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 STOODunsteadily 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.