‘Please . . . my car.’
‘Where are you parked? Mr Kumar . . . !’
He was dazed and dishevelled, gazing over my shoulder at the crowd as if trying to grasp who exactly they were. Then he glanced into my face, recognizing me with an appalled stare.
‘No . . . no . . . never . . .’
He broke away from me before I could reassure him, heavy arms thrusting me aside, and stumbled into the darkness of the alley.
TRYING TO CATCHmy breath, I followed him into the next street. The marchers were returning to the stadium, and car doors slammed as they sounded their horns and drove away. Mr Kumar had vanished, perhaps taking refuge with local friends he had been visiting. Young Asian men were sweeping glass from the pavement into the gutters, smoking their cigarettes as they listened to the night.
I walked along the deserted street, lost in the glare of the stadium floodlights. Across the road was a disused cinema, a 1930s white-tile Odeon like a shabby iceberg, for years a bingo hall and now a carpet warehouse.
A police car approached, cruising the silent streets as if nothing had happened. I climbed the steps to the shuttered box office. The ancient Odeon was no longer even a ghost of itself, and violence had long since migrated from the screen to the surrounding streets. But its tiled alcoves, like the corners of a huge public lavatory, offered a moment’s shelter.
From the shadows I watched the police car pause outside the Odeon, then dip and flash its lights. I recognized the senior police officer in the passenger seat, Superintendent Leighton of the Brooklands force, whose photograph had been printed in the local newspaper that I read in the hospital cafeteria. Beside him, at the wheel, sat Sergeant Falconer, uniform cap over her immaculate Rhine-maiden hair. They waited outside the cinema, like a courting couple deciding whether to see a double feature, then flashed their lights at the empty street and continued their patrol.
Next to the Odeon was the cinema car park, empty except for a mud-spattered Range Rover. The driver was watching the street, speaking into his mobile phone. He wore a heavy Barbour jacket, trilby over his eyes, still unmistakably Geoffrey Fairfax. Beside him was a crop-haired man with a large Roman head, wearing a sheepskin jacket. Together they resembled hunt supporters following the hounds, happy to watch the chase from the comfort of their car, fortified by a thermos of warm brandy.
But were they leading the hunt, rather than following it? In the seat behind them were two men in St George’s shirts, muscled arms pressed against the windows. Both spoke freely to Fairfax and his passenger, pointing to the nearby road junctions as if describing an order of battle and reporting on the morale and enthusiasm of the troops.
A map was passed between the men, and Fairfax switched on the ceiling light. After consulting the map he started the engine, but I had seen clearly that there was a fifth person in the Range Rover.
Sitting in the rear between the two men in St George’s shirts, hair loose around her shoulders, was Dr Julia Goodwin.
I WALKED BACKto my car, stepping through shadows and avoiding the Asian men trying to clear up their shopfronts. Drowned by the glare of stadium lights, flames rose from a burning house.
11
A HARD NIGHT
LIKE ENGLISH LIFE as a whole, nothing in Brooklands could be taken at face value. I passed the next three days in my father’s flat, trying to make sense of this outwardly civilized Home Counties town—a town whose civic leaders, prominent solicitors and police chief were taking part in a pocket revolution. Had I stumbled into a conspiracy that was now shaping itself around me? And had my father been one of its instigators?
The stadium riot, orchestrated by Geoffrey Fairfax under the eyes of the police superintendent, had shaken me badly. Sipping rather too much of the old man’s malt, I watched the car park outside the flats, hoping to see Mr Kumar and convince him that I had not joined the attack on him. During the mêlée someone had punched my forehead, and the imprint of a signet ring starred the skin over my left eye. Staring at myself in the hall mirror, I could almost see Duncan Christie’s bruised face emerging through my own.
All in all, my first taste of street politics left me feeling like an out-of-condition rugby forward in a collapsed scrum. How, at the age of seventy-five, had my father coped with the violence and thuggery? In the evening, watching television with the sound down and the curtains drawn, I listened to the stadium crowds cheering on the Metro-Centre teams. Ambulance sirens wailed through the streets, and fire engines clanged their way to the shabby districts between Brooklands and the M25.
A hard night lay over the motorway towns, far harder than central London’s pink haze. Under the cover of a packed programme of sporting events, an exercise in ethnic cleansing was taking place, with the apparent connivance of the local police. I remembered Sergeant Falconer flashing her headlights at Fairfax’s Range Rover. Using the supporters’ clubs in their patriotic livery, they were moving against the immigrant population, harassing them out of their run-down streets to make room for new retail parks, marinas and executive estates.
But more than a land grab was going on. Every evening there were soccer, rugby and athletics matches, where Metro-Centre teams competed with rivals from the motorway towns. Illuminated arrays glowed through the night like the perimeter lights of a colony of prison camps, a new gulag of penal settlements where the forced labour was shopping and spending.
The matches ended, but then came the drumming of fists on car roofs, a tribal call to violence. The Audis, Nissans and Renaults were the new tom-toms. Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hostel, the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over the fence into an industrial estate. Metro-Centre stewards, the reports usually ended, had ‘headed off further violence’.
On his afternoon cable channel, David Cruise smirked knowingly to his guests. I watched this third-rate actor, on the surface so handsome and likeable, putting his well-polished gloss on the ugly violence.
‘. . . I don’t want to blow the Metro-Centre’s trumpet, but consumerism is about a lot more than buying things. You agree, Doreen? Good. It’s our main way of expressing our tribal values, of engaging with each other’s hopes and ambitions. What you see here is a conflict of recreational cultures, a clash of very different lifestyles. On the one side are people like us—we enjoy the facilities offered by the Metro-Centre, and depend on the high values and ideals maintained by the mall and its suppliers. Together they probably do a better job of representing your real interests than your Member of Parliament. No disrespect, and no emails, please. On the other side are the low-value expectations of the immigrant communities. Their suppressed womenfolk are internal exiles who never share the dignity and freedom to choose that we see in the consumer ideal. Right, Sheila?’
As always, his guests nodded their firm agreement, sitting in their black leather sofas in the mezzanine studio, the giant bears behind them. But that night brought attacks on Asian businesses by gangs of rugby and ice-hockey supporters, and a warehouse of cheap knitwear burned to the ground. And, as always, the police arrived ten minutes after the fire engines. Almost nothing appeared in the national press, where the incidents were lumped in with accounts of sporting violence and binge drinking in provincial towns.
What role had my father played in all this? I thought of the old pilot sitting at his workstation in the cluttered utility room, with the ironing board and its stack of St George’s shirts, surrounded by his sinister library, a shrine to the extremist gods. Was he a casualty of an ultra-right coup, an elderly foot soldier who had lost his balance on the slippery grass of a political turf war? Conceivably, he was not an innocent bystander but the real target of the assassin.