James Ballard - Kingdom Come - A Novel

‘Does it matter?’ Julia spoke sharply, tired of two bickering men. ‘At least they don’t think we killed him.’

‘Four days?’ I thought of the ventilator pumping away, and Julia tiptoeing around the oxygen tent. ‘How did they know he was dead?’

‘They smelled it.’ Maxted reached into the refrigerator and took out a bottle of mineral water. He washed his hands in a splash of the brittle fluid and then drank the last drops. ‘Now it’s time to go. When Cruise doesn’t sit up and read out the sports results these people are going to flip. I doubt if the police understand that.’

‘Sergeant Falconer is here,’ I said. ‘I saw her an hour ago near the North Gate.’

‘Mary Falconer?’ Julia sat forward, suddenly alert. ‘What was she doing?’

‘Keeping an eye on Sangster. He’ll soon take over.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’ Maxted kicked a pedal bin out of his way. ‘The magus of the shopping mall, a messiah without a message. You helped to write the script, Richard. The message is: there is no message. Nothing has any meaning, so at last we’re free.’

‘Falconer’s on to him,’ I said. ‘She’ll make sure he doesn’t go too far.’

‘I doubt it.’ Maxted sat at the table and spread his hands over the surface. ‘I suspect she’s on a different mission.’

‘Looking for Duncan Christie?’

‘Something like that.’ Maxted glanced sharply at me, avoiding Julia’s eyes. ‘Unfinished business. We need to find him, for his own safety.’

‘Why?’ I pressed. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Matter?’ Maxted stared at the table, as if expecting his cards to be dealt. ‘It does matter. Because Christie’s in danger.’

‘Good.’ Taking a gamble, and almost too tired to care, I said calmly: ‘He shot my father. You know that, doctor. You’ve always known it.’

‘Well . . .’ Without thinking, Maxted turned in his chair, clearly searching for an exit. ‘That’s not something I can discuss . . .’

‘He also shot David Cruise. Not those Bosnian brothers, whoever they are. Cruise was his real target all along.’

‘That’s a big jump, Richard.’

‘Not really.’ I waited for Julia to speak, but she was staring fixedly at Maxted. ‘What I can’t understand is why you’ve all been protecting him.’

‘Tell him.’ Julia stood up, rapping the table with her fist. She pulled back the hair from her forehead, wincing at a bruise on her scalp. ‘Maxted, tell him.’

‘Julia, it’s not that easy. The context . . .’

‘Fuck the context! Tell him!’

Julia stepped around the table towards Maxted and picked a knife from the sink. She was no longer angry with herself but with the foolish men who had brought her to this makeshift clinic in a besieged shopping mall. Her shoulders squared against Maxted, willing him to back away from her. I could see the relief she felt as the truth hovered in front of us, ready to spill over in a torrent.

‘Julia, sit down . . .’ Maxted offered her a chair, and beckoned to me, trying to enlist my help in calming this enraged woman. ‘Context is important. Richard has to understand what our intentions were . . .’

‘Never mind our intentions!’ Julia waited until she could control herself. ‘Tell him who killed his father.’

‘Christie did.’ I spoke as matter-of-factly as I could. ‘I know that, Julia. It was obvious from day one.’

Julia nodded, then raised the knife to quieten me. ‘Yes, Christie pulled the trigger. He fired the shots. I’m sorry, Richard, desperately sorry for that. So many people killed and badly wounded. It was a blunder from the start. But Duncan Christie didn’t kill your father.’

‘Who did?’

‘We did.’ Julia pointed to herself and Maxted. ‘We planned it, and we gave the order.’

‘Hold on . . .’ Maxted took the knife from Julia’s hand. ‘Julia and I were on the fringe. There were a lot of others.’

‘Sangster, Geoffrey Fairfax, Sergeant Falconer . . .’ I recited the names. ‘Various other people who gave their support, but preferred to stay in the shadows. The mayor and one or two councillors, Superintendent Leighton and senior police officers . . .’

‘The old Brooklands establishment,’ Julia commented wearily. ‘Terrible bores, the lot of them. Dangerous bores. There was even a clergyman, but Maxted frightened him off. All that talk about elective insanity.’

‘He thought I meant the Christian Church.’ Maxted added: ‘They’d already had one assassination too many, and weren’t looking for a second.’

‘Assassination?’ I pushed myself away from the table. ‘You planned to kill my father. Why?’

‘Not your father. He was never the target.’ Maxted sank his exhausted face into his hands. ‘Go back six months, Richard. Brooklands was in turmoil, along with all the other motorway towns. More than a million people were directly involved. Racist attacks, Asian families terrorized out of their homes, immigrant hostels burnt down. Football matches every weekend that were really political rallies, though no one there ever realized it. Sport was just an excuse for street violence. And it all seemed to spring from the Metro-Centre. A new kind of fascism, a cult of violence rising from this wilderness of retail parks and cable TV stations. People were so bored, they wanted drama in their lives. They wanted to strut and shout and kick the hell out of anyone with a strange face. They wanted to hero-worship a leader.’

‘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?’