My father described driving a seriously injured man to Brooklands Hospital.
We laid him in the back seat of the Bristol. Blood all over the leather. I put my foot down, outrunning the police Vauxhalls, earned many heartfelt handshakes. ‘Anything you need, Dad.’ When I asked to meet their leaders they looked blank.
He went on:
I realize there are no leaders. A Metro-Centre newsletter about a discount carpet sale is all that holds them together. They long for authority and some kind of deeper meaning in their lives. They need someone to admire and follow. The destination doesn’t matter. The nearest to a leader is a presenter on the cable channel called David Cruise. He winds them up at matches, but he is inadequate, an ex-actor lost without a script. He is dangerous, because the Metro-Centre is the mainspring of their empty lives.
Growing danger of a high-speed stall. The whole town will flip over and head for the ground at 400 knots. Will the passengers mind? Everything I’ve read about the Nazi leaders shows that their followers didn’t fear disaster but actively welcomed it.
My chief problem—there’s no one I can talk to about all this. Sport dominates everything, and fringe violence is part of the culture. Police too tolerant, and anyway see immigrants as a source of trouble, even if they aren’t to blame. The only person I’ve met is a Northfield psychiatrist, Dr Tony Maxted. An odd man, with an agenda of his own. Part of him welcomes the violence—it confirms some academic theory. He was very taken with my description of a high-speed stall.
Sadly, the Bristol was stolen during the night. Found torched in a lay-by on the Weybridge road. I loved the old lady, and it’s galling that it had to pay the price. At all costs, avoid being conspicuous. At any level, politics is a herd game . . .
On April 30:
There’s a limit to the infiltration I can carry out. The demos are getting more violent. I’m fit but no use at street fighting. Took a punch full-face from a young Bangladeshi defending his mother. Didn’t realize I was trying to help her. The group admire my ‘guts’ but tell me to go home.
It’s astonishing how well my masquerade has worked. No one suspects an old British Airways pilot. Chief regret is that I have frightened my neighbours, especially Dr Kumar and her husband. But I have to keep up the disguise for a few weeks longer. These Metro-Centre sports clubs are dangerous and need to be stopped. The supporters are turning into a freikorps, though they don’t realize it. That’s the strange thing. When I saw Fairfax about my pension he said: ‘Who are the leaders?’ Obvious question everyone asks. There are no leaders. Yet. Sooner or later some hard-eyed thug with the gift of the gab will seize control in a bloodless coup. Already there’s talk of a new ‘republic’ stretching from Heathrow to Brooklands, the whole M3/M4 corridor. A new kind of dictatorship based on the Metro-Centre. I tried to raise this with Fairfax, but he talked about his golf handicap. He’s part of a curious little cabal, they may have political ambitions of their own.
Then, on May 2, the last entry.
I watched the cable presenter David Cruise. Likeable in an actorish way. A highly developed feel for people’s ‘small’ emotions. Dangerous? He’s a toy, waiting to be wound up by anyone ready to make the effort. He might appeal to a certain kind of rootless person who believes in nothing and has worked out some pie-eyed theory to justify his own emptiness.
Tomorrow I will put on my St George’s shirt and try to get on his programme. I’ll play the old BA pilot card and stage a demo of my own. Warn people of the danger of too much sport and nothing else. Sooner or later a messiah is going to appear . . .
I closed the folder and sat back, my eyes scarcely noticing the führer moustache and forelock on the spine of a Hitler biography. I felt a vast relief, and a surge of confidence in this suburban flat and its memories. I felt close to my father again, and impressed by the bravery of this old man. He had known that something was wrong, and was determined to reach the source of the deep malaise that threatened his pacific community. His apparent membership of the St George’s clubs had convinced his neighbours and convinced me. To a larger extent than I wanted to admit, I had relied on my father to justify my support for the Metro-Centre and its sporting militias.
I now knew the truth, and I could admire my father and accept myself. I no longer needed to avoid the mirrors in the apartment. At the same time, these undercover missions raised a number of questions about his death. Had he been betrayed by a friend in whom he confided? Geoffrey Fairfax would have ratted on him without a qualm. Had someone slipped into the flat and checked his computer files? I thought of the ‘curious little cabal’ led by Fairfax and Superintendent Leighton, which had drawn Julia Goodwin into its fraying web. Had the cabal dealt with the meddling old man, recruiting some disgraced police marksman as their assassin, who had shot my father dead as he climbed the staircase to the mezzanine studio? Out of the smokescreen of rumour they then produced Duncan Christie, misfit and urban scarecrow, and kept him in place long enough for the killer’s trail to be stamped into the dust. Even Sangster and Dr Maxted may have had no idea of Fairfax’s real game. The fool’s mate set out on the chessboard concealed a far more elaborate gambit . . .
To Fairfax’s dismay, the murdered old man was replaced by his son, an even greater meddler. The bomb in my car, left there by the impatient solicitor, should have removed a minor nuisance from the board.
But at long last the pieces were beginning to fight back against the players.
29
THE STRICKEN CITY
THERE WAS TOO LITTLE AIR in the flat. Even with the windows open, I felt suffocated. Schemes and conspiracies were leaping out of trap doors around me, then evaporating into mist. I needed to clear my head, and the only place in Brooklands untouched by the Metro-Centre was the racing circuit, a monument to a far saner dream of speed.
I left the flat and went down to my car. The chanting crowd at the athletics ground, the bursts of cheering and the commentator’s relentless harangues, together bruised the afternoon. The din drummed against the windows of nearby houses, turning a pleasantly sunny day into a summer in Babel.
I drove through the residential avenues towards the circuit, past the wrought-iron gates and the St George’s flags. Every day a few more of them flew from improvised flagpoles, or flapped weakly from brass porch lanterns, a feeble attempt to ward off the roaming supporters’ clubs, ensigns of surrender that marked the capitulation of a powerful class.
Half a mile from the circuit the road was closed by a police barricade. Officers stood by their car, signalling the traffic towards a detour. Ignoring their advice, I turned into a side street, but the next approach road was sealed off by police tapes. Detour signs sent the traffic on an endless tour of half-timbered houses, and I had a momentary vision of Brooklands’ entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.
Glad of the chance to walk, I parked outside the entrance to a nursing home and set off on foot. Police patrolled the junctions, but there was little traffic near the racing circuit. I crossed the perimeter road, and approached the section of embankment.