Kingdom Come: A Novel

33 THE CONSUMER LIFE

IN AN HOUR I would be leaving the dome. For the last time I crossed the deserted terrace of the Holiday Inn and stepped onto the beach beside the lake. Within the lobby the latest group of hostages to be released was checking out of the hotel, ready for their transfer to the South Gate entrance. Guarded by their marshals, they shuffled through the doors, several almost too weak to walk. I waved to them, trying to remind them that in a few minutes they would breathe a different air, but none of them noticed me. There were tired mothers with restless teenage daughters, wives steering elderly husbands, a pallid McDonald’s assistant whom Dr Maxted had treated for hysteria, and a young couple barely coping with a fever picked up from the polluted water.

Julia Goodwin had selected them the previous evening from the pool of five hundred remaining hostages, insisting that the disease risk they posed made them urgent candidates for release. When I presented the list of names to Tom Carradine he rejected Julia’s choice out of hand. Fanatical in his defence of the Metro-Centre—and, according to Maxted, showing the first clinical signs of paranoia—he sat in his make-up chair at the mezzanine studio, tapping the sheet of paper with his eyebrow brush. He spent hours preparing himself for the camera, but had never actually appeared on the in-house channel, saving this moment for his last stand. I assumed that deep in the race memory of PR managers was the belief that when they appeared live on television a miracle would follow. The seas would part, and the sky would fall.

Carradine stared cautiously at the list, searching for any coded message to the police and journalists waiting behind the security cordon around the dome. Finally he gave in, silencing Julia when she graphically described the symptoms of typhoid and typhus. He edged away from the exhausted doctor with her feverish corneas, a model of all the diseases that the police negotiators warned would soon break out in the dome, and signed the list with one of his dozen Montblanc pens.

As he knew, Julia held the trump card, at least for the time being. Severely injured, David Cruise lay in her makeshift intensive care unit, holding on to life by an effort of will long after his body had decided to call it a day. But once this card was played, and the ventilators and transfusion pumps were disconnected, Julia Goodwin would lose her authority. She and I would join the hostages in the squalid basement of the Holiday Inn.

At that point the real game of the dome would begin, as Carradine and his henchmen stabilized their rule. The micro-republic would become a micro-monarchy, and the vast array of consumer goods would be Carradine’s real subjects.

I STOOD ON the sand, staring at the oily surface of the lake as the hostage group shuffled away. The marshals still saw me as David Cruise’s media adviser, and reined in their abuse. A Zimmer frame scraped the marble floor, but the group was silent. An hour later they would step through the emergency hatch and face the world’s television cameras. In return, the police would hand over a portable air-conditioning plant that would cool the intensive care unit.

At the last moment I would slip in among them, after Julia added my name to the list. I wanted to stay with her, and help with the rougher chores at the temporary clinic she had set up in the first-aid unit. But she was concerned for my ankle infection, which had resisted all the antibiotics available in the Metro-Centre’s thirty pharmacies. Beyond that, she worried about the larger infection incubated within the dome that had begun to affect all of us: a deepening passivity, and a loss of will and any sense of time. The treasure house of consumer goods around us seemed to define who we were.

I hobbled along the sand to a deckchair set up on the water’s edge. I rested here every evening, when the endless sports commentaries in David Cruise’s recorded voice at last died away, ringside accounts of long-forgotten matches relayed through the public address system. Then the dome’s ceiling lights were dimmed and a grateful silence fell over the Metro-Centre.

I sat in my tilting chair and drank enough whisky from my flask to blunt the fever in my swollen ankle. The silence was even more soothing, before the night patrols began to swear and stamp their way around the dome, torches searching the empty stores and cafés for any intruders. The artificial twilight lasted until the morning. During the long night hours, the ghost creatures of the dome, the thousands of cameras and kitchen appliances and cutlery canteens, began to emerge and glow like a watching congregation.

I reached down to an empty beer can at my feet, and tossed it into a nearby waste bin. Beyond a three-feet radius of my chair, the beach was littered with bottles and empty food cartons. The water never moved, but a scum of cigarette butts and plastic wrappers formed a tide line. At least for the moment, consumerism had beached itself on this filthy sand. Within a few hours, once the police had debriefed me and the doctors confirmed that I was free of infectious disease, I would be back in my father’s flat.

AFTER ONLY FIVE days, the deterioration of the dome was starting to gather pace. In the first flush of victory, Carradine and his marshals found that they had locked themselves inside the mall with almost three thousand people for company—an inner core of several hundred sports supporters and Metro-Centre employees, determined to defend the dome against all comers, and a larger group of customers caught by the riot and spectators who fled into the entrance hall to escape the police truncheons. Almost all were keen to leave once the threat of violence was lifted.

Tom Carradine rose to his hour. The engaging PR man was showing a hard steel. Cannily, he played on the presence of some two hundred small children in the dome, dishevelled and hungry, parted from their favourite computer games and too frightened to sleep in the arms of their exhausted mothers. At midnight on the first day, when an army assault team abseiled from their helicopter onto the roof of the dome, Carradine released a distraught mother who had suffered a heart attack. Her stretcher, eased through the emergency hatch in the South Gate fire door, was accompanied by two weeping toddlers clinging to Julia Goodwin’s hands.

The exhausted but still attractive doctor made a powerful impact on the nation’s television screens, as I saw from my set at the Holiday Inn. Julia warned the police negotiators that further casualties would follow if they tried to break into the dome, and that many children would die in the crossfire between the marshals and the army marksmen. She then selflessly stepped back into the dome and returned to her care of David Cruise, with a promise from the police that a complete intensive care unit would be provided by Brooklands Hospital. No mention was made of the fact that Carradine refused to release Cruise, who had become Hostage Number One, but no further attempts were carried out to penetrate the Metro-Centre.

Secure behind their fire doors, with their own power generators and an unlimited supply of food, drink and hostages, Carradine and the marshals soon consolidated their position. They set out their demands—that all threats to close the dome be lifted, that no charges be brought against its defenders, and that the Metro-Centre re-open for business, along with its supporters clubs and sports teams. The hapless general manager of the mall, flanked by his cowed department heads, was escorted to the mezzanine studio and declared that he was ready to throw open the doors and begin trading again.

Naturally, the Home Office refused to negotiate, but by now a huge media presence surrounded the dome. Beyond the perimeter road, where the police set up their outer cordon, dozens of TV location crews followed every move. Supporters from the motorway towns filled the streets of Brooklands in a huge show of solidarity. Commentators described the seizure of the dome as a populist uprising, the struggle of consumer man and his consumer wife against the metropolitan elites with their deep loathing of shopping malls. The people of the retail parks were defending a more real Britain of Homebase stores, car-boot sales and garden centres, amateur sports clubs and the shirt of St George.

Carradine and his marshals took full advantage of this. Fortunately, the crowd trapped within the dome soon grasped that there was no immediate threat to their lives. The twenty supermarkets inside the Metro-Centre were stocked to capacity with fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and poultry, pizzas and cook chill meals. Its freezer cabinets held a glacier of ice cream. On shelves within easy reach was enough alcohol to float the dome into the North Sea.

Like Tony Maxted, I was amazed that there was little looting. None of the restaurants and cafés were functioning, but the crowd dispersing across the mall in the hours after the lock-down moved in an orderly way through the supermarkets. The cash tills were silent, but customers paid for their purchases, dropping their money into the honesty buckets which the marshals placed beside the tills. Everyone knew that the Metro-Centre was ready to sustain them. The aisles and concourses were their parks and neighbourhoods, and they would keep them clean and law-abiding.

Afterwards, the marshals steered us to the hotels and staff rest rooms in the dome, and to the furniture and bedding departments of the big stores. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn, sharing a double room on the third floor with Tony Maxted. We slept in our clothes, windows sealed against the unending night noises of the police and army, the searchlights sweeping across the dome’s semitransparent skin.

Maxted was a restless sleeper, haranguing me in his dreams. The room was stuffy, the water pipes in the bathroom fluting and whining as the pressure fell and airlocks interrupted the system. The next morning, when I stepped onto the balcony, the outside air was as warm as the tropics.

Both Maxted and I took for granted that the siege would end that day. But neither Carradine nor the Home Office was ready to compromise. All morning a dishevelled crowd waited in the entrance hall, arguing with the marshals who guarded the fire door. Others drifted away with their fractious children, already bored by the fourth ice cream of the day. They sat at the café tables in the central atrium, like passengers abandoned by their airlines. I strolled among them as they checked their watches, reassuring each other that they would be home in an hour.

Carradine and his marshals had other ideas. They realized that once they survived the period immediately after the dome’s seizure the crisis would pass and their power would grow. The concern of both the general public and the Home Office would move from the future of the Metro-Centre to the safety of the hostages. Carradine’s engineers were working hard on the Metro-Centre’s power supply, ensuring the most efficient use of its oil reserves. Carradine ordered that the under-roof lighting arrays should be switched off. Many of the shops and stores seemed to recede into an inner darkness, an uncanny transformation. As people moved down the unlit aisles, searching for tin-openers and disposable wipes, the strange gloom gave the impression that an air raid was imminent. Entering one of the larger hardware stores, I felt my way past the counters, surrounded by hundreds of knives, saws and chisels, their blades forming a silver forest in the darkness. A more primitive world was biding its time.

By late afternoon of the second day everyone realized that a further night lay ahead, and that all of them were now hostages. At this point, as the police negotiators lost their patience and the lights faded into the dusk, Carradine made an astute move. He was being closely advised by Sangster, whose huge and shambling figure with its babyish face followed the young manager around like an ambitious fight promoter with a promising featherweight. Tony Maxted approved of the head teacher’s involvement. ‘He’ll keep an eye on things, hold a tight rein on the hotheads,’ he assured me, but I had heard this before. I sensed that Sangster saw the seizure of the Metro-Centre as an interesting social experiment, and was in no hurry to see it end.

When the army helicopters resumed their tiresome patrols above the dome, Carradine called a public meeting in the South Gate entrance hall. Taking up a suggestion made by Sangster, he notified the police negotiators that he would release five hundred hostages on each of the next three days, and demand no concessions in return.

Immediately the crisis eased. The police postponed any attempt to invade the dome. Skilfully finessed by Carradine and Sangster, they were forced to wait until the last of the hostages had stumbled through the emergency hatch into freedom. The mutineers, meanwhile, had rid themselves of a large part of their security problem, lessened the drain on the dome’s resources, and raised the hope of further releases and a peaceful end to the siege.

At seven o’clock that evening, the first tranche of hostages stepped from the dome into a blizzard of flashbulbs. Mostly elderly customers, young mothers and their toddlers, and several dozen teenage mall rats, they were sent by bus to Brooklands Hospital and then rejoined their families. The rest of us selected our suppers from the supermarket shelves and retired to our stifling hotel rooms, exhausted enough to sleep through the helicopters and searchlights.

Forgotten in all this was the lonely figure whose attempted assassination had triggered the uprising. David Cruise still lay in his intensive care unit in a back room at the first-aid station, carefully tended by Julia Goodwin and two off-duty nurses who volunteered to help her. Barely conscious and unable to speak, he hovered in a medical nowhere zone of tubes, drips and ventilator pumps, at once forgotten and the most important person in the dome. Julia protested to Carradine, but the young manager refused to release him, claiming that he would soon recover and take over the leadership of the revolt.

The police, meanwhile, had arrested his would-be assassins, two Bosnian brothers whose motorcycle repair shop had been torched by a gang of football rioters. They walked into the Brooklands police station, confessed to the crime and surrendered the weapon, a gun-club target rifle they had smuggled onto one of the upper-level retail decks above the mezzanine studio. No one needed to question their motives, but whatever their motives were, they clearly fitted the crime.

SITTING IN MY chair on the beach, I finished the whisky in my flask. Part of me was drunk, but at the same time I felt queasily sober, like someone trapped on a runaway roller-coaster. I needed to leave for the South Gate entrance hall and hide myself among the hostages due to be released within the next half-hour. My foot was still badly infected, but in my mind I had detached myself from it, as if the throbbing wound was a tiresome relative who insisted on tagging after me. At the same time I felt reluctant to leave the Metro-Centre, though it was difficult to find a reason for staying. But did I need a reason . . . ?

I lay back in the chair, gathering my strength for the short walk. High above me were the upper decks of the shopping mall, railed terraces filled with fading palms and potted plants, a botanical garden running towards its death in the sky. Now that the lifts and escalators were out of action, almost no one made the long climb to the seventh floor, where the saturated air seemed to perspire into a heavy mist.

But someone was looking down from the seventh-floor railing, partly hidden behind the yellowing fronds of a large yucca. A man stared steadily at me, uninterested in the activity taking place on the floor of the dome, the hostages window-shopping or sitting at the cafés with their week-old newspapers.

I sat up and eased myself from the chair, aware that I was a conspicuous target as I sat alone on my private beach. Was the intruder a police marksman, smuggled into the dome through one of the dozens of ventilator and sewage pipes, with a hit list of prominenti to be disposed of? The man who was watching me carried a small firearm, and a black barrel emerged from his leather jacket. Unlike the police snatch squads, he wore no helmet or chin-strap.

Aware that I had noticed him, he leaned forward over the railing. I could see his face, as sharp as an axe blade, and the odd plates of his forehead, a geometry of disjointed thoughts. A pallid and undernourished skin stretched over the pointed bones, bruised by more than camouflage paste.

‘Christie . . . ? What the hell are we doing . . . ?’

I stood up, speaking to myself in a slurred mutter. Bowing his head, the man stepped back. For a few seconds he vanished behind the yucca, and then reappeared with a hand raised over his shoulder.

‘Christie . . . !’ My voice seemed to dent the dark water that lay listlessly against the beach. ‘Come down, man . . . You’re a target . . . !’

As I stumbled against the chair, knocking it onto the sand, the man hurled something towards me. I lost sight of the object as it flew through the misty air, but it landed ten feet from me, a bronze node that glinted in the scruffy sand.

I tried to steady myself, and felt the strong hands of a marshal grip my arms.

‘Mr Pearson?’ One of the burly weightlifters detailed to keep an eye on me had been sitting in the terrace bar when he heard my shout. ‘You’re not hurt?’

‘He missed me. It’s over there.’

‘I didn’t hear a shot. Let’s get you indoors.’

‘Indoors? We’re already indoors. Aren’t we?’ I was mulling this over as he steered me to the terrace steps. I had lost my chance of joining the hostage release from the South Gate entrance, but I needed to see the object on the beach.

In the moments before the marshal’s heavy foot stamped it into the sand I managed to clear my eyes, and recognized the same bullet and cartridge case that Duncan Christie had pressed into my palm outside the Metro-Centre.

34 WORK MAKES YOU FREE

VERY LITTLE HAD CHANGED, I told myself, but nothing was quite the same. By the end of the second week we were still convinced that we would soon be released from the Metro-Centre. That morning the remaining hostages emerged from their hotels, sleepless and dishevelled, and looking as if their dreams had attacked them. They selected a breakfast of sorts from the soft drink and confectionery shelves of the nearest supermarket, washed themselves in a litre of Perrier water, and then assembled in the South Gate entrance hall, ready to play their roles in an eternal baggage handlers’ strike.

By now nearly two thousand hostages had been freed, but those who remained were aware that their value to Tom Carradine and his mutineers had risen steeply. Barely a dozen were released each day, and Julia Goodwin no longer bothered to present her list in person. She had already despaired of me, and shook her head wearily whenever I appeared, asking about David Cruise’s health. Ask about your own health, her tired but punitive gaze seemed to say.

Out of duty, I hobbled to the South Gate entrance and joined the hostages patiently forming themselves into a queue. Tired of waiting, a group of parents with older children tried to force their way through the marshals guarding the fire door. Cheered on, they kicked aside the security rails and demanded to be released.

The reaction was prompt and violent. The marshals drew their batons, and the parents were pushed back with a show of force that hushed everyone in the entrance hall and left two of the husbands bleeding from head wounds. Behind his screen of bully-boys, Sangster watched all this with a resigned but understanding smile.

I wanted to talk to the head teacher, but I felt uneasy with him. He had begun to sway from side to side like a fourth atrium bear, keeping time to the music inside his head. His role was too ambiguous for comfort, and he had moved from hostage to principal ringleader without taking off his overcoat.

After the brutal response by the marshals everyone stared silently at the open floor where the scuffles had taken place. Bloody skid marks covered the tiles, and Sangster stepped forward and began to scrutinize them in a strangely obsessive way, like an anthropologist examining the foot paintings of a primitive tribe. Rousing himself from his reverie, he stepped through a service door and reappeared with a mop cart and bucket. Watched by the crowd, he swabbed away at the skid marks, squeezed out the bloodstained mop and worked it up and down the floor until the marble gleamed again. The hostages stared stolidly at their reflections but remained silent.

I said nothing to Sangster or Tony Maxted about my sighting of Duncan Christie, deciding to keep this to myself. The bullet thrown onto the beach, like the one he had pressed into my hand, was his way of reminding me that the Metro-Centre had killed my father, and that the agents of his death were now with me inside the dome. I kept my eyes on the high galleries, but Christie had disappeared into the mist that separated the seventh floor from the sky.

Rumours swerved around the Metro-Centre, phantoms that flew by day. I dozed for an hour behind the enquiry desk, and woke to find the hostages discussing the news that David Cruise had begun to revive in the intensive care unit. He had removed his oxygen mask and spoken to several witnesses about his determination to defend the Metro-Centre and return it to its rightful place in the M25 community.

I dismissed this as a near-hysterical fantasy, but Tom Carradine arrived and confirmed the good news through his megaphone. He looked confident and charismatic in his freshly pressed uniform, but almost too lucid for comfort, speaking with an amphetamine fluency, eyes bright and unblinking as he surveyed the exhausted hostages. Nonetheless, he announced that he would celebrate the good news by freeing a further fifty hostages. His decision was relayed to the police negotiators at their post beyond the fire door, and dominated the lunchtime television bulletins.

Everyone lined up for the selection, trying to look their worst as Carradine and Sangster moved along them. Parents did everything to irritate their already fractious teenagers, wives urged their middle-aged husbands to mumble and drool. Most of us were too tired to think of feigning exhaustion, but Sangster pointed to an ailing widow who had been injured by police truncheons and showed the effects of mild concussion.

The hostages accepted their fate, but a group of well-to-do Pakistanis were convinced that they had been deliberately ignored. They surrounded Carradine in a rage of indignation, shouting and thrusting at his shoulder. Sangster quickly signalled to the marshals, who forced back the gesticulating group and kicked open their parcels. To a chorus of jeers, they held aloft the silkily expensive underwear, then trampled the garments underfoot. The elderly barrister who was the family patriarch worked himself into a fury of anger, shouting abuse at Carradine and by chance spitting on his shirt. Batons were being drawn as I left the ugly scene.

I disliked the violence and limped back to the first-aid post, hoping to see Julia Goodwin. The marshals guarding David Cruise had seen enough of me for the day and turned me away, so I sat on the podium beneath the bears. Half an hour later I heard the emergency hatch clang shut as the last of the returnees stepped shakily into freedom.

About three hundred hostages now remained, and the same number of mutineers. The latter formed a hard core of supporters who had forsaken everything, their homes and families, their jobs and cars and loft extensions, to defend the Metro-Centre.

Despite their efforts, conditions in the dome were steadily deteriorating. Without the powerful air-conditioning units, the temperature inside the mall continued to climb. The supermarket floors were slick with melted ice cream oozing from their cabinets, and a foul air rose from the defrosting meat freezers. The water pressure was too low to fill the lavatory cisterns, and a farmyard stench enclosed the Ramada Inn where the dome’s director and senior staff were held prisoner. The Metro-Centre, once bathed in a cool and scented air, was turning into a gigantic sty.

At two o’clock that afternoon, when the hostages drifted off in search of lunch, they found all the supermarkets closed. They peered through the doors, rattling the chains and padlocks, until the public address system ordered them to assemble in the central atrium. Carradine appeared thirty minutes later, descending the staircase from the mezzanine, and informed us that lunch was off the menu until we cleaned up the supermarkets and returned them to their previously immaculate state. He called on everyone to remember their pride in the Metro-Centre, and repay the debt they owed the mall for transforming their lives. The hostages would be divided into ten work groups and each of these would be assigned a supermarket.

Carradine gazed triumphantly at the glum faces and listened to Sangster whispering in his ear. He then announced that the work groups would take part in a competition. The team that did the best job of cleaning and waste disposal during the next week would be allowed to leave the dome.

As the hostages dispersed, queuing to collect their mops and pails, I caught up with Sangster, still smiling slyly to himself.

‘Richard? Good . . .’ He laid a huge arm across my shoulders. ‘Rather a neat wheeze, don’t you think?’

‘ “Work Makes You Free”?’

‘Who said that? It’s very true. It keeps alive the sporting instinct, and gives them something to live for. At the same time it weeds out the stronger and more determined elements.’

‘Those who might cause trouble?’

‘We can’t lose. A sick hostage is much more valuable than a robust one. And less dangerous. Don’t worry, I’ll see that you’re excused from cleaning duties.’

‘I’m very grateful. It’s good to have a friend in high places. As it happens, I can barely walk.’

‘Your foot?’ Sangster frowned with distaste at my bloodstained bandage. ‘We could find you a sedentary job. Rinsing mops, say? Is it psychosomatic?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll ask Tony Maxted.’

‘I would.’ Sangster stared at me with a straight face, then broke into a cheery grin. ‘You want to stay here, Richard. You know that.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Of course you do. This place is your . . . spiritual Eden. It’s all you have to believe in.’

‘Never. Tell me—the siege, when will it end?’

‘Let’s wait and see.’ Sangster seemed almost gleeful at the remote prospect. ‘That’s what’s so interesting. This isn’t about the Metro-Centre: it’s about England today. Now, go back to your room and rest. You’re too valuable to be ill. When David Cruise wakes, you’ll be there to cheer him up.’

‘Will he wake?’

Sangster turned to wave. ‘He’d better . . .’

I WATCHED THE hostages shuffle to their workstations, with all the enthusiasm of patients ordered to clean their own hospital. Discipline ruled, and a more martial spirit prevailed. The cartons of perished pizzas, the shoals of rotting fish fingers, the thousands of cartons of rancid milk were stripped from the shelves and carted away to the refuse hoppers in the basement. Carradine and Sangster introduced a strict rationing system, and we queued for our modest meals of corned beef, pilchards and baked beans.

Negotiations continued with the police, who were increasingly impatient as the release of hostages slowed, but the lack of violence forced them to bide their time. A full-scale assault would leave scores of hostages dead, and the Metro-Centre was a sniper’s paradise. More to the point, floor-to-floor street battles would inflict millions of pounds’ worth of damage on the unprotected merchandise.

A few hostages, the last of the sick and elderly, were released. On the portable radio that Maxted gave to me in an attempt to keep up my spirits, I listened to an account of their debriefing. All the freed hostages were carefully searched for any plundered jewellery, watches and cameras, but from the very start of the siege none had been found. No one had slipped a single fountain pen or gold chain into their pockets. The consultant psychologists were baffled by this, but a likely explanation struck me a few days later when I wandered through a large furniture emporium near the Holiday Inn.

Vaguely searching for a more comfortable mattress than my fever-sodden berth in the hotel, I stood in the entrance to the store as the pilot lights shone on the freshly waxed floor. A work party had moved through the ground level, and the tang of polish hung on the unmoving air, making me feel almost giddy. By sweeping out these temples to consumerism, by wiping and waxing and buffing, we made clear that we were ready to serve these unconsecrated altars. Every shop and store in the Metro-Centre was a house of totems. We accepted the discipline that these appliances and bathroom fittings imposed. We wanted to be like these consumer durables, and they in turn wanted us to emulate them. In many ways, we wanted to be them . . .

WATER LAPPED AT my feet, a cooling stream that drained away the fever in my bones. Half asleep in my deckchair beside the lake, I listened to the wavelets tapping at the sand. Somewhere was the rhythmic murmur of deep water, the same tides that my father had sailed as he circled the globe.

The chair legs sank into the wet sand, tipping me forward. I looked down to find the water swilling around my ankles. The lake had come alive, its surface rolling towards the shoreline.

Someone had switched on the wave machine. I stood up as dark water sluiced across my feet, covered by a slick of lubricating oil. Two engineers stood outside the Holiday Inn, working at the fuse box that controlled the lighting arrays around the roof and terrace. Bars of strip neon glowed and dimmed as the emergency generator pushed out its erratic current. Moving through the fuses, the engineers had switched on the wave machine. Roused in its watery vault, the machine stirred and woke, driving the deep water across the lake.

I stepped back onto the dry sand, as the waves washed through the debris of beer cans and cigarette packets, receding when the undertow sucked them into its deeps. A stronger wave rolled in, nudging a greasy freight of floating magazines and a soggy raft that I guessed was a waterlogged cushion from a restaurant banquette, trapped for weeks under the wave machine’s paddle.

The lumpy parcel, crudely lashed with rope and duct tape, drifted towards me, and with a last heave bumped against my chair. As I stepped forward, about to kick it back into the water, the undertow turned it onto its side. A figure with human features lay trussed inside a small carpet, perhaps a piece of teak statuary that one of the hostages had tried to hide before leaving the Metro-Centre.

A wave washed over the figure, dispersing the glaze of oil and dirt. Eyes with intact pupils stared up at me, and I recognized the blanched face of the Pakistani barrister I had seen remonstrating with Carradine.

Behind me, the engineers switched off the current. A last wave rolled across the beach, its foam hissing among the beer cans. With a faint sigh, the undertow retrieved the body and drew it down towards the dark floor of the lake.

35 NORMALITY

DAVID CRUISE WAS DYING, among stuffed elephants and kangaroos, surrounded by cheerful wallpaper and plastic toys, in sight of the television studio that had created him.

The Metro-Centre’s first-aid post, now housing an intensive care unit, occupied a suite of rooms below the mezzanine, usually visited by small children who had scraped their knees and pensioners with nosebleeds. For the present, the toys were corralled inside a playpen, and the reception room once manned by a kindly sister was filled with beds commandeered from a nearby store. The six patients lay on luxurious mattresses, unwashed pillows leaning against quilted boudoir headboards. Almost all were elderly hostages unable to keep up with Carradine’s more dictatorial regime.

Tony Maxted was crouching on a chair beside a white-haired woman, trying to extract a broken dental plate. He waved to me and pointed to the treatment room. He seemed unsurprised to see me, though every morning he urged me to make the most of my Sangster contacts and join the few hostages still leaving the dome.

Julia Goodwin, though, seemed surprised when I walked into the treatment room. Pale and nerveless, her neck flushed by a persistent rash, she was almost asleep on her feet, trying to break the seal on a bandage pack while searching for a stray hair over her eyes. As always, I was glad to see her, and had the odd sense that as long as I was with her, emptying the pedal bins and foraging for packets of herbal tea, she would be all right. An absurd notion, which reminded me of my childhood motoring trips with my mother, when I strained forward to watch the road as she argued with herself over the traffic lights.

‘Richard? What happened?’

‘Nothing.’ I tried to prompt a smile from her. ‘Nothing’s happened for days. We could be here for ever.’

‘You were supposed to leave. What are you doing here?’

‘Julia . . . I’ll make some tea.’ I pulled a packet of Assam breakfast tea from my shirt. ‘I’ve been tracking this down for days. Leaf, please note, not tea bags . . .’

‘Wonderful. That’ll block the drain for good.’ She held my shoulders, yellowing eyes under her uncombed hair. ‘You shouldn’t be here. I’ll speak to Carradine.’

‘No. I was held up at the hotel.’ I decided not to alarm her over the dead barrister. ‘There was a security problem—someone thought he saw Duncan Christie.’

‘Not again. People are seeing him all the time. It must be some sort of portent, like flying saucers.’ She took my hands and turned my anaemic palms to the light. ‘You have to get out of here, Richard. If there’s a release tomorrow . . .’

‘I will. I will. I want to leave.’

‘Do you? Maybe. Let’s have a look at that foot.’

Julia rebandaged my foot, using a fresh strip of lint, part of a consignment supplied, reluctantly, by the police. We were sitting in the pharmacy next to the treatment room, and our chairs were close enough for me to embrace her. Her fingers fumbled at the tie, and I took over when she seemed to lose interest. Her mind was elsewhere, in one of the high galleries closer to the sun, rather than in this airless clinic with its erratic air conditioning.

‘Good . . .’ I patted the bandage with its clumsy bows. ‘That should keep me going.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She leaned briefly against my shoulder, and then watched me with a faint smile. She was waiting for me to produce a ‘gift’ from my pockets, perhaps a foil sheet of antibiotics looted from a chemist’s shop. ‘It’s been a hell of a night. I keep hearing helicopters. Tomorrow, go straight to the entrance hall—you’ll be on the list.’

‘I’ll get there. Don’t worry.’

‘I do worry. We’re short of everything. We might as well close up shop.’

‘Why? The chemists here are packed with enough drugs to fit out a hospital.’

‘Haven’t you heard? It’s all got to stay as it was. We’re not allowed to touch a thing.’

‘Even for emergencies? I don’t get it.’

‘Dear man . . .’ Julia placed her worn hands around mine, for once glad of the physical warmth. ‘Emergencies don’t exist any more. For Carradine and his people everything is normal. He and Sangster did their ward round this morning and decided all the patients were getting better. Even the old pensioner who died in the night.’

‘And David Cruise?’

‘He’s holding on . . .’ She avoided my eyes and listened to the faint sighing of the ventilator from the empty storeroom, converted into Cruise’s intensive care unit. ‘I ought to take a look—I keep forgetting about him.’

I followed her into the storeroom, where Cruise lay in his makeshift oxygen tent. As always, the sight of him stretched inertly in his maze of wires and tubes made me deeply uneasy. The lithe and athletic figure with his tactile charm had vanished, as if the monitors and gauges were steadily pumping his life from him and transferring his blood and lymph to their voracious machines.

Only his hair survived, a blond mane lying across the phlegm-soaked pillow. I stood beside Julia as she adjusted the ventilator, now and then stroking the hair like the pelt of a sleeping cat. Cruise’s head had shrunk, his cheeks and jaw folding into themselves, as if his face was a stage set being dismantled from within. A transfusion bag hung from its stand and dripped serum into a relay tube, but the television presenter seemed so empty of life that I wondered if Julia was trying to revive a corpse.

‘Richard? He won’t recognize you.’ She led me back to the treatment room. ‘Now, we’ll find something for you to do.’

‘Julia . . .’ I put my arm around her shoulders, trying to steady her. ‘How is Cruise?’

‘Not good.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I’ve got to get him to the hospital, but Carradine won’t let him leave. Sangster says he’ll be up in a couple of days.’

‘How long can he last?’

‘Not long. We’ll have to use car batteries to run the ventilator.’

‘How long? A day? Two days?’

‘Something like that.’ Her eyes darkened. ‘If he died . . .’

‘Would it matter?’

‘They believe in him. If anything happened . . .’ She laughed to herself, a desperate chuckle. ‘It’s a pity they can’t see him now, all those people who marched and stamped.’

‘Julia, hold on.’

‘You corrupted him, you know.’ She spoke matter-of-factly. ‘Still, it’s a kind of revenge.’

‘For what? Losing my job?’

‘Your job? Your father’s death, for God’s sake. This pays for it. In a way, I’m glad for you.’

‘Why?’ I took her arm, trying to hold her attention before her mind could slide away. ‘David Cruise had nothing to do with my father’s death.’

‘Cruise? No. But . . .’

‘Others did? Who? Is that why you went to the funeral?’

Her gaze, once so thoughtful and concerned, drifted away into the borders of fatigue. But her hands touched my chest, searching for refuge. The attempted murder of David Cruise had relieved her of the guilt I had sensed since our first meeting, an anger at herself that had always come between us.

‘Julia? Who . . . ?’

‘Quiet!’ She smoothed her hair. ‘The consultants are here. They’re starting their ward rounds.’

THREE MARSHALS IN St George’s shirts had entered the first-aid post and were strolling around the ward. Ignoring Tony Maxted, they began to read the clinical notes attached to the bed frames. With heavy earnestness, they bent over the patients and tried to take their pulses.

I started to protest, but Maxted caught my arm and bundled me through the entrance.

‘Right. We can take a breather.’ He was ruffled but unabashed. ‘They know I’m a psychiatrist—not the most popular profession in the Metro-Centre. I can’t think why . . .’

We sat on the plinth below the bears in the centre of the atrium, surrounded by jars of honey and the fading get-well messages. Trying to ease my ankle, I took off my shoe and stood up. I wanted to be with Julia, and resented being frogmarched from the first-aid post. But Maxted wearily pulled me against the baby bear’s massive paw.

‘Maxted . . . is Julia safe?’

‘Just about. Rape isn’t a problem . . . yet, I’m glad to say. The Metro-Centre is more important than sex.’

‘What are we doing here?’

‘Keeping you out of harm’s way. The bears are a tribal totem—you should be safe for a while.’

‘Am I in danger? I didn’t know.’

‘Come on . . .’ Maxted examined me wearily, taking in the sweat caked into my jacket, my hands bruised from prising the lids off corned beef tins, the tramp-like appearance that would once have barred me from the Metro-Centre. By contrast, Maxted was still wearing a shirt and tie, and maintained his professional air under the shabby lab coat. ‘As long as Cruise hangs on, you’ll be okay. Once he goes, all hell is going to break loose.’

‘I thought it had.’

‘Not yet. Take this siege—what’s the strangest thing you’ve noticed?’

‘No looting?’

‘Spot on. Not a diamond stud pinched, not a Rolex trousered. Look around you. These aren’t consumer goods—they’re household gods. We’re in the worship phase, when everyone believes and behaves.’

‘And if Cruise dies?’

‘When, not if. We’ll move into a much more primitive and dangerous zone. Consumerism is built on regression. Any moment now the whole thing could flip. That’s why I’m still here—I need to see what happens.’

‘Nothing will happen.’ I tried to push away the probing paw of the baby bear. ‘The siege will end any day now. Everyone’s bored. It could end this afternoon.’

‘It won’t end. Carradine doesn’t want it to end. His mind’s been under siege ever since he arrived at the Metro-Centre. Sangster doesn’t want it to end. All those years trapped in that terrible school, teaching those kids how to be a new kind of savage.’

‘And the Home Office?’

‘They don’t want it to end, though they’re being subtle about it. This is a huge social laboratory, and they’re watching from the front row as the experiment heats up. Consumerism is running out of road, and it’s trying to mutate. It’s tried fascism, but even that isn’t primitive enough. The only thing left is out-and-out madness . . .’

Maxted broke off as a squad of some fifty hostages trudged into the atrium, led by a marshal with a shotgun. They carried buckets and mops, brooms and aerosols of furniture polish, enough equipment to buff and shine the world. Surprisingly, they were in good spirits, as if determined to be the best cleaning squad in the dome.

Together they formed up below the mezzanine terrace, waiting as Carradine and Sangster walked down the steps where my father had met his end. An aide carried a pile of St George’s shirts, neatly pressed and store-new.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Maxted. ‘Don’t tell me Carradine is going to complain about the ironing. The siege must be over.’

‘Nice idea. But I don’t think so . . .’

Carradine briefly addressed the cleaning squad. Sangster prowled behind him, eyes searching the upper terraces under the roof. The marshal signalled to his force, and a dozen members of the squad lowered their brooms and buckets to the floor and stepped forward. Carradine moved along the line, shaking them by the hand and handing over a St George’s shirt.

‘Maxted—it’s some sort of sick game . . .’

‘No. It’s exactly what you see. They’re being sworn in. They’re no longer hostages and they’re joining the rebellion.’

‘Joining . . . ?’

Without thinking, I stood up, steadying myself against Maxted’s shoulder. I watched the dozen former hostages don their shirts, then move away in an informal group, exchanging banter with Sangster. They were at ease with themselves and the vast building, with the deep rose light that lit the entrances to the stores and cafes around the atrium. They were immigrants to a new country, already naturalized, citizens of the shopping mall, the free electorate of the cash till and the loyalty card.

‘Richard . . .’

Maxted spoke warningly, but I was watching the ceremony. At the last moment a thirteenth volunteer, a sturdy young woman in jeans and a biker’s leather jacket, stepped forward to volunteer. All doubts satisfied, she walked up to Carradine, came smartly to attention and claimed her St George’s shirt.

Holding my shoe in one hand, I began to limp forward, then felt Maxted take my arm.

‘Richard, let’s sit down and think . . .’

He guided me back to the bears. Carradine and Sangster moved away, and the marshal drilled off his depleted hostage squad, assigning them to a supermarket near the atrium.

Maxted took the blood-caked shoe from my hand. Smiling a little wanly, he tapped it against his free hand.

‘Richard, what were you doing? Any idea?’

‘Not much.’ I looked up at his almost kindly face. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘That’s what I mean. Now, go back to the hotel. I’ll see you later and we’ll find something to eat.’

‘But, Julia . . . ?’

‘I’ll see she’s all right.’ He handed me the shoe. ‘Dear chap, you were going to join them. The Metro-Centre finally got to you . . .’

36 SHRINES AND ALTARS

THE FIRST SHRINES had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

At dawn, when the last gunfire had died down, I stepped onto the balcony of my room at the Holiday Inn. No one within the dome had slept through the night, and a thin mist filled the shopping thoroughfares, a hazy fog of insomnia that haunted the arcades and pedestrian decks, in places dense enough to conceal an army marksman.

I assumed that the police commandos had withdrawn, and that the real danger, as always, came from one’s own side, from Carradine’s untrained militia. After thirty seconds on the balcony, inhaling the over-ripe air with its guarantee of another tropical day, I wiped the sweat from my face onto the net curtain and found my way to the bathroom.

Two bottles of Perrier were all that remained of my stock. Standing in the shower stall, I drank one and then poured the second over myself, feeling the vivid, carbonated stream bring my skin alive.

As usual, I avoided the washbasin mirror, where I would be joined by the tramp-like figure who shared the bedroom with me. Whenever I saw him, bearded and scarily calm, he moved towards me like a sharp-eyed beggar spotting a prospect. Then he flinched away from me, repelled by my body odour and the even more rancid stench of deep and dangerous obsessions.

Still nominally playing my role as David Cruise’s adviser, I was left alone by Carradine and his marshals as they rallied their three hundred supporters, kept careful watch on the few score remaining hostages and defended the Metro-Centre against the armed might of a government. Meanwhile I did my best to look after Julia Goodwin, scavenged through the abandoned supermarkets and brought her enough food to feed her four patients and herself.

I always stayed until she had forced herself through the tins of frankfurters, condensed milk and foie gras, rewarding me with a plucky smile. Her two volunteer nurses had long since left the dome and returned to their husbands and children, but Julia was still determined to stay to the end. I sensed that in caring for David Cruise, keeping him forever on the edge of death, she was performing a penance similar to the shared bed into which she had drawn me at my father’s flat.

We were now into the second month of the Metro-Centre siege, and time had begun to dilate in unexpected ways. Days of sweaty boredom merged into each other, broken by the unending quest for food and water as Carradine’s quartermasters opened another supermarket for a few hours. Then everything would change abruptly, as Carradine released four or five of the more exhausted hostages. In exchange, the bathroom taps ran for half an hour, enough time to fill the baths and lavatory cisterns and stave off the danger of a typhoid epidemic.

But the patience of the police and Home Office had run out. Unsurprisingly, their willingness to go for the long haul, in the hope that the mutineers would lose heart or fall out among themselves, seemed to fluctuate with public interest in the siege. The television crews around the dome had been drifting away for weeks, and a Home Office junior minister blundered badly when he described the seizure of the Metro-Centre as part of an industrial dispute, a sit-in by disgruntled staff. When the siege was dropped from the main TV bulletins and exiled to late-night discussion programmes on BBC2 I knew that there would be a show of strength.

At three o’clock that morning, as I lay on the sofa beside the window, trying to breathe the humid, microwave air, I heard helicopters crossing the dome. Searchlights swerved and loudspeakers blared. Stun grenades exploded against the metal panels high above the atrium, showering debris on the luckless bears. A powerful explosion blew a hole in the dome above the portico of the North Gate entrance. A joint army and police commando entered the mall, and swiftly overpowered the small group of rebels defending the entrance. Unable to raise the fire door, the commandos moved to their primary target, the eighty remaining hostages held in the banqueting hall at the Ramada Inn.

As it happened, two days earlier Sangster had moved the hostages from their squalid quarters at the Ramada Inn and marched them to the empty Novotel. When the commandos burst unopposed into their original target they found themselves stumbling through the darkness among overflowing latrine buckets. This gave Carradine and his armed defence units time to arrive on the scene and surround the Ramada Inn.

A fierce firefight followed, which the police and army were certain to win. Tragically, a group of hostages at the Novotel made the mistake of overpowering their guards. After leaving the hotel, they raced across the central atrium towards their rescuers.

As a propaganda measure, and to deceive the police spy cameras that Sangster knew would be watching their every move, he had given the hostages a fresh set of clothes, equipping them with St George’s shirts. The commandos, assuming that they were faced with a suicide charge by defiant rebels, opened fire at point-blank range. Five of the hostages, including the general manager of the Metro-Centre and two of his department heads, were killed on the spot. The commandos withdrew, the helicopters ended their patrols, and the police loudspeakers faded into their own huge embarrassment.

But an even stranger phase of the Metro-Centre siege was about to begin.

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, when there was no sign of police or army activity, I left the Holiday Inn and made my way towards the first-aid post. I wanted to make sure that Julia was unharmed, and help her with any wounded brought in during the night assault. Limping on my shooting stick, which I had filched from the best sporting goods shop in the dome, I followed a circular route that would bypass the central atrium.

A hundred yards from the Holiday Inn, I found myself in a thoroughfare of shops that specialized in electrical goods. All were unshuttered, since none of Carradine’s supporters would think of stealing from them. Their interiors were transformed by darkness into a street of caves crowded with treasure. I paused to gaze into these magical grottoes, aware that I was surrounded by all the toys I had so longed for as a child, and could take whatever I wanted.

Nearby was a store with a still intact pyramid of sample wares in its doorway. A trio of microwave ovens supported columns of computer towers, topped by a plasma television screen, the whole display decorated like a Christmas tree with a dozen digital cameras, lenses gleaming in the half-light. The structure had been lovingly designed to resemble an altarpiece. Bouquets of artificial flowers lay at its base, and a circle of candles surrounded a framed photograph of David Cruise. An almost religious aura glowed from the shrine, a votive offering to the threatened spirit of the Metro-Centre.

A few minutes later, in an alleyway behind the Novotel, I came across another of the pyramids, a modest tableau built from dozens of mobile phones and DVD players. Part sales display and part consumer shrine, it was clearly a prayer point for pilgrims on the great circuits of the Metro-Centre.

Beguiled by this votive trail, I had entered the northern sector of the mall. Little sunlight penetrated the roof, and the seven-storey galleries threw the lower levels into a twilight that even the brightest neon never fully dispelled. The rental charges were the lowest in the dome, and the shopping areas were dominated by cut-price travel agencies, bookshops and charity stores, areas of commerce where the lack of light was no disadvantage.

A spotlight flared in the North Gate entrance hall, briefly blinding me as I moved down a narrow street of car-rental offices and discount air-ticket agencies. From the doorway of a luggage store I watched the repair team at work. Metro-Centre engineers stood on a mobile scaffold, securing the roof section blown out by the police and army commandos. Sparks from a welding arc showered through the gloom, dancing among the glass and metal debris on the floor.

‘Mr Pearson . . . step back.’

Behind me I heard a metal display stand being dragged across the stone floor. The spotlight swung across the ceiling of the entrance hall, and the shadows veered and swerved around me like a demented dance troupe.

‘Richard . . .’

Only a few steps from me, a woman in belted blue overalls was watching from a doorway. The overalls bore no badges, but I was sure that she was wearing a police uniform favoured by crowd-control units. A blue peaked cap covered her eyes, but revealed her carefully braided blonde hair, and I recognized the strong chin and the broad mouth forever downturned in apology.

‘Sergeant Falconer . . . ?’ I moved towards her as she beckoned to me with a pair of night-vision goggles. ‘Be careful, the marshals are armed . . .’

‘Mr Pearson, come with me . . .’ She spoke softly, hissing at me through the gloom. ‘I’ll get you out now.’

‘Sergeant?’

‘Listen! It’s time to leave the Metro-Centre. You’ve been here too long.’

‘Sergeant Falconer . . . I have to stay—they need me here.’

‘No one needs you. Try to think for once.’

‘David Cruise . . . Dr Goodwin . . .’

‘They’re leaving, Mr Pearson. They’re all going.’ Her face was briefly lit by the reflected spotlight. Baring her teeth, she whispered: ‘Soon you’ll be alone here, Mr Pearson. You’re a little boy lost in a toy factory . . .’

‘Sergeant, wait . . .’

But she had vanished into a maze of shadows and doorways.

‘Mary . . . listen . . .’

I called out, and felt a pair of strong hands seize my shoulders and pull me into the light. A marshal wearing a St George’s shirt stared into my face. He ran a hand over my beard, recognizing me with some effort.

‘Missing your girlfriend, Mr Pearson? You look all in, mate. Mr Sangster said you might be here . . .’

HE LED ME into the uneasy glare of the entrance hall. A golf cart had arrived, towing a luggage trailer in the livery of the Ramada Inn. Sangster was at the controls, his huge frame in its black overcoat almost squeezing out Tom Carradine. The PR manager sat beside him, eyes still resolute, hunched over his bandaged arms. He had been wounded in the previous night’s action, leading his squad of marshals from the front, but his courage and determination were intact.

Laid out on the trailer were five bodies, the unlucky casualties of the commando assault.

37 PRAYERS AND WOOL-WASH CYCLES

‘RICHARD, YOU LOOK A MESS, poor man . . .’ Sangster ordered the marshal to release me. Smiling like an indulgent parent, he put a protective arm around my waist. ‘Too many strange dreams. Far too many . . .’

‘They are strange.’ I tried to clear my head. ‘Sangster, I saw Sergeant Falconer. And Duncan Christie . . .’

‘There you are.’ Sangster chuckled to himself, still light-headed after the excitements of the night. ‘You always were a dreamer, Richard.’

‘Sangster, listen—’

‘Think of it like this.’ He raised his huge hands to silence me, exposing his deeply bitten nails. ‘The Metro-Centre is dreaming you. It’s dreaming all of us, Richard.’

‘Sergeant Falconer was here. If she can get in, there must be other police inside the dome.’

‘Others? Of course there are. They want to join us. They can’t do us any harm. We control the Metro-Centre. Now, let’s get on with the transfer.’

Still holding my waist, he turned to the trailer carrying the five bodies. Armed marshals stood in a circle around the golf cart, ears tuned to the distant sounds of army helicopters. Sangster’s hands gestured at the air, as if conducting an invisible choir. His tall figure dominated the entrance hall, but he still deferred to Carradine, who sat quietly in the cart’s passenger seat, staring at his bandaged arms. The former publicity manager was grey with fatigue and blood loss, but his confidence was intact, and he clenched and unclenched his jaws as if savouring the aftertaste of the night’s violence.

Then he caught my eye, and stared at me for a moment too long, and I could see that he knew the game was up. Yet in a way this gave him the freedom to do anything, however deranged.

‘Sangster . . .’ I struggled to lower my voice. ‘Is Carradine . . . ?’

‘He’s fine. Last night was a shock. The police betrayed us. All that shooting. I keep warning Tom that violence is the true poetry of governments. Right, then . . .’

He steered me to the trailer, as if wanting me to stare at the bodies. Already they were turning blue in the morning light. The only victim I recognized was the Metro-Centre general manager, his eyes wide open as if puzzled by his unaudited and unplanned death. A bullet had pierced his neck, but he had scarcely bled, as if deciding to surrender his life with the least fuss.

‘Sangster . . .’ I turned away from the grimacing mouths. ‘What happens now?’

‘The exchange. We can’t keep them in the Metro-Centre. Carradine has a list of demands.’

‘Are the press here?’

‘A few agency reporters. They squat on cornices, fouling the stone. Why?’

‘The police and army killed them. Make sure the reporters know that.’

‘We will . . .’ Sangster turned to stare at me. His huge head began to nod. ‘You’ve given me an idea. Brilliant man . . .’

Carradine waited in his seat, painfully raising his left hand to read the list of demands. Sangster sat beside him, and began to stroke his shoulder, as if grooming an old dog.

‘Tom? You’re doing well. Don’t be afraid to look angry. There’s been a change of plan. I want you to tell the police negotiator that we shot the hostages. All five of them.’

‘We did . . . ?’ Carradine’s eyes stirred in their deep sockets. ‘All five?’

‘We executed them in retaliation. Can you remember?’

‘All five? That would be—?’

‘Murder? No. It shows we’re strong, Tom. Last night was an unprovoked attack. Many of our people could have died. As the occupying military power we are entitled to retaliate. Tell them, Tom—next time we will shoot ten hostages . . .’

SATISFIED WITH THE deception, Sangster boyishly rubbed his hands and led me through the armed marshals. Their eyes forever scanned the high galleries, as if waiting for a messiah to overfly the dome. We watched the trailer being uncoupled from the golf cart and wheeled to the emergency hatch of the fire door.

‘Good . . .’ Sangster’s nostrils flicked. ‘Those bodies were getting a bit ripe. Even for you, Richard . . .’

‘I’ve let myself go. Why, I don’t know. I was supposed to leave with the last hostage release.’

‘What’s happening here is too interesting to leave.’ Sangster nodded eagerly, eyes brightening again now that the bodies were being lifted through the hatch. ‘You know that, Richard. All this is the culmination of your life’s work.’

‘In a way. I wanted to keep an eye on Julia.’

‘Good. It’s time for the patients to watch the physicians—that’s the twenty-first century in a nutshell.’ He gestured with both hands at the tiers of retail terraces and the silent escalators. ‘You created the Metro-Centre, Richard. But I created these people. Their empty, ugly minds, their failure to be fully human. We have to see how it ends.’

‘It’s already ended.’

‘Not quite. People are capable of the most wonderful madness. The kind of madness that gives you hope for the human race.’

We were following the stationary travelator that led from the North Gate entrance to the central atrium. We passed a kitchenware store with a display pyramid outside its doors, an altar of expensive oven dishes, fruit strainers and paper flowers adorning a publicity photograph of David Cruise.

‘Sangster . . .’ I pointed to the shrine. ‘Here’s another . . .’

‘I’ve seen them.’ Sangster stopped and bowed his head in solemn show. ‘They’re prayer sites, Richard. Altars to the household gods who rule our lives. The lares and penates of the ceramic hob and the appliance island. The Metro-Centre is a cathedral, a place of worship. Consumerism may seem pagan, but in fact it’s the last refuge of the religious instinct. Within a few days you’ll see a congregation worshipping its washing machines. The baptismal font that immerses the Monday-morning housewife in the benediction of the wool-wash cycle . . .’

WITH A WAVE he turned and left me, walking back to the North Gate entrance hall, one hand tapping the travelator rail. I watched him whistling to himself, and then set off towards the central atrium, where the stronger sunlight was dispersing the warm mist.

I opened the handles of my shooting stick, and rested in front of an unlooted deli that had remained closed throughout the siege. Exquisite moulds climbed out of cheese jars and pesto bowls, turning the interior into an art-nouveau grotto.

I was almost asleep when a shot sounded from the central atrium, echoing around the upper circle of galleries. There was an erratic burst of rifle fire, followed by cries and shouts that merged into a wave of ululation, the stricken keening of a Middle Eastern bazaar. I assumed that another commando raid was taking place, but the sporting rifles were firing at random, an expression of collective grief and outrage.

As I reached the central atrium a crowd of mutineers in St George’s shirts besieged the first-aid post. A group of marshals emerged from the doors, clearing a path through the throng. They propelled a hospital bed fitted with serum drips and electrical leads hanging from its head rail, and raced alongside it like tobogganists setting off on the Cresta run.

As they swept past me the crowd of supporters ran beside them, firing their shotguns into the air. Someone stumbled and I had a glimpse of the bed’s occupant, a desiccated mummy with a childlike face under an oxygen mask, topped by a pelt of blond hair.

A distraught woman in a tear-stained St George’s shirt approached me, muscular arms above her head, as if ringing a mortuary bell. Trying to calm her, I gripped her hand.

‘What happened? Is Dr Goodwin . . . ?’

‘David Cruise . . .’ She pushed me away, and stared beseechingly at the impassive bears on their plinth. ‘He died . . .’

38 TELL HIM

‘WE’RE CLOSING THE SHOP, Richard.’ Tony Maxted paced around the cluttered treatment room, waving away the stench from the pails of soiled bandages. ‘I advise you to come with us. You’ve been here far too long, for reasons even I don’t understand.’

‘We’ve all been here too long.’ I sat on a broken-backed chair kicked aside when the marshals burst into the first-aid post. ‘How exactly do we get out?’

‘Hard to say yet. But things are on the turn. God knows what could happen.’

Maxted drummed his fingers on the sink. He was decisive but unsure of everything, and patted Julia Goodwin on the shoulder to settle himself.

She sat at the far end of the metal table, her back to the looted pharmacy cabinets. With her bruised forehead and torn blouse she resembled a casualty doctor who had barely fought off an assault by a deranged patient. I wanted to sit next to her and take her worn hands, but I knew that she would see the gesture as mawkish and irrelevant.

‘When did David Cruise die?’ I asked. ‘During the night?’

Maxted glanced at Julia, who nodded briefly to him. He waited for a gunshot to echo its way around the atrium and said: ‘Four days ago. We did everything we could, believe me.’

‘Why did they take him?’

‘Why?’ Maxted stared at his palms. ‘They think they can revive the poor man.’

‘How?’

‘I wish I knew. I’d make a fortune. Resurrection as the ultimate placebo effect.’ Seeing my impatience, he added: ‘They’re taking the body on a tour of the Metro-Centre. All that merchandise is supposed to bring him back. It’s worth a try.’

‘Does it matter?’ Julia spoke sharply, tired of two bickering men. ‘At least they don’t think we killed him.’

‘Four days?’ I thought of the ventilator pumping away, and Julia tiptoeing around the oxygen tent. ‘How did they know he was dead?’

‘They smelled it.’ Maxted reached into the refrigerator and took out a bottle of mineral water. He washed his hands in a splash of the brittle fluid and then drank the last drops. ‘Now it’s time to go. When Cruise doesn’t sit up and read out the sports results these people are going to flip. I doubt if the police understand that.’

‘Sergeant Falconer is here,’ I said. ‘I saw her an hour ago near the North Gate.’

‘Mary Falconer?’ Julia sat forward, suddenly alert. ‘What was she doing?’

‘Keeping an eye on Sangster. He’ll soon take over.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ Maxted kicked a pedal bin out of his way. ‘The magus of the shopping mall, a messiah without a message. You helped to write the script, Richard. The message is: there is no message. Nothing has any meaning, so at last we’re free.’

‘Falconer’s on to him,’ I said. ‘She’ll make sure he doesn’t go too far.’

‘I doubt it.’ Maxted sat at the table and spread his hands over the surface. ‘I suspect she’s on a different mission.’

‘Looking for Duncan Christie?’

‘Something like that.’ Maxted glanced sharply at me, avoiding Julia’s eyes. ‘Unfinished business. We need to find him, for his own safety.’

‘Why?’ I pressed. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Matter?’ Maxted stared at the table, as if expecting his cards to be dealt. ‘It does matter. Because Christie’s in danger.’

‘Good.’ Taking a gamble, and almost too tired to care, I said calmly: ‘He shot my father. You know that, doctor. You’ve always known it.’

‘Well . . .’ Without thinking, Maxted turned in his chair, clearly searching for an exit. ‘That’s not something I can discuss . . .’

‘He also shot David Cruise. Not those Bosnian brothers, whoever they are. Cruise was his real target all along.’

‘That’s a big jump, Richard.’

‘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. They’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.

At six, having destroyed the possibility of sleep, the helicopters withdrew, and dawn began its queasy descent through the dome’s roof, a cumbersome special effect staged for an exhausted audience. The pearly, metallic light exposed the silent plazas of a retail city whose streets were too dangerous to walk, whose crossroads waited like targets for the unwary.

Supermarkets were open all day, for anyone hungry enough to venture between the aisles and risk blundering into a meat locker that incubated every known disease. Freezer cabinets as hot as ovens would suddenly burst from their hinges, each one a vent of hell exhaling a miasma that drifted over the display counters. After digging in the rubble of unwanted cans, I would finally find a few tins of pâté, artichoke hearts in vinegar, jars of butter beans as pale as death.

I would then make my way to Julia, climbing to the second-floor gallery that circled the atrium, take a service staircase to the mezzanine and rush the final few steps past the landing where my father had been shot. An exhausting route, but Julia depended on my modest shopping trips. Limping on my infected foot, which she ritually rebandaged, I made my twice-a-day runs like a gentleman caller in a city under siege. Julia slept in a bed next to the elderly couple, with whom she shared her rations. In the treatment room she made friendly small talk, her eyes on the supermarket bag, like an unfaithful wife determined to survive. She knew I had forgiven her, but she hated me to watch her eat, as if part of her rejected her own right to life. Like everyone, she waited for the siege to end. I urged her to join me in the Holiday Inn, but she refused to leave the first-aid post, the only refuge of sanity in the dome.

AT NOON, WHEN the shadows briefly left us to ourselves, a few people crossed the atrium and began praying to the bears. Loyal supporters too weak to work, they wandered around the dome, rattling the grilles of the empty supermarkets in the hope of finding something to eat. One or two of them had marked barcodes on the backs of their hands, trying to resemble the consumer goods they most admired.

I watched them as I moved along the second-floor deck, feeling sorry for them until I discovered that my favourite deli had been looted during the night. This Polish speciality shop had been a modest haven of eastern European delicacies, spurned by the sweeter palates of Brooklands man and woman. Now it had been stripped of everything remotely edible, its doors chained and padlocked.

Unable to face Julia with an empty shopping bag, I decided to climb to the third floor. Pulling myself up the hand rail was a huge effort, but I rested on every landing, and there was safety on the upper floors. Madness lay below like the mist that covered the atrium.

I reached the third-floor gallery and sat on the top step until my head cleared. Beside me, pools of liquid evaporated in the sunlight. I watched them shrink and dissolve, unsure if I was seeing a mirage. Other drops formed a trail along the arcade, splashes from a casually carried bucket. I dipped my fingers in the nearest pool and raised them to my mouth. Immediately I thought of my Jensen, and the familiar aromatic reek of filling stations.

Petrol? Ten feet away, outside a discount furniture store, was a set of wet shoeprints, a trainer’s sole clearly stamped on the stone floor. I stepped into the foyer and searched the three-piece suites, drawn up like a dozing herd.

Petrol, I was sure. I found the source in a demonstration dining room, a domestic universe of rosewood-effect tables, polished chairs and curtains swagged over glassless windows, missing only the dinner-party chatter relayed from a loudspeaker. A jerrycan stamped with the logo of the Metro-Centre motor pool sat under the dining table, its cap missing, giving off a potent stench in the overheated air.

I backed away from it, aware that the smallest spark would ignite the vapour. I left the store and moved along the deck. The arcade of furniture stores was an arsonist’s paradise, retail space after retail space filled with inflammable sofas and varnished cabinets.

Was this a last-ditch threat by Carradine and his Metro-Centre supporters? Six stores along the arcade, I found a second jerrycan in a bedding store, surrounded by a harem’s wealth of goose-down pillows, fluffy quilts and duvets. The aroma of a hundred filling stations, threatening but somehow enticing, drifted from the silent stores and rose into the haze below the roof.

Fifteen minutes later I reached the top floor, where a third jerrycan sat on the landing above the stairwell, petrol slopped around it. A police helicopter drifted over the dome, throwing its spidery shadows across the galleries, a flicker of rotor blades scrambling through the dead vines and yuccas.

Above the cuffing downdraught I heard the fracture-cry of plate glass falling to the floor. A display stand collapsed in the entrance to a kitchenware store, hurling saucepans and pieces of heavy ovenware onto the landing. I pressed myself against the wall, almost expecting a furnace of petroleum vapour to explode from the store.

Lying at my feet between a colander and a copper steamer was a police-issue firearm, a Heckler & Koch machine gun of the type that had killed my father. I stared down at it in a befuddled way, trying to grasp how it had become a useful kitchen aid for the busy Brooklands home-maker.

Without thinking, I picked the weapon from the floor, surprised by its weight. The firing pin was cocked, and I held the pistol grip, easing my forefinger around the trigger.

I peered into the darkened shop. A woman in a black police uniform, dishevelled blonde hair torn from her scalp, struggled among the scattered saucepans. She thrashed on the floor, kicking at a cascade of falling frying pans, a demented housewife attacking her own home. She lunged at a man who burst from the darkness, and seized him around the waist. He threw her aside and emerged into the light, feet sliding on the saucepan lids, like an enraged husband escaping for ever from suburban life.

He gasped at the air and turned to me, seeing me for the first time. His camouflage jacket stank of petrol, as if he were about to combust spontaneously in the sunlight. He calmed himself, and a scarred hand reached out for the machine gun that I pointed towards him.

Recognizing Duncan Christie, I stepped back and levelled the weapon at his chest. Christie edged forward, aware that I would probably miss him if I fired. His quirky mouth with its unhealed lips worked through a set of grimaces, some whispered message to himself. His hand tried to grip the barrel of the gun, but as he stared into my face, willing me not to fire, he recognized me through my beard.

‘Mr Pearson? Remember? Duncan Christie . . .’

Sergeant Falconer leaned against the doorway, too exhausted to throw herself at Christie. She gasped something into the radio clipped to her left shoulder, then signalled to me with her free hand.

‘Shoot him, Richard! Shoot him now!’

I watched Christie, well aware that I was holding the actual weapon that had killed my father. Looking at this hopeless misfit, sustained by a single obsession, I knew that his life was about to end, expiring in the sights of a police marksman waiting in the upper galleries.

‘Mr Pearson . . .’ Christie exposed his broken teeth. ‘You know what happened. She made me kill your father . . .’

Sergeant Falconer shouted in warning as Christie lunged towards me. I moved across the arcade, raised the weapon above my head and flung it over the rail.

‘Go!’ I shouted at Christie. ‘You know what to do! Run . . . !’

SERGEANT FALCONER STOOD unsteadily among the clutter of saucepans, one hand on an injured knee, the other trying to tether her blonde hair to her head.

‘Mr Pearson? For pity’s sake, you’re madder than he is.’

‘I forgive him.’ I listened to Christie racing along the gallery below us, running through endless arcades of autumn fashions and television sets, fleeing from a universe of digital cameras and cocktail cabinets. ‘He can go—if he can find somewhere.’

‘Forgive him?’ Sergeant Falconer switched off her radio. The bruises on her forehead were showing through her pale skin, but she seemed far more determined than the uneasy woman I had seen making tea in Fairfax’s office. I guessed that she had put the murder conspiracy behind her and found a new compass bearing in her life. ‘Forgive him? For your father? It doesn’t matter.’

‘No? It’s all that does matter. For what it’s worth, I forgive you. I don’t think you knew what you were doing.’

‘Maybe not. Anyway, it’s too late. Just get out of here. Take Dr Goodwin and anyone else. You’re in real danger.’

‘Why? Sergeant . . . ?’

‘They’re coming in. It’s all over, Mr Pearson. You’ll have to find another playgroup.’

‘And Christie?’

‘I’ll arrest him later.’

As she spoke there was a heavy explosion from the South Gate entrance hall. The deck swayed beneath my feet, and the roof of the Metro-Centre lifted slightly and then settled as a cascade of dust fell like talc. The smog cloud that covered the atrium seethed and swirled, billows chasing themselves around the bears.

The siege was ending.

40 EXIT STRATEGIES

AT LAST TOGETHER, our hands gripping the head rail, Julia and I propelled the bed through the doorway of the first-aid post and set off for the South Gate entrance. After twenty yards we were both exhausted. Out of control, the bed veered into an overturned golf cart. The elderly couple who were Julia’s last patients lay strapped to the mattress. As we jolted through the scatter of roof debris they closed their eyes, alarmed by the erratic excursion and the panic that now gripped the dome. Bent over the head rail, I saw them trying to reassure each other that all would be well, neither believing it for an instant.

‘We’re almost there, Mrs Mitchell,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be home soon, warming the teapot.’

‘Home? I don’t think this is the right way, Mr Pearson. We usually go to the No. 48 bus stop. Dr Julia . . . ?’

‘We’ll find it, Mrs Mitchell.’ Julia winced as we slewed across a floor of broken glass, then clung to my shoulder when I straightened the bed’s wayward front wheels. ‘I’ll tell the driver to wait for you.’

‘Maurice . . . did you hear that?’ Mrs Mitchell’s sharp eyes noticed the dust clouds escaping through the fractured roof. ‘It’s all been such a fuss about nothing . . .’

The past, in its small but persistent ways, was returning to the Metro-Centre, though few of those left behind had Mrs Mitchell’s acuity. Carradine’s defenders at the South Gate entrance were falling back, many of them stunned by the controlled explosion that had blown down a section of the fire door. A few die-hard marshals were building a barricade beside the travelator, piling up café chairs and tables. Hostages ran in all directions, distraught and speechless after their forced stay in the Ramada Inn and Novotel. A few huddled in shop doorways, still clutching the carrier bags they held when the siege began. Julia shouted to them, urging them to leave. She pulled my arm and pointed helplessly to two hostages hiding among the mannequins in the window of a dress shop and trying to mimic their calm and plastic detachment.

Almost too weary to walk, she fell behind me, stumbling through the debris and dust. I stopped and took her arms, then made her sit at the foot of the bed.

‘Julia, stay there—I can push on my own . . .’

‘Just for a minute. Richard, where are the police?’

Blocked by a barricade, I reversed and manoeuvred the bed into a side thoroughfare that led past the Holiday Inn. The lake was black as death, a tar pit freighted with horrors, but elsewhere the lights were coming on. Neon tubes stuttered and steadied themselves, logos glimmered through the dust. Strip lighting flooded the shops and stores, revealing a hundred polished counters. Crazed patterns raced across the display screens, the brain tracings of a giant struggling to awake from its deranged sleep.

‘Richard . . . all these lights.’ Julia looked up in a dazed way at the arrays of gleaming bulbs. ‘They’re going to open for business . . .’

‘Not yet. Snipers, I guess. The police need to flush them out.’

I steered us past the Holiday Inn with its familiar glowing sign. The wave machine was stirring the sluggish water into a nightmare brew, but as we approached the South Gate entrance hall an even stranger smell surrounded us, a cool flavour that I had first scented as a child.

‘Richard? What is it?’ Julia stepped down from the bed and nervously filled her lungs. ‘It tastes of . . . trees and sky.’

‘Fresh air! We’re there, Julia . . .’

Ahead of us, though, were a dozen of Carradine’s marshals in St George’s shirts, shotguns and rifles strapped to their shoulders with the barrels facing the floor. They were disciplined and marching in step, but their heads were bowed, like a defeated team leaving the field after a fierce but losing struggle, each player communing with himself.

At their head was Tony Maxted, wearing a crisply white surgical coat that he had secretly saved for this moment. He was tired but confident, doing his best to encourage this breakaway group whom he had persuaded to call an end to the siege. He moved up and down their ranks, smiling and talking to each man in turn as they moved towards the waiting light.

Maxted flinched when another controlled explosion burst through a nearby emergency exit. The strap muscle beneath his bald scalp seized his skull and threw his head back. He stumbled and reached out to two of the marshals, then seemed to lose his bearings in the swirl of dust.

I leaned against the head rail, too weary to push. The entrance hall was covered with debris, and a section of the fire door lay in the sun. Masked figures in dark uniforms moved through the intensely lit air.

Behind us an even brighter glow illuminated the interior of the dome, turning an immense spotlight onto the underside of the roof. Shadows wavered and swayed from every doorway, like nervous onlookers unsure whether to believe their eyes.

Flames rose from the seventh-floor galleries around the atrium, lazy blades of light that seemed to wake together and race around the high keep of the retail citadel. Soon the top three decks were burning briskly, every balcony and doorway bursting into blooms of fire. The petrol-soaked settees and carpets, the demonstration dining rooms and ideal kitchens were giving themselves to their own fiery ends.

The platoon in St George’s shirts stopped to look back, tired faces revived by the fire, colour returning to their cheeks after the twilight weeks. They were roused by the sight of the Metro-Centre consuming itself, as if welcoming this last transformation.

‘Right! Keep going!’ Maxted strode down the ranks, clapping his hands, trying to wake them from their trance. ‘Come on, lads! We’re there . . .’

Debris was falling from the roof, clouds of super-heated dust that had burst into flame as air was drawn into the dome. I could feel the huge mall shifting its weight, its frame members flexing in the heat. A gale rushed past us, cooler air speeding through the vents of a furnace.

‘Wake up, the lot of you!’ Maxted struck one of the marshals on the shoulder, trying to rouse the man and hold his attention. ‘Let’s move! We’ll all be incinerated . . .’

The marshal turned, aware of Maxted for the first time. He seemed to emerge from a deep rigor, and seized the psychiatrist by the collar of his white coat. Other hands gripped his arms, forcing his body into a crouch. A tremor ran through the platoon, a spasm of anger, fear and pride. Together they turned their backs to the entrance hall. They moved forward, carrying Maxted like a totem at their head, running towards the blaze, his hoarse cries lost in the fierce drumming of the inferno.

41 A SOLAR CULT

‘WHAT HAPPENED to Tony Maxted?’ Julia asked.

We stood by the police railings and gazed across the empty plaza at what remained of the Metro-Centre. Much of the dome was intact, a curved wall like the stand of a circular stadium. But the apex had collapsed, falling into the furnace of shops, hotels and department stores. Three weeks after our escape, smoke and steam rose from the ruin, watched by a dozen fire crews drawn up within fifty yards of the structure. A small crowd appeared each day, staring at the stricken mall as if unable to grasp what had happened. The Metro-Centre had devoured itself, a furnace consumed by its own fire.

‘Richard . . . poor man, are you still here?’

‘I’m not sure. It feels rather strange. In a way we shouldn’t be watching . . .’

‘No? Where should we be? Sweet man, part of you will be forever beachcombing near the Holiday Inn . . .’

She took my arm to reassure me, but kept a wary eye on my shifting moods. For the first time her hair was reined in over her left shoulder, exposing her face. Three nights under sedation at Brooklands Hospital, and long days of sleep in her bed at home, had transformed her from the haggard refugee I had pushed to safety from the dome. That morning I had heard from her for the first time, when she left a text message suggesting that she drive me to the dome.

Parking outside my father’s flat, she smiled approvingly when I crossed the gravel, stick supporting me as I swung my foot in its surgical boot. I knew there and then that she was at ease with herself and ready to be at ease with me. I had rescued her from the furnace of the Metro-Centre, and in the mysterious logic of the affections this single act erased her guilt over the part she had played in my father’s death. Victims had to pay twice for the crimes committed against them.

By contrast, I was still exhausted, barely able to keep awake, watching the TV news, hobbling around the flat and cooking boiled eggs that I found waiting for me the next day. But the sight of the Metro-Centre woke me. I was glad to be with Julia, and slipped my arm around her waist.

‘Richard . . . ?’

‘Sorry, I was dreaming. What happened to Maxted? They found his body yesterday. Hard to identify in all that ash. One thing you can say about consumer durables, they give off a lot of heat.’

‘Where was he?’

‘In the atrium. I think they tied him to one of the bears.’

‘What a hell of a way to go.’ Julia shuddered, tempted to unrein her hair. ‘He was rather devious, but I liked him. Why did the marshals turn on him? He was leading them out of the dome.’

‘They “flipped”. Willed madness, he called it. Remember Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia? It never occurred to Maxted that he could be the last victim.’

‘And Sangster? I don’t think he got out.’

‘Most people didn’t.’ I held Julia’s shoulder, trying to calm her. ‘Sergeant Falconer, Carradine, all those marshals and engineers who helped him seize the dome. The fire . . .’

‘Did Duncan Christie set it off?’

‘Hard to say. He wasn’t very good at anything. His wife has taken the child and disappeared. I hope he’s with them.’

‘If Christie didn’t start the fire, who did?’

‘No one. The army commander gave the order to turn on the lights. Once the police opened the doors the air flooded in. One spark somewhere was all it needed. Instead of flushing out any snipers they started a solar cult.’

Lips pursed, Julia listened to me. ‘So . . . Geoffrey Fairfax, Maxted, Sangster, Sergeant Falconer, Christie—the people who killed your father are all dead. Except for one.’

‘Julia . . .’ I dropped my stick and embraced her. She held her head from me, exposing her chin and neck, and I could see the scars brought to the surface of her skin like a guilty rash, a last flush of self-contempt. ‘You didn’t kill my father. If you’d known what Fairfax and Sangster had really planned you’d have stopped them.’

‘Would I?’ Julia forced her eyes to look away from the dome. ‘I’m still not sure.’

‘Something very dangerous was happening here. You needed to act.’

‘But the wrong people got hurt, as they usually do.’ Julia retrieved my stick and pressed it into my hand. ‘I have to get to the hospital—all these check-ups, they’re a disease in their own right. I’ll give you a lift home.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stay here for a while. There are a few things . . .’

WE WALKED TO her car, parked on the nearby kerb. She settled herself behind the wheel, watching me through the bright new windscreen as I arranged my mind.

‘Richard? You’re trying to say something?’

‘Right. Why don’t we meet this weekend—you can stay in my father’s flat?’

‘Your flat, Richard.’ She corrected me solemnly. ‘Your flat.’

‘My flat.’

‘Brave chap. That took some doing. You’re on—I’ll take my chances with a wounded man.’

‘Good. I’ll have to learn how to clean the bath.’

‘I’ll come, if you tell me something. I’ve been thinking about it all week.’ She pointed to the dome and the watching crowds, their impassive faces turned towards the plumes of smoke and water vapour. ‘When you and David Cruise started all this, did you know where it would end?’

‘I can’t say. Perhaps we did . . . in a way, that was the whole idea.’

SHE THOUGHT OVER my reply, once again the serious young doctor, and drove away with a mock-fascist salute. I waved to her until she had gone, inhaling the last traces of her scent on the air. Tapping the ground before each step, I moved through the crowd and found a free place at the railings. The Metro-Centre was as much a tourist attraction as it had ever been. Visitors drove from the motorway towns to gaze at its smoking carcass, once the repository of everything they most valued. None of them, I noticed, was wearing a St George’s shirt. Tom Carradine’s seizure of the dome had sent a seismic jolt through the Heathrow suburbs, and the ground beneath our feet was still shifting.

The policewoman who carried out my debriefing told me that all marches and most of the sports fixtures had been cancelled. Post-match violence and racist attacks had fallen away, and many Asian families were returning to their homes. The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air with all the vapourizing three-piece suites and discount carpeting.

I GRIPPED THE police railing in both hands, the stick crooked over one arm. In some ways the dome reminded me of a crashed airship, one of the vast inter-war zeppelins that belonged to the lost era of the Brooklands racing circuit. But in other ways it resembled the caldera of a resting volcano, still smoking and ready to revive itself. One day it would become active again, spewing over the motorway towns a shower of patio doors and appliance islands, sun loungers and en-suite bathrooms.

I remembered my last moments in the dome, looking back at the fires that raced along the high galleries from one store to the next. In my mind the fires still burned, moving through the streets of Brooklands and the motorway towns, the flames engulfing crescents of modest bungalows, devouring executive estates and community centres, football stadiums and car showrooms, the last bonfire of the consumer gods.

I watched the spectators around me, standing silently at the railing. There were no St George’s shirts, but they watched a little too intently. One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.