James Ballard - Kingdom Come - A Novel

‘It did work.’ Maxted ignored her protests. ‘Everything was arranged. Geoffrey Fairfax knew his stuff. Sadly, when the hour came the only thing missing was the target.’

‘But my father and the bears filled in.’ I rearranged the dirt on the table, and then drew my father’s initials. ‘How many of you were involved?’

‘A small inner group. Fairfax was in the driving seat. He’d served in the army, he knew and loved the old Brooklands. He saw the Metro-Centre as a spaceship from hell. Superintendent Leighton supported us, but he had to be careful. He’d join our meetings, then slip away early. Sergeant Falconer was under Fairfax’s thumb—he’d got her mother off a shoplifting charge. She supplied the weapon, a standard Heckler & Koch, apparently mislaid by the armoury. Leighton covered up for her.’

‘Sangster?’

‘He reconnoitred the target area. Tom Carradine was an old pupil, and very proud to take his headmaster on a tour of the Metro-Centre and show off the fire and emergency systems. He gave Sangster a security pass for his visiting “nephew”. An hour before the shooting Sangster hid the weapon in the fire-control station.’

‘And Julia?’

‘I did nothing!’ Julia tore a children’s drawing from the wall and crushed it in her hands. ‘I didn’t think anyone would get killed, or even wounded . . .’

‘You did almost nothing.’ Maxted waited until she tossed the crumpled drawing among the bloody bandages in an overflowing bin. ‘Julia had treated Christie’s daughter after the accident. He may be schizoid but he’s no fool. He wasn’t sure we were serious. She gave him beta-blockers to calm him down and convinced him he was doing the right thing. Christie believed her, and that was vital.’

‘I drove him to the Metro-Centre.’ Julia half closed her eyes, smiling faintly to herself. ‘When we parked he didn’t want to get out of the car. He actually asked me if he should go ahead. I said . . .’

‘You said yes.’ Maxted sat back in his chair, letting the point sink in. ‘He trusted you, Julia.’

‘But after the shooting . . .’ Puzzled, I asked: ‘Weren’t you afraid that Christie would talk?’

‘Only if he went on trial. Hours of CID grilling, months in a remand centre away from his wife and daughter—he’d have given away everything. We knew that killing David Cruise would be easy. The cover-up was the difficult part. It was vital that Christie be arrested.’

‘Why? Arrested?’

‘Arrested and brought before a magistrate. If enough witnesses testified that they saw Christie at the time of the shooting and he was nowhere near the atrium the case against him would be dismissed. Especially if the witnesses knew Christie well and were worthy members of the local community.’

‘His doctor, psychiatrist, head teacher. So that’s why you went to the entrance hall. You were protecting Christie.’

‘And ourselves. If Christie confessed to the murder no one would take his word against ours. Misfits and psychotics are confessing all the time to crimes they haven’t committed.’ Maxted sighed to himself. ‘It was almost the perfect murder.’

‘Almost?’

‘The victim failed to turn up. We’d told Christie to hide the weapon and get away, but he lost his nerve. He’d come that far and he needed a target.’

‘My father? He hated David Cruise and the sports clubs.’

‘Not your father. That was a tragic blunder. Christie was firing at the bears. He hated them even more than he hated Cruise. Especially as his daughter liked to watch them bobbing about on a children’s programme. He fired blindly, and hit your father, along with other visitors to the mall. I take responsibility, Richard. Innocent bystanders, collateral damage, they’re easy phrases to say . . .’

I nodded coldly, refusing to spare Maxted any of his contrition. He had spoken truthfully, but the truth was not enough. I wanted to see him serving years of imprisonment, but I knew that Julia would be with him, her life and career destroyed. She was standing with her back to me, hands wiping her eyes, and I understood now the hostility and guilt that had stood between us since my arrival.

I said: ‘So you smuggled Christie out of Brooklands? Where, exactly?’

‘Sangster drove him to a disused chicken farm near Guildford that Fairfax had helped foreclose. His wife and daughter turned up in a camper van. I kept him sedated and told him we’d try again. He was definitely up for it.’

‘The police found him so quickly. Someone must have tipped them off.’

‘We did.’ Maxted whistled through his teeth without thinking. ‘We needed to get him cleared by the magistrate. The deaths were tragic, but we hoped everyone would see sense. In fact, the opposite happened. The Metro-Centre shooting stirred everything up. People felt frightened. They could cope with Asian youths defending their shops, but a deranged assassin with a machine gun . . . ? There were rallies at the sports grounds night after night, Brooklands was seriously threatening to turn into a fascist republic. But it never made that final flip.’

‘You sound disappointed. Why not? Too British?’

‘In a way.’ Maxted listened to a volley of shots echo through the atrium. ‘Sporting rifles—that about spells it out. The problem was David Cruise. He was too amiable, too second-rate. Then a minor miracle happened, someone we hadn’t counted on turned up.’

‘Me?’

‘Right. You turned up. Your father had died, and you wanted to know why. It didn’t take you long to realize that something very fishy was going on.’

‘Julia came to the funeral. That started me thinking.’

‘Richard . . .’ Julia stood shivering behind me, her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’d helped to kill a fine old man. I knew how stupid I’d been, listening to all this talk about elective madness.’

‘Talk, maybe. But I was right.’ Maxted quietly ignored her, addressing me directly. ‘The assassination failed, but everything moved up a gear. It needed a final push. A bomb in the Metro-Centre, a huge riot that would overwhelm the police, David Cruise proclaiming an independent state.’

‘He was too canny for that.’

‘So we found. The riot went ahead, Sangster planted another bomb near the town hall, and we did our best to stir up the crowd. But without Cruise it was hopeless. Fairfax’s death frightened off a lot of our key supporters.’

‘How did he die?’

‘I guess his fingers were rusty. Never liked the man. He was always a bit too impetuous. The last person to be a bomb-maker.’

‘But why pick my car?’

‘That was Fairfax’s idea. He knew you were on to something. And he loathed you, anyway. It was a warning, a reminder of how easy it would be to frame you. Leighton and Sergeant Falconer went along with that—it’s why you were never charged and the car’s ownership was never identified. We had you where we needed you. But everything collapsed when Cruise refused to take the bait. He came from the TV world, and he needed an autocue. Then a new friend appeared with the right kind of skills and a taste for stylized violence.’

‘A suburban Dr Goebbels?’

Maxted stared at me with real distaste, then managed a weak smile. ‘You saw fascism as just another sales opportunity. Psychopathology was a handy marketing tool. David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy, a shrink-proof shaman of the multi-storey car parks, Kafka in a tired trenchcoat, a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.’

‘Still, everyone admired him.’

‘Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbours’ wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbours’ asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt. We’re worthless, Richard—to your credit, you know that.’