‘Mr Fairfax . . .’ I felt sorry for him, still holding his red flag in front of the first motor vehicle, but I needed to leave. ‘Can we call a taxi—I have to get back to my car.’
‘Your car?’ Fairfax waved this aside. He lowered his voice, as if the shadows in the deserted square might hear him. ‘Look around you, Mr Pearson. We’re facing a new kind of man and woman—narrow-eyed, passive, clutching their store cards. They believe anything that people like you care to tell them. They want to be tricked, they want to be deluded into buying the latest rubbish. They’ve been educated by TV commercials. They know that the only things with any value are those they can put in a carrier bag. This is a plague area, Mr Pearson. A plague called consumerism.’
Still carrying the shotgun, he remembered that I was waiting by the door. He paused, mentally ticking off the last bead in his rosary, then led me into the corridor. The offices were empty, but voices came from a conference room across the hall.
‘A plague area,’ I repeated. ‘Can I ask what the cure is? I take it you plan to fight back?’
‘Believe me, yes. We’ll fight back. I can assure you we’ve already started . . .’
Fairfax lowered his voice, but as we passed the conference room the door opened and his deputy, Susan Dearing, looked out at us. I had last talked to her at the funeral, and she seemed embarrassed to see me. She was about to speak to Fairfax, but he waved her away with the shotgun.
Through the open door I saw half a dozen people sitting around the conference table, chairs pushed back as if they were unsure of each other. I recognized none of them, though something about the unruly hair of a young woman with her back to the door seemed familiar. She wore a doctor’s white coat, like a medical attendant supervising a patients’ meeting, but her right foot tapped restlessly on the floor.
We walked through to the reception area. The desk was unattended, and a young black woman sat on a bench, her daughter asleep across her lap. Mrs Christie was scarcely aware of the child, her eyes above bruised cheeks staring at the hunting scenes on the walls. One lapel of her jacket had been torn from its seams, and her hand fretted over the loose fabric, trying to hold it in place. Her face had a beaten but still determined set. She had been punched and spat upon by the crowd, but some inner conviction kept her going. Watching her, it occurred to me that she believed her husband was innocent.
Behind the reception desk a narrow passage led to a pantry. Sergeant Mary Falconer stood by a gas element, pouring warm milk from a saucepan into two cups.
‘Mr Pearson . . .’ Fairfax beckoned me to the door, impatient for me to leave. ‘You’ll drive back to London tonight?’
‘If I can find the way. Brooklands seems to be off all the maps . . .’ I looked back at Sergeant Falconer, who was wiping spilled milk from the gas ring, trying to fit her into the larger events that had brought me to this curious town, and this even stranger firm of solicitors. I hailed an approaching taxi, and as it stopped I shook Fairfax’s hand. Before he could turn away, I said: ‘Mrs Christie—she’s sitting in there . . . ?’
‘Who?’
‘Mrs Christie. The wife of the man who killed my father. You’re not representing her?’
‘No, no.’ Fairfax signalled to the taxi driver. ‘Someone needs to look after her. She and the child are as much victims of all this as you are.’
‘Right.’ I walked down the steps and then turned to look up at Fairfax. ‘One last question. Did Duncan Christie shoot my father?’
Fairfax avoided my eyes and stared hard at the dome. ‘I’m afraid so. It certainly looks like it . . .’
It was the only thing that Geoffrey Fairfax had said that I was ready to take at face value.
THE METRO-CENTREwithdrew behind me as I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point. ‘Metro-Centre South Gate . . . West Surrey Retail Park . . . Brooklands Convention Centre . . . Metro-Centre North Gate . . .’
I was lost, and the AA guide I scanned at a deserted crossroads made sure that I was completely adrift. I passed tracts of middle-income housing, all-night superstores surrounded by acres of brightly lit parking. I thought of my confused day at Brooklands, a catalogue of missed arrivals. A father I had hardly known was dead, and the place of his last days was covering its tracks and rearranging itself into a maze.
I crossed the perimeter of the old Brooklands racing circuit. Giant floes of black concrete emerged from the darkness, a geometry of shadows and memories, a stone dream that would never awake. I could almost smell the exhaust drifting on the mist, and hear the roar of deep-chested engines, a vision of speed that long predated the shotgun and jodhpur fantasies of Geoffrey Fairfax and his squadrons of heavy hunters.
I opened the window to catch the sounds in my head, the rumble and burble of exhaust. But another noise drummed across the night air, coming from a football stadium half a mile away. Lighting arrays rose into the night sky, blurred by the heat and breathy vapour of the crowd.
I left the racetrack at the next turning, and joined the traffic moving past the stadium. The match had ended, and the crowd was spilling into the nearby streets. Men and women in St George’s shirts emerged from the exits and searched for their parked cars. High above the stadium, the electronic display screens faced each other at opposite ends of the ground, as the giant image of the match commentator addressed himself across the empty stands. Fragments of his voice boomed above the traffic and the cheers of rival supporters. He was a handsome, fleshy man with a salesman’s easy manner, a type I knew well from a hundred product launches, with an easy patter, a smile and a promise in every polished phrase.
A fist struck the roof above my head. The supporters crossing the road drummed on the cars, pounding out a tribal tattoo. Three men in St George’s shirts stepped in front of the Jensen, forcing me to halt as they slapped the bonnet. Two women followed them, wearing the same red and white shirts, arms linked in the friendliest way. They were good-humoured but oddly threatening, as if celebrating soccer as society’s last hope of violence. They walked along the line of parked cars, then stepped into a large BMW. Flashing their headlights in time to the jungle tattoo, they forced their way through the passing traffic and drove off at speed.
The commentator on the screens floated above the night, voice booming at the empty stands. Clips of muscular football action were crosscut with showroom displays of bathroom suites and microwave ovens. He was still at it when I set off northwards, his smile dying in the blur of arc lights, authentic in his insincerity.
5
THE METRO-CENTRE
LIKE ALL GREAT SHOPPING MALLS, the Metro-Centre smothered unease, defused its own threat and offered balm to the weary. I stood in the sunshine fifty yards from the South Gate entrance, watching the shoppers cross the wide apron that surrounded the mall, a vast annular plaza in its own right. In a few moments they would be bathed in a light more healing than anything on offer from the sun. As we entered these huge temples we became young again, like children visiting the home of a new schoolfriend, a house that at first seemed forbidding. Then a strange but smiling mother would appear and put the most nervous child at ease with a promise that small treats would appear throughout the visit.
All malls subtly infantilized us, but the Metro-Centre showed signs of urging us to grow up a little. Uniformed stewards stood by the entrance, checking bags and purses, a response to the tragedy in which my father had died. An elderly Asian couple approached the entrance, and were quickly surrounded by volunteers in St George’s shirts. No one spoke to the couple, but they were stared at and shouldered about until a Metro-Centre security man intervened.