Instructed by the policewoman, the imam urged his followers into the garden. Three Asian youths in jeans and white shirts emerged into the light, followed by an elderly Pakistani man and a woman in a jellaba carrying a suitcase. Heads lowered, they moved through the now silent crowd, guarded by the firemen and police. As she passed me, the woman stumbled on the kerb, and I caught the stale, sweat-stained odour from her robe, the reek of fear.
I raised my hands to help her, but a strong shoulder knocked me off balance. Two of the hardware store assistants in St George’s shirts blocked my path, narrowed eyes staring over my head. I tripped onto one knee beside the Volvo, my hands pressed against a charred rag of plastic seating. Legs stepped over me, shopping bags swinging past my face. Without comment, the policewoman lifted me onto my feet, then walked me through the crowd to her car, where the imam sat alone in the back seat. His small congregation had vanished into the smoky air.
‘You’re with him?’ The policewoman opened the passenger door for me. ‘You can sit up front … ?’
‘No, no. I’m passing through. I’m a tourist.’
‘A tourist? We don’t get many of those.’ She slammed the door and turned away from me. ‘Next time try Brooklands Metro-Centre. Or Heathrow … everybody’s welcome there.’
I walked back to the car park, no longer surprised that the policewoman thought of a shopping mall and an airport as tourist attractions. I had witnessed a very suburban form of race riot, which had barely disturbed the peaceful commerce of the town. The shoppers grazed contentedly, like docile cattle. No voice had been raised, no stone thrown, and no violence displayed, except to the old Volvo and myself.
I drove out of the car park, following a sign that pointed to Shepperton and Weybridge, glad to be leaving this strange little town. I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger. The decision by the estate-dwellers to reject the imam was an exercise of consumer choice.
Everywhere St George’s flags were flying, from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices, as this nameless town celebrated its latest victory.
2
JOURNEYS SELDOM END when I think they do. Too often a piece of forgotten baggage goes on ahead and lies in wait for me when I least expect it, circling an empty carousel like evidence being assembled before a trial.
Airports, arrivals and the departure of one old pilot filled my mind as I entered Brooklands an hour later. Around me was a prosperous Thames Valley town, a pleasant terrain of comfortable houses, stylish office buildings and retail parks, every advertising man’s image of Britain in the twenty-first century. I passed a bright new sports stadium like an open-air nightclub, display screens showing a road-safety commercial that merged seamlessly into an elegant pitch for a platinum credit card. Brooklands basked. Prosperity glowed from every roof shingle and gravel drive, every golden Labrador and teenage girl riding her well-trained nag.
But I was still thinking of the frightened Muslim woman being escorted from the tiny mosque, the acid stench of her robe and the smell of terror that no perfume could mask. Something had gone seriously wrong in the Thames Valley, and already I identified her with my father, another victim of a malaise even deeper than shopping.
Three weeks earlier my father – Captain Stuart Pearson, formerly of British Airways and Middle East Airlines – set off on one of his regular Saturday afternoon outings to the Brooklands Metro-Centre. Still vigorous at seventy-five, he walked the eight hundred yards to the retail complex that was the west of London’s answer to the Bluewater mall near Dartford. Joining the crowd of shoppers, he crossed the central atrium on his way to the tobacconist that stocked his favourite Dunhill leaf.
Soon after two o’clock, a deranged gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing three shoppers and wounding fifteen more. The gunman escaped in the confusion that followed, but the police soon arrested a young man, Duncan Christie, a day-release patient with a criminal record and a long history of public disturbance. He had carried out an eccentric campaign against the huge mall, and a number of witnesses saw him flee the scene.
My father was hit in the head by a single bullet, and lost consciousness as fellow shoppers tried to revive him. With the other wounded he was taken to Brooklands Hospital, then transferred by helicopter to the specialist neurology unit at the Royal Free Hospital, where he died the next day.
I had not seen my father for several years, and in the hospital mortuary failed to recognize the tiny, aged face that clung to the bony points of his skull. Given the fifteen years he had spent in Dubai, I expected almost no one to attend the funeral service at the north London crematorium. A group of elderly BA pilots saw him off, grey but stalwart figures with a million miles in their ever-steady eyes. There were no local friends from Brooklands, but his solicitor’s deputy, a sympathetic woman in her forties named Susan Dearing, arrived as the service began and handed me the keys to my father’s flat.
Surprisingly, there was a representative from the Metro-Centre, a keen young manager from the public relations office who introduced himself to everyone as Tom Carradine, and seemed to see even this morbid event as a marketing opportunity. Masking his professional smile with an effort, he invited me to visit the mall on my next trip to Brooklands, as if something good might still come from the tragedy. I guessed that attendance at the funerals of shoppers who had died on the premises was part of the mall’s after-sales service, but I was too distracted to brush him off.
Two young women slipped into a rear pew as the recorded voluntary groaned from a concealed vent, a music that only the dead could appreciate, the sound of coffins straining like the timbers of storm-tossed galleons. One of the women laughed as the chaplain launched into his homily. Knowing nothing of my father, he was forced to recite the endless scheduled routes that Captain Pearson had flown. ‘The next year Stuart found himself flying to Sydney …’ Even I let out a giggle at this.
The women left as soon as the service ended, but I caught one of them watching me from the car park as the friend hunted for her keys. Dark-haired, with the kind of dishevelled prettiness that unsettles men, she was too young to be one of my father’s girlfriends, but I knew nothing about the old sky-dog’s last days. She waited irritably when her friend fumbled with the door lock, and tried to hide in the passenger seat. As their car passed she looked at me and nodded to herself, clearly wondering if I was too louche or too frivolous to match up to my father. For some reason I was sure that we would see each other again.
The traffic into Brooklands had slowed, filling the six-lane highway built to draw the population of south-east England towards the Metro-Centre. Dominating the landscape around it, the immense aluminium dome housed the largest shopping mall in Greater London, a cathedral of consumerism whose congregations far exceeded those of the Christian churches. Its silver roof rose above the surrounding office blocks and hotels like the hull of a vast airship. With its visual echoes of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, it fully justified its name, lying at the heart of a new metropolis that encircled London, a perimeter city that followed the path of the great motorways. Consumerism dominated the lives of its people, who looked as if they were shopping whatever they were doing.
Yet there were signs that a few serpents had made their home in this retail paradise. Brooklands was an old county town, but in the poorer outskirts I passed Asian shops that had been vandalized, newsagents boarded up and plastered with St George’s stickers. There were too many slogans and graffiti for comfort, too many BNP and KKK signs scrawled on cracked windows, too many St George’s flags flying from suburban bungalows. Never far from the defensive walls of the motorways, there was more than a hint of paranoia, as if these people of the retail city were waiting for something violent to happen.
Unable to breathe inside the low-slung Jensen, I opened the window, preferring the roadside microclimate of petrol and diesel fumes. The traffic unpacked itself, and I turned left at the sign ‘Brooklands Motor Museum’, moving down an avenue of detached houses behind high walls. My father had made his last home in a residential complex of three-storey apartment buildings in a landscaped park, reached by a narrow lane off the main avenue. As I drove between the privet walls I was still trying to prepare a few pat answers for the ‘interview’ that would decide my fitness for the post of his son, an application that had been turned down nearly forty years earlier.
Unconsciously I reapplied for the post whenever I met him – he was always affectionate but distant, as if he had run into a junior member of an old cabin crew. My mother sent him details of my school reports, and later my LSE graduation photograph, but only to irritate him. Luckily, I lost interest in him during my teens, and last saw him at the funeral of my stepmother, when he was too distressed to speak.
I had always wanted him to like me, but I thought of the single piece of baggage on the deserted carousel. How would I react if I found a framed photograph of myself on his mantelpiece, and an album lovingly filled with cuttings from Campaign about my then successful career?
Holding the door keys in my hand, I stepped from the car and walked across the deep gravel to the entrance, half expecting the neighbours to emerge from their flats and greet me. Surprisingly, not a window or curtain stirred, and I climbed the stairs to the top-floor landing. After a count of five, I turned the key and let myself into the hallway.
The curtains were partly drawn, and the faint light seemed to illuminate what was unmistakably a stage set. This was an old man’s flat, with its leather armchair and reading lamp, pipe rack and humidor. I almost expected my father to appear on cue, walk to the rosewood drinks cabinet and pour himself a Scotch and soda, take a favourite volume from the bookshelf and peruse its pages. It needed only the telephone to ring, and the drama would begin.
Sadly, the play had ended, and the telephone would never ring, or not for my father. I tried to wave the scene away, annoyed with my own flippancy, a professional habit of trivializing the whole of life into the clichés of a TV commercial. The unopened mail on the hall table struck a more sombre note. Curiously, several envelopes carried black bands and were addressed to my father, as if he himself would read them.
I walked across the sitting room and drew the curtains. The bright garden light flooded through the scent of stale tobacco and staler memories. In front of me, looming across the houses and office buildings, was the silver dome of the Metro-Centre, dominating the landscape to the west of London. For the first time I realized that its presence was almost reassuring.
For the next hour I moved around the flat, opening desk drawers and kitchen cupboards, like a burglar trying to strike up a relationship with a householder whose home he was ransacking. I was introducing myself to my father, even though I was paying him a rather late visit. I shook my head a little sadly over his spartan bedroom with its narrow mattress, part of a widower’s self-denial. Here an old man had dreamed his last dreams of flight, a reverie of wings that overflew deserts and tropical estuaries. I opened the wardrobe and counted his six uniform suits, hanging together like an entire flight crew of senior captains. On the dressing table was a set of silver-backed hairbrushes that I assumed he had given to my stepmother, memories that would greet him each morning of this gaunt but still glamorous woman. Another memory of married years was an ancient bottle of Chanel, contents long evaporated. Pressing the cap, I picked out a faint scent, echoes of a much-loved skin.
In the bathroom I opened the medicine cabinet, expecting to find a small warehouse of vitamin supplements. But the shelves were bare apart from a denture wash and a packet of senna pods. The old man had kept himself fit, using the rowing machine and exercise cycle in the spare bedroom. In the utility room beyond the kitchen was an ironing board and a table with the maid’s electric kettle and biscuit tin. Behind the piles of ironing and a row of heavily starched shirts was a workspace with a computer and printer, a few books stacked beside it.
I went back to the sitting room and scanned the shelves, with their rows of popular novels, cricket almanacs and restaurant guides to airline destinations: Hong Kong, Geneva, Miami. At some point I would go through his desk, hunting out share certificates, bank statements, tax returns, and assemble a financial picture of the estate he had left, money more than useful now that I was unemployed and likely to remain so.
But I left the drawers closed. I had learned enough to grasp that I scarcely knew this old man, and probably never would. I was looking for myself, but clearly I had played no part in his life.
In the centre of the mantelpiece was a framed photograph of a youthful airline captain standing with his crew beside a BOAC Comet, presumably my father’s first command. Gallant and confident, he looked ten years younger than his crew, and might have been my junior brother.
On either side of the photograph was a set of smaller frames, each containing a woman’s holiday snapshot. One showed a cheerful blonde legging her way out of a sports car. A second blonde posed in tennis whites beside a Cairo hotel, while a third grinned happily in front of the Taj Mahal. Others smiled across nightclub tables and lounged by swimming pools. All the women in this trophy corridor were happy and carefree; even the rather intense thirty-year-old in a fur coat whom I recognized as my mother seemed briefly to revive in front of my father’s camera lens. The display was oddly endearing, and already I liked the old pilot and decided I would get to know him better.
I drew the sitting-room curtains, ready to leave for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer at Brooklands police station, who would bring me up to date with the investigation into the tragic shooting. Trying not to think of the deranged youth who had fired into the crowd of shoppers, I looked out at the Brooklands racing track half a mile away. A section of the embankment had been preserved as a monument to the 1930s, the heroic age of speed, the era of the Schneider Trophy seaplane race and record-breaking flights, when glamorous women pilots in white overalls lit their Craven A cigarettes as they leaned against their aircraft. The public had been seized by a dream of speed no advertising agency could rival.
A faint smell had entered the room, the tang of an expensive but unpleasant cologne. Standing in the shadows beside the drawn curtains, I saw a thickset man in a black suit pause in the doorway, right hand feeling for the light switch on the wall. In his left hand he carried what seemed to be a stout metal truncheon, which he raised to test the darkness.
Willing myself to keep my nerve, I breathed steadily and edged away from the window, hidden from the intruder by the sitting-room door. In the light reflected from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece I could see the heavily built visitor still hovering in the hall, unsure whether to enter the room. Then I tripped over a pair of my father’s golf shoes, stumbled and knocked the shade from the standard lamp beside the desk. The intruder flinched back, the truncheon above his head, searching for a target. I threw myself at the door, shoulder-charging it like a rugby prop forward, and heard the man’s hand hit the wall, shattering the face of his wristwatch. He turned in a flurry of huge arms, sweat and hair oil, but I pinned the door against his hand, forcing his pudgy fingers to drop the truncheon.
I lost my balance and fell across the leather armchair. When I stood up and pulled back the door, gasping at the scented air, the man had gone. Feet sounded unevenly down the stairs, the limping gait of someone with a fractured kneecap. Another door slammed, but when I went to the sitting-room window the car park and gardens were silent.
I drew the curtains and opened the windows, then sat in the armchair and waited for the intruder’s scent to disperse. I assumed that I had been so awed by my father’s flat that I had forgotten to close the front door after me when I arrived. The visitor with the truncheon had behaved more like a housebreaker or a private detective than a neighbour calling to offer his sympathies.
When I left for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer, I found the ‘truncheon’ on the floor beside the door. I picked it up, unrolling a heavy magazine, a copy of the Journal of Paediatric Surgery.
3
‘I’VE THOUGHT OF IT,’ I said to Sergeant Mary Falconer. ‘Cyclops …’
‘Is that his name?’ She spoke slowly, as if trying to calm one of her dimmer prisoners. ‘The man in your father’s flat?’
‘No.’ I pointed through the canteen window at the roof of the Metro-Centre. ‘I meant the shopping mall. It’s a monster – it makes us seem so small.’
Without looking up from her notes, she said: ‘That’s probably the idea.’
‘Really? Why, Sergeant?’
‘So we buy things to make us grow again.’
‘That’s interesting. It’s almost a slogan. You should be working for the Metro-Centre.’
‘I hope not.’
‘I take it you don’t do your shopping there?’
‘Not if I can help it.’ Sergeant Falconer glanced into her pocket mirror, permanently to hand beside her files, and threaded a loose blonde hair into its tight braid. ‘I’d keep away from the place, Mr Pearson.’
‘I will. I wish my father had taken your advice.’
‘We all do. That was a terrible tragedy. Superintendent Leighton asked me to convey his …’
I waited for the sergeant to complete her sentence, but her mind had drifted away. She turned to the window, her eyes avoiding the Metro-Centre. A fast-tracked graduate entry, she was clearly destined for higher things than consoling bereaved relatives, not an ideal role for a steely but oddly vulnerable woman. She seemed unsure of me, and nervous of herself, forever glancing at her fingernails and checking her make-up, as if pieces of an elaborate disguise were in danger of falling apart. Much of her appearance was an obvious fake – the immaculate beauty-salon make-up, the breakfast TV accent, but was this part of a double bluff? In the interview room I explained that I had hardly known my father, and she listened sympathetically, though keen to get off the subject of his death. In an effort to reduce the tension, she opened her mouth and smiled at me in a surprisingly full-lipped way, almost a come-on, then retreated behind her most formal manner.
She tapped her notebook with a well-chewed pencil. ‘This man you say attacked you …?’
‘No. He didn’t attack me. I attacked him. In fact, I probably injured him. He may be a doctor. You could check the local hospital.’
‘What exactly happened?’
‘I was drawing the curtains, looked round, and he was there, holding a kind of club.’ I rolled up the paediatric journal and raised it across the table, as if about to strike Sergeant Falconer on the head, then let her take it from me. ‘I probably overreacted. It’s a fault of mine.’
‘Why is that?’ The sergeant stared at me for a few seconds. ‘Do you know?’
‘I can guess.’ Something about this attractive but quirky policewoman made me want to talk. ‘My mother never remarried. I always felt I had to stick up for her. If the doctor complains, say I’ve been under a lot of stress.’
‘That’s true. Sadly, it won’t end for some time. Prepare yourself, Mr Pearson.’ In a matter-of-fact tone, as if reciting a bus timetable, she said: ‘This afternoon the accused will be brought back to Brooklands from Richmond police station. He’ll be held here overnight and appear before the magistrates tomorrow.’
‘Full marks to the police. Who is he?’
‘Duncan Christie. Aged twenty-five, white, a Brooklands resident. He’s already been charged with the murder of your father and two other victims. We expect he will be sent for trial at Guildford Crown Court.’ Sergeant Falconer pointed sternly to my bruised hands. ‘It’s important that nothing prejudices the hearing, Mr Pearson. You’ll attend court tomorrow?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know whether I can trust myself.’
‘I understand. The trial may not be for six months. By then …’
‘I’ll have calmed down? Guildford Crown Court … I take it he’ll be found guilty?’
‘We can’t say. I interviewed three witnesses who are certain they saw Christie with the weapon.’
‘All the same, he got away. No one stopped him.’
‘There was chaos, a complete stampede. The paramedics had to fight their way into the Metro-Centre. Four thousand people fled to the exits. Hundreds were injured trying to get out. There’s a moral there, Mr Pearson.’
‘And my father paid the price.’ Without thinking, I took her hand, surprised by its hot palm. ‘Why shoot an old man?’
‘Your father wasn’t the target, Mr Pearson.’ Quietly, she withdrew her hand, and let it lie limply on the table like an exhibit. ‘The sniper fired at random into the crowd.’
‘Insane … This Christie fellow, some sort of mental patient. Why was he allowed onto the streets?’
‘He was on day release from Northfield Hospital. The doctors felt he was ready to see his wife and child. It was a judgement call.’
‘You sound doubtful.’
‘We’re not psychiatrists, Mr Pearson. Christie was well known in Brooklands. He was always campaigning against the Metro-Centre.’
‘Quite a target to pick.’
Sergeant Falconer closed her files. I expected a display of passion from her, a denunciation of this psychopathic misfit, but her tone was as neutral as ice. ‘His daughter was injured by a contractor’s lorry. Some steel rails rolled off during one of his demos. The company offered compensation but he refused. He kept breaking the terms of his probation and was sectioned.’
‘Good. They got something right.’
‘It was a way of keeping him out of prison. At the time he had a lot of support.’
‘Support?’ I digested this slowly, trying not to look Sergeant Falconer in the eyes. Despite the neutral tone, I felt that she was trying to tell me something, and had invited me for coffee in the canteen so that she could address the real purpose behind our meeting. I said, calmly: ‘Sergeant? Go on.’
‘Not everyone likes the Metro-Centre. I can’t give you any names, but they think it encourages people in the wrong way. Everyone wants more and more, and if they don’t get it they’re ready to be …’
‘Violent? Here, in leafy Surrey? The consumer paradise? It’s hard to believe. Still, you can’t miss the banners and flags, the men in St George’s shirts.’
‘Team leaders. They help us control the crowds. Or that’s what Superintendent Leighton likes to think.’ The sergeant gazed warily at the ceiling. ‘Be careful if you go out at night, Mr Pearson.’
She sat back, turning her face in profile. The mask of the policewoman had slipped, revealing the emotional flatness of a strong-willed but insecure graduate. In her left-handed way she wanted my help. I remembered that not once had she criticized Duncan Christie, despite the pain and tragedy he had wrought.
I said: ‘Right … You hate the Metro-Centre, Sergeant?’
‘Not really. In a last-Thursday-of-the-month kind of way. Not hate, exactly.’
‘And the Brooklands area?’
Her shoulders eased, and she put away her pocket mirror, as if she realized that self-vigilance would never be enough. ‘I’ve applied for a transfer.’
‘Too much violence?’
‘The threat of it.’
I wanted to take her hand again, but she seemed to be blushing. As the afternoon ended, a reddish glow lit the deep mirror of the Metro-Centre dome, an inner sun.
I said: ‘It looks like it’s waking up.’
‘It never sleeps. Believe me, it’s wide awake. It has its own cable channel. Lifestyle guide, household hints, especially for households that know when to take a hint.’
‘Racist incitement?’
‘Along those lines. There are people who think it’s preparing us for a new world.’
‘And who’s behind it all?’
‘No one. That’s the beauty of it …’
She stood up, gathering her files. I could see that she was closing herself away. To begin with she had talked to me as if I were a child, and I assumed that her role was to defuse my anger and send me back to London. But she had used our meeting to get across a message of her own. In a way, she herself was the message, a bundle of unease and disquiet wrapped inside an elegant blonde package. She had slipped a few ribbons and then quickly retied them.
As we moved through the tables, I asked: ‘Did you find the weapon this Christie fellow used? What was it? Some mail-order Kalashnikov?’
‘It’s not turned up yet. A Heckler & Koch semi-automatic.’
‘Heckler & Koch? That’s a police-issue machine gun. It might have been stolen from a police station.’
‘It was.’ Sergeant Falconer surveyed the empty canteen as if seeing it for the first time. ‘An inquiry is under way. You’ll be kept informed, Mr Pearson.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Tell me, which station was it stolen from?’
‘Brooklands Central.’ She spoke with deliberate casualness. ‘Where we are now.’
‘This station? It’s hard to believe …’
But Sergeant Falconer was no longer listening to me. She stepped to the window and peered down into the avenue beside the entrance to the station car park. A crowd was forming, well-dressed Brooklands residents in smart trenchcoats, many carrying Metro-Centre shopping bags. They filled the pavement outside the station, held back by half a dozen constables.
Several burly men in St George’s shirts acted as stewards, steering people away from a young black woman who stood in the centre of the road, holding the hand of a small child. The mother was clearly exhausted, trying to cover her swollen upper lip and cheek. But she ignored the hostile crowd and stared over the glaring faces at the police station windows.
‘Mrs Christie, and their bairn. Did she have to bring her along?’ Sergeant Falconer frowned at her watch. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Pearson, I didn’t want you exposed to all this …’
‘Don’t worry.’ I stood next to her at the window, inhaling her scent, a heady mix of Calèche and oestrogen. I stared at the young black woman, standing alone with her anger and fierce intelligence. ‘She’s got guts of a kind.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for her. I’ll get you out into a side street.’
Flashbulbs flickered near the gates to the car park. People in the crowd were hurling bouquets of torn flowers at Mrs Christie. As she brushed away the blood-red petals a set of TV lights lit her tired face.
‘Sergeant … the crowd’s working itself up. You’re going to have a riot.’
‘A riot?’ She beckoned me to the staircase outside the canteen. ‘Mr Pearson, people don’t riot in Surrey. They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous …’
We passed the empty CID offices, where computer screens glimmered at each other across untidy desks. The staircase windows looked out over the station car park, where the crowd pressed against the cordon of constables. Uniformed officers filled the hallway below us, ready to receive the prisoner.
Already spectators were running across the car park. A police car forced its way through, siren keening, followed by a white van with a wire-mesh windscreen guard lowered like a visor. A bottle of mineral water burst against it, sending a spume of frothing Perrier across the glass.
There was a roar from the spectators already inside the gates, the visceral baying of a mob who had scented a nearby guillotine. The police officers in the reception area moved into the yard, forming a cordon around the van as its rear doors opened.
Swept into the centre of the mêlée was the young black woman, daughter clasped in her arms. I waited for someone to rescue her, but my eyes were fixed on the man who was stepping from the van. A constable threw a grey blanket over him, but for a few seconds I saw his sallow, unshaved face, scarred chin pockmarked by acne, forehead flushed by recent punches. He was unaware of the crowd and the policemen jostling him, and stared at the radio aerials above the station, as if expecting a message from a distant star to be relayed to him. His head swayed drunkenly, a vacancy of mind coupled with a deep inner hunger that was almost messianic. I could see years of poor nutrition, self-neglect and arrogance, the face of assassins through the ages, of rootless metropolitan men from an earlier era who had survived into the twenty-first century, as out of place among the four-wheel drives and school runs of prosperous suburbia as Neanderthal Man discovered in a sun lounger beside a Costa Blanca swimming pool. Somehow this misfit and dement had evaded the juvenile courts and social-service inspectors, and had taught himself to hate a shopping mall so intensely that he could steal a weapon and fire at random into a lunch-hour crowd, killing a retired airline pilot about to buy his favourite tobacco.
Der kostenlose Auszug ist beendet.