microwaves . . .’

‘They’re part of people’s lives. Consumerism is the air we’ve given them to breathe.’

JULIA HAD TURNED away, refusing to listen to me as she hunted through her handbag for her mobile phone. She stood up and patted me on the head. ‘There’s a call I need to make. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Don’t forget we’re having dinner tonight. Julia?’

‘I hope so.’ She paused at the door and stared hard at me. ‘The air they breathe? Richard, people breathe out as well as breathe in . . .’

24 A FASCIST STATE

‘RICHARD . . .’ SANGSTER TAPPED the table with his heavy knuckle, recalling me to his inquisition. ‘I hope you realize what you’re doing.’

‘Not exactly.’ We sat at opposite ends of the table, undistracted by Julia’s presence. ‘You’re going to tell me.’

‘I am.’ Sangster examined his swollen hands, and picked a splinter from his thumb. ‘In a way it’s quite an achievement. Back in the nineteen-thirties it needed a lot of twisted minds working together, but you’ve done it by yourself.’

‘Is my mind twisted?’

‘Definitely not. That’s the disturbing thing. You’re sane, kindly, with all the genuine sincerity of an advertising man.’

‘So what have I done?’

‘You’ve created a fascist state.’

‘Fascist?’ I let the word hover overhead, then dissipate like an empty cloud. ‘In the . . . dinner party sense?’

‘No. It’s the real thing. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been watching it grow for the past year. It’s been stirring in its mother’s belly, but you knelt down in the straw and delivered the beast.’

‘Fascist? It’s like “new” or “improved”. It can mean anything. Where are the jackboots, the goose-stepping Brownshirts, the ranting führer? I don’t see them around.’

‘They don’t need to be.’ Sangster watched me with a quirky smile that never completely formed, as if I were a destructive pupil he disliked but was unaccountably drawn to. ‘This is a soft fascism, like the consumer landscape. No goose-stepping, no jackboots, but the same emotions and the same aggression. As you say, there’s a strong sense of community, but it isn’t based on civic rights. Forget reason. Emotion drives everything. You see it every weekend outside the Metro-Centre.’

‘Sports supporters, cheering on their rival teams.’

‘Like Goering’s “gliders”? Anyway, these teams aren’t really rivals. They’re all marching to the same brass band. As for a true sense of community, people get that in traffic jams and airport concourses.’

‘Or the Metro-Centre?’ I suggested. ‘The People’s Palace?’

‘And a hundred other shopping malls. Who needs liberty and human rights and civic responsibility? What we want is an aesthetics of violence. We believe in the triumph of feelings over reason. Pure materialism isn’t enough, all those Asian shopkeepers with their cash-register minds. We need drama, we need our emotions manipulated, we want to be conned and cajoled. Consumerism fits the bill exactly. It’s drawn the blueprint for the fascist states of the future. If anything, consumerism creates an appetite that can only be satisfied by fascism. Some kind of insanity is the last way forward. All the dictators in history soon grasped that—Hitler and the Nazi leaders made sure no one ever thought they were completely sane.’

‘And the people in the Metro-Centre?’

‘They know that, too. Look how they react to your new cable ads.’ Sangster pointed a grimy finger at me, grudgingly forced into a compliment. ‘A bad actor howls from the roof of a multi-storey car park and we think he’s a seer.’

‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’

‘As long as the bands play and everyone marches in step?’

‘Right!’ Sangster sat forward, jarring the table against my elbows. ‘So beat the drums, sound the bugles, lead them to an empty stadium where they can shout their lungs out. Give them violent hamster wheels like football and ice hockey. If they still need to let off steam, burn down a few newsagents.’

Raising his arms as if to surrender, Sangster stood up and turned his back to me. As he read the messages on his phone I stared through the window. A taxi had pulled into the main entrance of the school, and stopped in front of the admin building.

‘Your taxi?’ I asked Sangster when he put away his phone.

‘No. There’s work I have to do here.’ He gestured at the fence, where the students were threading a strand of razor wire between the posts. ‘Meanwhile, we’re organizing a deputation to the Home Office—Julia, Dr Maxted, myself, a few others. I’d like you to join us.’

‘A deputation . . . ? Whitehall . . . ?’

‘The seat of power, so they say. We may not see the Home Secretary, but Maxted knows a junior minister he met on a television programme. Something has to be done—this thing is spreading along the M25, sooner or later the noose will tighten around London and choke it to death.’

‘What about the police?’

‘Useless. Whole streets are torched and they claim it’s football hooliganism. Secretly, they want the Asians and immigrants out. Likewise the local council. Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet—they hide the sound of the cash tills.’

‘That’s today’s England. Whitehall?’ I looked away. ‘I’m not sure there’s a lot of point. What’s happening in the motorway towns may be the first signs of a national revival. Who knows, the end of late-stage capitalism and the start of something new . . . ?’

‘It’s possible.’ Sangster stood over me, and I could smell his stale, threatening clothes. ‘Will you join us?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Sangster held my shoulders in his huge hands, a bear’s grip. ‘Don’t think.’

WE LEFT THE kitchen and stepped into the gymnasium. A line of Asian women and their children sat against the parallel bars, suitcases in front of them, new arrivals being processed by Dr Kumar.

‘Sad. Very wrong.’ I said to Sangster: ‘Their houses have been torched?’

‘No. But they’re fearful of what may happen tonight. Let me know about the Home Office delegation.’

‘I’ll get Julia to call you.’ I glanced into the women’s changing room. The antenatal clinic had ended, and the lockers holding the medical supplies were sealed. ‘Julia . . . Where is she?’

‘She’s gone home.’ Sangster was watching me with a faint hint of smugness. ‘A taxi came for her.’

‘I could have given her a lift. We’re having dinner tonight.’

‘Perhaps not . . .’

SANGSTER WALKED AWAY, smiling to himself as he strode across the polished wooden floor. I nodded to Dr Kumar, who ignored me, and searched the side corridors for Julia. I was sorry she had left for home, irritated and distracted by Sangster’s talk of fascism. I suspected that he had deliberately provoked her into leaving. At the same time he had spoken with such force that he seemed to be making the case against which he was arguing. I intrigued Sangster because I was part of the fierce new world he was drawn to. Mathematics might be his subject, but emotion was the ungelded horse he rode so brutally. Not all the would-be gauleiters in Brooklands were manning traffic checkpoints.

In the playground an Asian woman passed me, swathed in dark shawls, a billeting docket in one hand, small son manfully trying to help her with the suitcase. Two Asian men approached, but neither offered any aid, so I stopped the woman and took the suitcase from her. Helped by the boy, I carried it to the classroom block and left it inside the entrance, where an older Asian woman halted me with a raised hand.

Catching my breath, I looked out at the dome of the Metro-Centre, its silver surface lit by a trio of swerving spotlights. On the M25 drivers were slowing to watch the parades, as they listened to David Cruise’s commentary on their car radios. The suburbs were coming alive again. A malignant fringe had done its damage, terrifying a blameless minority of Asians and east Europeans.

But a corpse had revived and sat up, and was demanding breakfast. The moribund motorway towns, the people of the Heathrow plain, were positioning themselves on the runway, ready to take flight.

25 LONELY, LOST, ANGRY

AS USUAL, TOM CARRADINE was waiting at the kerb when I stopped near the South Gate entrance of the Metro-Centre. Before I could release the seat belt he had opened the door and switched off the ignition. Confident and enthusiastic, he was dressed in the new uniform of the public relations department, a braided powder-blue confection that might have been worn by one of Mussolini’s air marshals.

‘Thanks, Tom.’ I waited as he helped me from the car and locked the doors. ‘This gives a new dimension to valet parking. In my next life I’ll come back as a Merc or BMW . . .’

‘The VIP car park for you, Mr Pearson. The Jensen still being repaired?’

‘Well . . . I think it’s come to the end of its natural life.’

Carradine nodded promptly, but there was a sharp-eyed caution about him that had become more pronounced since the bomb in the basement garage. The Metro-Centre had been attacked, and every customer was now a potential enemy, forcing a revolution in his world view. For Tom Carradine the Metro-Centre was never a commercial enterprise, but a temple of the true faith that he would defend to the last yard of Axminster and the last discount holiday. He gazed at the great concourse in front of the dome, filled with crowds of shoppers, marching supporters in their team livery, wide-eyed tourists, pipe bands and majorettes. A TV camera on a crane circled the scene, ever vigilant for any fanatic with an explosive waistcoat. Narrowing his eyes, Carradine beckoned me forward. Two marshals preceded us, affably clearing a way through the press of people.

‘You’re wearing your new uniform,’ I said to him. ‘I’m impressed. I feel I ought to salute you.’

‘I salute you, Mr Pearson. You’ve done everything here. I’ll never forget you brought the Metro-Centre back to life. You and Mr Cruise. Everybody really loves the latest cable ad.’

‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

‘Never. Existential choice. Isn’t that what the Metro-Centre is about?’

‘I think it is.’

‘Dr Maxted explained everything on his programme yesterday. By the way, Mr Pearson, the Metro-Centre tailor is calling this afternoon. He’ll be happy to measure you up for your uniform.’

‘Well, thanks, Tom.’ In an unguarded moment I had tried on one of the new jackets. ‘I’m not sure, though . . .’

‘Three rings, lots of scrambled egg on the cap peak.’

‘I know. I’m just a writer, Tom. I dream up slogans.’

‘You’re more than a writer, Mr Pearson. You’ve given us all heart again.’

‘Even so. It’s a little too military . . .’

‘We have to defend the Metro-Centre.’

‘I’m with you there. But is it in danger?’

‘It’s always in danger. We have to be ready, whatever happens.’

I watched the muscles flexing in his cheeks. For all his flattery, the offer of a uniform was a clever power play of his own. Everyone in the uniform would be under Tom Carradine’s command, myself included. The threat to the Metro-Centre had sharpened his reflexes, but he remained the fanatical youth leader, eager to sacrifice himself for his principles.

We approached the South Gate entrance. Above the cantilevered marquee were a pair of loudspeakers used for crowd control, operated from a kiosk outside the doors. Through the din of pipe bands and marching feet I heard a succession of amplified clicks and stutters as someone adjusted the controls.

Then a harsh voice boomed over our heads:

‘NOTHING IS TRUE! NOTHING IS UNTRUE . . . !’

Carradine stopped and held my arm, as if the sky was about to fall onto the dome and slide down the roof towards us.

‘. . . UNTRUE! NOTHING IS . . . HEAR YE . . . NOTHING IS TRUE . . . !’

Carradine broke away from me, racing through the startled shoppers staring into the air. The two marshals followed him, manhandling young mothers and old ladies out of their way. They rushed towards the control kiosk and seized a tall youth in a string vest and frayed denims who was waving the microphone like a club, trying to fend them off.

When I reached the kiosk he was lying on the ground and being viciously kicked by the marshals. Blood poured from his nose and left ear. I recognized Duncan Christie, striking the marble floor with his chin as if in an epileptic fit. Carradine was stamping on Christie’s hands, and pointing frantically at the microphone that swung from its cord, almost mesmerized by this threat to the Metro-Centre. He had lost his peaked cap, but a small boy in a sailor suit found it among the swirl of feet and handed it back to him. Carradine placed it defiantly on his head, momentarily disoriented.

‘Tom, take it easy . . .’ I held his shoulders, trying to calm the confused manager, then waved the marshals away from Christie. ‘It’s a prank—no one’s hurt.’

The marching bands filled the air, and the crowd pressed through the doors, Christie’s slogan already forgotten. Winded and bruised, the blood from his nose pooling on the marble floor, Christie lifted himself onto his knees. He looked up at me and nodded warningly, as if willing me to turn back from the Metro-Centre.

One of the marshals leaned down and bellowed into his face. Christie raised a hand to quieten him, then twisted away and lunged towards me, arms outstretched to seize my shoulders.

Carradine and the marshals threw themselves on him, struggling to control his long, violent body, skin and ragged clothes slippery with dirt and grease. They kicked his feet from under him, but as fists jarred his forehead an arm reached out to me. He seized my left hand and pressed a hot stone into my palm.

As Christie was dragged through the crowd I opened my hand, shielding it from any curious gaze.

Lying in my palm was a live round of ammunition.

WEIGHING THE ROUND in my hand, I moved through the entrance hall and mounted the travelator to the central atrium. After the moments of ugly violence, the air in the Metro-Centre was pleasantly cool and scented. The ambient sound system played a pleasant melody of marching songs, a sweetened reworking in the Mantovani idiom of the Horst Wessel song and the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. The music was distant and unobtrusive, but almost everyone was in step.

Still shaken by the brutal attack on Christie, I held the bullet up to the light. I tried to read the symbols stamped on the base of the cartridge. Christie had fought to press the round into my hand, but his message was of the rather oblique kind that he favoured. I doubted if he was threatening me. At the same time this gift of a bullet, probably of the same type that had killed my father, carried a clear signal from Christie, and not one that I wanted to hear . . .

IN THE CENTRE of the atrium the three giant bears stood on their podium, paws beating time to the music, an amiable trio whose button eyes saw nothing and everything. In their toylike way they displayed a touching serenity. At their feet were more offerings of honey and treacle, and several ‘diaries’ penned by admirers which detailed their imaginary lives. In a light-hearted moment David Cruise had suggested a commercial in which he attacked the bears and chopped off their heads, but I had vetoed this. For one thing, the bears reminded me of all the toys never given to me during my childhood.

I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine studio where Cruise was conducting his afternoon discussion programme. The open deck was filled with visitors, as close to Cruise as the tighter security allowed. I found a chair in the exhibition area and watched a monitor screen relaying the last exchanges of the programme.

Cruise was tieless, dressed in the shabby black suit and tired white shirt that was now his trademark, an ensemble I had based on the costume worn by the doomed heroes of gangster films, desperate men on the verge of madness. Cruise had lost weight, and his signature tan was whitened down by the make-up department, giving him a hungry and martyred gaze, the fugitive messiah of the shopping malls.

Cruise was holding forth to his circle of docile and obedient housewives.

‘. . . “community”, Angela? That’s a word I hate. It’s the kind of word used by snobby, upper-class folk who want to put ordinary people in their place. Community means living in a little box, driving a little car, going on little holidays. It means obeying the rules that “they” tell you to obey. Sheila, you don’t agree? Frankly, the hell with you. Go back to your little box and polish your little dinette. Community? I know what an Asian community is. I know what a Muslim community is. We all know, don’t we? Yes . . . I hate community. For me, the only real community is the one we’ve built here at the Metro-Centre. That’s what I believe in. The sports teams, the supporters’ clubs, the gold-card loyalty nights. Sheila? Just shut up. I want to say something that’s going to shock you. Ready? When I leave here and go home, how do I feel? Betty, I’ll tell you. I feel lonely. Maybe I drink too much and feel too sorry for myself. I miss you girls. Sheila, Angela, Doreen, and everyone watching. I miss your mad questions and your crazy, beautiful dreams. I have these odd ideas—yes, Sheila, those too—I want to tear down the old world and build a new order, something like the one we’re building together inside the Metro-Centre. I know I’m right, I know we can bring a new world to life. It’s started here inside the Metro-Centre, but it’s spreading all over the real England. If you can smell the motorway you’re in the real England. You can feel it, can’t you, Cathy? Deep inside you. No, not there, Sheila. Come and see me later and we’ll find it. Yes, I’m lonely, I don’t sleep well, part of me, frankly, is a little bit bonkers. But I’m right, I’ve seen the future and I believe. I want to do things even I can’t mention. I need you all, and I need you here . . .’

The peroration wound to its climax, as the key camera closed in on Cruise’s haggardly handsome face. The producer made his windup signal, the housewives sank back, looking stunned, and Cruise disconnected his microphone and dashed for his dressing room.

Within seconds, phone calls, emails and text messages would arrive from viewers desperate to help Cruise assuage his demons. There would be invitations to barbecues, honorary memberships of sports clubs, heartfelt ‘please, please’ calls. More recruits would pour in, drawn towards the Metro-Centre. This was a political movement, but one without any supporting bureaucracy of placemen and jobsworths. The will to power came from the bottom up, from a thousand checkouts and consumer aisles. The promises were visible and within arm’s reach in the displays of merchandise. Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.

I walked between the cameras as the crew shut down their equipment, complimented the producer and his assistant on another superb effort, then let myself into Cruise’s dressing room.

He lay back in front of the picture window that overlooked the central atrium, generously saluting any concourse visitors who waved to him.

‘Richard! Did you see the show?’

‘You were great. Lonely, lost, angry. More than a hint of the mentally deranged. I almost believed you.’

‘It’s all true. I wasn’t acting.’ He sat up and grasped my hands. ‘I’m finding myself out there. I’m laying myself bare, tearing shreds off my flesh, letting the blood trickle over the mike. Things I didn’t know about myself. God, the stuff waiting to come out. All the psychic shit backed up for years.’

‘Don’t hold it in. People need that stuff. It’s pure gold.’

‘You think so? Really?’ He waited until I nodded vigorously. ‘I’m going mad so they can stay sane.’

‘The show’s over. Try to take it easy.’

‘I’m fine.’ He lay back and raised his hand, waiting for me to pass him his glass of vodka and tonic. ‘It takes me a while to land. I have to fly so high, there’s some strange weather up there. I spent years humiliating my guests and got nowhere. Now I humiliate myself and I’m a huge success. What do you make of that?’

‘It’s the air we breathe.’

‘You’re right.’ He pointed to a reproduction on his dressing table of one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, as if recognizing himself in this demented pontiff who had glimpsed the void hidden within the concept of God. On a bizarre impulse I had given the reproduction to Cruise, and he had taken a keen interest in it. ‘Richard, tell me again—what exactly is he screaming at?’

‘Existence. He’s realized there is no God and mankind is free. Whatever free means. Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I know the feeling. Sometimes . . .’

Still holding the glass of vodka, ready to place it in Cruise’s limply hanging paw, I sat in the armchair next to the sofa, the position of an analyst listening to a disturbed patient. These chat-show performances were changing Cruise. He had begun to resemble the distraught heroes he played in the commercials. His face was thinner and more angular, and he had the ashy pallor of a hostage released after years of captivity.

‘So, Richard. Sold your flat? Goodbye Chelsea, goodbye all those nancy dinner parties. You’re part of Brooklands now, you’re committed to the Metro-Centre. We’ll put you on salary.’

‘Well, not a good idea.’

‘I won’t order you around. Anyway, you’ve earned it. Sales and viewing figures are up, and that’s not just the Metro-Centre. It’s all along the M25. There’s something new out there, and I’m giving it to them.’

‘Something violent. That frightens me a little.’

‘I feel for you, Richard. Sitting for years behind a big desk in Berkeley Square, you still believe in the human race. People like violence. It stirs the blood, speeds the pulse. Violence is the best way of controlling them, making sure that things don’t get really out of hand.’

‘They have already. These attacks on Asians and asylum seekers, the fiery crosses in front gardens. You didn’t want all that, David. Some of these supporters are using the sports rallies as a cover for racist attacks. Setting fire to streets of houses. It’s ethnic cleansing.’

‘Street theatre, Richard. Just street theatre. Maybe I wind them up a little, but the crowds want blood. They believe in the Metro-Centre, and the Asians don’t come here. They have a parallel economy. They’ve excluded themselves, and they’re paying the price.’

‘Even so. Can you talk to the chief marshals? Try to calm things down?’

‘Right. I’ll see what I can do.’ Bored by this talk and my wheedling voice, Cruise sat up and waved away the glass of vodka. ‘Think of them as skid marks, Richard. Roadkill. But we have to keep driving. Remember—“Mad is bad. Bad is good”?’

‘I meant it. I still do.’

‘Good. Maybe we need to go further, engine up the product a little. I could talk more about my alcoholism and drug use.’

‘You’re not an alcoholic. You’re not a drug user.’

‘That’s not the point.’ Cruise watched me patiently. ‘Alcoholism, drug addiction. They’re today’s equivalent of military service. They give you a kind of . . .’

‘Man-to-man authenticity?’

‘Exactly.’ Cruise raised a forefinger, calling me to attention. ‘Take sex compulsion. I’ve been looking at that book you gave me.’

‘Krafft-Ebing?’

‘That’s the one. It’s full of ideas. We could slip one or two into the programme, see how the sofa ladies react.’

‘They’d have a heart attack.’ Trying to reassert my control, I stood up and turned my back to the picture window and the shoppers waving from the floor of the atrium. ‘Be careful people don’t start to pity you. It’s far better if they fear you. Don’t give too much away. Be more punitive, more demanding.’

‘The stick, not the carrot?’

‘Be more mysterious. Get rid of the Lincoln. It’s too American, too show business.’

‘Hey! I love that car.’

‘Swap it for a black Mercedes. A black stretch Merc with tinted windows. Aggressive but paranoid. At the same time make it clear you’re manipulating their emotions. Make shopping an emotionally insecure experience. Forget value for money, good buys, all that liberal middle-class rubbish. We want bad buys. Try to touch their unease, their dislike of all those people who look down on consumerism.’

‘The old-style county set? I like that.’

‘Another point.’ I circled the sofa, apparently deep in thought. ‘You need your audience, but now and then deride them. You despise them, but you need them. Play the unpredictable parent. Invent some new enemies. Tell people to join a consumer club at the Metro-Centre if they want to be part of their real family. Defend the mall is the message.’

‘Defend the mall.’ Cruise nodded solemnly. ‘That’s it.’

‘Tell people to join the gold-card evenings, the discount shopping nights when they can go on TV. Keep them on their toes with the threat of withholding affection. Treat them like children—it’s what they really want.’

‘They are children!’ Cruise threw his hands in the air, then gave a middle-finger salute to the picture window. ‘I love it, Richard. I’m glad we talked this through. You can feel it happening—MPs are phoning up to help, they say they want to be part of the organization. I tell them there is no organization! Even the BBC offered me a show.’

‘You declined?’

‘Of course. People here would cut off my balls.’

‘We don’t want that . . . What would Cory and Imelda think?’

Laughing at this reference to his Filipina maids, Cruise stood up and patted me on the back. A red star pulsed on his control panel, and he saluted smartly. ‘Right. Rehearsal for the evening show. Stay to watch?’

‘I’ll get home and catch it there. I’m still settling in.’

‘Take your time.’ Cruise followed me to the door, an arm around my shoulders. ‘Someone told me you were off to London again.’

‘News to me. When?’

‘This Home Office delegation. Julia Goodwin, Maxted, Sangster. They want more police involved in our lives.’

‘That’s the middle-class way.’

‘You’re not going?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Good. The Metro-Centre is your real home, Richard. Your father would have understood that.’

I LEFT THE dome by one of the side exits and joined the late-afternoon crowd that filled the plaza outside the Metro-Centre. Three separate rallies were taking place. Marching bands stamped and wheeled, supporters’ clubs cheered the high-stepping majorettes. The motorway towns were out for the day, small children on their fathers’ shoulders, teenage girls in saucy gangs. Families glowed with health and optimism, cheering and clapping in rhythm. I still assumed that I was part of a merchandising operation that was ringing all the tills in the Thames Valley, but something far larger was under way, a new kind of England that was disciplined, proud and content. The burning Asian houses belonged to another country.

26 A BULLET IN THE HAND

I DROVE BACK to my father’s flat, ready to shower and wash away the cloying scent of the dome’s sterilized atmosphere. A fire engine blocked the access lane, reversing slowly towards the avenue. I shouted to one of the firemen, but he was intent on manoeuvring the huge vehicle. A tang of seared paint and charred plastic filled the air, seeping into the privet hedges and touched by a third ingredient that reminded me of a butcher’s shop.

I waited until the fire engine reached the avenue, and drove down the exhaust-filled lane, followed by an ambulance with its lights flashing in my rear-view mirror. Two police cars and a breakdown truck were parked in front of the flats. The building was intact, residents watching from their windows as a group of my neighbours were questioned by a woman police officer.

I parked by the refuse bins, letting the ambulance drive up to the entrance. Crime-scene tapes surrounded a small Fiat, which sat on flattened tyres, retardant foam deliquescing on the gravel like crab spawn on a beach. Police engineers shackled a steel cable to the car, ready to winch it onto the loader.

I walked towards the entrance, waving to my neighbours, who as usual failed to respond. The glass door was starred by a bullet hole, and a pool of blood covered the tiles. Above my head a window closed sharply, and an elderly couple speaking to the police officer fell silent when I approached. Frowning at me, they stepped back, as if I were returning a little too early to the scene of my crime.

‘Keep back. Mr Pearson, can you hear me?’

I turned to find Sergeant Mary Falconer warning me away from the blood-soaked tiles. She stood so close to me that I could smell the powder on her face. She scrutinized me warily, as if searching for a pointer to the violent crime that had reached the doors of this once peaceful enclave.

‘Sergeant? I didn’t see you. This car . . . ?’

‘It’s all over. There’s no danger of fire. Can I ask what you’re doing here?’

Her chin was raised, eyes narrowed as she looked down her nose at me. I could tell that she had changed sides since the Metro-Centre bomb. I remembered how she had almost fainted after hearing that Geoffrey Fairfax had been killed. She had been closely involved with Fairfax and Tony Maxted, but her crisp manner made it clear that this belonged to the past. The faction in the Brooklands police who had allied themselves to this odd clique had gone to ground, and I assumed that Superintendent Leighton was climbing a different corner of the cat’s cradle of local politics, and had taken Sergeant Falconer with him. Had she once had an affair with Geoffrey Fairfax? I doubted it, though this rather frozen woman with her always immaculate make-up probably needed to feel subservient to a powerful man.

‘Mr Pearson!’

‘What am I doing here? This is where I live. I’ve moved into my father’s flat.’

‘I know that.’ She was more aggressive than I recalled, shoulders squared and head canted to one side as if ready to push me into the flowerbed. ‘Why are you here now?’

‘I’ve just come home.’ I stepped past her, as the residents in the porch moved away. ‘What exactly is going on?’

Sergeant Falconer waited until the burnt-out Fiat was tied down to the loader. Lowering her voice, she confided: ‘Your neighbours don’t like you much, do they?’

‘What have they been saying? This is nothing to do with me.’

‘Nothing? Where were you an hour ago?’

‘At the Metro-Centre. In David Cruise’s dressing room. Hundreds of people must have seen me.’

‘Did you use a phone? Contact anyone?’

‘You mean send a signal? What happened here?’

Almost casually, she said: ‘There was an attack on the Kumars just after five o’clock. Mr Kumar was driving home in his wife’s car. A group of ice-hockey supporters followed him from the street and assaulted him as he tried to leave the car. Your neighbours saw them spray petrol over him and set him alight.’

‘Good God . . . poor man. Is he . . . ?’

‘Somehow he got out through the passenger door and reached the hall. The gang were jeering and singing while Dr Kumar tried to revive him. She went to speak to them, but one of the supporters took out a handgun and shot her through the chest.’

‘Why . . . ? God almighty . . . Are they all right?’

‘We’ll know when we get them to hospital. If you have any information, Mr Pearson, it’s important that you give it to me.’

‘Information . . . ?’

The paramedics emerged from the Kumars’ flat, pushing a wheeled stretcher. Somewhere under the oxygen mask and the silver foil was Mr Kumar, bulky figure deflated by the restraining straps. Sergeant Falconer drew me away when I tried to approach him. The paramedics slid Kumar into the ambulance and ran back for his wife. Numbed by the sight of this elegant woman reduced to a parcel of barely human wreckage, I stared at the ambulance until it drove away, siren wailing as if bringing the news.

The driver of the breakdown truck reversed across the drive, and the passenger door of the Fiat swung open above our heads. Clinging to the frosted window like scorched parchment was a patch of what resembled human skin.

Without thinking, I gripped Sergeant Falconer’s arm. ‘This gang—who were they?’

‘Who?’ The sergeant stared at me, as if I was being tiresomely facetious. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘Why on earth should I? Sergeant?’

‘Some people think you had a motive. You wanted the Kumars out of your block.’

‘That’s absolute rubbish. I don’t approve of these attacks.’

‘Maybe not. But you’re doing a lot to encourage them.’

‘With a few TV commercials? We’re trying to sell refrigerators.’

‘You’re selling a lot more than that.’ She moved me away from the reversing truck. ‘If David Cruise is king of the castle, you’re his grand vizier.’

‘Writing advertising slogans?’

‘Oh yes . . . the kind of slogans that convince people that black is white, that it’s all right to go a little mad. You think you’re selling refrigerators, but what you’re really selling is civil war, nicely wrapped up as sport.’

‘Then why aren’t the police doing more? You’ve let things get out of control.’

For the first time Sergeant Falconer was evasive. She turned away from me, composing her expression and arranging her full lips squarely across her teeth. ‘We’re in control, Mr Pearson. But our resources are stretched. The chief constable feels we might provoke even more violence if we ban the marches and rallies.’

‘You agree with him?’

‘It’s hard to say. The Home Office sees this as a matter of community discipline. There are outbreaks of soccer hooliganism every four or five years. Containment is the official policy, not confrontation . . .’

‘Gobbledegook. Families are being driven out of their homes, shot on their own doorsteps. Dr Maxted is leading a delegation to the Home Office, demanding more action. I might join them.’

‘Don’t.’ The sergeant took my arm. Lowering her voice, she stepped closer to me. ‘Be careful, Mr Pearson. Go back to London and get on with your life. I’m afraid Dr Maxted is wasting his time.’

‘Really? You’ve changed sides, Sergeant. Not so long ago you were running errands for Geoffrey Fairfax and his little clique, and heating milk for a murderer’s baby.’

‘Duncan Christie was discharged. The police offered no evidence.’

‘Quite right. He’d served his role, shifting attention from the real killer. Fairfax and Superintendent Leighton kept him dangling long enough to stir up trouble for the Metro-Centre. By the way, what happened to the superintendent? I haven’t seen you driving him around.’

‘He’s on indefinite sick leave.’ Sergeant Falconer tried to step away from me, but I had backed her against the flowerbed. She waved to the two constables interviewing my neighbours, but neither responded. ‘The bomb attack was a huge strain on the Brooklands force.’

‘I bet it was. At least the superintendent missed getting his brains blown out. I hope he didn’t supply the bomb to Geoffrey Fairfax.’

‘Mr Pearson? Is that an accusation?’

‘No. Just a passing thought.’ I took the round of ammunition from my pocket and held it up to her. ‘Recognize it, Sergeant? Police-issue Heckler & Koch, I’m ready to bet. Someone gave it to me outside the Metro-Centre this afternoon. Not so much a friendly warning, more of a get-well card, telling me to keep looking.’

Sergeant Falconer reached out to take the round, but I closed my hands around her fingers, pressing the warm bullet into her soft palm. I was surprised that she made no attempt to free her hand. She watched my eyes in her level way, undisturbed by my overtly sexual play, and waiting to see what I would do. If it was true that she liked to attach herself to powerful men, then there was a vacancy in her life now that Fairfax and Superintendent Leighton had moved from the scene. As David Cruise’s vizier, I was certainly powerful, and might fill that vacancy. The Heckler & Koch bullet, identical to the one that had killed my father, was my valentine to her. By getting close to this attractive but conflicted woman, watching her heat the coffee milk in my father’s kitchen, I might learn the truth about his death.

‘Mr Pearson?’ She freed her hand, but made no attempt to take the round from me. ‘More passing thoughts?’

‘In a way. A lot more interesting, though.’

‘Good.’ Her poise had never deserted her, whatever the cost in later humiliation. ‘I see you’re driving a different car.’

‘It’s leased. My Jensen was in an accident.’

‘Nothing too serious?’

‘Hard to say. Somehow I don’t think it’s going to get through its MOT.’

‘That’s a shame. Dr Goodwin thought it suited you.’ She raised her chin, and managed a faraway smile. ‘You know—a little past its prime, but handsome enough for a spin. Erratic steering and hopeless brakes. A tendency to veer off into dead ends . . .’

‘Not exactly roadworthy?’

‘It doesn’t look like it. Try being a pedestrian, Mr Pearson. But watch your feet . . .’

She walked away from me, her smile fading into a smirk, and joined the two constables completing their interviews. I had unsettled her, and any concern she had once felt for me had gone. But emotions in the conventional sense probably mattered little to Sergeant Falconer. She attached herself to powerful men, fully expecting to be humiliated, and almost welcoming any rebuffs that came her way. She had played her part in the interlocking conspiracies that had flourished after my father’s death, probably without ever realizing that other lives would be at stake.

Yet my own role was even more compromised. I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and sometime actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement, while the cable presenter had expanded a hundredfold and was ready to burst out of his bottle. The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.

For the first time I regretted that I had sold my Chelsea Harbour flat. I turned to the bullet-starred door, more than ready for a cold shower and a colder drink, but my foot seemed to stick to the entrance tiles. I looked down at my shoe, and realized that I had stepped into the pool of Dr Kumar’s blood. Sergeant Falconer waved to me as I took off my shoe and limped into the hall.

27 AN ANXIOUS INTERMISSION

VIOLENCE AND HATE were coming out to play.

The Kumars survived, the doctor with a deep puncture wound to her left lung, and her husband with severe burns to his chest and arms. I tried to visit them at Brooklands Hospital, but the relatives who arrived from Southall turned me away. One of the nephews who kept guard over Dr Kumar manhandled me to the lift and threatened to kill me if I appeared again. Julia Goodwin, sadly, avoided me and refused to take my calls. My neighbours were equally hostile, staring through me on the stairways and declining to park anywhere near my Mercedes.

The delegation to the Home Office led by Sangster and Dr Maxted came to nothing. The junior minister offered them the usual assurances, but he represented a marginal Birmingham constituency with high unemployment and was only too keen to import the magic formula of sport, discipline and consumerism.

For the next week I remained at the flat, alone with my father, thrown back on my memories of the old pilot or, more exactly, on my reconstruction of him from the few clues he had left me. From the start I had separated myself from his right-wing views, his St George’s shirts and Hitler biographies, and the obsession with Nazi regalia. I loathed all that, as I loathed the attacks on the Asian communities near the M25. Nevertheless, my neighbours saw me as a sinister manipulator helping to sell, not refrigerators and microwave ovens, but a flat-pack führer and an ugly suburban fascism. Consumerism and a new totalitarianism had met by chance in a suburban shopping mall and celebrated a nightmare marriage.

MEANWHILE, THE SPORTING weekends seemed to last for ever, moving without a break through the working week. A packed list of fixtures filled every venue from Brooklands to Heathrow. Mini-leagues and knockout championships brought coachloads of supporters to the Metro-Centre, where they marched and countermarched behind their drum majors. There were so many fixtures, so many local finals mutating into league quarter-finals and area semi-finals, that supporters were light-headed from the endless cheering. They needed to stamp and shout and wave their banners, to believe passionately in something or, failing that, in nothing.

At night, grimly, they preferred nothing. National radio and TV bulletins made clear that violence rose as sports fever mounted. Attacks on Muslim shops and community centres were now as routine as a post-match pint. After the evening football games any Chinese and Indian takeaways near the stadium were attacked by gangs of supporters looking for violence. On his cable show David Cruise commented slyly that the easiest way to find a curry house was to look for black eyes and broken windows.

Around the Metro-Centre the sports-club marshals, dubbed honour guards by Tom Carradine, had merged into paramilitary units, protecting hypermarkets and retail parks from ‘thieves and outsiders’, who were blamed for the drunken damage. David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.

New enemies were always needed, and one in particular was soon found. The traditional middle class, with their private schools and disdain for the Metro-Centre, became a popular target. Bored after trashing another halal butcher’s and another Sikh grocer’s, gangs of supporters took to roaming the more prosperous residential areas, jeering at any half-timbered house with a rose pergola and a tennis court. A Harrods or Peter Jones van caught in the motorway towns was promptly spray-painted and had its tyres let down. Teenage girls clip-clopping their docile nags under the beech trees of comfortable avenues were followed by hooting cars emblazoned with St George’s insignia. Bizarrely, the aerosolled Star of David began to appear on the garage doors of the most snootily gentile barristers and architects.

I urged Cruise to call for restraint, but he was too busy showing off his new Mercedes, a black stretch limousine that he christened ‘Heinrich’. With the Filipina girls bouncing on the jump seats behind the chauffeur, he swept from stadium to ice-hockey rink to athletics ground. Standing in the directors’ box, Cory and Imelda simpering beside him, he boomed at the crowd, his amplified voice drumming through the night sky. As ‘Heinrich’ made its threatening progress through the streets, he gave a continuous commentary to an on-board camera, reminding his viewers of gold-card and select-entry evenings at the Metro-Centre. For all his suggestive by-play with the Filipinas, and the strong hint that more than slap and tickle went on in their shared jacuzzi, he urged his viewers to defend their ‘republic’ against the corrupt alliance of the snobbish middle class and the snootier London boroughs who had always despised the motorway suburbs.

But Cruise’s worries were for show only. The reign of the bully had begun. Led by Cruise and the Metro-Centre, the new movement was sweeping through the Home Counties. Supporters in St George’s shirts swaggered down high streets from Dagenham to Uxbridge, hunted in packs through middle-class estates and terrorized every golden retriever in sight.

Three days after the attack on the Kumars, a gang of sports supporters invaded the Brooklands magistrates’ court where two marshals charged by the police with attempted murder were being sent for trial. The supporters jeered the police officers and shouted down the elderly neighbours testifying that they had seen the attack. The hearing broke up, and the shocked magistrates adjourned the case, releasing the accused men on a nominal bail.

The next day supporters’ groups invaded social security offices in Brooklands, Ashford and Hillingdon, demanding an immediate increase in supplementary benefit for those who left their jobs to become marshals at the local retail parks.

Despite the growing climate of fear, what was left of the county establishment firmly supported David Cruise and his brand of ideological consumerism. Mayors, MPs and even church leaders saw Cruise and the Metro-Centre as calming influences. They admired the new discipline, especially as it drove up property values and brought a surge in activity to every cash counter within ten miles of Heathrow. Crime continued to fall throughout the Thames Valley, and police chiefs dismissed the attacks on Asian and immigrant communities as the exuberance of a few sports fans.

Reassuringly, there was no obvious centre to the new movement. There were no cold-eyed strategists plotting to seize power. If all this had faint echoes of fascism, it was fascism lite, a mild and non-toxic strain.

I was far less sure, and stayed by the television set, amazed by the optimistic bulletins sent in by BBC reporters in the Metro-Centre car parks. Admiring the self-confident crowds and marching bands, they reminded the viewers that no one was organizing these displays of local pride.

But violence and hate, as always, were organizing themselves.

28 THE OLD MAN’S QUEST

THINKING OF THE KUMARS, both fortunately on the mend, I switched off the BBC news. I listened to the passing sirens of police cars and ambulances, by now an integral part of the Brooklands festival. I paced around the lounge, staring at my father’s framed photographs and logbooks. Years in the Middle East had turned him into a rightwing fanatic with his ugly library and Roman banners. But his grip on me still held, and I half believed that he would have supported everything I had done at the Metro-Centre.

Unsettled by so many doubts, I left the lounge and walked past the kitchen to the utility room. I kept the door locked, avoiding even a glimpse of the neatly ironed shirts and Hitler biographies. But now I needed to call again on his support, and the key was in the lock.

I SAT AT THE desk, a workstation disguised as a shrine, and began with his computer. My father’s estate was still moving through probate, a process delayed by Geoffrey Fairfax’s death and passed to another of the senior partners, and most of his records were filed away in various computer folders.

I scanned the list of folders: income-tax returns, share holdings, BUPA subscriptions, nursing homes in the Brooklands area, undertakers and their fees, golf courses near Marbella and Sotogrande, light airfields in the Algarve. The last folder was labelled ‘Sports Diary’. Expecting to find a list of veteran car rallies, I opened the folder, ready to read his account of the London-to-Brighton run.

But the diary recorded meetings of a rather different kind. The image of my father in a raccoon coat, sitting high among the brass and leather of an antique Renault or Hispano-Suiza, faded quickly. Turning my eyes from the screen, I could scent the well-thumbed pages of the Hitler biographies, and the peculiar chemical reek of the coated paper that publishers seemed to reserve for atrocity photographs.

The sports diary covered the last three months of my father’s life, and recorded a number of racist incidents he had witnessed, attacks on Asian shops and asylum seekers’ hostels. Each entry described the sporting event that provided cover for the post-match incident, the number of supporters present, the damage inflicted and my father’s general thoughts on the supporters’ esprit de corps, background and professions.

The first entry had been logged on February 3.

Byfield Lane sports ground. Spartan League quarter-final. Brooklands Wanderers 2 Motorola FC 5. Thirty Brooklands supporters met at the Feathers, a regular rendezvous. At least ten had been to the match. Wore a St George’s shirt and was warmly welcomed. At 9.15 we formed up and marched down to the industrial estate. A Bangladeshi newsagent’s was attacked, windows broken, soft drinks and chocolate bars taken. Good-humoured, and no racist shouts. Seen as a prank by everyone. Members: supermarket junior manager, a call-centre worker, two delivery drivers, hospital clerk. Few knew each other, but they stayed together when police car cruised past, and waited for me to catch up with them. Decent types, mostly married, sport brings them together. No interest in Hitler and the Nazis. National Front they see as a joke.

A fortnight later my father was at the ice-hockey stadium.

Brooklands Bears 37 Addlestone Retail Park 3. The wide margin set everyone going. Hard contact sport acts like adrenalin. Inner group of a dozen met at the Crown and Duck. Elbow and shoulder pads under St George’s shirts. They kept me at arm’s length until I spoke loudly about ‘middle-class snobs’. Picked up twenty supporters waiting in car park and moved to bus depot. Chinese takeaway attacked. Cook and wife watched patiently as spring rolls thrown at walls. Manager emptied cash till, offered them money, was kicked to the floor for his pains. Indignation at thought of taking money. Open violence and racist anger, but community pride. Feel they are defending Brooklands, though no idea against what. Draughtsman, taxi driver, dental mechanic, hotel receptionist. Have cars, own homes, wives and children. Stick together, but looking for leadership.

I read through further entries. My father had joined a variety of supporters’ clubs. He seemed aware of the limitations of these saloon-bar racists, and was trying to gain entry to a more senior level of the leadership, if that existed. He was clearly worried that the uncoordinated attacks would slip into anarchy. He listed attacks on Asian property, the assault on a hostel for Kosovan refugees and the trashing of an unofficial gypsy caravan park.

In an April 12 entry he reported:

Local derby at an out-of-town football stadium. Tin shack stands with the latest giant-screen technology, like Sopwith Camel fitted with a Rolls-Royce turbofan. Tremendous atmosphere, a real sense of a united community. Good-humoured, passionate people. A hundred or so supporters, all from Metro-Centre clubs, formed up in the car park and set off for east Brooklands. Wrecked a Bangladeshi tailor’s, then broke into a large Asian supermarket. Running battles with Sikh youths armed with knives and iron bars. The St George’s shirts meant something. The supporters stood their ground, bare fists against the Asian knives, holding the line as their grandfathers did at Arnhem and Alamein. Fine men, careful to protect me, though I was a damned nuisance. Best NCO material: store managers, electricians, shoe-shop salesmen. They long for discipline and leadership. The Metro-Centre alone gives a focus to their lives.

My father described driving a seriously injured man to Brooklands Hospital.

We laid him in the back seat of the Bristol. Blood all over the leather. I put my foot down, outrunning the police Vauxhalls, earned many heartfelt handshakes. ‘Anything you need, Dad.’ When I asked to meet their leaders they looked blank.

He went on:

I realize there are no leaders. A Metro-Centre newsletter about a discount carpet sale is all that holds them together. They long for authority and some kind of deeper meaning in their lives. They need someone to admire and follow. The destination doesn’t matter. The nearest to a leader is a presenter on the cable channel called David Cruise. He winds them up at matches, but he is inadequate, an ex-actor lost without a script. He is dangerous, because the Metro-Centre is the mainspring of their empty lives.

Growing danger of a high-speed stall. The whole town will flip over and head for the ground at 400 knots. Will the passengers mind? Everything I’ve read about the Nazi leaders shows that their followers didn’t fear disaster but actively welcomed it.

My chief problem—there’s no one I can talk to about all this. Sport dominates everything, and fringe violence is part of the culture. Police too tolerant, and anyway see immigrants as a source of trouble, even if they aren’t to blame. The only person I’ve met is a Northfield psychiatrist, Dr Tony Maxted. An odd man, with an agenda of his own. Part of him welcomes the violence—it confirms some academic theory. He was very taken with my description of a high-speed stall.

Sadly, the Bristol was stolen during the night. Found torched in a lay-by on the Weybridge road. I loved the old lady, and it’s galling that it had to pay the price. At all costs, avoid being conspicuous. At any level, politics is a herd game . . .

On April 30:

There’s a limit to the infiltration I can carry out. The demos are getting more violent. I’m fit but no use at street fighting. Took a punch full-face from a young Bangladeshi defending his mother. Didn’t realize I was trying to help her. The group admire my ‘guts’ but tell me to go home.

It’s astonishing how well my masquerade has worked. No one suspects an old British Airways pilot. Chief regret is that I have frightened my neighbours, especially Dr Kumar and her husband. But I have to keep up the disguise for a few weeks longer. These Metro-Centre sports clubs are dangerous and need to be stopped. The supporters are turning into a freikorps, though they don’t realize it. That’s the strange thing. When I saw Fairfax about my pension he said: ‘Who are the leaders?’ Obvious question everyone asks. There are no leaders. Yet. Sooner or later some hard-eyed thug with the gift of the gab will seize control in a bloodless coup. Already there’s talk of a new ‘republic’ stretching from Heathrow to Brooklands, the whole M3/M4 corridor. A new kind of dictatorship based on the Metro-Centre. I tried to raise this with Fairfax, but he talked about his golf handicap. He’s part of a curious little cabal, they may have political ambitions of their own.

Then, on May 2, the last entry.

I watched the cable presenter David Cruise. Likeable in an actorish way. A highly developed feel for people’s ‘small’ emotions. Dangerous? He’s a toy, waiting to be wound up by anyone ready to make the effort. He might appeal to a certain kind of rootless person who believes in nothing and has worked out some pie-eyed theory to justify his own emptiness.

Tomorrow I will put on my St George’s shirt and try to get on his programme. I’ll play the old BA pilot card and stage a demo of my own. Warn people of the danger of too much sport and nothing else. Sooner or later a messiah is going to appear . . .

I closed the folder and sat back, my eyes scarcely noticing the führer moustache and forelock on the spine of a Hitler biography. I felt a vast relief, and a surge of confidence in this suburban flat and its memories. I felt close to my father again, and impressed by the bravery of this old man. He had known that something was wrong, and was determined to reach the source of the deep malaise that threatened his pacific community. His apparent membership of the St George’s clubs had convinced his neighbours and convinced me. To a larger extent than I wanted to admit, I had relied on my father to justify my support for the Metro-Centre and its sporting militias.

I now knew the truth, and I could admire my father and accept myself. I no longer needed to avoid the mirrors in the apartment. At the same time, these undercover missions raised a number of questions about his death. Had he been betrayed by a friend in whom he confided? Geoffrey Fairfax would have ratted on him without a qualm. Had someone slipped into the flat and checked his computer files? I thought of the ‘curious little cabal’ led by Fairfax and Superintendent Leighton, which had drawn Julia Goodwin into its fraying web. Had the cabal dealt with the meddling old man, recruiting some disgraced police marksman as their assassin, who had shot my father dead as he climbed the staircase to the mezzanine studio? Out of the smokescreen of rumour they then produced Duncan Christie, misfit and urban scarecrow, and kept him in place long enough for the killer’s trail to be stamped into the dust. Even Sangster and Dr Maxted may have had no idea of Fairfax’s real game. The fool’s mate set out on the chessboard concealed a far more elaborate gambit . . .

To Fairfax’s dismay, the murdered old man was replaced by his son, an even greater meddler. The bomb in my car, left there by the impatient solicitor, should have removed a minor nuisance from the board.

But at long last the pieces were beginning to fight back against the players.

29 THE STRICKEN CITY

THERE WAS TOO LITTLE AIR in the flat. Even with the windows open, I felt suffocated. Schemes and conspiracies were leaping out of trap doors around me, then evaporating into mist. I needed to clear my head, and the only place in Brooklands untouched by the Metro-Centre was the racing circuit, a monument to a far saner dream of speed.

I left the flat and went down to my car. The chanting crowd at the athletics ground, the bursts of cheering and the commentator’s relentless harangues, together bruised the afternoon. The din drummed against the windows of nearby houses, turning a pleasantly sunny day into a summer in Babel.

I drove through the residential avenues towards the circuit, past the wrought-iron gates and the St George’s flags. Every day a few more of them flew from improvised flagpoles, or flapped weakly from brass porch lanterns, a feeble attempt to ward off the roaming supporters’ clubs, ensigns of surrender that marked the capitulation of a powerful class.

Half a mile from the circuit the road was closed by a police barricade. Officers stood by their car, signalling the traffic towards a detour. Ignoring their advice, I turned into a side street, but the next approach road was sealed off by police tapes. Detour signs sent the traffic on an endless tour of half-timbered houses, and I had a momentary vision of Brooklands’ entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.

Glad of the chance to walk, I parked outside the entrance to a nursing home and set off on foot. Police patrolled the junctions, but there was little traffic near the racing circuit. I crossed the perimeter road, and approached the section of embankment.

As always, I could hear engines running in the distance, the deep-throated roar of unmuffled exhausts and the hacking gasps of carburettors hungry for air. Only a small section of the circuit remained, but in my mind, and in my father’s mind, the great track was intact. The banked surface still carried the sports cars that raced for ever through faraway afternoons, in a happier world of speed and glamour and elegant women in white helmets and overalls.

Engines sounded, but not in my head. I followed the path alongside the access road that cut through the embankment. The car park beside the industrial estate in the centre of the circuit was filled with police and military vehicles. Dozens of camouflaged vans and canvas-topped trucks were backed onto the embankment. Buses converted to mobile diners, pantechnicons loaded with aerials and communications gear, and flat-bed trailers carrying three huge bulldozers were parked on the runway of the disused airfield within the circuit. Dozens of police and soldiers in overalls crossed the runway to a metal warehouse in the industrial estate, commandeered as a temporary barracks.

I was walking through the vehicle park of a large invasion force, and assumed that it was about to rehearse the seizure of Heathrow Airport after a terrorist attack. A soldier sat in the driving cab of a camouflaged truck, smoking a cigarette as he studied a road map.

I walked across to him, but a police car with lights flashing left the road and climbed the embankment behind me, its wing grazing my knees. A constable leaned from his window and waved me away without speaking, then watched me until I left the circuit.

I walked back to my car, surprised by the scale of this military operation. Vehicles were still arriving, stopped and checked by military police. Aldershot, the chief garrison town of the British Army, was only a few miles beyond the M25, and I guessed that a large-scale civil-defence exercise was under way.

When I reached my car I paused to look up and down the deserted avenue. The detour signs were still in place, and the St George’s flags hung slackly from the garden gates. But a complete silence lay over the town. The amplified commentaries and communal singing had died away, and for the first time in days, if not weeks, no one was cheering.

A young woman ran towards me from the drive of the nursing home, propelling a pushchair with a startled child. She seemed distraught, buttons bursting from her blouse, and I raised my hands to calm her.

‘Let me help you, please . . . are you all right?’

I assumed that she was a bereaved relative, and was ready to comfort her. But she pushed past me, swearing when she tripped on the kerb. She pointed wildly at the sky.

‘The dome’s on fire!’

‘The dome? Where?’

‘It’s on fire!’ She waved at the rooftops. ‘They’re burning down the Metro-Centre!’

She fled with her child, the last inhabitant of a stricken city.

30 ASSASSINATION

A SILENCE LOUDER than thunder lay over Brooklands. I could hear the traffic moving along the M25, and pick out the engines of individual trucks and coaches. Stadiums and athletics grounds had emptied, and all evening fixtures were postponed. Everyone was waiting for news from the dome.

Like most people, I spent the afternoon watching my television set. From the living-room windows I could see the narrow column of white smoke that rose from an emergency vent in the roof of the Metro-Centre. In the still air it climbed vertically, trembled and then dispersed into the cloud cover.

I guessed that an electrical fault in the air-conditioning plant was to blame. The fire would be brought under control and the rumours of arson promptly scotched. But the ITN and BBC news teams reporting from the South Gate entrance were uncertain of the cause, and unable to assess the damage. The reporters both confirmed that the dome had not been evacuated, and reassured any relatives watching that there were no casualties. A view of the central atrium, taken with a concealed camera, showed the strolling crowds, the three bears swaying and jigging to the music, and no signs of panic.

By contrast, the Metro-Centre’s three cable channels talked up the threat, claiming that unknown arsonists had tried to burn down the dome. Relays of announcers spoke of serious damage costing tens of millions of pounds, and of sinister enemies determined to raze the entire structure to the ground.

Live coverage showed David Cruise at the forefront of the battle, wearing a red helmet and firefighter’s suit. In a series of handheld shots from the basement garage, he stepped from the cabin of an emergency vehicle, conferred urgently with a white-faced Tom Carradine and a team of Metro-Centre engineers, and pressed his healing hands to the maze of pipes and cable ducts in the generator room. Gasping into his oxygen mask, he shared bottles of a well-advertised mineral water with an exhausted fire crew. When he addressed the camera he was in no doubt about the threat to every Metro-Centre customer and every sports-club supporter. Rubbing his flushed forehead, his cheekbones stylishly marked with a dark commando stain, he said:

‘All of you out there . . . this is David Cruise, somewhere in the front line. Listen to me, if I can still get through to you. We need your support, every one of you watching. Make no mistake, there are people out there who want to destroy us. They hate the Metro-Centre, they hate the sports clubs and they hate the world we’ve created here.’ He coughed into his oxygen mask, brushing aside the attractive paramedic who tried to calm him. ‘This time we’ll have to fight for what we believe. The people who did this will try again. I want you all to be ready. You created this, don’t let them take it away. There are enemies out there, and you know who they are. If I don’t see you again, you can be sure I went down fighting for the Metro-Centre . . .’

AN HOUR LATER the smoke still rose from the roof, a white plume almost invisible in the late-afternoon light. A BBC journalist had entered the basement, and reported that the source of the fire was now clear. A large hopper filled with cardboard cartons had been set ablaze, but this was under control.

David Cruise, however, was closer to the action. He climbed from an inspection hatch and wearily doffed his helmet, then whispered hoarsely about the dangers of igniting the Metro-Centre’s oil stores. ‘We’re talking about timed devices,’ he darkly informed his cable viewers. ‘Be on the alert, and check your garages and basements. Every one of us is a target . . .’

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK he would address his cable audience from the mezzanine studio. I watched him play his role, an extra now promoted to be the star of his own towering inferno. The engineers around him looked vaguely embarrassed, but Cruise was completely sincere, the naturalized citizen of a new kingdom where nothing was true or false. Most of his audience probably knew that the fire in a rubbish hopper was a ruse designed to rally support for the Metro-Centre, for reasons not yet clear. They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They preferred lies and mood music, they accepted the make-believe of David Cruise the firefighter and defender of their freedoms. Consumer capitalism had never thrived by believing the truth. Lies were preferred by the people of the shopping malls because they could be complicit with them.

Sadly, real fires burned on the outskirts of Brooklands. By the early evening a huge crowd had gathered outside the Metro-Centre, a suburban army dressed in its St George’s shirts. Sports clubs formed up and marched away, heading for the outskirts of the town as if to defend the walls of a besieged city. As I feared, outbreaks of burning and looting soon struck the Asian and immigrant housing estates.

But the gangs were quick to find other targets. Bored by the punch-ups with desperate Bangladeshis and exhausted Kosovans, they attacked the further-education college near the town square with its irritating posters advertising classes in cordon bleu cooking, archaeology and brass rubbings. The public library was another target, its shelves swept clear of the few books on display, though the huge stock of CDs, videos and DVDs was untouched.

Other gangs invaded the Brooklands Cricket Club, where they defecated on the pitch, and the Gymkhana Riding School, a stronghold of the would-be middle class, which was swiftly put to the torch. The TV news showed wild-eyed horses galloping through the Metro-Centre car parks, their singed manes alive with sparks. Even the police station and magistrates’ court were under threat, cordoned off by a thin blue line of officers in riot gear.

Ominously, the BBC reported that fights were breaking out between the supporters’ groups—unable to find any new enemies, they were turning on themselves.

I WAS TRYING to phone Julia Goodwin, and warn her that the Asian women’s refuge was in danger, when David Cruise began his address to his new ‘republic’, transmitted live from the mezzanine studio in the Metro-Centre. He had swapped his fireman’s overall for a stylish combat jacket, but the make-up girls had left untouched his ruffled hair and oily bruises on his cheeks. He was fighting off his own hysteria, aware that his sports clubs might rampage through a modest county town, but the referee was about to blow the whistle and there would be no extra time. What the television reporters still called football hooliganism was what central government termed civil insurrection. The army and police were waiting.

Cruise leaned forward into the camera, ready to rally his loyal audience, and unable to resist his familiar cheeky smile. But as he opened his mouth, displaying his strong teeth and muscular tongue, he seemed to slip from his chair. A spasm of indigestion brought a hand to his chest, and his eyes lost their focus. He swayed to one side, elbow sliding across the desk, and tore the lapel microphone from his jacket. He reached out to clutch at the air, eyes rolling under their lids. His smile seemed to drift away, an empty smirk deserted like an abandoned ship. He held himself upright, and then fell forward from his chair, head across his bloodstained script.

Five seconds later, the screen went blank. There was a brief silence, and then a deep roar rose from the Metro-Centre as the crowd watching the screens above the South Gate entrance let out a cry of anger and pain, the visceral bellow of an animal goaded at the point of death. The sound rose over Brooklands, drumming at the windows and echoing off the nearby roofs.

I turned to the Channel 4 news. The reporter stared uneasily at her autocue, ready to interrupt herself.

‘We’re hearing reports . . . of an assassination attempt at a Brooklands shopping mall. Eyewitnesses claim that a lone gunman . . . we don’t know yet if—’

I switched off the set and stared at the darkened room. Someone had shot David Cruise, but I found it difficult to cope with the notion that he had been seriously injured. I knew him too well, and had helped to create him. He was so pervasive a figure, dominating almost every moment of my life at Brooklands, that he had long since become a fictional character. He had floated free into a parallel space and time where celebrity redefined reality as itself. His anguished slide across the table, the desperate way in which he had torn the microphone from his bursting chest, had been the latest episode in the series of noir commercials I had devised for him. In fact, I had switched off the set to avoid turning back to the cable channel and seeing the consumer product that sponsored the episode.

But already I was forgetting David Cruise. Julia Goodwin would be at her wits’ end, trying to protect her Asian women from the ferocious backlash that would soon follow. Bereft of their champion and cable philosopher, the supporters’ clubs would go berserk, attacking anything in their sights.

I strode into the hall and unlocked the cupboard where I stored my suitcases. My father’s golf bag, clubs untouched for months, leaned against the rear wall. I pulled out the heavy leather bag, felt between the putters and drew my father’s Purdey shotgun into the light.

On the shelf above was a box of twelve-bore shells, enough to see off any hooligans trying to ransack their old school. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue. But the real was making a small stand against the unreal.

31 ‘DEFEND THE DOME!’

A CAR APPROACHED, tyres raking the gravel outside the entrance to the flats. Its headlights were on full beam, flooding the car park like a film set. I leaned through the rear passenger door of the Mercedes and stowed the shotgun on the floor, wrapped in my raincoat. Its butt rested on the transmission hump within easy reach of the driving seat.

The headlights of the visitor’s car still flared in my face. The driver stepped out, a burly man who left his engine running. He stared around him, bald head almost glowing in the dark, then recognized me.

‘Right . . . I thought you’d be here. Leave that and come with me.’

‘Who the hell . . . ? Dr Maxted?’

‘I hope so—nothing’s certain now. Look snappy.’

‘Wait . . . where are we going?’

Maxted stared at me as I hesitated, one hand moving towards the shotgun. He was exhausted but determined, his troubled face openly hostile as he peered at me. Wearily he took my arm.

‘Where? Your spiritual home—the Metro-Centre. For once you’re going to do something useful.’

‘Hold on . . .’ I watched the fires rising into the night sky and pointed to my Mercedes. ‘There’s a shotgun in the back.’

‘Forget it. If we need that, it’s already too late. We’ll take my car.’

‘You heard the news flash? About David Cruise?’

‘Someone put a bullet through him.’ Maxted stepped into the Mazda sports car. ‘On air! My God, I have to hand it to you people. Don’t tell me that was something you dreamed up?’

‘No . . .’ I slid into the cramped passenger seat. In the light reflected from the porch I could see Maxted’s swollen face, knuckle marks bruising his cheek. ‘Is he alive?’

‘Just about.’ Maxted reversed and ran over a rose display. He winced at the hooting horns and the din of traffic in the avenue, the shouts and cheering that had returned to Brooklands. ‘The bullet knocked out a lung—let’s hope he lasts the night.’

‘Who shot him? Do they know?’

‘Not yet. Some Bangladeshi who’s had his shop trashed once too often, maybe a Kosovan who’s seen his wife slapped around.’ Maxted accelerated down the narrow drive, then braked sharply as we reached the avenue, a free-for-all of stalled traffic, veering headlights and panic-stricken pedestrians. He shouted above the din. ‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’

I ignored this jibe, thinking of the hours I had spent in Cruise’s swimming pool, watched by the Filipina maids. ‘Where is he? Brooklands Hospital?’

‘The first-aid unit at the Metro-Centre. Until he stabilizes it’s too risky to move him. Let’s hope the unit is well equipped. I never thought I’d say it, but David Cruise is one person we need to keep alive.’

‘And if he dies?’

‘People here are ready to flip. Not just Brooklands, but all along the motorway towns. I don’t like what’s been going on, but the next chapter could be a lot nastier.’

‘Elective . . . ?’

‘Psychopathy? You’ve got it. Willed madness.’ Maxted swung the sports car into the traffic stream, a motorized babel of horns and whistles. ‘They don’t know it, but they’ve been waiting for the trigger. Sooner or later some nobody would turn up with the key and put it into the lock for them.’

‘And did he?’

‘Turn up? Oh, yes.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’ Maxted overtook a pick-up truck packed with banner-waving supporters. ‘You wrote the script for our pocket führer. A suburban Dr Goebbels . . . what did you think you were doing? Selling washing machines?’

‘Something like that. It worked.’

‘It worked too well. Late capitalism is scratching its piles and trying to figure out where next to shit. All the privy doors are closed except one. Buying a washing machine is a political act—the only real kind of politics left today.’

We sat in the stalled traffic, the air dinned by a rising clamour of horns. Supporters in St George’s shirts darted between the cars, drumming on the roofs. Everyone in the Thames Valley was converging on the Metro-Centre. It rose above the houses and office blocks, an immense white ghost, a mausoleum readying itself for death.

‘And the fire this afternoon?’ I asked Maxted, shouting over the noise. ‘At the dome?’

‘Don’t be taken in. That was David Cruise trying to light the fuse.’

‘It was a stunt?’

‘Absolutely. He needed to set off an uprising, but he knew he’d left it too late. He’d heard about the army units waiting at the racetrack.’

‘I saw them this afternoon. They look as if they mean business.’

‘They do.’ Maxted laughed into the raucous horns. ‘That must have sobered you up.’

‘I already was sober. I checked my father’s computer and read his diary. He wasn’t a St George’s supporter. He hated all the sports clubs and the whole Metro-Centre thing.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now you’ve got someone better to look up to.’

‘He tried to infiltrate the movement and find who’s leading it. It’s just possible that’s why he was shot.’

‘Maybe.’ Two ice-hockey fans sat on the Mazda’s bonnet, beating time with their fists, and Maxted sounded the horn until they leapt away through the confusion of headlights. He bellowed at me: ‘No one is leading it. I’m sorry your old man was killed, but this is a bottom-up revolution. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Sangster and I were trying to damp it down. We wanted Cruise out of the studio and into the street where he could see what was going on. But reality was never his thing.’

‘Why haven’t the government moved in? Brooklands has been out of control for months.’

‘Not just Brooklands. The Home Office want to see what happens. The suburbs are the perfect social laboratory. You can cook up any pathogen and test how virulent it is. The trouble is, they’ve waited too long. The whole M25 could flip and drag the rest of the country into outright psychopathy.’

‘Impossible. People are too docile.’

‘People are bored. Deeply, deeply bored. When people are that bored anything is possible. A new religion, a fourth reich. They’ll worship a mathematical symbol or a hole in the ground. We’re to blame. We’ve brought them up on violence and paranoia. Now, what’s happening here?’

The traffic was moving around a Range Rover parked outside a Tudor-style mansion. A gang of sports supporters were breaking the car’s windows with iron bars. The driver, a shocked young matron in a sheepskin jacket, tried to remonstrate with them, pushing away one of the youths who was fondling her.

‘Maxted . . . we ought to help.’

‘No time.’ Head down, Maxted drove on, joining the main boulevard that ran to the dome. ‘We need to get you to the Metro-Centre before the roof lifts off.’

‘You want me to talk to David Cruise?’

‘Talk? Julia Goodwin says the man’s on a ventilator.’

‘Julia? She’s there?’

‘Sangster drove her from the refuge. Julia knows we have to keep Cruise alive.’

‘And what can I do?’

‘Take over from David Cruise. You know the production team, they’ll be glad to have you. You wrote the scripts so you should be word-perfect. Speak to the camera, urge everyone to go home and cool down. Say the whole sports-club programme is a PR exercise, a marketing experiment that failed. Cobble something together, but say you were wrong.’

‘I wasn’t wrong.’

WE ABANDONED THE car five hundred yards from the dome. Maxted drove onto a traffic island, and we stepped out between the lines of cars and buses bringing supporters to the Metro-Centre from all over the Thames Valley. A huge crowd packed the open plaza, staring at the dome as if waiting for a message. They watched the display screens over the South Gate entrance, as two linkmen described Cruise’s battle for life in an emergency operating theatre set up in the first-aid station.

Maxted pushed through the spectators, showing his doctor’s ID card and shouting at a marshal who tried to turn us back. Behind us, headlamps flared along the perimeter road, the sweeping spotlights of police and military vehicles forcing their way through the traffic. An armoured personnel carrier rammed Maxted’s little Mazda and tossed it to one side. Heavy trucks with bull bars shouldered the smaller cars out of their way and shunted them brutally onto the verge. Squads of police in riot gear marched forward under a creeping barrage of megaphoned orders.

‘Richard! Snap out of it!’ Maxted seized my arm. ‘Head for the South Gate entrance.’

The crowd moved with us, a mulish mob forced by the police against the dome. Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons. A young woman dropped to the ground, knocked senseless when she tried to defend her husband. Her children began to shriek, voices soon drowned by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air. Searchlights swept the storm of dust stirred by the downdraught, probing the more resolute sections of the crowd. Elite supporters’ clubs joined battle with the aggressive snatch squads seizing their marshals. A police horse reared, its padded legs flinching from the rain of baseball bats. The bitter tang of CS gas mingled with the stench of vomit.

The crowd yielded, retreating to the South Gate entrance. I steadied an elderly woman listening to her mobile phone. She tried to elbow me away, then cried out: ‘They want to close the dome!’

I shook her birdlike shoulder. ‘Why? Who want to?’

‘The police! They’re closing the dome!’

All around me the cry was taken up, a fearful mantra that flashed like a spectre from mouth to mouth.

‘Closing the dome . . . ! Closing the dome . . . !’

Everyone was shouting. The crowd surged towards the entrance, a frantic riptide that swept us with it, carrying us under the display screens, past the first-aid tables, through the doors and into the brightly lit haven of the entrance hall. People were stumbling, hands clutching each other, shoes lost in the stampede, consumers returning to their sanctuary, to their fortress temple and sacred asylum.

A new cry went up.

‘Defend the dome . . . !’

32 THE REPUBLIC OF THE METRO-CENTRE

FLEEING FROM THE TEAR GAS and the police truncheons, the last of the crowd burst past the doors into the entrance hall. The searchlights seemed to follow us into the dome, and the iron din of the helicopters drummed at the roof over our heads, the language of pain roaring through the cheerful interior light.

I tripped over a shopping trolley and fell to my knees, bringing down a black woman and two children who clung to my jacket. Tony Maxted had vanished, swept away by the rush. People were boarding the travelator, seeking safety in the vast interior of the Metro-Centre, waving their loyalty cards at the astonished counter staff who came to the doors of their shops.

I stood up, and noticed that I had lost my left shoe. Sandals, trainers, court shoes and even a pair of carpet slippers lay scattered among the abandoned shopping bags. I found my brogue beside a broken stiletto heel, and remembered a large woman in a fur coat stepping on my foot, then screaming abuse at me.

Beyond the doors a line of soldiers with shields and batons were dispersing the hundreds of spectators who had stepped from their cars on the perimeter road. Police constables in riot gear and vizored helmets now sealed off the entrance, and ignored the television cameras recording the scene from the location vans of the main news channels.

But already a modest fightback had begun. Spurred on by the camera lights, a group of marshals and supporters in St George’s shirts were bolting the outer doors. They sealed the manual locks, unwound a heavy hose from the emergency fire-control station and threaded the brass nozzle through the door handles.

The police ignored all this, taking for granted that they could break down the doors whenever they wanted. Two inspectors conferred, watching the marshals assemble a barricade of sales counters and display stands, clearly unconcerned by all this fierce determination. By neutralizing the Metro-Centre, the police had defused the threat of a civil uprising, and the ringleaders of any open rebellion had conveniently isolated themselves from their supporters outside the dome.

Sitting on a chair beside the enquiry desk, I peeled off my bloody sock and tied my handkerchief around my foot. I watched the marshals rallying their teams, admiring their doomed efforts to defend the mall. Many of the customers trapped inside the dome by the riot were now helping to build the barricade, and their commitment to the Metro-Centre was more than a set of slogans. They resented the police ambush, and the involvement of the army. The helicopters endlessly soaring over the roof were trying to intimidate them, and they had decided to stand their ground. Everyone cheered on a women’s judo team who carried a hamburger kiosk across the hall, leaking a trail of hot fat. Clapped by their menfolk, they swung the kiosk to and fro and launched it onto the barricade. Even the inspectors gave an admiring salute.

I STOOD UP, trying to clear my throat of the dust and tear gas. The public-address system played a medley of Strauss marches, and the information screens announced the opening of a new crèche. Customers still sat in a nearby coffee house with their double espressos and Danish pastries. But for all their bravery, the Metro-Centre had struck its iceberg. I needed to find Julia Goodwin, and help her to move David Cruise to Brooklands Hospital before we sank together.

Outside the dome a column of riot vehicles and military trucks had drawn up. Spotlights were trained on the doors, turning the entrance hall into a giant hallucination of swerving shadows. The police had forced three of the doors, and a squad of a dozen constables approached the barricade, but for the moment made no attempt to dismantle it. A senior officer, an assistant commissioner of the Surrey police, began to address the watching crowd, fragments of his amplified message barely audible above the blare of the helicopters.

‘. . . from tonight the Metro-Centre will close for renovations . . . management in full agreement . . . concern for customers . . . for your own safety leave in an orderly way . . .’

At least five hundred people were crammed into the entrance hall and the nearby shopping aisles. Staff, sports-club supporters, customers caught in the riot, and passers-by driven by panic to seek refuge in the dome were together waiting for something to happen. Many wanted to leave, but fell silent as a militant minority shouted abuse at the assistant commissioner.

At a signal, the constables began to dismantle the barricade, first hurling aside the hamburger kiosk, slipping and sliding in the fat. Scuffles broke out in the watching crowd, and children shrieked at the grappling shadows projected by the spotlights onto the walls of the entrance hall.

‘Right . . .’ I shifted my weight from my injured foot, ready to join the exodus from the Metro-Centre. ‘It’s all over. Small revolution in Thames Valley . . .’

‘Not quite.’ Beside me an elderly man in a grey topcoat, briefcase in hand, smiled to himself in a resigned way. I had noticed him taking shelter behind the enquiry desk, and assumed he was leaving the dome when the riot began. He pointed to the staff entrance near the cloakrooms. ‘I fear we won’t see our beds tonight . . .’

Pushing aggressively through the crowd, and almost marching in step, was a group of marshals, Metro-Centre engineers in orange overalls, and some fifty supporters in St George’s shirts. At their head was Tom Carradine, still in his sky-blue public relations uniform, but no longer the earnest figure whose faith in the mall I found so touching. He seemed small but poised, as watchful and unsmiling as a bullfighter faced with a stupid but dangerous bull. Behind him, forming his personal bodyguard, were the two marshals who had hurled Duncan Christie to the ground as he tried to press a bullet into my palm. Both marshals carried shotguns that I assumed they had looted from the many gun shops in the dome. Carradine’s right hand was raised above his head, and he signalled to the marshals with small movements of his forefinger. He was confident and undaunted, glad to be rising at last to the supreme challenge that faced him.

Hard on the marshals’ heels came William Sangster, broad shoulders swaying from side to side, massive head ducking like a boxer’s before climbing into the ring. His eyes scanned the crowd, as if searching for any former pupils who were still playing truant. He smiled in a disoriented way, unsure of himself and what he was doing with these armed men.

A shot rang out, a sharp roar like the slamming of a door. The concourse fell silent. A raised shotgun pointed to the ceiling, as the faint smoke from its barrel faded on the sweating air. The assistant commissioner lowered his megaphone, and the constables dismantling the barricade stopped to wait for their orders.

Carradine handed the shotgun to the marshals. He took off his peaked cap, revealing his blond hair swept back from a surprisingly steep forehead. He listened to the silence that filled the entrance hall, and then spoke briefly into the microphone passed to him by a marshal. His magnified voice in its motorway accent boomed over the heads of the police and soldiers outside the dome.

‘The Metro-Centre is secure . . . Withdraw all army units . . . Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure . . . We have hostages . . . Repeat, we have hostages . . .’

The sounds echoed through the mall, drumming against the roof. Carradine, the marshals and engineers were staring upwards, as if expecting salvation to descend from the sky. Even Sangster had stopped ducking his head and leaned back.

‘What are they doing?’ I kept my voice down and spoke to the elderly man standing wearily beside me. ‘They’re waiting for a miracle.’

‘Unlikely . . .’ He tried to summon a signal on his mobile, but gave up. ‘Still, you’re on the right track.’

‘These hostages? Who are they?’

‘That I can tell you. We are . . .’

There was a gasp from the crowd, and a hundred hands pointed to the ceiling of the security lobby, the narrow vestibule leading to the entrance hall. A steel fire door was slowly falling from its housing, shutting out the barricade, the assistant commissioner and his officers.

A deep metallic rumble like the clenching of a giant’s teeth filled the hall as the fire door settled onto the floor. The vibration moved away, a subsonic wave that seemed to take in smaller tremors from the exit doors of the dome, the answering calls from the furthest outposts of a vast vault that was sealing itself off from the world.

I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’

‘I know. Tell me—are we sealed in?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘The North Gate entrance?’

‘I imagine that’s also closed.’

‘And the side exits?’

‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’ He raised a hand to calm me, seeing that I was agitated. ‘It’s the fear of fire, you see. Any draught would turn a small blaze into a furnace.’

‘Right . . .’ I was surprised by how calm he seemed, as if he had known what would happen and had detached himself from all the excitement long before it began. He stared in a regretful way at his useless mobile, resigned to the prospect of being unable to contact his wife. Trying to rest my foot, I asked: ‘I take it you work here?’

‘In Accounts. We tend to have a good idea what’s going on. Mr Carradine is a very determined young man, but these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do . . .’

‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, being a washing machine has been a safe option. There was a shooting here this evening.’

‘The television actor? I’m very sorry. It’s probably best not to know if it really happened.’ He shook my hand. ‘I’ll rest here for a bit. You’ll need to find a bed for the night. There’s a huge selection to choose from . . .’

He sat in his chair behind the enquiry desk, a grey-haired sphinx ready to answer all questions but ignored by the crowd drifting across the entrance hall and unable to find its bearing. Carradine and his entourage had set off on an inspection tour of their new domain, apparently uninterested in the fate of all those trapped inside the dome.

I walked over to the steel fire door, so massive that it muffled all sounds of police and army activity. An emergency escape panel was set into the fire door, and I was tempted to make a run for it, but its electrical locks would be too much for me.

Besides, a new and more interesting world was waiting for me inside the dome, a self-contained universe of treasure and promise. The crowd was drifting back into the mall, resigned to a future of eternal shopping. The republic of the Metro-Centre had at last established itself, a faith trapped inside its own temple.