Текст книги "Kingdom Come: A Novel"

Автор книги: James Graham Ballard

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

6
GOING HOME

I EXPECTED TO FIND a noisy crowd outside the magistrates’ court, but the police outnumbered the few spectators. Passers-by paused on the pavement opposite the court, but the last of the photographers were packing away their equipment, deprived of their target.

Tuning to the local radio bulletin as I drove from the Metro-Centre, I heard the news confirmed. I drummed my fists on the steering wheel, certain that the law had tripped over itself. I had seen Christie close enough to punch him, and his lolling head and wandering eyes, a visible attempt to escape from himself, convinced me that he was guilty. Somehow I had to overturn this misguided and ludicrous decision. The large vacuum left in my life by my father’s murder had now been invaded by another vacuum.

I left the Jensen on a double yellow line, waving to the policeman who studiously said nothing when I walked past him. I was climbing the courthouse steps when I saw Sergeant Falconer emerging through the doors. She recognized me and began to turn away, pretending to adjust her hair. Unable to escape, she rallied herself and took my arm in a firm grip.

‘Mr Pearson . . . ?’ Her mind seemed miles away, but she steered me into the lobby, past three uniformed constables rocking on their heels. ‘You’ve heard? It’s quieter in here. The public . . .’

‘Don’t worry, they’ve all gone shopping. No one seems upset, or surprised.’

‘Believe me, it’s a complete surprise.’ Sergeant Falconer studied my face, relieved to find me on the edge of anger, an emotion with which her training had taught her to cope. She led me to a bench. ‘Let’s sit here. I’ll do my best to give you any details.’

‘Can’t we go in? Civic awareness, and all that. Everyone should observe a miscarriage of justice.’

‘The court is closed.’ She smiled in a sisterly way and touched my arm. ‘Mr Christie may be coming out soon. Is that all right . . . ?’

‘Fine. He’s innocent, isn’t he?’ I watched the constables sauntering about the steps, truncheons reluctantly sheathed, like salesmen deprived of their customers. Without thinking, I said: ‘The police sell violence.’

‘What?’

‘The idea of violence.’ I laughed to myself. ‘Sorry, Sergeant.’

‘You’re upset. It’s understandable.’

‘Well . . .’ I calmed myself, touched by her close interest. ‘Half an hour ago I was sure who had killed my father, and why. A mental patient with a grudge against a shopping mall. Now, suddenly, it’s a mystery again. Brooklands, the M25, these motorway towns. They’re damned strange places. Nothing is what it seems.’

‘That’s why people move here. The suburbs are the last great mystery.’

‘Is that the reason you’re leaving?’ I took her hand, surprised by its almost feverish warmth. There was an operation scar on the knuckle of her ring finger, the trace of an old tendon injury left by some hooligan with a beer bottle. Or had a tenacious engagement ring been surgically removed, her body holding on to a passion that her quirky mind repressed? Sergeant Falconer was wary and defensive, and not only about the confused police investigation into my father’s death. I knew that she wanted me out, safely back in central London, but I sensed that she wanted herself out, free from whatever web was spinning itself around her.

‘Mr Pearson? You fell asleep for a moment.’

‘Right. I’m sorry. These witnesses who came forward—who are they? Greens, hunt saboteurs, pot-smoking hippies? I take it they’re friends of Christie’s. How reliable are they?’

‘Totally. No greens or hippies. They’re all people of good standing. Respectable local professionals—a doctor at Brooklands Hospital, a head teacher, the psychiatrist at the secure unit who treated Christie.’

‘His own psychiatrist?’

‘All of them saw him in the South Gate entrance hall when they heard the shooting. He was only a few feet away.’

‘They recognized Christie? What about the earlier witnesses?’

‘Unreliable. One or two people saw him running across the car park, but by then everybody was running away.’

‘So . . .’ I leaned back in sheer fatigue and stared at the heavy ceiling. ‘If Christie didn’t kill my father . . . ?’

‘Someone else did. Brooklands CID are working twenty-four hours a day. We’ll find him. Go back to London, Mr Pearson. You didn’t really know your father. It’s too late to start creating a whole lifetime’s memories of him.’

‘That’s a little callous, Sergeant. There’s always been a space in my life, and now I’m trying to fill it. One last thing. I saw you in Geoffrey Fairfax’s office after the riot at the police station. He read my father’s will and took me through his estate. When I left, you were heating milk for Mrs Christie’s daughter.’

‘So?’ Sergeant Falconer watched me in the coolest way. ‘I was part of the child protection unit assigned to Christie’s next of kin.’

‘In Fairfax’s office?’ I raised my hands to the air. ‘He claimed that he no longer represented Christie. But he’s still giving shelter to a murderer’s wife.’

‘Mr Fairfax had helped her before. With pocket money, hotel charges. He paid for her to take her baby on holiday. It’s called charity, Mr Pearson. The better-off people in Brooklands still try to help the less fortunate.’

‘Decent of them. Though Geoffrey Fairfax doesn’t strike me as the charitable type. Territorial Army, riding to hounds, shotgun next to his desk. From what I saw, he’s a bit of a fascist bully-boy. How on earth did he represent someone like Duncan Christie?’

‘Solicitors represent the strangest people, Mr Pearson. There’s no conflict of interest.’

‘Exactly. Fairfax knew that Christie wouldn’t be charged.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ The sergeant lowered her voice. ‘A stitch-up involving the court?’

‘Not a stitch-up. But Fairfax was confident that the case against Christie would be dropped. Otherwise he would have passed my father’s estate to another firm of solicitors.’

‘So how did he know?’ Sergeant Falconer spoke in an offhand way, but with careful emphasis. ‘Mr Pearson?’

‘I can’t say. But something about all this strikes me as more than a little odd . . .’

Sergeant Falconer stood up as her mobile rang. She answered it briefly, then spoke to the constables by the door. Returning to me, she smiled and briskly beckoned me to my feet.

‘Go back to London, Mr Pearson. See your travel agent. I’m sorry about your father, but if you stir things up enough you’ll create a hundred plots and conspiracies. Mr Pearson . . . ?’

I watched her as she waited for me to reply. She was almost trembling with impatience for me to leave. Somehow I had unsettled the ramshackle construction that she had built around herself in Brooklands, a card castle of compromises and half-truths that threatened to collapse onto her. Already I sensed that she was as much a pawn as I was. Geoffrey Fairfax had wanted me to see her in his office pantry, just as he had wanted me to see Mrs Christie sitting in the reception area.

Snapping her fingers, Sergeant Falconer turned away from me as an unmarked blue van halted outside the courthouse. The driver signalled to the constables on the steps. Doors slammed in a nearby corridor, and a group of short-sleeved ushers moved swiftly down the hall, sheltering a man whom they propelled towards the entrance.

I recognized Duncan Christie, face still bruised and unshaved, tieless white shirt buttoned to the throat, arms gripped by the ushers. For all the urgency, Christie seemed relaxed, smiling around him with the good-humoured arrogance of a millionaire footballer acquitted of a shoplifting charge. Behind him was his wife, still in her red serge jacket, torn lapel held back by a safety pin. Sergeant Falconer dived into the scrum, held Mrs Christie and steered her down the steps.

But at least Christie had noticed me. As he approached the van he shook himself free from the ushers about to bundle him through the side door. Ignoring his wife, he seized Sergeant Falconer’s arm and pointed to me as I stood alone outside the courthouse.

I WALKED BACKto my car, waving away the traffic warden who had placed a penalty ticket under the windscreen wiper and was waiting to see how I would react. For once, I was thinking about matters even more urgent than parking fines. As I started the engine I had already made my decision. Rather than return to London, I would become a temporary resident of Brooklands. These suburban streets beside the Metro-Centre and the M25 were the gaming board that my father’s killer was still moving across. I was suspicious of the police, who would soon lose interest in the case. They had arrested the wrong man, and could easily do so again. Sergeant Falconer had done her best to confuse me, but the Metro-Centre seemed to disorient everyone in its shadow.

I might have been alone on the steps of the courthouse, but I had one important ally: my father. By drawing closer to him I would begin to see Brooklands through his eyes. I would live in his flat, cook in his kitchen, and even perhaps sleep in his bed. He and I were together now, and he would help me to find his murderer.

I was going home.

I moved away from the kerb, my eyes on the rear-view mirror. Thirty yards behind me, also parked on a double yellow line but free from the attentions of the traffic warden, was a familiar Range Rover, bull bars and hubcaps splashed with the best of Surrey mud. Out of curiosity, I made a sharp U-turn, and drove back past the courthouse.

Geoffrey Fairfax sat behind his steering wheel, head partly hidden inside a copy of Country Life, a solicitor keeping careful watch over his client.

7
SNAKES AND LADDERS

THE SNAKES ON THE Brooklands board were only pretending to be asleep, and the ladders led anywhere.

I unlocked the front door and stepped into the darkened flat, lowering my suitcase to the floor. Around me were the few rooms, the now silent spaces of my father’s life, even more unfamiliar than they had been four days earlier. I felt like a student returning after a year at a foreign university, unsettled by the strange shapes of the rooms in the family home.

No one was here to greet me, uncork a bottle of champagne or hand me the keys of my first sports car. But there was a welcome of another kind. I recognized my father’s scent on the air, an old man’s soft breath, the sweet tang of tobacco steeped into the curtains and carpets.

A presence I scarcely knew was already arraying itself around me. Should I sleep in my father’s bed? I hesitated before entering his bedroom. Sleeping on his mattress, my head on his pillow as I dreamed of him, was too close for comfort. I left my suitcase in the hall and drew the curtains, aware that too much daylight would unnerve the ghosts.

In the bookcase beside the bed was a shelf of logbooks tracking his transits of the globe. There were biographies of test pilots of the 1960s, privately published by long-ago aircraft companies—Fairey, De Havilland, Avro—signed and dedicated to my father: ‘For Stuart, who always kept flying speed . . .’

Amazingly, there was a copy of Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, signed by my mother, sent to him two years after their divorce, a desperate attempt to reach out to him. As she lived with me in our large but sparsely furnished house, with the second-hand Mercedes and the need at all costs to keep up appearances, my father’s life must have seemed effortlessly glamorous, exotic horizons coming up like an unending series of travel films.

I poured myself a small whisky before exploring his chest of drawers. Everyone had a sex life, and their own little habits, not all endearing. But there was nothing on the shelf of the bedside table, apart from a bottle of eye drops and a sachet of beta-blockers, with its line of foil punctures ending on the morning of his death. There were no sleeping pills or tranquillizers. The old pilot slept easily, and sleep was something to be dealt with quickly. My father had been a man who wanted to stay awake.

I carried my suitcase into the second bedroom, and opened the windows with their view of the Metro-Centre. Its presence was curiously inviting, filled with those treasures I had spent my childhood coveting. Despite our large house and Mercedes, the home my mother made for us was bleak. Very rarely did anything new enter our lives. We made do with an elderly TV set, an electric clock that tried bravely to guess the time, and a central heating system that whined ceaselessly to itself. Shops and department stores were places of magic. I was forever showing my mother advertisements for new toasters and washing machines, hoping that they would ease the strain of existence for her. Even my presents were rationed. A proportion of birthday gifts sent to me by her sister and friends was carefully set aside, locked away for future use, so that I was always outgrowing my gifts.

Surprisingly, I turned out to be rather spartan as an adult, living in large apartments that I kept almost unfurnished. I worked all day devising ways of selling people a host of consumer goods, but rarely bought anything unless I needed to. Childhood had inoculated me against the consumer world I longed for so eagerly.

SEARCHING FOR SHEETSand pillowcases in the utility room, I noticed the workstation in the corner with its computer. My father’s emails were still stacking up, messages and fixture lists from local sports clubs that he supported. I scrolled through the details of ice-hockey matches, archery and basketball contests. My father supported a huge number of teams, and must have exhausted himself trailing around from ice rink to football stadium to athletics ground.

But the books on the nearby shelf were even more of a surprise. Next to the yearbook of a small-arms manufacturer were biographies of Perón, Goering and Mussolini, and a history of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I pulled down an illustrated guide to Nazi regalia and the ceremonial uniforms of the Third Reich. The heavy, laminated paper was soft from frequent handling, and I could almost feel my father sitting at this desk and turning the pages as he scanned the illustrations of Reichsmarschalls’ batons and leather SS overcoats.

A darker scent had crept into the flat. I sat back from the desk and pulled open the metal drawer. There was a clutter of Metro-Centre knick-knacks, loyalty gold cards and season passes, invitations to consumer clubs and sports events. A bulldog clip held a dozen issues of a Metro-Centre newsletter, filled with photographs of sporting club dinners, everyone in their St George’s shirts. The teams looked as smart and disciplined as paramilitary units.

Present in several of the group portraits was David Cruise, the Metro-Centre cable-channel presenter, with his actor’s handsome but empty face, a suntan like an advertising campaign and a smile that owed nothing to humour. His fleshy jaw made me think of Wernher von Braun posing beside a Redstone rocket in Arizona, Nazi past behind him and the future on hold.

Was my father a National Front supporter? Sleep would be less easy in the flat than I hoped. I opened the window, trying to let out the unpleasant aura, and noticed a banner hanging from the wall behind the door. This bore the emblem of a local football club, the Brookland Eagles. Embroidered in gold thread, two raptors with grotesquely hooked talons grimaced from the scarlet field.

My father’s interests had taken him into some threatening arenas. The modest workstation was almost a neo-fascist altar. I paused by the neatly pressed laundry on the ironing board. Lifting one of the shirts, I unfolded the familiar St George’s Cross, armorial eagles stitched to its left shoulder. I held the shirt to my chest, and imagined my elderly father wearing this threatening costume with its screaming eagles, the oldest football hooligan in Brooklands.

I stared at myself in the half-length mirror above the maid’s kettle and biscuit tin. The tasselled banner hung behind me, as if I were on a podium that faced a chanting crowd. I seemed more aggressive, not in the bully-boy way of the street thugs who had driven the imam from his suburban mosque, but in the more cerebral style of the lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps. For them, the black uniforms and death’s-head emblems represented a violence of the mind, where aggression and cruelty were part of a radical code that denied good and evil in favour of an embraced pathology. Morality gave way to will, and will deferred to madness.

I tried to smile, but a different self stood behind the shirt. My cautious take on the world, imposed on me by my neurotic mother, had given way to something far less introverted. The focus of my face moved from my eyes and high forehead to my mouth and jaw. The muscles in my face were more visible, the strings of a harder appetite, a more knowing hunger . . .

I threw the shirt into the empty laundry basket.

WHAT DANGEROUS GAMEhad my father been playing? Years of mismanaged third world airports brought out a nasty strain of racism in senior pilots. Or was there something fascist about flight itself? Death, far from closing his life, had opened the door to a dozen possible futures. Already he was a different man from the wise and sympathetic figure I had imagined. What sort of father would he have made? I sensed my free and easy childhood, scarcely controlled by my distracted mother, giving way to a more disciplined regime. Discipline as a means of instilling love . . . ?

The flat was airless, and I needed to pace a car park somewhere to clear my head. I closed the door behind me and left the apartment house, listening to my feet on the gravel, a horizontal slide area where nothing was firmly bedded.

I was sitting in the driving seat of the Jensen, waiting for my mental compass to reset itself, when a grey Audi turned into the car park beside me. A tall, middle-aged Asian in a creased business suit stepped out. As his large shoes ploughed their way to the entrance doors, I noticed that he was carrying a rolled-up newspaper in his right hand, tapping the air like a bandmaster beating time. His bulky chest and shoulders reminded me of the intruder I had pinned briefly to the wall.

‘Excuse me . . . ! Sir, can you wait . . . ?’

I caught up with him in the lobby, as he searched for his keys to the ground-floor flat. Startled when I burst through the doors, he dropped the keys onto the tiled floor. None of my neighbours had called on me to express their sympathies, but this Asian resident would have seen me coming and going, and must have guessed who I was.

Trying to calm him, I introduced myself. ‘Richard Pearson—I’m Captain Pearson’s son. He died in the Metro-Centre shooting. You remember . . . ?’

‘Of course. My deepest sympathies.’ His eyes moved quickly over my grey suit and tie and then turned to the lobby doors, as if he suspected that an accomplice might be lurking outside. ‘A shocking affair, even for Brooklands.’

‘For Brooklands . . . ?’ I bent down and retrieved his keys, then handed them to him, conscious of the rolled-up newspaper and the bandage around his right wrist. ‘Tell me, Mr—?’

‘Kumar. Nihal Kumar. I’m resident here for many years.’

‘Good. It’s a pleasant little backwater. We’ve met before, Mr Kumar. No . . . ?’

‘It’s not likely.’ Kumar pumped his doorbell, too confused to use his keys. ‘Perhaps when your father . . . ?’

‘A few days ago. I left the door of the flat open. You probably thought a burglar had broken in. I still have your medical journal. You are a doctor?’

‘Definitely not.’ He gestured wearily. ‘My professional background is in engineering. I’m the manager of Motorola’s research laboratory in Brooklands. My wife is a doctor.’

‘A paediatrician? That makes sense.’ I was still puzzled by his extreme unease with me, and tried to shake his hand. ‘I should have been more careful. My father’s death, I was on edge.’

‘It’s to be expected.’ Kumar seemed to relax a little, reassured that I was not about to harm him. ‘It’s best to keep your door locked. At all times.’

‘Thanks for the tip. There’s a lot of crime here?’

‘Crime, certainly. And violence.’

‘I’ve noticed that. These towns along the M25. There’s something in the air. I take it there are right-wing groups here?’

‘Many. They create real fear.’ Kumar pressed his bell again, impatient to enter his flat. ‘The Asian community is deeply concerned. In the old days there were organized attacks, but they were predictable. Now we see violence for its own sake.’

‘These so-called sports clubs?’

‘Sports? Just one sport. Beating people up.’

‘Asians, mostly?’

‘Asians, Kosovans, Bosnians. Far too many sports clubs. The police should stop them.’

‘I think my father belonged to one.’ When Kumar made no reply, I said: ‘You knew my father?’

‘Lately, not so well. When we first came to Brooklands he was very charming to my wife. He made us feel at home. Later . . .’

‘He changed?’

‘His new friends . . . sometimes they were here. They frightened my wife.’

‘My father wasn’t violent?’

‘Your father was a gentleman. But the atmosphere was different . . . everywhere the red crosses, not to help people but to hurt them.’

‘I’m sorry. Tell me, Mr Kumar, all this violence—where do you think it’s coming from?’

‘The Metro-Centre? It’s possible.’

‘How? It’s just a large shop.’

‘It’s more than a shop, Mr Pearson. It’s an incubator. People go in there and they wake up, they see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream . . .’

He reached for the bell, but his front door opened quietly. An elegant Asian woman in her fifties with a high forehead and severe face stared out at us. I assumed that Dr Kumar had been listening to everything we said. Her eyes followed me up the stairs, waiting until I was safely out of sight before she stepped aside to admit her husband.