SITTING IN MYchair on the beach, I finished the whisky in my flask. Part of me was drunk, but at the same time I felt queasily sober, like someone trapped on a runaway roller-coaster. I needed to leave for the South Gate entrance hall and hide myself among the hostages due to be released within the next half-hour. My foot was still badly infected, but in my mind I had detached myself from it, as if the throbbing wound was a tiresome relative who insisted on tagging after me. At the same time I felt reluctant to leave the Metro-Centre, though it was difficult to find a reason for staying. But did I need a reason . . . ?
I lay back in the chair, gathering my strength for the short walk. High above me were the upper decks of the shopping mall, railed terraces filled with fading palms and potted plants, a botanical garden running towards its death in the sky. Now that the lifts and escalators were out of action, almost no one made the long climb to the seventh floor, where the saturated air seemed to perspire into a heavy mist.
But someone was looking down from the seventh-floor railing, partly hidden behind the yellowing fronds of a large yucca. A man stared steadily at me, uninterested in the activity taking place on the floor of the dome, the hostages window-shopping or sitting at the cafés with their week-old newspapers.
I sat up and eased myself from the chair, aware that I was a conspicuous target as I sat alone on my private beach. Was the intruder a police marksman, smuggled into the dome through one of the dozens of ventilator and sewage pipes, with a hit list of prominenti to be disposed of? The man who was watching me carried a small firearm, and a black barrel emerged from his leather jacket. Unlike the police snatch squads, he wore no helmet or chin-strap.
Aware that I had noticed him, he leaned forward over the railing. I could see his face, as sharp as an axe blade, and the odd plates of his forehead, a geometry of disjointed thoughts. A pallid and undernourished skin stretched over the pointed bones, bruised by more than camouflage paste.
‘Christie . . . ? What the hell are we doing . . . ?’
I stood up, speaking to myself in a slurred mutter. Bowing his head, the man stepped back. For a few seconds he vanished behind the yucca, and then reappeared with a hand raised over his shoulder.
‘Christie . . . !’ My voice seemed to dent the dark water that lay listlessly against the beach. ‘Come down, man . . . You’re a target . . . !’
As I stumbled against the chair, knocking it onto the sand, the man hurled something towards me. I lost sight of the object as it flew through the misty air, but it landed ten feet from me, a bronze node that glinted in the scruffy sand.
I tried to steady myself, and felt the strong hands of a marshal grip my arms.
‘Mr Pearson?’ One of the burly weightlifters detailed to keep an eye on me had been sitting in the terrace bar when he heard my shout. ‘You’re not hurt?’
‘He missed me. It’s over there.’
‘I didn’t hear a shot. Let’s get you indoors.’
‘Indoors? We’re already indoors. Aren’t we?’ I was mulling this over as he steered me to the terrace steps. I had lost my chance of joining the hostage release from the South Gate entrance, but I needed to see the object on the beach.
In the moments before the marshal’s heavy foot stamped it into the sand I managed to clear my eyes, and recognized the same bullet and cartridge case that Duncan Christie had pressed into my palm outside the Metro-Centre.
34
WORK MAKES YOU FREE
VERY LITTLE HAD CHANGED, I told myself, but nothing was quite the same. By the end of the second week we were still convinced that we would soon be released from the Metro-Centre. That morning the remaining hostages emerged from their hotels, sleepless and dishevelled, and looking as if their dreams had attacked them. They selected a breakfast of sorts from the soft drink and confectionery shelves of the nearest supermarket, washed themselves in a litre of Perrier water, and then assembled in the South Gate entrance hall, ready to play their roles in an eternal baggage handlers’ strike.
By now nearly two thousand hostages had been freed, but those who remained were aware that their value to Tom Carradine and his mutineers had risen steeply. Barely a dozen were released each day, and Julia Goodwin no longer bothered to present her list in person. She had already despaired of me, and shook her head wearily whenever I appeared, asking about David Cruise’s health. Ask about your own health, her tired but punitive gaze seemed to say.
Out of duty, I hobbled to the South Gate entrance and joined the hostages patiently forming themselves into a queue. Tired of waiting, a group of parents with older children tried to force their way through the marshals guarding the fire door. Cheered on, they kicked aside the security rails and demanded to be released.
The reaction was prompt and violent. The marshals drew their batons, and the parents were pushed back with a show of force that hushed everyone in the entrance hall and left two of the husbands bleeding from head wounds. Behind his screen of bully-boys, Sangster watched all this with a resigned but understanding smile.
I wanted to talk to the head teacher, but I felt uneasy with him. He had begun to sway from side to side like a fourth atrium bear, keeping time to the music inside his head. His role was too ambiguous for comfort, and he had moved from hostage to principal ringleader without taking off his overcoat.
After the brutal response by the marshals everyone stared silently at the open floor where the scuffles had taken place. Bloody skid marks covered the tiles, and Sangster stepped forward and began to scrutinize them in a strangely obsessive way, like an anthropologist examining the foot paintings of a primitive tribe. Rousing himself from his reverie, he stepped through a service door and reappeared with a mop cart and bucket. Watched by the crowd, he swabbed away at the skid marks, squeezed out the bloodstained mop and worked it up and down the floor until the marble gleamed again. The hostages stared stolidly at their reflections but remained silent.
I said nothing to Sangster or Tony Maxted about my sighting of Duncan Christie, deciding to keep this to myself. The bullet thrown onto the beach, like the one he had pressed into my hand, was his way of reminding me that the Metro-Centre had killed my father, and that the agents of his death were now with me inside the dome. I kept my eyes on the high galleries, but Christie had disappeared into the mist that separated the seventh floor from the sky.
Rumours swerved around the Metro-Centre, phantoms that flew by day. I dozed for an hour behind the enquiry desk, and woke to find the hostages discussing the news that David Cruise had begun to revive in the intensive care unit. He had removed his oxygen mask and spoken to several witnesses about his determination to defend the Metro-Centre and return it to its rightful place in the M25 community.
I dismissed this as a near-hysterical fantasy, but Tom Carradine arrived and confirmed the good news through his megaphone. He looked confident and charismatic in his freshly pressed uniform, but almost too lucid for comfort, speaking with an amphetamine fluency, eyes bright and unblinking as he surveyed the exhausted hostages. Nonetheless, he announced that he would celebrate the good news by freeing a further fifty hostages. His decision was relayed to the police negotiators at their post beyond the fire door, and dominated the lunchtime television bulletins.
Everyone lined up for the selection, trying to look their worst as Carradine and Sangster moved along them. Parents did everything to irritate their already fractious teenagers, wives urged their middle-aged husbands to mumble and drool. Most of us were too tired to think of feigning exhaustion, but Sangster pointed to an ailing widow who had been injured by police truncheons and showed the effects of mild concussion.