Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘David…’ He spoke softly, introducing me to the trees and to the light. Behind him, the sirens keened through the traffic, as if the streets around us were in mourning.

  25

  A Celebrity Murder

  THE SIRENS SOUNDED for many days, a melancholy tocsin that became the aural signature of west London, eclipsing the revolution at Chelsea Marina. Every newsreel unit and press photographer in the capital converged on Woodlawn Road, the residential street in Hammersmith only a few hundred yards from where I had parked near the River Café. The cruel murder of the young television performer pressed hard on one of the nation’s exposed nerves. The problems of the middle class, unwilling to pay their school fees and private medical bills, sank into insignificance.

  A likeable blonde in her mid-thirties, the presenter was one of the most admired personalities in television. For a decade she had introduced breakfast magazine programmes, family discussion panels and childcare investigations, always ready with sensible advice and good-humoured charm. I had never seen her on screen and could never remember her name, but her death on her own doorstep prompted an outpouring of grief that reminded me of Princess Diana.

  The security cameras in the King Street shopping mall showed her leaving the Habitat store soon after four o’clock. She then took the escalator and collected her Nissan Cherry from the multi-storey car park behind the mall. The supervisor at the exit failed to remember her, but the ticket she pushed into the barrier machine bore her thumbprint. She drove to Woodlawn Road, where she lived alone in a two-storey terraced house. Her neighbours were civil servants and actors, middle-class professionals like those at Chelsea Marina, almost all at work during the day.

  No one observed her murder, but her next-door neighbour, a self-employed film technician, told the police that he heard the backfire of a motorcycle exhaust at or around four thirty. Minutes later, he noticed two distressed women standing by the garden gate, pointing to the front door. He went out and found the presenter lying on her doorstep. Her white linen suit was soaked with blood, but he tried to revive her. A nearby neighbour, a midwife at Charing Cross Hospital in Fulham Palace Road, joined him and applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but was forced to confirm that she was dead.

  She had been shot in the back of the head as she opened the front door, dying almost instantly. The key to the front door was still in its lock, and the police were puzzled why her killer had shot her in daylight, in full view of dozens of nearby houses, rather than follow her into the privacy of the hallway.

  No one saw the killer arrive at the murder scene, or remembered a possible assailant loitering in Woodlawn Road and waiting for the victim to drive up in her car. How he managed to avoid everyone’s attention was a mystery that would never be solved.

  The presenter had several male friends and was often away for days during the location shooting of her programmes. That the killer was able to arrive just as she returned from the King Street mall suggested that the assailant was closely aware of her movements. Staff and co-workers at the BBC Television Centre in White City were carefully questioned, but no one had known of her plans for the day. The longstanding lover with whom she spent the previous night at his Notting Hill flat stated that after a morning’s shopping she had booked a manicure at her favourite Knightsbridge salon.

  Once the killer had carried out the murder, he walked away or was picked up by an accomplice in a car. Several witnesses agreed that a black Range Rover was circling the nearby streets an hour before the shooting. A security camera in Putney High Street caught a similar Range Rover passing the local Burger King, but computer enhancement failed to yield the licence number.

  Some days later, a Webley revolver was found at low tide on the exposed riverbed below Putney Bridge. The weapon, of World War II army issue, was entangled in a fishing net wrapped around a deflated rubber dinghy. Matching the metallic traces on the barrel with the bullet fragments found in the victim’s skull strongly indicated that the Webley pistol was the killer’s weapon.

  The callous murder of this attractive and wholesome young woman led to a huge police operation. As a successful television celebrity, she had mastered a good-natured blandness that audiences especially prized. She had millions of admirers but no enemies. Her death was inexplicable, a random killing made all the more meaningless by her celebrity.

  Three weeks after the murder I watched the funeral service on the TV set in Kay Churchill’s kitchen. Saddened like everyone else by the death, Kay held my hand across the table as the service was relayed from Brompton Oratory. She had never seen one of the victim’s programmes, and failed to recognize her photograph on the front page of the Guardian, but fame defined its own needs.

  ‘Who…? Who could…?’ Kay wiped the salt from her cheeks with a damp tissue. ‘Who could kill like that? Shoot down another human being…?’

  ‘A maniac…it’s hard to imagine. At least they’ve arrested a man.’

  ‘This misfit living in the next street?’ Kay threw her tissue into the sink. ‘I don’t believe it. They had to find someone. What was his motive?’

  ‘The police don’t say. These days, there doesn’t need to be a motive.’ I pointed to the screen. ‘There he is – behind the police van.’

  The parade of famous television faces, unsure whether to smile at the crowd outside the Oratory or stare solemnly at their feet, was interrupted by a cutaway to shots of the accused being moved between police stations. A zoom lens mounted on a roof above West End Central showed him bundled from an armoured van. He was an overweight youth with lardy white arms, a blanket over his head. When he stumbled there was a glimpse of round cheeks and an unsavoury beard.

  ‘Grim…’ Kay shuddered in disgust. ‘He’s prepubescent, like a huge child. Who is he?’

  ‘I missed his name. His flat is around the corner from Woodlawn Road. He’s a gun enthusiast. The police found an arsenal of replica firearms. He liked photographing celebrities leaving the River Café.’

  ‘Fame…it’s too close, standing next to you in the checkout queue. He probably saw her getting out of her car. Some people can’t cope with the idea of fame…’

  Kay leaned against me, gripping the remote control, ready to hurl it at the screen. The murder had shocked her deeply. The sight of the Turners’ burnt-out house across the road reminded her of the palpable presence of evil, and made her even more determined to right any injustice within her reach.

  I pressed Kay’s careworn hand to my cheek, feeling a surge of affection for this passionate woman, with her hopeless dreams and careless sex. Kay had many lives – lover, incendiarist, fomenter of pocket revolutions, suburban Joan of Arc, which she struggled to control like a team of unruly mares. If I were to walk out of her life she would miss me intensely, for ten minutes. Then the next lodger would arrive and join the game of emotional snakes and ladders that led to her bedroom.

  The funeral service began, a solemn ritual that played to the worst needs of television. Kay, vaguely religious but fiercely anti-clerical, switched off the set. She paced into the living room, and stared at the Turners’ scorched timbers. There was a death to be avenged, video stores to be bombed, middle-class housewives in Barnes and Wimbledon to be jolted out of their servitude.

  I sat in the kitchen, with the silent screen for company. Already I suspected that I knew who had killed the television presenter. Richard Gould had hinted as much after I found him in the park at Fulham Palace. Somewhere in London a priest was sitting in a rented room, watching the service on another television set, trying to wring from his mind all memory of the meaningless murder he had committed. Had Stephen Dexter killed the young presenter in an attempt to erase his memories of Joan Chang’s death at the Tate? And had Gould, exhausted after following him from the King Street mall, stumbled onto the murder scene as the crime took place?

  I remembered the hard soil under my feet in the park at Fulham Palace. I had taken Gould’s elbow and guided him away from the great trees that trapped
the sky in their branches. He tripped in his cheap shoes, and I put my arm around his shoulders, feeling the damp fabric of his suit and the cold fever that burned beneath his skin. The elderly couple stopped to watch us, clearly assuming that Gould was a drug addict in the last stages of withdrawal.

  Slumped in the rear seat of the Range Rover, he briefly roused himself and pointed to Putney Bridge. We left the park and turned onto Fulham Palace Road, and crossed the river in the heavy traffic. Sirens wailing, police cars sped past us towards Hammersmith. Gould slept as we drove along the Upper Richmond Road and returned to Chelsea Marina by Wandsworth Bridge. I steered him into the coffinlike elevator at the Cadogan Circle apartments, found his keys in his sodden pockets and left him outside the door of Vera Blackburn’s flat. In the empty elevator, the sweatprints of his palms glistened on the faded mirror.

  Before we parted, he noticed me, his depthless eyes suddenly in focus.

  ‘David, be careful with Stephen Dexter.’ He gripped my hands, trying to wake me from a deep sleep. ‘No police. He’ll kill, David. He’ll kill again…’

  This was the last I saw of Richard Gould. He and Vera left Chelsea Marina that evening. When I returned to Kay’s house the entire population of Grosvenor Place stood silently in the street, watching as two fire engines doused the embers that remained of the Turner home. Already the first reports of a murder in Hammersmith were coming through on the firemen’s radios. On hearing who the victim was, everyone drifted away, as if there was some unconscious connection between the murder and the events at Chelsea Marina.

  The next day the police and bailiffs withdrew from Grosvenor Place. Outside the Cadogan Circle apartments a neighbour told me that Gould and Vera had driven away in the Citroën estate. I said nothing to Kay, but I assumed that Gould had seen Dexter shoot his victim. Too late to save the young woman, he followed the deranged clergyman to Fulham Palace, where Dexter had thrown the revolver into the Thames and disappeared into the infinite space of Greater London, a terrain beyond all maps.

  I was tempted, briefly, to go to the police, using Henry Kendall to arrange a meeting with a senior officer at Scotland Yard. But my friendship with Stephen Dexter, the sightings of the Range Rover near Woodlawn Road and in Putney High Street, our meeting at the Tate, would soon turn me into the chief accomplice of this grounded priest and pilot. Given time, Dexter’s conscience would rally him, and he would turn himself in, ready to face the coming decades in Broadmoor.

  Soon afterwards, a flabby loner and celebrity stalker was charged with the murder of the television presenter. He said nothing to the magistrate who committed him for trial, a vacuum of a human being who seemed almost brain-dead in his passivity. His star-struck camera, his obsessive collecting of replica guns, and a personality so blank that no one would have noticed him outside the fatal doorstep, together hinted at an extreme form of Asperger’s syndrome.

  His arrest took days to leave the headlines. Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous was itself an incitement to anger and revenge, playing on the uneasy dreams of a submerged world, a dark iceberg of impotence and hostility.

  But I was thinking of Richard Gould, shivering and exhausted under the trees in Bishop’s Park. I thought of the dying children in the Bedfont hospice, and the Down’s teenagers he had helped to take on holiday, and his attempt to find a desperate meaning in nature’s failings. The world had retreated from Stephen Dexter, but it rushed towards Richard Gould with all the hunger of space and time.

  26

  A Wife’s Concern

  MEANWHILE, SMALLER CONFRONTATIONS loomed. Quietly and stealthily, the barricades were going up in Chelsea Marina. The lull in police activity after the Hammersmith murder had given the residents time to organize their defences. The bailiffs’ attempt to seize the Turners’ house was a threat to every property on the estate. As in the past, we all agreed, the police were doing the dirty work for a ruthless venture capitalism that perpetuated the class system in order to divide the opposition and preserve its own privileges.

  Crossing Cadogan Circle on my way to Vera Blackburn’s apartment, I noticed that almost every avenue was now blocked by residents’ cars, leaving a narrow space for traffic that could quickly be sealed. Banners hung from dozens of balconies, sheets of best Egyptian cotton from Peter Jones, gladly sacrificed for the revolution.

  ‘VISIT CHELSEA MARINA – YOUR NEAREST POORHOUSE.’

  ‘YOU CAN’T REPOSSESS THE SOUL.’

  ‘WELCOME TO LONDON’S NEWEST SINK ESTATE.’

  ‘FREEDOM HAS NO BARCODE.’

  Vandalized parking meters lined the kerbs. I passed a metal skip into which a family had despatched their tribal totems – school blazers and jodhpurs, Elizabeth David’s cookbooks, guides to the Lot and Auvergne, a set of croquet mallets.

  I was impressed by the self-sacrifice of a threatened salariat, but it belonged to the past. I was thinking only of Richard Gould as the lift carried me to Vera’s third-floor flat. I called in each afternoon, hoping they had returned, pressing the doorbell long enough for Vera’s temper to snap. My chief fear was that Gould, still feverish and exhausted, might confess to the Hammersmith murder in a selfless attempt to save Stephen Dexter.

  As I stepped from the lift I saw that Vera’s door was open. I crossed the landing and peered into the empty lounge. Someone had disturbed the air, and the sunlight caught a faint drift of motes carried by the dust.

  ‘Richard…? Dr Gould…?’

  I walked into the lounge, staring at the discarded suitcases and a pile of medical journals on the sofa. Then I heard a distinctive, blind man’s tapping from the bedroom. The sounds were distant but familiar, echoes from a never-forgotten past.

  ‘Sally?’

  She stood by the bedroom door, blonde hair over the collar of her tweed coat, gloved hands gripping her walking sticks. She had made an effort to dress down for her visit to Chelsea Marina, as if she were a member of a delegation of civic worthies inspecting a condemned tenement. Her groomed hair, modest but expensive make-up and air of confidence made me realize how far the residents of Chelsea Marina had declined.

  A diet of indignation and insecurity had turned us into more of an underclass than we realized. I was fond of Kay, but compared to Sally the former film lecturer was an intellectual fishwife, a Bloomsbury slattern. Without thinking, I turned to the mirror above the leather sofa and saw myself, shifty and shabby, with badly shaven cheeks and self-cut hair.

  ‘David…?’ Surprised to find me, Sally moved across the airless room, unsure that I was her husband. ‘Are you living here now?’

  ‘It belongs to friends. I’m staying with Kay Churchill – she has one or two lodgers.’

  ‘Kay?’ Sally nodded to herself, eyes scanning my sallow cheeks with wifely concern. ‘Did you take the lift?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You look tired. Absolutely exhausted.’ She smiled with unfeigned warmth, the sun in her hair. ‘It’s good to see you, David.’

  Briefly, we embraced. I was glad of the affection I felt for her. I missed her schoolgirl contrariness and her sidelong glances at the world. It seemed as if I was meeting an old and well-liked friend, someone I had first encountered on a safari holiday. We had camped together on the slopes of a rich man’s hill, shared an insulated tent and forded the choppy stream of her illness. Our marriage belonged to an adventure playground where real danger and real possibility never existed. The revolution at Chelsea Marina was against more than ground rents and maintenance charges.

  Unsure that we were alone, I stepped past Sally to the bedroom door. An empty suitcase lay on the black silk coverlet. In the wardrobe a rack of mannish suits hung skewed from the rail.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ Sally told me. ‘I had a sniff round. People’s bedrooms are such a giveaway.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Nothing much. They’re rather odd – Dr Gould and this Vera woman.’ She frowned at the black curtains. ‘Are they into S&M?

/>   ‘I didn’t ask.’ Trying to take charge, I said: ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘I wrote out a cheque for a mother with a charity box – some architect’s wife with a couple of kids to feed. When she saw my name she said you used to run errands for Dr Gould.’

  ‘Right. Did you come alone?’

  ‘Henry drove me. He’s parking the car, somewhere off the King’s Road. You people at Chelsea Marina make him nervous.’

  ‘I bet we do. How is he?’

  ‘Same as ever.’ She dusted the sofa and sat down, glancing at one of the medical journals. ‘That’s the trouble with Henry – he’s always the same as ever. What about you, David?’

  ‘Busy.’ I watched her stow the walking sticks. Their reappearance meant that Henry Kendall’s days were numbered. ‘There’s a lot going on.’

  ‘I know. It’s all rather frightening. Direct action isn’t really your thing.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here – to rescue me?’

  ‘Before it’s too late. We’re all worried for you, David. You resigned from the Institute.’

  ‘I wasn’t spending any time there. It didn’t seem fair to Professor Arnold.’

  ‘Daddy says he’ll increase your retainer, give you a chance to do research, or write a book.’

  ‘More useless activity. Thank him for me, but it’s what I was trying to get away from. I’m too involved here.’

  ‘With this revolution? How serious is it?’

  ‘Very serious. Wait till you need a dentist or a solicitor and they’re all out on the picket line. Things are starting to go bang.’

  ‘I know.’ Sally shuddered, then opened her compact to check that the emotion had not distorted her make-up. ‘We heard the explosion two nights ago. The Peter Pan statue. Anything to do with you?’