‘David Cruise? Hard to believe.’
‘Right. But this was a new kind of fascism, and it needed a new kind of leader—a smiley, ingratiating, afternoon TV kind of führer. No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite. For most people it was just soccer hooliganism.’
‘But the bodies kept arriving at the morgue.’ Julia reached across the table and gripped my wrist, angry with me even for being a victim. ‘I counted them, Richard.’
‘Asian and Kosovan bodies.’ Maxted wiped a fleck of spit from his mouth. He stared at it, as if disgusted with himself. ‘Julia had to deal with the relatives. Weeping Bangladeshi wives and deranged fathers of children with third-degree burns . . .’
Thinking of the Kumars, I said: ‘So you decided to do something?’
‘We had to move fast, while the whole nasty business was still controllable. A soft fascism was spreading through middle England, and no one in authority was concerned. Politicians, church leaders, Whitehall turned their noses up. For them it was just a brawl in a retail park off some ghastly motorway.’
‘But you knew they were wrong?’
‘Absolutely. Think of Germany in the nineteen-thirties. When good men do nothing . . . We needed a target, so we picked David Cruise. He wasn’t ideal, but shooting him down in the Metro-Centre, in the middle of one of his television rants, would make a powerful point. People would think hard about where they were going.’
‘So you needed a triggerman. And you came up with Duncan Christie?’
‘I found him.’ Maxted waited as Julia raised her hands in mock wonder. ‘He was sitting in a secure ward at Northfield. A misfit who’d twice been sectioned, a borderline schizophrenic with a fierce hatred of the Metro-Centre. His daughter had been injured and he wanted revenge. He was a missile primed to launch. All we had to do was point him at the target.’
‘You weren’t worried about the . . . ?’
‘Ethics of it all? Of course, we were planning a murder! We talked it through a hundred times. I kept Julia out of it—I knew I’d never convince her.’
‘I thought Christie was letting off a bomb. A smoke bomb.’ Julia pressed her hand to her bruised scalp, forcing herself to wince with pain. ‘So I gave my support. Madness—how did I think it would ever work?’
‘It did work.’ Maxted ignored her protests. ‘Everything was arranged. Geoffrey Fairfax knew his stuff. Sadly, when the hour came the only thing missing was the target.’
‘But my father and the bears filled in.’ I rearranged the dirt on the table, and then drew my father’s initials. ‘How many of you were involved?’
‘A small inner group. Fairfax was in the driving seat. He’d served in the army, he knew and loved the old Brooklands. He saw the Metro-Centre as a spaceship from hell. Superintendent Leighton supported us, but he had to be careful. He’d join our meetings, then slip away early. Sergeant Falconer was under Fairfax’s thumb—he’d got her mother off a shoplifting charge. She supplied the weapon, a standard Heckler & Koch, apparently mislaid by the armoury. Leighton covered up for her.’
‘Sangster?’
‘He reconnoitred the target area. Tom Carradine was an old pupil, and very proud to take his headmaster on a tour of the Metro-Centre and show off the fire and emergency systems. He gave Sangster a security pass for his visiting “nephew”. An hour before the shooting Sangster hid the weapon in the fire-control station.’
‘And Julia?’
‘I did nothing!’ Julia tore a children’s drawing from the wall and crushed it in her hands. ‘I didn’t think anyone would get killed, or even wounded . . .’
‘You did almost nothing.’ Maxted waited until she tossed the crumpled drawing among the bloody bandages in an overflowing bin. ‘Julia had treated Christie’s daughter after the accident. He may be schizoid but he’s no fool. He wasn’t sure we were serious. She gave him beta-blockers to calm him down and convinced him he was doing the right thing. Christie believed her, and that was vital.’
‘I drove him to the Metro-Centre.’ Julia half closed her eyes, smiling faintly to herself. ‘When we parked he didn’t want to get out of the car. He actually asked me if he should go ahead. I said . . .’
‘You said yes.’ Maxted sat back in his chair, letting the point sink in. ‘He trusted you, Julia.’
‘But after the shooting . . .’ Puzzled, I asked: ‘Weren’t you afraid that Christie would talk?’
‘Only if he went on trial. Hours of CID grilling, months in a remand centre away from his wife and daughter—he’d have given away everything. We knew that killing David Cruise would be easy. The cover-up was the difficult part. It was vital that Christie be arrested.’
‘Why? Arrested?’
‘Arrested and brought before a magistrate. If enough witnesses testified that they saw Christie at the time of the shooting and he was nowhere near the atrium the case against him would be dismissed. Especially if the witnesses knew Christie well and were worthy members of the local community.’
‘His doctor, psychiatrist, head teacher. So that’s why you went to the entrance hall. You were protecting Christie.’
‘And ourselves. If Christie confessed to the murder no one would take his word against ours. Misfits and psychotics are confessing all the time to crimes they haven’t committed.’ Maxted sighed to himself. ‘It was almost the perfect murder.’
‘Almost?’
‘The victim failed to turn up. We’d told Christie to hide the weapon and get away, but he lost his nerve. He’d come that far and he needed a target.’
‘My father? He hated David Cruise and the sports clubs.’
‘Not your father. That was a tragic blunder. Christie was firing at the bears. He hated them even more than he hated Cruise. Especially as his daughter liked to watch them bobbing about on a children’s programme. He fired blindly, and hit your father, along with other visitors to the mall. I take responsibility, Richard. Innocent bystanders, collateral damage, they’re easy phrases to say . . .’
I nodded coldly, refusing to spare Maxted any of his contrition. He had spoken truthfully, but the truth was not enough. I wanted to see him serving years of imprisonment, but I knew that Julia would be with him, her life and career destroyed. She was standing with her back to me, hands wiping her eyes, and I understood now the hostility and guilt that had stood between us since my arrival.
I said: ‘So you smuggled Christie out of Brooklands? Where, exactly?’
‘Sangster drove him to a disused chicken farm near Guildford that Fairfax had helped foreclose. His wife and daughter turned up in a camper van. I kept him sedated and told him we’d try again. He was definitely up for it.’
‘The police found him so quickly. Someone must have tipped them off.’
‘We did.’ Maxted whistled through his teeth without thinking. ‘We needed to get him cleared by the magistrate. The deaths were tragic, but we hoped everyone would see sense. In fact, the opposite happened. The Metro-Centre shooting stirred everything up. People felt frightened. They could cope with Asian youths defending their shops, but a deranged assassin with a machine gun . . . ? There were rallies at the sports grounds night after night, Brooklands was seriously threatening to turn into a fascist republic. But it never made that final flip.’
‘You sound disappointed. Why not? Too British?’