Police emergency lights shone through the haze, and crime-scene tapes marked out the empty parking bays being searched by forensics officers. A wedge-shaped section of the concrete ceiling had vanished, driven into the changing rooms of a health club near the atrium.

‘All the customers had gone to the sports matches,’ Sergeant Falconer explained. ‘So they’d closed for the night. It’s a miracle no one was hurt.’

I watched the forensics teams picking their way through the rubble. ‘Not much to find. What are they looking for?’

‘Timer fragments. A clock mechanism. Human tissues . . .’ Sergeant Falconer stared at me with concern. ‘This isn’t the place for you, Mr Pearson. It’d be best if you went home.’

‘You’re right.’

My presence unsettled her, and she was eager to get away from me. Why she had brought me to the Metro-Centre in the first place seemed unclear, like Dr Maxted’s motives for driving me all the way to his mental hospital.

I tried to remember where I had parked that morning, but the perspectives of everything in the basement garage seemed to have changed. I had driven around for a few minutes, searching for a place, then lost the numbered ticket during my scuffle with the thugs who attacked Duncan Christie.

A dozen cars caught fire when their petrol tanks exploded, burning fiercely before the sprinkler system came into play. Smothered in foam, the blackened vehicles sat in the wreckage of themselves, windows and doors missing, shreds of tyres peeling from their rims.

At the centre was the car that had carried the bomb, an agony of splayed body panels, exposed seating springs, engine block and drive shaft. The entire roof had vanished, and the forensics officers in white overalls were leaning into the debris, searching the carbonized remains of the instrument panel.

I assumed that the bomber had stolen the car before driving it to the Metro-Centre, and had left the bomb in the boot, directly above the fuel tank. Both the front and rear number plates had vaporized in the fireball, but the large engine had blunted the blast damage to the front of the car. A metal Guards Polo Club badge was still bolted to the front bumper.

A similar badge had been attached to my Jensen when I bought it from the young widow of a Grenadier lieutenant a few months after his death in the Iraq war. As a nod to the dead soldier, I left the badge where it was, hoping that it might catch the eye of his former comrades.

I looked away, shielding my face from the harsh emergency lights. Of all the vehicles to choose from in the Metro-Centre car park, the bomber had left his vicious surprise in my old but still sleek and handsome Jensen . . .

I took out my ignition keys and stared at the ancient fob, all that was left of the stylish tourer from a vanished age of motoring. It occurred to me that the driver, not the car, was the real target, and I had barely escaped being blown through the Jensen’s roof. My hour trapped in Maxted’s penthouse had probably saved me. Had I left Northfield Hospital with Maxted, and taken a taxi back to the Metro-Centre, I would have been driving the Jensen to my father’s flat when the bomb detonated.

I walked towards the forensics officer picking pieces of ragged upholstery from the car’s floor-pan. Within a few days, if not hours, the engine and chassis numbers would lead the police to the Grenadier’s widow, and then to me.

Would they assume that I was the bomber? My father had died in the Metro-Centre, and leaving a bomb in the garage would strike the police as a likely act of revenge. The forensics officer had turned to watch me, and I noticed that I was waving the Jensen’s keys in my hand, a nervous tic that had come from nowhere.

I calmed myself, and searched for Sergeant Falconer. She was standing with a group of journalists who were questioning a uniformed inspector. In a transparent plastic bag he carried a trilby hat with a ragged hole through its crown. He removed the hat from the bag and showed it to the journalists. As he spoke, his fingers flicked at a fishing fly sewn into the hatband.

The journalists scribbled into their notebooks, clearly impressed by the hat. But I was watching Sergeant Falconer. Even in the harsh glare of the emergency lights her face was unnaturally blanched. The blood had drained from her cheeks, revealing the bones beneath her skin patiently waiting for their day. She turned and swayed, then stumbled against the inspector. Still talking to the journalists, he beckoned to two policewomen behind him and they quickly helped Sergeant Falconer towards the driving cab of a forensics van parked inside the crime-scene area.

Concerned for her, I tried to cross the nearest tape, but an officer ordered me away. As I backed off, trying to clear the stench and grit from my throat, I brushed past the young constable who had driven us from the hospital.

‘Is she all right?’ I held her arm. ‘Sergeant Falconer? She fainted . . .’

‘She’ll be fine. There’s bad news. We’ve found the first victim. Or what’s left of him.’

‘Dear God . . . where is he?’

‘In a nasty little jigsaw puzzle.’ She took my hand from her arm and stared at me shrewdly, still unsure whether I was a patient at the mental hospital. ‘Don’t breathe in too much or look at the soles of your shoes . . .’

‘I won’t.’ I pointed to the inspector dismissing the troop of journalists. ‘The hat? Was the dead man a local fisherman?’

‘A Brooklands solicitor. His name’s inside it. Geoffrey Fairfax.’ She raised the brim of her cap, debating whether to detain me as a possible suspect. ‘Did you know him, Mr Pearson . . . ?’

I THANKED THEconstable and climbed the steps beside the freight entrance, trying not to breathe until I reached the open air, and an even deeper darkness than the night.

17

THE GEOMETRY OF THE CROWD

THE POLICE WERE withdrawing from Brooklands, climbing into their patrol cars parked in the perimeter road and driving away from the mall. I walked through the huge crowd in the Metro-Centre plaza and filled my lungs with the sooty air, trying to expel the tang of dust and burnt rubber. The night hung heavily over the sullen faces, the darkness stained with the sweat of athletes’ bodies, the scent of chewing gum, bottled beer and anger.

Deep in the crowd, I stood on the running board of an unattended Land Cruiser and raised my head to a brief eddy of cooler air. Tom Carradine had gone, ending his frantic tennis game with himself, no doubt working on a flurry of cheerful press releases. The citadel had been breached, but the police were going, leaving the defence to a scratch brigade of PR executives, floor managers and secretaries.

Two officers in the last patrol car watched as a group of ice-hockey supporters surrounded a forgotten Volvo and drummed their fists on the roof, the familiar tribal tattoo. The windscreen shattered, but the policemen ignored the incident and drove away.

Only the forensics team remained in the basement garage of the Metro-Centre, picking through the debris of my car. Already I missed the classic Jensen, with its elegant body and huge American engine. I found it hard to believe that Geoffrey Fairfax had set out to kill me. Conceivably the solicitor had seen the bomber planting the device in my car, and tried to defuse it before I returned.

Or was I being framed by Fairfax and his shadowy group, set up as the likely bomber, obsessed by my hatred of the Metro-Centre? These were cold questions with even colder answers. The half decanter of Laphroaig I had downed in the penthouse had evaporated from my bloodstream the moment I recognized the shattered Jensen.

I watched the perimeter road, waiting for police reinforcements to arrive. A restless crowd several thousand strong surrounded the Metro-Centre, moving in vast currents within itself. Sports groups circled the mall, football and ice-hockey fans pushing past each other as they roamed the darkness. There was no hostility between the groups, but I could almost smell the anger, the coarse breath of a disturbed beast searching for an enemy.