‘Not exactly roadworthy?’
‘It doesn’t look like it. Try being a pedestrian, Mr Pearson. But watch your feet . . .’
She walked away from me, her smile fading into a smirk, and joined the two constables completing their interviews. I had unsettled her, and any concern she had once felt for me had gone. But emotions in the conventional sense probably mattered little to Sergeant Falconer. She attached herself to powerful men, fully expecting to be humiliated, and almost welcoming any rebuffs that came her way. She had played her part in the interlocking conspiracies that had flourished after my father’s death, probably without ever realizing that other lives would be at stake.
Yet my own role was even more compromised. I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and sometime actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement, while the cable presenter had expanded a hundredfold and was ready to burst out of his bottle. The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.
For the first time I regretted that I had sold my Chelsea Harbour flat. I turned to the bullet-starred door, more than ready for a cold shower and a colder drink, but my foot seemed to stick to the entrance tiles. I looked down at my shoe, and realized that I had stepped into the pool of Dr Kumar’s blood. Sergeant Falconer waved to me as I took off my shoe and limped into the hall.
27
AN ANXIOUS INTERMISSION
VIOLENCE AND HATE were coming out to play.
The Kumars survived, the doctor with a deep puncture wound to her left lung, and her husband with severe burns to his chest and arms. I tried to visit them at Brooklands Hospital, but the relatives who arrived from Southall turned me away. One of the nephews who kept guard over Dr Kumar manhandled me to the lift and threatened to kill me if I appeared again. Julia Goodwin, sadly, avoided me and refused to take my calls. My neighbours were equally hostile, staring through me on the stairways and declining to park anywhere near my Mercedes.
The delegation to the Home Office led by Sangster and Dr Maxted came to nothing. The junior minister offered them the usual assurances, but he represented a marginal Birmingham constituency with high unemployment and was only too keen to import the magic formula of sport, discipline and consumerism.
For the next week I remained at the flat, alone with my father, thrown back on my memories of the old pilot or, more exactly, on my reconstruction of him from the few clues he had left me. From the start I had separated myself from his right-wing views, his St George’s shirts and Hitler biographies, and the obsession with Nazi regalia. I loathed all that, as I loathed the attacks on the Asian communities near the M25. Nevertheless, my neighbours saw me as a sinister manipulator helping to sell, not refrigerators and microwave ovens, but a flat-pack führer and an ugly suburban fascism. Consumerism and a new totalitarianism had met by chance in a suburban shopping mall and celebrated a nightmare marriage.
MEANWHILE, THE SPORTINGweekends seemed to last for ever, moving without a break through the working week. A packed list of fixtures filled every venue from Brooklands to Heathrow. Mini-leagues and knockout championships brought coachloads of supporters to the Metro-Centre, where they marched and countermarched behind their drum majors. There were so many fixtures, so many local finals mutating into league quarter-finals and area semi-finals, that supporters were light-headed from the endless cheering. They needed to stamp and shout and wave their banners, to believe passionately in something or, failing that, in nothing.
At night, grimly, they preferred nothing. National radio and TV bulletins made clear that violence rose as sports fever mounted. Attacks on Muslim shops and community centres were now as routine as a post-match pint. After the evening football games any Chinese and Indian takeaways near the stadium were attacked by gangs of supporters looking for violence. On his cable show David Cruise commented slyly that the easiest way to find a curry house was to look for black eyes and broken windows.
Around the Metro-Centre the sports-club marshals, dubbed honour guards by Tom Carradine, had merged into paramilitary units, protecting hypermarkets and retail parks from ‘thieves and outsiders’, who were blamed for the drunken damage. David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.
New enemies were always needed, and one in particular was soon found. The traditional middle class, with their private schools and disdain for the Metro-Centre, became a popular target. Bored after trashing another halal butcher’s and another Sikh grocer’s, gangs of supporters took to roaming the more prosperous residential areas, jeering at any half-timbered house with a rose pergola and a tennis court. A Harrods or Peter Jones van caught in the motorway towns was promptly spray-painted and had its tyres let down. Teenage girls clip-clopping their docile nags under the beech trees of comfortable avenues were followed by hooting cars emblazoned with St George’s insignia. Bizarrely, the aerosolled Star of David began to appear on the garage doors of the most snootily gentile barristers and architects.
I urged Cruise to call for restraint, but he was too busy showing off his new Mercedes, a black stretch limousine that he christened ‘Heinrich’. With the Filipina girls bouncing on the jump seats behind the chauffeur, he swept from stadium to ice-hockey rink to athletics ground. Standing in the directors’ box, Cory and Imelda simpering beside him, he boomed at the crowd, his amplified voice drumming through the night sky. As ‘Heinrich’ made its threatening progress through the streets, he gave a continuous commentary to an on-board camera, reminding his viewers of gold-card and select-entry evenings at the Metro-Centre. For all his suggestive by-play with the Filipinas, and the strong hint that more than slap and tickle went on in their shared jacuzzi, he urged his viewers to defend their ‘republic’ against the corrupt alliance of the snobbish middle class and the snootier London boroughs who had always despised the motorway suburbs.
But Cruise’s worries were for show only. The reign of the bully had begun. Led by Cruise and the Metro-Centre, the new movement was sweeping through the Home Counties. Supporters in St George’s shirts swaggered down high streets from Dagenham to Uxbridge, hunted in packs through middle-class estates and terrorized every golden retriever in sight.
Three days after the attack on the Kumars, a gang of sports supporters invaded the Brooklands magistrates’ court where two marshals charged by the police with attempted murder were being sent for trial. The supporters jeered the police officers and shouted down the elderly neighbours testifying that they had seen the attack. The hearing broke up, and the shocked magistrates adjourned the case, releasing the accused men on a nominal bail.
The next day supporters’ groups invaded social security offices in Brooklands, Ashford and Hillingdon, demanding an immediate increase in supplementary benefit for those who left their jobs to become marshals at the local retail parks.
Despite the growing climate of fear, what was left of the county establishment firmly supported David Cruise and his brand of ideological consumerism. Mayors, MPs and even church leaders saw Cruise and the Metro-Centre as calming influences. They admired the new discipline, especially as it drove up property values and brought a surge in activity to every cash counter within ten miles of Heathrow. Crime continued to fall throughout the Thames Valley, and police chiefs dismissed the attacks on Asian and immigrant communities as the exuberance of a few sports fans.