Kingdom Come (26 page)

I said: ‘So you smuggled Christie out of Brooklands? Where, exactly?’

‘Sangster drove him to a disused chicken farm near Guildford that Fairfax had helped foreclose. His wife and daughter turned up in a camper van. I kept him sedated and told him we’d try again. He was definitely up for it.’

‘The police found him so quickly. Someone must have tipped them off.’

‘We did.’ Maxted whistled through his teeth without thinking. ‘We needed to get him cleared by the magistrate. The deaths were tragic, but we hoped everyone would see sense. In fact, the opposite happened. The Metro-Centre shooting stirred everything up. People felt frightened. They could cope with Asian youths defending their shops, but a deranged assassin with a machine gun . . . ? There were rallies at the sports grounds night after night, Brooklands was seriously threatening to turn into a fascist republic. But it never made that final flip.’

‘You sound disappointed. Why not? Too British?’

‘In a way.’ Maxted listened to a volley of shots echo through the atrium. ‘Sporting rifles—that about spells it out. The problem was David Cruise. He was too amiable, too second-rate. Then a minor miracle happened, someone we hadn’t counted on turned up.’

‘Me?’

‘Right. You turned up. Your father had died, and you wanted to know why. It didn’t take you long to realize that something very fishy was going on.’

‘Julia came to the funeral. That started me thinking.’

‘Richard . . .’ Julia stood shivering behind me, her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’d helped to kill a fine old man. I knew how stupid I’d been, listening to all this talk about elective madness.’

‘Talk, maybe. But I was right.’ Maxted quietly ignored her, addressing me directly. ‘The assassination failed, but everything moved up a gear. It needed a final push. A bomb in the Metro-Centre, a huge riot that would overwhelm the police, David Cruise proclaiming an independent state.’

‘He was too canny for that.’

‘So we found. The riot went ahead, Sangster planted another bomb near the town hall, and we did our best to stir up the crowd. But without Cruise it was hopeless. Fairfax’s death frightened off a lot of our key supporters.’

‘How did he die?’

‘I guess his fingers were rusty. Never liked the man. He was always a bit too impetuous. The last person to be a bomb-maker.’

‘But why pick my car?’

‘That was Fairfax’s idea. He knew you were on to something. And he loathed you, anyway. It was a warning, a reminder of how easy it would be to frame you. Leighton and Sergeant Falconer went along with that—it’s why you were never charged and the car’s ownership was never identified. We had you where we needed you. But everything collapsed when Cruise refused to take the bait. He came from the TV world, and he needed an autocue. Then a new friend appeared with the right kind of skills and a taste for stylized violence.’

‘A suburban Dr Goebbels?’

Maxted stared at me with real distaste, then managed a weak smile. ‘You saw fascism as just another sales opportunity. Psychopathology was a handy marketing tool. David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy, a shrink-proof shaman of the multi-storey car parks, Kafka in a tired trenchcoat, a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.’

‘Still, everyone admired him.’

‘Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbours’ wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbours’ asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt. We’re worthless, Richard—to your credit, you know that.’

‘And David Cruise knew it. Who shot him? Did you organize that?’

‘Definitely not. That must have been Christie, finishing the job. He’s somewhere here, a fugitive protected by the one place he hated.’

‘And Sergeant Falconer? Is she after him?’

‘I assume so. I dare say Superintendent Leighton can feel the wind changing. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has other targets.’

‘You and Sangster? And Julia?’

‘And you, Richard. Don’t forget that.’

JULIA HAD LEFT
the room, too nervous to look me in the face. She spoke to the last of the patients, an elderly couple who had been swept into the Metro-Centre on the night of the riot. Sensibly they had taken refuge, while the elevators still worked, in a health-food restaurant on the sixth floor. They held out there for more than a month, living on dates, figs and pomegranates, like travellers in a new desert, too timid and too sensible to walk down the escalators into the hell unfolding below them.

I followed Maxted into the entrance to the first-aid post. The atrium was deserted, its floor covered with debris that had fallen from the roof.

‘So what happens now?’ I asked. Despite everything he had told me, I still liked him. He was restless and insecure, but trying to conduct his life according to a set of desperate principles. He would never be brought to trial for the deaths and injuries he had caused. He lived out a fantasy, as quietly deranged as any psychiatrist I had met, the only real inmate in the asylum he ruled.

‘Try not to think.’ Maxted clasped and unclasped his bruised hands. ‘I hope the police decide to rush the place. Carradine and Sangster still have hostages locked into the Novotel, plus a couple of hundred hard-core supporters. They have nothing to lose. Meanwhile, here’s a first taste of real madness . . .’

He pointed to the bears on their podium. Nearby was the bed holding the body of David Cruise, secure inside his oxygen tent. His tour of the Metro-Centre was over, and he had been left like a slain hero to the kindness of the bears. Half a dozen supporters in St George’s shirts knelt on the floor, faces raised to the stuffed beasts.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked Maxted. ‘Waiting for the music?’

‘They’re praying. It’s your consumer dream come true, Richard. They’re praying to the teddy bears . . .’

LEAVING MAXTED, I
stepped slowly across the atrium, avoiding the spurs of glass and torn aluminium that had fallen from the roof. Somewhere above me, on the abandoned galleries, Duncan Christie would be waiting for another target to appear. He had killed David Cruise—was I, the ventriloquist, the next bull’s-eye in his sights?

I passed the group of praying supporters, avoiding the stench that rose from David Cruise’s bed. Several of them had jars of honey in front of them, offerings to the deities who guided their lives. One middle-aged woman in a St George’s shirt, blonde hair knotted behind her neck, was rocking to and fro, humming to herself. Her husband, a hefty fellow wearing ice-hockey armour, joined her, and I heard their consoling verse
.

. . . if you go down to the woods today,

you’d better go in disguise.

For every bear that ever there was . . .

39

THE LAST STAND

ITS OWN SHADOWS
stalked the Metro-Centre. Twice during the night I was woken by Carradine’s marshals, firing at random into the dark. Helicopters soared tirelessly above the roof, searchlights throwing restless shadows that leapt from a hundred doorways, like the crazed remnants of a routed army.

At 5 a.m. I gave up any hope of sleep. Barely able to breathe, I sat behind the balcony curtains, thinking through Maxted’s account of my father’s death, and how a group of amateurish conspirators had blundered into murder. But their crime was now little more than a small annexe to what was taking place in the Metro-Centre. In the three days since the abduction of David Cruise’s body, and his failure to rouse himself for a curtain call, life within the dome had severed its last links to reality.

Despite all the violence, the vast mall was an unlooted treasure house that preserved the intact dream of a thousand suburbs. In the unlit interiors of furniture stores, in carpet emporiums and demonstration kitchens, the heart of a despised way of life still beat strongly. Leaving Sangster and his self-hating motives to one side, I admired Carradine and his mutineers, and the robustly physical world they had based on their consumerist dream. The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies, where the only reality was to be found in the certainties of the washing machine and the ceramic hob, as precious as the iron stove in a pioneer’s shack.

At six, having destroyed the possibility of sleep, the helicopters withdrew, and dawn began its queasy descent through the dome’s roof, a cumbersome special effect staged for an exhausted audience. The pearly, metallic light exposed the silent plazas of a retail city whose streets were too dangerous to walk, whose crossroads waited like targets for the unwary.

Supermarkets were open all day, for anyone hungry enough to venture between the aisles and risk blundering into a meat locker that incubated every known disease. Freezer cabinets as hot as ovens would suddenly burst from their hinges, each one a vent of hell exhaling a miasma that drifted over the display counters. After digging in the rubble of unwanted cans, I would finally find a few tins of pâté, artichoke hearts in vinegar, jars of butter beans as pale as death.

I would then make my way to Julia, climbing to the second-floor gallery that circled the atrium, take a service staircase to the mezzanine and rush the final few steps past the landing where my father had been shot. An exhausting route, but Julia depended on my modest shopping trips. Limping on my infected foot, which she ritually rebandaged, I made my twice-a-day runs like a gentleman caller in a city under siege. Julia slept in a bed next to the elderly couple, with whom she shared her rations. In the treatment room she made friendly small talk, her eyes on the supermarket bag, like an unfaithful wife determined to survive. She knew I had forgiven her, but she hated me to watch her eat, as if part of her rejected her own right to life. Like everyone, she waited for the siege to end. I urged her to join me in the Holiday Inn, but she refused to leave the first-aid post, the only refuge of sanity in the dome.

AT NOON, WHEN
the shadows briefly left us to ourselves, a few people crossed the atrium and began praying to the bears. Loyal supporters too weak to work, they wandered around the dome, rattling the grilles of the empty supermarkets in the hope of finding something to eat. One or two of them had marked barcodes on the backs of their hands, trying to resemble the consumer goods they most admired.

I watched them as I moved along the second-floor deck, feeling sorry for them until I discovered that my favourite deli had been looted during the night. This Polish speciality shop had been a modest haven of eastern European delicacies, spurned by the sweeter palates of Brooklands man and woman. Now it had been stripped of everything remotely edible, its doors chained and padlocked.

Unable to face Julia with an empty shopping bag, I decided to climb to the third floor. Pulling myself up the hand rail was a huge effort, but I rested on every landing, and there was safety on the upper floors. Madness lay below like the mist that covered the atrium.

I reached the third-floor gallery and sat on the top step until my head cleared. Beside me, pools of liquid evaporated in the sunlight. I watched them shrink and dissolve, unsure if I was seeing a mirage. Other drops formed a trail along the arcade, splashes from a casually carried bucket. I dipped my fingers in the nearest pool and raised them to my mouth. Immediately I thought of my Jensen, and the familiar aromatic reek of filling stations.

Petrol? Ten feet away, outside a discount furniture store, was a set of wet shoeprints, a trainer’s sole clearly stamped on the stone floor. I stepped into the foyer and searched the three-piece suites, drawn up like a dozing herd.

Petrol, I was sure. I found the source in a demonstration dining room, a domestic universe of rosewood-effect tables, polished chairs and curtains swagged over glassless windows, missing only the dinner-party chatter relayed from a loudspeaker. A jerrycan stamped with the logo of the Metro-Centre motor pool sat under the dining table, its cap missing, giving off a potent stench in the overheated air.

I backed away from it, aware that the smallest spark would ignite the vapour. I left the store and moved along the deck. The arcade of furniture stores was an arsonist’s paradise, retail space after retail space filled with inflammable sofas and varnished cabinets.

Was this a last-ditch threat by Carradine and his Metro-Centre supporters? Six stores along the arcade, I found a second jerrycan in a bedding store, surrounded by a harem’s wealth of goose-down pillows, fluffy quilts and duvets. The aroma of a hundred filling stations, threatening but somehow enticing, drifted from the silent stores and rose into the haze below the roof.

Fifteen minutes later I reached the top floor, where a third jerrycan sat on the landing above the stairwell, petrol slopped around it. A police helicopter drifted over the dome, throwing its spidery shadows across the galleries, a flicker of rotor blades scrambling through the dead vines and yuccas.

Above the cuffing downdraught I heard the fracture-cry of plate glass falling to the floor. A display stand collapsed in the entrance to a kitchenware store, hurling saucepans and pieces of heavy ovenware onto the landing. I pressed myself against the wall, almost expecting a furnace of petroleum vapour to explode from the store.

Lying at my feet between a colander and a copper steamer was a police-issue firearm, a Heckler & Koch machine gun of the type that had killed my father. I stared down at it in a befuddled way, trying to grasp how it had become a useful kitchen aid for the busy Brooklands home-maker.

Without thinking, I picked the weapon from the floor, surprised by its weight. The firing pin was cocked, and I held the pistol grip, easing my forefinger around the trigger.

I peered into the darkened shop. A woman in a black police uniform, dishevelled blonde hair torn from her scalp, struggled among the scattered saucepans. She thrashed on the floor, kicking at a cascade of falling frying pans, a demented housewife attacking her own home. She lunged at a man who burst from the darkness, and seized him around the waist. He threw her aside and emerged into the light, feet sliding on the saucepan lids, like an enraged husband escaping for ever from suburban life.

He gasped at the air and turned to me, seeing me for the first time. His camouflage jacket stank of petrol, as if he were about to combust spontaneously in the sunlight. He calmed himself, and a scarred hand reached out for the machine gun that I pointed towards him.

Recognizing Duncan Christie, I stepped back and levelled the weapon at his chest. Christie edged forward, aware that I would probably miss him if I fired. His quirky mouth with its unhealed lips worked through a set of grimaces, some whispered message to himself. His hand tried to grip the barrel of the gun, but as he stared into my face, willing me not to fire, he recognized me through my beard.

‘Mr Pearson? Remember? Duncan Christie . . .’

Sergeant Falconer leaned against the doorway, too exhausted to throw herself at Christie. She gasped something into the radio clipped to her left shoulder, then signalled to me with her free hand.

‘Shoot him, Richard! Shoot him now!’

I watched Christie, well aware that I was holding the actual weapon that had killed my father. Looking at this hopeless misfit, sustained by a single obsession, I knew that his life was about to end, expiring in the sights of a police marksman waiting in the upper galleries.

‘Mr Pearson . . .’ Christie exposed his broken teeth. ‘You know what happened. She made me kill your father . . .’

Sergeant Falconer shouted in warning as Christie lunged towards me. I moved across the arcade, raised the weapon above my head and flung it over the rail.

‘Go!’ I shouted at Christie. ‘You know what to do! Run . . . !’

SERGEANT FALCONER STOOD
unsteadily among the clutter of saucepans, one hand on an injured knee, the other trying to tether her blonde hair to her head.

‘Mr Pearson? For pity’s sake, you’re madder than he is.’

‘I forgive him.’ I listened to Christie racing along the gallery below us, running through endless arcades of autumn fashions and television sets, fleeing from a universe of digital cameras and cocktail cabinets. ‘He can go—if he can find somewhere.’

‘Forgive him?’ Sergeant Falconer switched off her radio. The bruises on her forehead were showing through her pale skin, but she seemed far more determined than the uneasy woman I had seen making tea in Fairfax’s office. I guessed that she had put the murder conspiracy behind her and found a new compass bearing in her life. ‘Forgive him? For your father? It doesn’t matter.’

‘No? It’s all that does matter. For what it’s worth, I forgive you. I don’t think you knew what you were doing.’

‘Maybe not. Anyway, it’s too late. Just get out of here. Take Dr Goodwin and anyone else. You’re in real danger.’

‘Why? Sergeant . . . ?’

‘They’re coming in. It’s all over, Mr Pearson. You’ll have to find another playgroup.’

‘And Christie?’

‘I’ll arrest him later.’

As she spoke there was a heavy explosion from the South Gate entrance hall. The deck swayed beneath my feet, and the roof of the Metro-Centre lifted slightly and then settled as a cascade of dust fell like talc. The smog cloud that covered the atrium seethed and swirled, billows chasing themselves around the bears.

The siege was ending.