Kingdom Come: A Novel

by Ballard, J. G.

  ‘Not really.’ I waited for Julia to speak, but she was staring fixedly at Maxted. ‘What I can’t understand is why you’ve all been protecting him.’

  ‘Tell him.’ Julia stood up, rapping the table with her fist. She pulled back the hair from her forehead, wincing at a bruise on her scalp. ‘Maxted, tell him.’

  ‘Julia, it’s not that easy. The context . . .’

  ‘Fuck the context! Tell him!’

  Julia stepped around the table towards Maxted and picked a knife from the sink. She was no longer angry with herself but with the foolish men who had brought her to this makeshift clinic in a besieged shopping mall. Her shoulders squared against Maxted, willing him to back away from her. I could see the relief she felt as the truth hovered in front of us, ready to spill over in a torrent.

  ‘Julia, sit down . . .’ Maxted offered her a chair, and beckoned to me, trying to enlist my help in calming this enraged woman. ‘Context is important. Richard has to understand what our intentions were . . .’

  ‘Never mind our intentions!’ Julia waited until she could control herself. ‘Tell him who killed his father.’

  ‘Christie did.’ I spoke as matter-of-factly as I could. ‘I know that, Julia. It was obvious from day one.’

  Julia nodded, then raised the knife to quieten me. ‘Yes, Christie pulled the trigger. He fired the shots. I’m sorry, Richard, desperately sorry for that. So many people killed and badly wounded. It was a blunder from the start. But Duncan Christie didn’t kill your father.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘We did.’ Julia pointed to herself and Maxted. ‘We planned it, and we gave the order.’

  ‘Hold on . . .’ Maxted took the knife from Julia’s hand. ‘Julia and I were on the fringe. There were a lot of others.’

  ‘Sangster, Geoffrey Fairfax, Sergeant Falconer . . .’ I recited the names. ‘Various other people who gave their support, but preferred to stay in the shadows. The mayor and one or two councillors, Superintendent Leighton and senior police officers . . .’

  ‘The old Brooklands establishment,’ Julia commented wearily. ‘Terrible bores, the lot of them. Dangerous bores. There was even a clergyman, but Maxted frightened him off. All that talk about elective insanity.’

  ‘He thought I meant the Christian Church.’ Maxted added: ‘They’d already had one assassination too many, and weren’t looking for a second.’

  ‘Assassination?’ I pushed myself away from the table. ‘You planned to kill my father. Why?’

  ‘Not your father. He was never the target.’ Maxted sank his exhausted face into his hands. ‘Go back six months, Richard. Brooklands was in turmoil, along with all the other motorway towns. More than a million people were directly involved. Racist attacks, Asian families terrorized out of their homes, immigrant hostels burnt down. Football matches every weekend that were really political rallies, though no one there ever realized it. Sport was just an excuse for street violence. And it all seemed to spring from the Metro-Centre. A new kind of fascism, a cult of violence rising from this wilderness of retail parks and cable TV stations. People were so bored, they wanted drama in their lives. They wanted to strut and shout and kick the hell out of anyone with a strange face. They wanted to hero-worship a leader.’

  ‘David Cruise? Hard to believe.’

  ‘Right. But this was a new kind of fascism, and it needed a new kind of leader—a smiley, ingratiating, afternoon TV kind of führer. No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite. For most people it was just soccer hooliganism.’

  ‘But the bodies kept arriving at the morgue.’ Julia reached across the table and gripped my wrist, angry with me even for being a victim. ‘I counted them, Richard.’

  ‘Asian and Kosovan bodies.’ Maxted wiped a fleck of spit from his mouth. He stared at it, as if disgusted with himself. ‘Julia had to deal with the relatives. Weeping Bangladeshi wives and deranged fathers of children with third-degree burns . . .’

  Thinking of the Kumars, I said: ‘So you decided to do something?’

  ‘We had to move fast, while the whole nasty business was still controllable. A soft fascism was spreading through middle England, and no one in authority was concerned. Politicians, church leaders, Whitehall turned their noses up. For them it was just a brawl in a retail park off some ghastly motorway.’

  ‘But you knew they were wrong?’

  ‘Absolutely. Think of Germany in the nineteen-thirties. When good men do nothing . . . We needed a target, so we picked David Cruise. He wasn’t ideal, but shooting him down in the Metro-Centre, in the middle of one of his television rants, would make a powerful point. People would think hard about where they were going.’

  ‘So you needed a triggerman. And you came up with Duncan Christie?’

  ‘I found him.’ Maxted waited as Julia raised her hands in mock wonder. ‘He was sitting in a secure ward at Northfield. A misfit who’d twice been sectioned, a borderline schizophrenic with a fierce hatred of the Metro-Centre. His daughter had been injured and he wanted revenge. He was a missile primed to launch. All we had to do was point him at the target.’

  ‘You weren’t worried about the . . . ?’

  ‘Ethics of it all? Of course, we were planning a murder! We talked it through a hundred times. I kept Julia out of it—I knew I’d never convince her.’

  ‘I thought Christie was letting off a bomb. A smoke bomb.’ Julia pressed her hand to her bruised scalp, forcing herself to wince with pain. ‘So I gave my support. Madness—how did I think it would ever work?’

  ‘It did work.’ Maxted ignored her protests. ‘Everything was arranged. Geoffrey Fairfax knew his stuff. Sadly, when the hour came the only thing missing was the target.’

  ‘But my father and the bears filled in.’ I rearranged the dirt on the table, and then drew my father’s initials. ‘How many of you were involved?’

  ‘A small inner group. Fairfax was in the driving seat. He’d served in the army, he knew and loved the old Brooklands. He saw the Metro-Centre as a spaceship from hell. Superintendent Leighton supported us, but he had to be careful. He’d join our meetings, then slip away early. Sergeant Falconer was under Fairfax’s thumb—he’d got her mother off a shoplifting charge. She supplied the weapon, a standard Heckler & Koch, apparently mislaid by the armoury. Leighton covered up for her.’

  ‘Sangster?’

  ‘He reconnoitred the target area. Tom Carradine was an old pupil, and very proud to take his headmaster on a tour of the Metro-Centre and show off the fire and emergency systems. He gave Sangster a security pass for his visiting “nephew”. An hour before the shooting Sangster hid the weapon in the fire-control station.’

  ‘And Julia?’

  ‘I did nothing!’ Julia tore a children’s drawing from the wall and crushed it in her hands. ‘I didn’t think anyone would get killed, or even wounded . . .’

  ‘You did almost nothing.’ Maxted waited until she tossed the crumpled drawing among the bloody bandages in an overflowing bin. ‘Julia had treated Christie’s daughter after the accident. He may be schizoid but he’s no fool. He wasn’t sure we were serious. She gave him beta-blockers to calm him down and convinced him he was doing the right thing. Christie believed her, and that was vital.’

  ‘I drove him to the Metro-Centre.’ Julia half closed her eyes, smiling faintly to herself. ‘When we parked he didn’t want to get out of the car. He actually asked me if he should go ahead. I said . . .’

  ‘You said yes.’ Maxted sat back in his chair, letting the point sink in. ‘He trusted you, Julia.’

  ‘But after the shooting . . .’ Puzzled, I asked: ‘Weren’t you afraid that Christie would talk?’

  ‘Only if he went on trial. Hours of CID grilling, months in a remand centre away from his wife and daughter—he’d have given away everything. We knew that killing David Cruise would be easy. The cover-up was the difficult part. It was vital
that Christie be arrested.’

  ‘Why? Arrested?’

  ‘Arrested and brought before a magistrate. If enough witnesses testified that they saw Christie at the time of the shooting and he was nowhere near the atrium the case against him would be dismissed. Especially if the witnesses knew Christie well and were worthy members of the local community.’

  ‘His doctor, psychiatrist, head teacher. So that’s why you went to the entrance hall. You were protecting Christie.’

  ‘And ourselves. If Christie confessed to the murder no one would take his word against ours. Misfits and psychotics are confessing all the time to crimes they haven’t committed.’ Maxted sighed to himself. ‘It was almost the perfect murder.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘The victim failed to turn up. We’d told Christie to hide the weapon and get away, but he lost his nerve. He’d come that far and he needed a target.’

  ‘My father? He hated David Cruise and the sports clubs.’

  ‘Not your father. That was a tragic blunder. Christie was firing at the bears. He hated them even more than he hated Cruise. Especially as his daughter liked to watch them bobbing about on a children’s programme. He fired blindly, and hit your father, along with other visitors to the mall. I take responsibility, Richard. Innocent bystanders, collateral damage, they’re easy phrases to say . . .’

  I nodded coldly, refusing to spare Maxted any of his contrition. He had spoken truthfully, but the truth was not enough. I wanted to see him serving years of imprisonment, but I knew that Julia would be with him, her life and career destroyed. She was standing with her back to me, hands wiping her eyes, and I understood now the hostility and guilt that had stood between us since my arrival.

  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. T
hey’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.