‘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 iron
y 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.
Kingdom Come: A Novel Page 19