I turned on the radio, one-handed, and after a few wild stabs in the dark found the channel-search button. Samples of pop, reggae, advertising jingles and the occasional solemn BBC voice washed around my ears as I realised that I didn’t even know exactly where I was headed. Bloemfontein Road. I didn’t know it at all, but the announcer on the TV news had said it had a north and a south end, so we were probably talking about either a turning off the Westway or one of the maze of streets around the stadium. I just had to hope that once I got close enough I could find my way by following the flames and the sirens.
The road was reasonably clear at first, and I made good time – but the traffic was bound to start piling up once I got to Hanger Lane, and in any case there was a quicker route down through Willesden to Scrubs Lane. I realised as I turned off onto the Harrow Road that I was going to drive within a hundred yards or so of my office. Well, Pen was always telling me I should spend more time there.
‘– in what has rapidly turned into a siege situation.’ Finally! The tone as much as the words told me that I’d found what I was looking for. I stopped the channel search, again with a fair bit of fumbling, and turned up the volume. I also switched on the back wipers and the hazard lights along the way, but this was no time to worry about fine details. A man’s voice, solemn but with an undertone of excitement, blared out of the speakers, the car’s crummy sound system giving him a tinny echo. ‘It’s thought that there could be as many as twenty people still inside the shopping centre, but we don’t have any idea as yet how many of them are being held against their will, or even who their attackers are. The fires are mostly out now, and the immediate danger has passed, but these armed men and women have issued no demands and given no indication of what their agenda is. The earlier destruction seemed almost random, and from the sounds we can hear it’s still going on inside the centre. Only five minutes ago, an exercise machine came flying through a window on the upper level and fell onto a police car parked on the street below. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it’s a very tense situation here and there’s little prospect of it being resolved any time soon.’
A sudden absence of street sounds in the background made it clear that we’d gone back to the studio, as a second voice, female this time but with the same titillated solemnity, took up the story – or rather, hijacked it away into rarefied realms of speculation about terrorist cells and soft economic targets. I tuned it out. This wasn’t about terrorism, I felt that in my guts: it was about Nicky’s bell-shaped curve. And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you’re not going to like the answer.
My phone went off and I took it in case it was Pen, wanting to know where the hell I’d scooted off to in such a hurry. But it wasn’t.
‘Hey,’ said Nicky. ‘Catch you at a bad moment?’
The Civic was an automatic: I could manage with just the one hand, but I had enough to concentrate on without shooting the breeze with Nicky on top of it all.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Can I call you back?’
‘Sure. You watching TV?’
‘I was. Now I’m listening to the radio.’
‘Interesting times, eh? Call me when you’ve got a moment. But make it quick. This shit you need to hear. Actually don’t call me, because I’m going out to the Ice-Maker’s. You can meet me down there.’
‘Peckham? Nicky, it’s been a long day—’
‘Fine. Wait until tomorrow. It’s your call. But if I were you, I’d want this particular dish served hot.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I’d almost reached the Westway, which meant I had to be getting close to the action now. I slowed just a little as I came around the underpass in case I ran into any of those police roadblocks. Nothing to see, but as I passed White City stadium I caught sight of the flashing lights of the police cars a couple of hundred yards up the road. Okay, X presumably marked the spot. I took the first left, then a right – past a closed-up nursery school whose deserted swings and climbing frames leaped into the bleaching glow of my headlights: in the harsh light they were divorced from their functions in a way that was frankly sinister, looking more or less like the contents of a torture chamber.
I was counting off the distance roughly in my head, but long before I got to the next intersection I could see exactly what I was aiming for. Up ahead of me was a wall of red-brick which was already familiar from the TV news bulletin: the give-away, though, was the wide strip-sign hanging out over the road, which proclaimed Whiteleaf Shopping Centre in an Italic font with plenty of scrolling. Heavy coils of smoke hung above and around it, wearing out their welcome in the still spring air.
I turned off the lights and pulled over. Up ahead of me the street was packed with people: cops in uniform, ambulance crews, passers-by who’d stopped to watch the drama play itself out. I walked up, skirting the edges of the crowd as I looked for a way to move in a little closer without drawing unwelcome attention to myself. I didn’t have any definite plans past that point, except that I wanted to get inside the building and take a look for myself at what was going down in there. And that I wanted Susan the verger to get out of this intact, with all her doubts and hesitations. A modest enough goal, I thought. The police could sort out the rest of it: that was what they were paid for.
But the crowd was a solid wedge, and even if I could have got past them there was a police cordon all around this face of the building. To the right that cordon stretched all the way up the street back as far as I could see – probably all the way to the roadblock on the Westway. On the other side the houses came right up to the wall of the shopping centre, the last one facing it at an oblique angle like a dinghy that had collided with an ocean liner and been knocked spinning. I was going to have to try elsewhere.
That last house offered a possibility, though. It had a strip of garden to the side, bordering right up against the wall of the shopping centre. I slipped in through the gate, trying to look like I owned the place, and trotted around to the side. There was a fence at the back that was low enough to vault over; then another strip of garden, helpfully shielded from the house it belonged to by a clothes line full of washing. Unfortunately there was a stout, hatchet-faced brunette in the midst of the washing, presumably evacuating it to the safety of the house. She had two or three clothes-pegs in her mouth, but she gaped when she saw me and they fell out. Her shriek of surprise and protest pursued me across the narrow lawn to the higher brick wall on the far side. I took a flying jump and scrambled up, using elbows and feet.
I found I was looking down into a service area where a dozen or so lorries in red and silver livery were parked. No sign of any police cars, nor any rioters for that matter. Straight ahead of me there was a loading bay, and its corrugated-steel rolling door was only three-quarters shut. That’s an open invitation to a thief. I jumped down lightly on the further side, hearing a woman’s voice behind me yell, ‘There was a man, Arthur! There was a man in the yard!’ and a male voice truculently reply, ‘What effing man? I can’t see a man.’
I glanced around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then crossed quickly to the loading bay. There was a lorry drawn up there, its back doors wide open and its loading ramp lowered. An overturned pallet nearby had spilled brown cardboard boxes across the concrete apron in front of the rolling door. Whoever had been working here had downed tools pretty abruptly: with luck that meant they’d fled when the riot started, but it was also possible that they were among the hostages inside. I wondered belatedly what the Hell I was getting myself into here, but it seemed a little late to start having second thoughts. Probably the trick was to rule out stunts like this at the first-thoughts stage.