I LAY BACK on the sofa, watching the lights come on over the motorway flatlands, the desert wastes of retail England. It was a night of important sports matches: the arrays of arc lights above the football and athletics stadiums blazed through a hazy glare that caught every insect in the Thames Valley. Already thousands of spectators in St George’s shirts would be taking their seats, ready to work themselves into a frenzy before they seized the placid town.
I sat with my whisky, in this penthouse correctly sited above a lunatic asylum. Maxted had impressed me, but I discounted his claim that he knew who had shot my father. His motives were ambiguous even for a suburban psychiatrist who appeared too often on television. There he played the same role, the tough-but-tender physician moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, but even the television audience had failed to be taken in. He was trying to recruit me into his ‘resistance’ group, but I could hear the communal singing from the stadiums, great war hymns that seemed to lift the night, and I knew that Maxted and his posse of eccentric professionals were doomed.
I stepped onto the balcony and gazed at the silver back of the Metro-Centre, a self-supporting structure far more impressive than the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, a glorified tent filled with patronizing tat. The Metro-Centre was a house of treasure that enriched the lives of its visitors. Like an unimportant but hard-working merchant in a souk, I had given my entire career to the task of displaying that treasure at its best.
I returned to the living room and listened to the silence. It was easy to imagine Maxted with a prostate the size of a cricket ball, legs astride the lavatory pan, discussing a difficult patient on his mobile as he conjured the sluggish urine from his bladder.
I opened the door to the hallway. A corridor ran to the bathroom and bedroom, but there was no sound of Maxted’s voice on a telephone. The flat was silent, light flaring against the windows from the display screens at the football stadium. I was alone in the penthouse, and assumed that Maxted had hurried away to deal with an emergency call, too distracted to warn me.
I pressed the lift button and watched the indicator panel, then pressed again and waited. There was no response, and the red warning light glowed steadily in the swipe unit. Without a pass card the lift was closed to me, part of the elaborate security that guarded the research laboratories and their drug stores from escaped patients.
‘Maxted … for God’s sake!’
Irritated by the endless series of charades that seemed to unfold within each other, I pounded the lift doors and pressed my ears to the metal panels. Annoyed with myself for letting Maxted play his devious games, I walked back to the kitchen. A plate-glass door led to a narrow balcony, where a short stairway joined the main fire escape.
Cautiously, giving the security system time to think, I turned the handle on the door, but it failed to open. Somewhere in the penthouse lay the fuse box and the switching unit that controlled the security locks, but my temper was up. Holding the kitchen chair by its legs, I raised it above my head and drove the steel frame into the plate-glass door. The violent blows echoed like gunfire through the empty rooms, but left the barest marks on the toughened glass. Then, after the third blow, I heard an alarm shrill far below me.
* * *
Thirty minutes later I was sitting in Maxted’s black armchair, finishing the last of the whisky in the decanter and mulling over the almost deliberate way in which everyone I visited in Brooklands had plied me with alcohol. Even my father had left a substantial supply of gin and whisky, as if keen to ease the culture shock awaiting me. Fairfax, Sangster and Dr Maxted had been as quick with a bottle as an over-attentive sommelier in an unpopular restaurant.
I was staring gloomily at the decanter when the lift doors at last opened. Two security men emerged, carrying a leather restraining harness. They approached me without speaking, feinting around the furniture like dog handlers cornering an alcoholic pit bull, but I was sure that they knew who I was. After checking the flat they beckoned me to the lift.
‘Mr Pearson, we’ll have to see you out.’
‘Good. I’ll come quietly. I take it you’re the Rapid Response Unit?’
‘Dr Maxted said –’
‘Don’t tell me. I couldn’t cope …’
I assumed that Maxted had slipped away on some errand of his own, knowing that I would set off the alarm, and had told the security men to release me half an hour later. I entered the lift, the guards behind me with their harness, ready to throw it over me at the first sign of dementia.
The doors closed. In the pause before the lift moved there was the distant sound of a powerful explosion, a loud percussive boom that entered the shaft above our heads and rocked the lift.
I stepped into the night air, and searched the sky for the burning debris of this huge firework. A police car was parked beside the rhododendron screen. The headlights were on full beam, and the distracted woman constable at the wheel was trying to speak through a blizzard of radio chatter. She saw me walk to the security barrier and signalled me to stop.
As I approached the police car a blonde-haired woman in a blue tracksuit and trainers emerged from the admin offices. She strode past me, and caught the tang of whisky on the dark air.
‘Mr Pearson?’ Sergeant Mary Falconer seemed surprised to find me. She pointed to the security men still watching me from the elevator. ‘What are you doing here? Did you break in?’
‘Break in?’ I raised my hands to seize her shoulders, and then let her step back. ‘This place really is a madhouse. For the last hour I’ve been trying to break out.’
‘Break out?’ She fussed with a stray hair. ‘Why? How did you get in?’
‘Forget it. No wonder the crime rate is soaring. Dr Maxted brought me here.’
‘Dr Maxted? Are you a patient of his?’
‘At this rate I soon will be. Now, I need to find a taxi.’
‘Hold on a moment. Just wait there …’
Sergeant Falconer listened to the radio chatter and rubbed the dial of her watch. She was dressed for the athletics field, or at least a run around the neighbourhood, though scarcely a hair or eyelash was out of place. At the same time she seemed ill at ease, like a supporting actor assigned the wrong role. Once again she reminded me of a strait-laced but vulnerable teacher aware that her class had seen her in a piece of questionable behaviour.
A second police car turned off the main road and approached the security barrier, but Sergeant Falconer was too distracted to notice it. She listened to the ambulance sirens in the distance and drew a mobile phone from her tracksuit top. She stared at the text message, then crossed the road to the second police car. She took the radio earpiece from the driver, listened briefly and ran back to me. For the first time she was alert and focused, as if the script she had been following now synchronized with reality.
‘Sergeant Falconer …?’ I held her arm. ‘Something’s going on. What are you people playing at?’
‘Get into the car.’ Avoiding my breath, she pushed me through the rear door. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’
‘What is it?’ I watched the second police car reverse and speed away. ‘Have they caught the gunman?’
‘Who? Which gunman?’
‘The man who killed my father. They’ve arrested him?’
‘No.’ She fastened her seat belt, beckoning the woman driver to climb the grass embankment around the security barrier. ‘It’s the Metro-Centre. There’s been a bomb attack. Heavy damage, but no casualties. So far …’