I tried to smile, but a different self stood behind the shirt. My cautious take on the world, imposed on me by my neurotic mother, had given way to something far less introverted. The focus of my face moved from my eyes and high forehead to my mouth and jaw. The muscles in my face were more visible, the strings of a harder appetite, a more knowing hunger . . .
I threw the shirt into the empty laundry basket.
WHAT DANGEROUS GAME had my father been playing? Years of mismanaged third world airports brought out a nasty strain of racism in senior pilots. Or was there something fascist about flight itself? Death, far from closing his life, had opened the door to a dozen possible futures. Already he was a different man from the wise and sympathetic figure I had imagined. What sort of father would he have made? I sensed my free and easy childhood, scarcely controlled by my distracted mother, giving way to a more disciplined regime. Discipline as a means of instilling love . . . ?
The flat was airless, and I needed to pace a car park somewhere to clear my head. I closed the door behind me and left the apartment house, listening to my feet on the gravel, a horizontal slide area where nothing was firmly bedded.
I was sitting in the driving seat of the Jensen, waiting for my mental compass to reset itself, when a grey Audi turned into the car park beside me. A tall, middle-aged Asian in a creased business suit stepped out. As his large shoes ploughed their way to the entrance doors, I noticed that he was carrying a rolled-up newspaper in his right hand, tapping the air like a bandmaster beating time. His bulky chest and shoulders reminded me of the intruder I had pinned briefly to the wall.
‘Excuse me . . . ! Sir, can you wait . . . ?’
I caught up with him in the lobby, as he searched for his keys to the ground-floor flat. Startled when I burst through the doors, he dropped the keys onto the tiled floor. None of my neighbours had called on me to express their sympathies, but this Asian resident would have seen me coming and going, and must have guessed who I was.
Trying to calm him, I introduced myself. ‘Richard Pearson—I’m Captain Pearson’s son. He died in the Metro-Centre shooting. You remember . . . ?’
‘Of course. My deepest sympathies.’ His eyes moved quickly over my grey suit and tie and then turned to the lobby doors, as if he suspected that an accomplice might be lurking outside. ‘A shocking affair, even for Brooklands.’
‘For Brooklands . . . ?’ I bent down and retrieved his keys, then handed them to him, conscious of the rolled-up newspaper and the bandage around his right wrist. ‘Tell me, Mr—?’
‘Kumar. Nihal Kumar. I’m resident here for many years.’
‘Good. It’s a pleasant little backwater. We’ve met before, Mr Kumar. No . . . ?’
‘It’s not likely.’ Kumar pumped his doorbell, too confused to use his keys. ‘Perhaps when your father . . . ?’
‘A few days ago. I left the door of the flat open. You probably thought a burglar had broken in. I still have your medical journal. You are a doctor?’
‘Definitely not.’ He gestured wearily. ‘My professional background is in engineering. I’m the manager of Motorola’s research laboratory in Brooklands. My wife is a doctor.’
‘A paediatrician? That makes sense.’ I was still puzzled by his extreme unease with me, and tried to shake his hand. ‘I should have been more careful. My father’s death, I was on edge.’
‘It’s to be expected.’ Kumar seemed to relax a little, reassured that I was not about to harm him. ‘It’s best to keep your door locked. At all times.’
‘Thanks for the tip. There’s a lot of crime here?’
‘Crime, certainly. And violence.’
‘I’ve noticed that. These towns along the M25. There’s something in the air. I take it there are right-wing groups here?’
‘Many. They create real fear.’ Kumar pressed his bell again, impatient to enter his flat. ‘The Asian community is deeply concerned. In the old days there were organized attacks, but they were predictable. Now we see violence for its own sake.’
‘These so-called sports clubs?’
‘Sports? Just one sport. Beating people up.’
‘Asians, mostly?’
‘Asians, Kosovans, Bosnians. Far too many sports clubs. The police should stop them.’
‘I think my father belonged to one.’ When Kumar made no reply, I said: ‘You knew my father?’
‘Lately, not so well. When we first came to Brooklands he was very charming to my wife. He made us feel at home. Later . . .’
‘He changed?’
‘His new friends . . . sometimes they were here. They frightened my wife.’
‘My father wasn’t violent?’
‘Your father was a gentleman. But the atmosphere was different . . . everywhere the red crosses, not to help people but to hurt them.’
‘I’m sorry. Tell me, Mr Kumar, all this violence—where do you think it’s coming from?’
‘The Metro-Centre? It’s possible.’
‘How? It’s just a large shop.’
‘It’s more than a shop, Mr Pearson. It’s an incubator. People go in there and they wake up, they see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream . . .’
He reached for the bell, but his front door opened quietly. An elegant Asian woman in her fifties with a high forehead and severe face stared out at us. I assumed that Dr Kumar had been listening to everything we said. Her eyes followed me up the stairs, waiting until I was safely out of sight before she stepped aside to admit her husband.
8
ACCIDENTS AND EMERGENCIES
THE WAITING ROOM in the Accident & Emergency department at Brooklands Hospital was almost empty when I sat down. A teenager with a bruised cheek fiddled with a broken mobile phone. A mildly hysterical woman argued endlessly about a traffic intersection with her passive husband. An elderly man with a damp tissue to his eyes waited for news of his wife. Lastly, there was myself, more uncertain about my father than I had been when I first arrived. Together we were a collection of the ill-equipped and unsaved—a playground brawl, a wrong right turn, a heart too weary to embark on its next beat, and an assassin’s bullet had brought us together.
Dr Julia Goodwin, who had treated my father when he was driven from the Metro-Centre, would see me shortly, according to one of the nurses. But the clock on the wall disagreed, and as usual overruled her. I tried to read the local newspaper, smiled as comfortingly as I could at the elderly man, and watched the TV set.
It was tuned to the Metro-Centre cable channel, and showed an afternoon discussion programme transmitted from the mezzanine studio. The suntanned face of David Cruise dominated everything, and covered the proceedings like a cheap but over-bright lacquer. He was smiling and affable, but faintly hostile, like a bullying valet. Perhaps people in the motorway towns liked to be shouted at.
‘Mr Pearson?’ The nurse positioned her broad hips in front of the set. ‘Dr Goodwin will see you. For a few minutes . . . she’s very busy.’
‘Fine. How lucky to be busy . . .’
DR JULIA GOODWIN was standing with her back to me in the small office, slamming the metal drawers of a filing cabinet as if playing an arcade pin-table. When she glanced at me through her defensive fringe I recognized the young woman at the Golders Green crematorium, watching me in a morose way as her friend fiddled with the ignition keys. There was the same evasive gaze, and I sensed that she was aware of something about me that I had yet to learn. She was attractive, but had been tired for too long, still trying to scrape a little compassion for her patients from the bottom of a long-exhausted barrel.