‘Christie—it’s time to go.’ His wife took his arm, and whispered loudly enough for me to hear, ‘Baby’s getting tired.’
‘Baby not tired. Baby waking up . . .’
I turned, glad to leave them to their marital games, and found myself facing a thuggish group of stewards in St George’s shirts. They pushed through the crowd, grappling with each other like wrestlers in a ruck. A child screamed, setting off a deranged Airedale that started barking and biting. Trying to escape, husbands collided into their wives, and a scuffle broke out as the cabinet refrigerator toppled to the ground. Stewards shouted above the pipe band.
‘Right! Let’s have you! Off with this rubbish!’
Fists pounded on the side panels of the pick-up. Clutching her daughter, Mrs Christie flailed with her free hand at the brawling stewards. Fully awake now, her husband wrestled with their leader, a blond-haired bruiser with ice-hockey armour under his shirt.
I stepped back, and lost my balance when I was shoulder-charged by a heavily built woman wearing a biker’s crash helmet. Through the mêlée of legs, knees and fists I saw an open-topped car draw up behind the pick-up. The driver sprang from his seat, fastening a leather jacket around his midriff, apparently eager to join the brawl.
He searched the crowd, forcefully pushing aside anyone who approached him. He was well into his fifties, with an almost jocular scowl, a boxer’s rolling shoulders and the shaven scalp of a nightclub bouncer. He often appeared on television, but the last time I had seen him he was sitting beside Geoffrey Fairfax in the front of the lawyer’s Range Rover. This was Christie’s psychiatrist, Dr Tony Maxted, and the third of his helpful witnesses.
He saw me kneeling by the rear wheel of the pick-up and came straight towards me. He gripped my shoulders, like a well-muscled orderly with a mental patient, and laughed good-humouredly when I tried to wrench his hands away. He lifted me to my feet, and propelled me towards his car.
‘Richard Pearson? We ought to leave before you beat anyone up. I think the Christies can look after themselves . . .’
14
TOWARDS A WILLED MADNESS
THE THIRD WITNESS.
Biding my time, I crouched in the bucket seat of the frisky Mazda as Dr Maxted steered us erratically through the streets of east Brooklands. We passed a young offenders’ prison, then veered through a business park where the research laboratories of Siemens, Motorola and Astra Computers tried to outstare each other across untrodden lawns and beds of subdued daffodils that had given up waiting for their Wordsworth. Emerging into a street of glass and metal warehousing, we joined a dual carriageway that led past a marina and water-skiing club built beside a reclaimed gravel lake.
I assumed that Maxted was trying to confuse me, constructing a maze around my head from a jumbled atlas of back streets and slip roads. When we passed the young offenders’ prison for the second time I tapped Maxted’s shoulder, but he pointed to the road ahead, as if the car needed my full attention.
I decided to humour him, and studied the heavy muscles of his neck, and the close-cropped hair over his broad skull. He drove the powerful car with a surprising lack of grace, his fingers barely touching the wheel, bruising the gearbox as he stamped the clutch pedal with a heavy foot. Like many psychiatrists, he needed to play games with anyone who entered his professional space, performing the private rituals of the modern-day shaman.
At last we approached Northfield Hospital, the mental asylum where Duncan Christie had been held. We paused by the gate, and Maxted punched the horn to rouse the security guard dozing over his evening paper. We moved past a gym and sports centre, blocks of staff apartments and an inter-denominational chapel that resembled an avant-garde pissoir. We parked outside the main admin building, and walked to a side entrance behind a screen of rhododendrons. Using his swipe card, Maxted led us into a coffin-like lift.
As we climbed towards the roof he looked me up and down, nodding without comment.
‘Thanks for the mystery tour,’ I said. ‘Quite a car, especially the way you drive it.’
‘Is that a compliment?’ Maxted loosened his tie. ‘I wasn’t trying to confuse you. Driving straight here would have done that. I’m impressed you ever found your way to Brooklands in the first place.’
‘I’m not sure I did . . .’
We stepped from the lift into a windowless lobby. After dialling an entry code, Maxted beckoned me into the hallway of an airy penthouse, apparently built as an afterthought from sections of glass and aluminium panelling. Deep balconies looked out over the hospital buildings below. A mile away, across a terrain of dual carriageways and industrial estates, rose the dome of the Metro-Centre, its blimp lazing above it like a tethered soul.
Maxted gestured at the expensive but anonymous furniture, the black leather sofas and chromium lamps lighting remote areas of carpet that no one had ever visited. It reminded me of the mezzanine television studio where David Cruise held court. In a sense the cable presenter and the psychiatrist were in the same business, redefining the world as a minimalist structure in which human beings were an untidy intrusion. Fittingly, the bookshelves were empty, and in the deserted dining room the table was set for guests who would never arrive.
‘It’s a kind of glamorous shack . . .’ Maxted gestured at the low-ceilinged rooms with a dismissive wave, but he seemed relaxed and confident, springing on his feet as if the penthouse reflected his secret view of himself. ‘The new research wing was financed by DuPont. I helped to raise a lot of the cash. This is one of the perks, like having your own lift. It takes away the pain.’
‘Is there any pain?’
‘Believe me. Still, you’re used to this kind of thing. A big London agency, seven-figure salary, share options, duplexes . . . Am I right?’
‘Wrong. As it happens, I’ve just been sacked.’ There had been a hint of longing in Maxted’s voice, untouched by envy, as if he was happy to live vicariously the elegant life that the penthouse only hinted at. I pointed to the Metro-Centre, unsure why he had brought me to the hospital. ‘It doesn’t look quite so large from here. The best view in Brooklands.’
‘Even though I’m living above a madhouse?’ Maxted laughed generously, walked to the drinks cabinet and came back with a decanter and two tumblers. ‘Laphroaig—private patients only.’
‘Am I a patient?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’ Maxted steered me into the armchair facing him. His eyes ran over me, lingering on my scuffed but expensive shoes, though I decided not to tell him that I would never be able to afford another pair. He sipped noisily at the whisky, relying on his rough-edged charm to win me over. He was physically strong but insecure, glad to find shelter in the tumbler of malt. I assumed that he knew everything about me, and that Geoffrey Fairfax had told him about my enquiries.
‘So . . .’ Maxted put down his tumbler. ‘Tell me, do you like violence?’
‘Violence? What man doesn’t?’ I decided to let the whisky speak for me. ‘Yes, probably. When I was younger.’
‘Good. Sounds like an honest answer. Rugger brawls, nightclub aggro—that sort of thing?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘Did you box at school?’
‘Until they banned it. We formed a martial arts society to get around the ban. We called it self-defence.’
‘Kick and grunt? Slapping mattresses?’ Maxted smiled nostalgically. ‘What’s the appeal?’
‘In a word?’ I looked away from his slightly prurient eyes. ‘Danger.’
‘Go on.’
‘Fear, pain, anything to break the rules. Most people never realize how violent they really are. Or how brave, when your back’s against the wall.’
‘Exactly.’ Maxted sat forward, fists clenched, Laphroaig forgotten. ‘That’s when you rally yourself, even when someone’s beating the blood out of your brains.’
‘Don’t tell me you box?’
‘A long time ago. Half-blue. But I remember how it feels. After three rounds you’re alive again.’ Maxted pulled the stopper from the decanter. ‘That’s the trouble with the video conference. Primal aggression tamped down, no straight lefts, no uppercuts to the chin. We’re a primate species with an unbelievable need for violence. White-water rafting doesn’t quite fit the bill. There must be something else.’
‘There is. You know that, Dr Maxted.’
‘I’d like to hear it from you.’
I stared hard at the dome, trying to guess at the mindset of this maverick psychiatrist, almost as odd as any of his patients. The afternoon had begun to fade, and the interior lights turned the Metro-Centre into an illuminated pumpkin. I said: ‘Danger, yes. Pain, the fear of death. And outright insanity.’
‘Insanity . . . of course.’ Savouring the word, Maxted lay back in the sofa, resting his thick neck against the black leather. ‘That’s the real appeal, isn’t it? The freedom deliberately to lose control.’
‘Doctor, can we . . . ?’
‘Right.’ Having drawn the answer he wanted from me, Maxted clapped his hands. He pushed the decanter away, clearing the table between us. ‘Let’s get down to business. I brought you here, Richard, because there are things we ought to talk over. You’ve been in Brooklands a few weeks, and frankly you’re cutting it a little fine. Every street brawl, every supporters’ punch-up, that daft business this afternoon with the Christies . . . you’re a magnet tuned to violence.’
‘I’m trying to find who killed my father. The police have drifted away.’
‘They haven’t.’ Maxted waved me down. ‘Listen to me. I’m sorry about the old man. A cruel way for him to go. Sometimes the wheel spins and you see nothing but zeroes. A terrible accident.’
‘Accident?’ I rapped the table with my glass. ‘Someone fired a machine gun at him. Perhaps Duncan Christie or—’
‘Forget Christie. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘The police didn’t think so, until you and the other “witnesses” came forward. He was their chief suspect.’
‘The police always jump to conclusions. It’s part of their job, builds confidence with the public. You saw Christie today. He can’t concentrate long enough to mend a fuse, let alone carry through an assassination.’
‘Assassination?’ I turned to stare at the dome, which seemed to grow in size as it glowed in the fading light. ‘That implies someone very important. Who exactly?’
‘The target? Impossible to say. David Cruise?’
‘A cable-channel presenter? I once worked with him. The man’s a nonentity. Why would anyone want to murder David Cruise?’
Maxted simpered into his whisky. ‘There are folk here who’d give you a hundred reasons. He has a big power base. Sales are flat at the Metro-Centre, and without David Cruise they’d be in trouble. There’s even talk of him starting a political party.’
‘The kind that goose-steps? The Oswald Mosley of the suburbs? I don’t think he’d be convincing.’
‘He wouldn’t need to be. His appeal functions on a different level. It’s more your world than mine. Politics for the age of cable TV. Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception. Is Cruise up to that? I doubt it.’
‘Then who was the target? And who killed my father?’
‘Difficult questions, and obviously you want an answer . . .’
Maxted gestured at the air, as if trying to conjure a genie from the decanter, and I remembered him sitting in the front of Geoffrey Fairfax’s Range Rover, and the headlight signals outside the shabby Odeon. But I decided to say nothing, hoping that he would lead himself into a useful indiscretion. For all his bull-necked toughness, he was uneasy about something, and more vulnerable than I probably realized. I waited as he stood up and paced the carpet, retracing a half-remembered dance step.
Impatient for an answer, I said: ‘We could push the police a little harder. Find out who their main suspects are. Dr Maxted?’
‘The police? They’d be touched by your faith in them. They haven’t realized how much everything has changed out here. They’re not alone in that. People in London can’t grasp that this is the real England. Parliament, the West End, Bloomsbury, Notting Hill, Hampstead—they’re heritage London, held together by a dinner-party culture. Here, around the M25, is where it’s really happening. This is today’s England. Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along.’
‘That sounds as if they’re going to be frightened.’
‘They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad. Look around you, Richard. What do you see?’
‘Air-cargo warehouses. Shopping malls. Executive estates.’ As Maxted listened to me, nodding gloomily, I asked: ‘Why don’t people leave? Why don’t you leave?’
‘Because we like it here.’ Maxted raised his hands to stop me interrupting him. ‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’
‘It is. I’ve been there. It’s a zoo fit for psychopaths.’
‘Exactly. That’s what we like about it. We like dual carriageways and parking lots. We like control-tower architecture and friendships that last an afternoon. There’s no civil authority telling us what to do. This isn’t Islington or South Ken. There are no town halls or assembly rooms. We like prosperity filtered through car and appliance sales. We like roads that lead past airports, we like air-freight offices and rent-a-van forecourts, we like impulse-buy holidays to anywhere that takes our fancy. We’re the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the internet and cable TV. We like it here, and we’re in no hurry for you to join us.’
‘I don’t want to. Take it from me, I’ll leave as soon as I can.’
‘Good.’ Maxted nodded vigorously. ‘Brooklands is dangerous. You’re going to get hurt. The motorway towns are violent places. We’re not talking about a few individuals who go off the rails. We’re talking about collective psychology. The whole area is waiting for trouble. All these sports-club supporters, they’re just street gangs in St George’s shirts.’
‘My father might have been wearing one when he was shot. A retired airline pilot in his seventies? The Asian family in the next flat were frightened of him. They look at me as if I were National Front.’
‘Maybe you are, without realizing it.’ Maxted spoke without irony. ‘You have to think about England as a whole, not just Brooklands and the Thames Valley. The churches are empty, and the monarchy shipwrecked itself on its own vanity. Politics is a racket, and democracy is just another utility, like gas and electricity. Almost no one has any civic feeling. Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode. The great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph, led directly to today’s consumerism.’
I tried to reach the decanter. ‘In that case, why worry? Look around you here at Brooklands. You’ve found the earthly paradise.’
‘It’s not a paradise.’ Maxted tried to mask his scorn. ‘Brooklands is a dangerous and disturbed place. Nasty things are brewing here. All this racism and violence. Burning down Asian businesses. Naked intolerance for its own sake. And this is only the beginning. Something far worse is waiting to crawl out of its den.’