The exhausted but still attractive doctor made a powerful impact on the nation’s television screens, as I saw from my set at the Holiday Inn. Julia warned the police negotiators that further casualties would follow if they tried to break into the dome, and that many children would die in the crossfire between the marshals and the army marksmen. She then selflessly stepped back into the dome and returned to her care of David Cruise, with a promise from the police that a complete intensive care unit would be provided by Brooklands Hospital. No mention was made of the fact that Carradine refused to release Cruise, who had become Hostage Number One, but no further attempts were carried out to penetrate the Metro-Centre.
Secure behind their fire doors, with their own power generators and an unlimited supply of food, drink and hostages, Carradine and the marshals soon consolidated their position. They set out their demands—that all threats to close the dome be lifted, that no charges be brought against its defenders, and that the Metro-Centre re-open for business, along with its supporters clubs and sports teams. The hapless general manager of the mall, flanked by his cowed department heads, was escorted to the mezzanine studio and declared that he was ready to throw open the doors and begin trading again.
Naturally, the Home Office refused to negotiate, but by now a huge media presence surrounded the dome. Beyond the perimeter road, where the police set up their outer cordon, dozens of TV location crews followed every move. Supporters from the motorway towns filled the streets of Brooklands in a huge show of solidarity. Commentators described the seizure of the dome as a populist uprising, the struggle of consumer man and his consumer wife against the metropolitan elites with their deep loathing of shopping malls. The people of the retail parks were defending a more real Britain of Homebase stores, car-boot sales and garden centres, amateur sports clubs and the shirt of St George.
Carradine and his marshals took full advantage of this. Fortunately, the crowd trapped within the dome soon grasped that there was no immediate threat to their lives. The twenty supermarkets inside the Metro-Centre were stocked to capacity with fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and poultry, pizzas and cook chill meals. Its freezer cabinets held a glacier of ice cream. On shelves within easy reach was enough alcohol to float the dome into the North Sea.
Like Tony Maxted, I was amazed that there was little looting. None of the restaurants and cafés were functioning, but the crowd dispersing across the mall in the hours after the lock-down moved in an orderly way through the supermarkets. The cash tills were silent, but customers paid for their purchases, dropping their money into the honesty buckets which the marshals placed beside the tills. Everyone knew that the Metro-Centre was ready to sustain them. The aisles and concourses were their parks and neighbourhoods, and they would keep them clean and law-abiding.
Afterwards, the marshals steered us to the hotels and staff rest rooms in the dome, and to the furniture and bedding departments of the big stores. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn, sharing a double room on the third floor with Tony Maxted. We slept in our clothes, windows sealed against the unending night noises of the police and army, the searchlights sweeping across the dome’s semitransparent skin.
Maxted was a restless sleeper, haranguing me in his dreams. The room was stuffy, the water pipes in the bathroom fluting and whining as the pressure fell and airlocks interrupted the system. The next morning, when I stepped onto the balcony, the outside air was as warm as the tropics.
Both Maxted and I took for granted that the siege would end that day. But neither Carradine nor the Home Office was ready to compromise. All morning a dishevelled crowd waited in the entrance hall, arguing with the marshals who guarded the fire door. Others drifted away with their fractious children, already bored by the fourth ice cream of the day. They sat at the café tables in the central atrium, like passengers abandoned by their airlines. I strolled among them as they checked their watches, reassuring each other that they would be home in an hour.
Carradine and his marshals had other ideas. They realized that once they survived the period immediately after the dome’s seizure the crisis would pass and their power would grow. The concern of both the general public and the Home Office would move from the future of the Metro-Centre to the safety of the hostages. Carradine’s engineers were working hard on the Metro-Centre’s power supply, ensuring the most efficient use of its oil reserves. Carradine ordered that the under-roof lighting arrays should be switched off. Many of the shops and stores seemed to recede into an inner darkness, an uncanny transformation. As people moved down the unlit aisles, searching for tin-openers and disposable wipes, the strange gloom gave the impression that an air raid was imminent. Entering one of the larger hardware stores, I felt my way past the counters, surrounded by hundreds of knives, saws and chisels, their blades forming a silver forest in the darkness. A more primitive world was biding its time.
By late afternoon of the second day everyone realized that a further night lay ahead, and that all of them were now hostages. At this point, as the police negotiators lost their patience and the lights faded into the dusk, Carradine made an astute move. He was being closely advised by Sangster, whose huge and shambling figure with its babyish face followed the young manager around like an ambitious fight promoter with a promising featherweight. Tony Maxted approved of the head teacher’s involvement. ‘He’ll keep an eye on things, hold a tight rein on the hotheads,’ he assured me, but I had heard this before. I sensed that Sangster saw the seizure of the Metro-Centre as an interesting social experiment, and was in no hurry to see it end.
When the army helicopters resumed their tiresome patrols above the dome, Carradine called a public meeting in the South Gate entrance hall. Taking up a suggestion made by Sangster, he notified the police negotiators that he would release five hundred hostages on each of the next three days, and demand no concessions in return.
Immediately the crisis eased. The police postponed any attempt to invade the dome. Skilfully finessed by Carradine and Sangster, they were forced to wait until the last of the hostages had stumbled through the emergency hatch into freedom. The mutineers, meanwhile, had rid themselves of a large part of their security problem, lessened the drain on the dome’s resources, and raised the hope of further releases and a peaceful end to the siege.
At seven o’clock that evening, the first tranche of hostages stepped from the dome into a blizzard of flashbulbs. Mostly elderly customers, young mothers and their toddlers, and several dozen teenage mall rats, they were sent by bus to Brooklands Hospital and then rejoined their families. The rest of us selected our suppers from the supermarket shelves and retired to our stifling hotel rooms, exhausted enough to sleep through the helicopters and searchlights.
Forgotten in all this was the lonely figure whose attempted assassination had triggered the uprising. David Cruise still lay in his intensive care unit in a back room at the first-aid station, carefully tended by Julia Goodwin and two off-duty nurses who volunteered to help her. Barely conscious and unable to speak, he hovered in a medical nowhere zone of tubes, drips and ventilator pumps, at once forgotten and the most important person in the dome. Julia protested to Carradine, but the young manager refused to release him, claiming that he would soon recover and take over the leadership of the revolt.
The police, meanwhile, had arrested his would-be assassins, two Bosnian brothers whose motorcycle repair shop had been torched by a gang of football rioters. They walked into the Brooklands police station, confessed to the crime and surrendered the weapon, a gun-club target rifle they had smuggled onto one of the upper-level retail decks above the mezzanine studio. No one needed to question their motives, but whatever their motives were, they clearly fitted the crime.