I was staring gloomily at the decanter when the lift doors at last opened. Two security men emerged, carrying a leather restraining harness. They approached me without speaking, feinting around the furniture like dog handlers cornering an alcoholic pit bull, but I was sure that they knew who I was. After checking the flat they beckoned me to the lift.
‘Mr Pearson, we’ll have to see you out.’
‘Good. I’ll come quietly. I take it you’re the Rapid Response Unit?’
‘Dr Maxted said—’
‘Don’t tell me. I couldn’t cope . . .’
I assumed that Maxted had slipped away on some errand of his own, knowing that I would set off the alarm, and had told the security men to release me half an hour later. I entered the lift, the guards behind me with their harness, ready to throw it over me at the first sign of dementia.
The doors closed. In the pause before the lift moved there was the distant sound of a powerful explosion, a loud percussive boom that entered the shaft above our heads and rocked the lift.
I stepped into the night air, and searched the sky for the burning debris of this huge firework. A police car was parked beside the rhododendron screen. The headlights were on full beam, and the distracted woman constable at the wheel was trying to speak through a blizzard of radio chatter. She saw me walk to the security barrier and signalled me to stop.
As I approached the police car a blonde-haired woman in a blue tracksuit and trainers emerged from the admin offices. She strode past me, and caught the tang of whisky on the dark air.
‘Mr Pearson?’ Sergeant Mary Falconer seemed surprised to find me. She pointed to the security men still watching me from the elevator. ‘What are you doing here? Did you break in?’
‘Break in?’ I raised my hands to seize her shoulders, and then let her step back. ‘This place really is a madhouse. For the last hour I’ve been trying to break out.’
‘Break out?’ She fussed with a stray hair. ‘Why? How did you get in?’
‘Forget it. No wonder the crime rate is soaring. Dr Maxted brought me here.’
‘Dr Maxted? Are you a patient of his?’
‘At this rate I soon will be. Now, I need to find a taxi.’
‘Hold on a moment. Just wait there . . .’
Sergeant Falconer listened to the radio chatter and rubbed the dial of her watch. She was dressed for the athletics field, or at least a run around the neighbourhood, though scarcely a hair or eyelash was out of place. At the same time she seemed ill at ease, like a supporting actor assigned the wrong role. Once again she reminded me of a strait-laced but vulnerable teacher aware that her class had seen her in a piece of questionable behaviour.
A second police car turned off the main road and approached the security barrier, but Sergeant Falconer was too distracted to notice it. She listened to the ambulance sirens in the distance and drew a mobile phone from her tracksuit top. She stared at the text message, then crossed the road to the second police car. She took the radio earpiece from the driver, listened briefly and ran back to me. For the first time she was alert and focused, as if the script she had been following now synchronized with reality.
‘Sergeant Falconer . . . ?’ I held her arm. ‘Something’s going on. What are you people playing at?’
‘Get into the car.’ Avoiding my breath, she pushed me through the rear door. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’
‘What is it?’ I watched the second police car reverse and speed away. ‘Have they caught the gunman?’
‘Who? Which gunman?’
‘The man who killed my father. They’ve arrested him?’
‘No.’ She fastened her seat belt, beckoning the woman driver to climb the grass embankment around the security barrier. ‘It’s the Metro-Centre. There’s been a bomb attack. Heavy damage, but no casualties. So far . . .’
16
THE BOMB ATTACK
THE TEMPLE WAS UNDER THREAT, and the congregation was rallying to defend it. Crowds of football supporters filled the streets, running past our police car as it sat in the stalled traffic near the town hall. Urged on by Sergeant Falconer, the woman constable tried to force our way through the throngs of fans and evening shoppers. All the matches in the Thames Valley Olympics had been abandoned as the news broke of the bomb attack at the Metro-Centre. Supporters turned their backs on ice-hockey grudge matches and penalty shoot-outs, and set off through the streets to give succour to the stricken dome.
Six hundred yards from the Metro-Centre we could clearly see the smoke lifting from the roof, dark billows lit by cascades of sparks swept aloft in the updraughts. Still intact, the dome loomed in front of us when we reached the central plaza, as always so huge that I failed to notice the police vehicles, ambulances and fire engines drawn up around the entrance to the underground car park.
A small section of the roof was dark, a narrow triangle the size and shape of a schooner’s jib sail. The huge bomb detonated in the upper level of the basement car park had torn through the floor of the Metro-Centre, the explosive pressure blowing out the glass and aluminium panels two hundred feet above the atrium. The shopping mall, according to the police radio reports, was largely untouched, and the smoke rose from the burning vehicles ignited by the bomb. Opening the passenger window, I gazed at the dark triangle near the apex of the dome. It would soon be repaired, but for the moment a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.
Sergeant Falconer showed her warrant card to the policemen keeping a lane open for emergency vehicles. Above the din of ambulance sirens an officer in a yellow jacket directed us towards the underground garage.
‘Looks like a car bomb,’ Sergeant Falconer told me. ‘Three pounds of Semtex. There’s another maniac on the loose.’
‘Anyone killed or injured?’
‘No one. Let’s thank God for that . . .’
But her relief at the news scarcely left the sergeant any less agitated. Threads of blonde hair were springing loose from their braids. For some reason, the slightest shift from the immaculate left Sergeant Falconer looking frayed and insecure. Impatient to get into the car park, she reached across the driver and gripped the steering wheel, trying to change lanes. The car stalled, and the flustered constable flooded the engine as Sergeant Falconer drummed her fists on the instrument panel.
When we approached the entrance ramp I looked back at the plaza around the Metro-Centre, now occupied by a huge crowd, drawn to the St Peter’s Square of the retail world. Everyone was staring upwards at the billows of smoke that lifted into the night. In the front row was Tom Carradine, the young manager who had first welcomed me to the dome. He darted to and fro, desperate to find a better view, too distraught to express himself in any other way, like a tennis player leaping around a court as he tried to ward off defeat by an invisible opponent with an invisible ball. The notion that anyone might dislike the Metro-Centre and wish to damage it had clearly never occurred to him.
WE ENTERED THE basement car park, and followed the police guide rails into one of the delivery bays, finding a place between two articulated trucks. The night shift were being questioned by a team of investigators, and the freight carousels were stationary, stopped in mid-track at the moment of the explosion. Three-piece suites sealed in plastic sheeting, video-game consoles and coffee machines leaned against each other in a huge jumble. Over everything hung a stench of petrol and scorched rubber, and the acid dust of pulverized cement.
Police emergency lights shone through the haze, and crime-scene tapes marked out the empty parking bays being searched by forensics officers. A wedge-shaped section of the concrete ceiling had vanished, driven into the changing rooms of a health club near the atrium.
‘All the customers had gone to the sports matches,’ Sergeant Falconer explained. ‘So they’d closed for the night. It’s a miracle no one was hurt.’
I watched the forensics teams picking their way through the rubble. ‘Not much to find. What are they looking for?’
‘You’re right.’
My presence unsettled her, and she was eager to get away from me. Why she had brought me to the Metro-Centre in the first place seemed unclear, like Dr Maxted’s motives for driving me all the way to his mental hospital.
I tried to remember where I had parked that morning, but the perspectives of everything in the basement garage seemed to have changed. I had driven around for a few minutes, searching for a place, then lost the numbered ticket during my scuffle with the thugs who attacked Duncan Christie.
A dozen cars caught fire when their petrol tanks exploded, burning fiercely before the sprinkler system came into play. Smothered in foam, the blackened vehicles sat in the wreckage of themselves, windows and doors missing, shreds of tyres peeling from their rims.
At the centre was the car that had carried the bomb, an agony of splayed body panels, exposed seating springs, engine block and drive shaft. The entire roof had vanished, and the forensics officers in white overalls were leaning into the debris, searching the carbonized remains of the instrument panel.
I assumed that the bomber had stolen the car before driving it to the Metro-Centre, and had left the bomb in the boot, directly above the fuel tank. Both the front and rear number plates had vaporized in the fireball, but the large engine had blunted the blast damage to the front of the car. A metal Guards Polo Club badge was still bolted to the front bumper.
A similar badge had been attached to my Jensen when I bought it from the young widow of a Grenadier lieutenant a few months after his death in the Iraq war. As a nod to the dead soldier, I left the badge where it was, hoping that it might catch the eye of his former comrades.
I looked away, shielding my face from the harsh emergency lights. Of all the vehicles to choose from in the Metro-Centre car park, the bomber had left his vicious surprise in my old but still sleek and handsome Jensen . . .
I took out my ignition keys and stared at the ancient fob, all that was left of the stylish tourer from a vanished age of motoring. It occurred to me that the driver, not the car, was the real target, and I had barely escaped being blown through the Jensen’s roof. My hour trapped in Maxted’s penthouse had probably saved me. Had I left Northfield Hospital with Maxted, and taken a taxi back to the Metro-Centre, I would have been driving the Jensen to my father’s flat when the bomb detonated.
I walked towards the forensics officer picking pieces of ragged upholstery from the car’s floor-pan. Within a few days, if not hours, the engine and chassis numbers would lead the police to the Grenadier’s widow, and then to me.
Would they assume that I was the bomber? My father had died in the Metro-Centre, and leaving a bomb in the garage would strike the police as a likely act of revenge. The forensics officer had turned to watch me, and I noticed that I was waving the Jensen’s keys in my hand, a nervous tic that had come from nowhere.
I calmed myself, and searched for Sergeant Falconer. She was standing with a group of journalists who were questioning a uniformed inspector. In a transparent plastic bag he carried a trilby hat with a ragged hole through its crown. He removed the hat from the bag and showed it to the journalists. As he spoke, his fingers flicked at a fishing fly sewn into the hatband.
The journalists scribbled into their notebooks, clearly impressed by the hat. But I was watching Sergeant Falconer. Even in the harsh glare of the emergency lights her face was unnaturally blanched. The blood had drained from her cheeks, revealing the bones beneath her skin patiently waiting for their day. She turned and swayed, then stumbled against the inspector. Still talking to the journalists, he beckoned to two policewomen behind him and they quickly helped Sergeant Falconer towards the driving cab of a forensics van parked inside the crime-scene area.
Concerned for her, I tried to cross the nearest tape, but an officer ordered me away. As I backed off, trying to clear the stench and grit from my throat, I brushed past the young constable who had driven us from the hospital.
‘Is she all right?’ I held her arm. ‘Sergeant Falconer? She fainted . . .’
‘She’ll be fine. There’s bad news. We’ve found the first victim. Or what’s left of him.’
‘Dear God . . . where is he?’
‘In a nasty little jigsaw puzzle.’ She took my hand from her arm and stared at me shrewdly, still unsure whether I was a patient at the mental hospital. ‘Don’t breathe in too much or look at the soles of your shoes . . .’
‘I won’t.’ I pointed to the inspector dismissing the troop of journalists. ‘The hat? Was the dead man a local fisherman?’
‘A Brooklands solicitor. His name’s inside it. Geoffrey Fairfax.’ She raised the brim of her cap, debating whether to detain me as a possible suspect. ‘Did you know him, Mr Pearson . . . ?’
I THANKED THE constable and climbed the steps beside the freight entrance, trying not to breathe until I reached the open air, and an even deeper darkness than the night.
17
THE GEOMETRY OF THE CROWD
THE POLICE WERE withdrawing from Brooklands, climbing into their patrol cars parked in the perimeter road and driving away from the mall. I walked through the huge crowd in the Metro-Centre plaza and filled my lungs with the sooty air, trying to expel the tang of dust and burnt rubber. The night hung heavily over the sullen faces, the darkness stained with the sweat of athletes’ bodies, the scent of chewing gum, bottled beer and anger.
Deep in the crowd, I stood on the running board of an unattended Land Cruiser and raised my head to a brief eddy of cooler air. Tom Carradine had gone, ending his frantic tennis game with himself, no doubt working on a flurry of cheerful press releases. The citadel had been breached, but the police were going, leaving the defence to a scratch brigade of PR executives, floor managers and secretaries.
Two officers in the last patrol car watched as a group of ice-hockey supporters surrounded a forgotten Volvo and drummed their fists on the roof, the familiar tribal tattoo. The windscreen shattered, but the policemen ignored the incident and drove away.
Only the forensics team remained in the basement garage of the Metro-Centre, picking through the debris of my car. Already I missed the classic Jensen, with its elegant body and huge American engine. I found it hard to believe that Geoffrey Fairfax had set out to kill me. Conceivably the solicitor had seen the bomber planting the device in my car, and tried to defuse it before I returned.
Or was I being framed by Fairfax and his shadowy group, set up as the likely bomber, obsessed by my hatred of the Metro-Centre? These were cold questions with even colder answers. The half decanter of Laphroaig I had downed in the penthouse had evaporated from my bloodstream the moment I recognized the shattered Jensen.
I watched the perimeter road, waiting for police reinforcements to arrive. A restless crowd several thousand strong surrounded the Metro-Centre, moving in vast currents within itself. Sports groups circled the mall, football and ice-hockey fans pushing past each other as they roamed the darkness. There was no hostility between the groups, but I could almost smell the anger, the coarse breath of a disturbed beast searching for an enemy.
An ice-hockey cheerleader, the blond thug who had attacked Duncan Christie, strode through the press of people, his fists punching the air. He was moving at random, gathering more and more spectators into his train. Then he lost them when they peeled away and followed a pair of huge weightlifters whose rolling gait cleared their way through the throng.
Family groups, fathers with teenage sons and wives keeping watch on their daughters, still gazed at the Metro-Centre as the last smoke rose through the fissure in the roof. But most of the spectators had turned their backs to the dome. The crowd was watching itself, a congregation of the night waiting for the service to begin.
The Land Cruiser heaved sharply, and a window pillar struck my cheek. I gripped the roof
rack as the vehicle rocked from side to side. A group of athletics fans, middle-aged men in team shirts, surrounded the Land Cruiser and tore off the aerials and wing mirrors. People turned to watch them, with the detached stares of office workers viewing the excavation of a building site.
I stepped down from the running board and joined the crowd. A cheer went up as the Land Cruiser tilted on its offside tyres, received a final push and fell heavily to the ground like a stricken rhino. Its alarm lights came on, blinking in panic. Expert hands reached behind the petrol tank, and a clasp knife severed the fuel line. Petrol pooled around the rear tyre, a stench that made me gag.
A cigarette lighter flared in the darkness. There was a flash of light, and miniature flames glowed on the ground, racing around each other. The spectators moved back, hundreds of faces lit in a campfire circle. Then a single flame ten feet high lifted from the vehicle, and within an instant the Land Cruiser was an inferno of seared paintwork and exploding glass.
WHEN I REACHED the perimeter road, still waiting for the police to arrive, three more cars were burning. Smoke drifted over the heads of the crowd, and a few people followed me, shadowing my footsteps and changing direction as I did. Three ice-hockey supporters strode on my right, while an elderly couple in St George’s shirts kept in step on my left. Behind them came a large group of supporters, silently drinking from their beer cans. When I turned to avoid a traffic sign the entire column swung after me. I stopped to pick a strip of burnt rubber from my shoe, and they marked time without thinking, then resumed their strolling pace when I set off again.
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