THIRTY MINUTES LATERI was sitting in Maxted’s black armchair, finishing the last of the whisky in the decanter and mulling over the almost deliberate way in which everyone I visited in Brooklands had plied me with alcohol. Even my father had left a substantial supply of gin and whisky, as if keen to ease the culture shock awaiting me. Fairfax, Sangster and Dr Maxted had been as quick with a bottle as an over-attentive sommelier in an unpopular restaurant.
I was staring gloomily at the decanter when the lift doors at last opened. Two security men emerged, carrying a leather restraining harness. They approached me without speaking, feinting around the furniture like dog handlers cornering an alcoholic pit bull, but I was sure that they knew who I was. After checking the flat they beckoned me to the lift.
‘Mr Pearson, we’ll have to see you out.’
‘Good. I’ll come quietly. I take it you’re the Rapid Response Unit?’
‘Dr Maxted said—’
‘Don’t tell me. I couldn’t cope . . .’
I assumed that Maxted had slipped away on some errand of his own, knowing that I would set off the alarm, and had told the security men to release me half an hour later. I entered the lift, the guards behind me with their harness, ready to throw it over me at the first sign of dementia.
The doors closed. In the pause before the lift moved there was the distant sound of a powerful explosion, a loud percussive boom that entered the shaft above our heads and rocked the lift.
I stepped into the night air, and searched the sky for the burning debris of this huge firework. A police car was parked beside the rhododendron screen. The headlights were on full beam, and the distracted woman constable at the wheel was trying to speak through a blizzard of radio chatter. She saw me walk to the security barrier and signalled me to stop.
As I approached the police car a blonde-haired woman in a blue tracksuit and trainers emerged from the admin offices. She strode past me, and caught the tang of whisky on the dark air.
‘Mr Pearson?’ Sergeant Mary Falconer seemed surprised to find me. She pointed to the security men still watching me from the elevator. ‘What are you doing here? Did you break in?’
‘Break in?’ I raised my hands to seize her shoulders, and then let her step back. ‘This place really is a madhouse. For the last hour I’ve been trying to break out.’
‘Break out?’ She fussed with a stray hair. ‘Why? How did you get in?’
‘Forget it. No wonder the crime rate is soaring. Dr Maxted brought me here.’
‘Dr Maxted? Are you a patient of his?’
‘At this rate I soon will be. Now, I need to find a taxi.’
‘Hold on a moment. Just wait there . . .’
Sergeant Falconer listened to the radio chatter and rubbed the dial of her watch. She was dressed for the athletics field, or at least a run around the neighbourhood, though scarcely a hair or eyelash was out of place. At the same time she seemed ill at ease, like a supporting actor assigned the wrong role. Once again she reminded me of a strait-laced but vulnerable teacher aware that her class had seen her in a piece of questionable behaviour.
A second police car turned off the main road and approached the security barrier, but Sergeant Falconer was too distracted to notice it. She listened to the ambulance sirens in the distance and drew a mobile phone from her tracksuit top. She stared at the text message, then crossed the road to the second police car. She took the radio earpiece from the driver, listened briefly and ran back to me. For the first time she was alert and focused, as if the script she had been following now synchronized with reality.
‘Sergeant Falconer . . . ?’ I held her arm. ‘Something’s going on. What are you people playing at?’
‘Get into the car.’ Avoiding my breath, she pushed me through the rear door. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’
‘What is it?’ I watched the second police car reverse and speed away. ‘Have they caught the gunman?’
‘Who? Which gunman?’
‘The man who killed my father. They’ve arrested him?’
‘No.’ She fastened her seat belt, beckoning the woman driver to climb the grass embankment around the security barrier. ‘It’s the Metro-Centre. There’s been a bomb attack. Heavy damage, but no casualties. So far . . .’
16
THE BOMB ATTACK
THE TEMPLE WAS UNDER THREAT, and the congregation was rallying to defend it. Crowds of football supporters filled the streets, running past our police car as it sat in the stalled traffic near the town hall. Urged on by Sergeant Falconer, the woman constable tried to force our way through the throngs of fans and evening shoppers. All the matches in the Thames Valley Olympics had been abandoned as the news broke of the bomb attack at the Metro-Centre. Supporters turned their backs on ice-hockey grudge matches and penalty shoot-outs, and set off through the streets to give succour to the stricken dome.
Six hundred yards from the Metro-Centre we could clearly see the smoke lifting from the roof, dark billows lit by cascades of sparks swept aloft in the updraughts. Still intact, the dome loomed in front of us when we reached the central plaza, as always so huge that I failed to notice the police vehicles, ambulances and fire engines drawn up around the entrance to the underground car park.
A small section of the roof was dark, a narrow triangle the size and shape of a schooner’s jib sail. The huge bomb detonated in the upper level of the basement car park had torn through the floor of the Metro-Centre, the explosive pressure blowing out the glass and aluminium panels two hundred feet above the atrium. The shopping mall, according to the police radio reports, was largely untouched, and the smoke rose from the burning vehicles ignited by the bomb. Opening the passenger window, I gazed at the dark triangle near the apex of the dome. It would soon be repaired, but for the moment a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.
Sergeant Falconer showed her warrant card to the policemen keeping a lane open for emergency vehicles. Above the din of ambulance sirens an officer in a yellow jacket directed us towards the underground garage.
‘Looks like a car bomb,’ Sergeant Falconer told me. ‘Three pounds of Semtex. There’s another maniac on the loose.’
‘Anyone killed or injured?’
‘No one. Let’s thank God for that . . .’
But her relief at the news scarcely left the sergeant any less agitated. Threads of blonde hair were springing loose from their braids. For some reason, the slightest shift from the immaculate left Sergeant Falconer looking frayed and insecure. Impatient to get into the car park, she reached across the driver and gripped the steering wheel, trying to change lanes. The car stalled, and the flustered constable flooded the engine as Sergeant Falconer drummed her fists on the instrument panel.
When we approached the entrance ramp I looked back at the plaza around the Metro-Centre, now occupied by a huge crowd, drawn to the St Peter’s Square of the retail world. Everyone was staring upwards at the billows of smoke that lifted into the night. In the front row was Tom Carradine, the young manager who had first welcomed me to the dome. He darted to and fro, desperate to find a better view, too distraught to express himself in any other way, like a tennis player leaping around a court as he tried to ward off defeat by an invisible opponent with an invisible ball. The notion that anyone might dislike the Metro-Centre and wish to damage it had clearly never occurred to him.
WE ENTERED THEbasement car park, and followed the police guide rails into one of the delivery bays, finding a place between two articulated trucks. The night shift were being questioned by a team of investigators, and the freight carousels were stationary, stopped in mid-track at the moment of the explosion. Three-piece suites sealed in plastic sheeting, video-game consoles and coffee machines leaned against each other in a huge jumble. Over everything hung a stench of petrol and scorched rubber, and the acid dust of pulverized cement.