kind.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for her. I’ll get you out into a side street.’
Flashbulbs flickered near the gates to the car park. People in the crowd were hurling bouquets of torn flowers at Mrs Christie. As she brushed away the blood-red petals a set of TV lights lit her tired face.
‘Sergeant . . . the crowd’s working itself up. You’re going to have a riot.’
‘A riot?’ She beckoned me to the staircase outside the canteen. ‘Mr Pearson, people don’t riot in Surrey. They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous . . .’
WE PASSED THE empty CID offices, where computer screens glimmered at each other across untidy desks. The staircase windows looked out over the station car park, where the crowd pressed against the cordon of constables. Uniformed officers filled the hallway below us, ready to receive the prisoner.
Already spectators were running across the car park. A police car forced its way through, siren keening, followed by a white van with a wire-mesh windscreen guard lowered like a visor. A bottle of mineral water burst against it, sending a spume of frothing Perrier across the glass.
There was a roar from the spectators already inside the gates, the visceral baying of a mob who had scented a nearby guillotine. The police officers in the reception area moved into the yard, forming a cordon around the van as its rear doors opened.
Swept into the centre of the melee was the young black woman, daughter clasped in her arms. I waited for someone to rescue her, but my eyes were fixed on the man who was stepping from the van. A constable threw a grey blanket over him, but for a few seconds I saw his sallow, unshaved face, scarred chin pockmarked by acne, forehead flushed by recent punches. He was unaware of the crowd and the policemen jostling him, and stared at the radio aerials above the station, as if expecting a message from a distant star to be relayed to him. His head swayed drunkenly, a vacancy of mind coupled with a deep inner hunger that was almost messianic. I could see years of poor nutrition, self-neglect and arrogance, the face of assassins through the ages, of rootless metropolitan men from an earlier era who had survived into the twenty-first century, as out of place among the four-wheel drives and school runs of prosperous suburbia as Neanderthal Man discovered in a sun lounger beside a Costa Blanca swimming pool. Somehow this misfit and dement had evaded the juvenile courts and social-service inspectors, and had taught himself to hate a shopping mall so intensely that he could steal a weapon and fire at random into a lunch-hour crowd, killing a retired airline pilot about to buy his favourite tobacco.
A scrum of police surrounded him, arms locked together as they propelled the prisoner towards the station. On the outer edge of the scrum was Sergeant Falconer, arms outstretched to calm the shouting spectators. She was watching me as I stood in the staircase window, and I was certain that she had left me on the stairs so that I could see clearly the man who had killed my father.
The reception area was empty now, except for two civilian typists who had left their desks. I stepped past them, and stood by the open doorway as the police readied themselves to rush Christie into the station. I searched my pockets for a weapon, and came up with my car keys. I gripped them inside my fist, the largest key between my index and middle fingers. One lucky blow to Christie’s temple would rid the world of this mental degenerate.
Holding the key, I readied myself as Christie approached, bruised head emerging from the blanket. Seeing him beyond their grasp, the crowd surged forward, hands drumming on the sides of the van. In the crush of hatless officers trying to dodge the swinging carrier bags I saw Christie’s wife scream abuse at a woman constable trying to reunite her with her daughter.
I raised my fist to aim a blow at Christie, who swayed towards me in an idiot’s trance. But a powerful hand gripped my arm and forced it behind me. Strong fingers expertly stripped me of the ignition keys. I turned to find a large, military-looking man with an untrimmed ginger moustache, his deep chest and shoulders squeezed into a tweed jacket too small for him.
‘Mr Pearson?’ He shook the keys in my face, and steadied me as a policewoman lurched past with an arrested demonstrator. ‘Geoffrey Fairfax, your father’s solicitor. We’ve spoken on the phone. If I’m right, we have an appointment in ten minutes’ time. I must say you look as if you’d rather like to get out of here . . .’
4
THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
‘AS YOU CAN SEE, Mr Pearson, the bulk of your father’s estate goes to the pilots’ benevolent fund. Unfair to you, perhaps, and rather too final for my taste.’ With a resigned gesture, Geoffrey Fairfax let the cover of the antique wooden box-file fall like a coffin lid. ‘But in a good cause—the widows of pilots who died in aircraft accidents. After forty years he must have known a good many. Whatever consolation that is to you.’
‘A lot. He did the right thing.’ I finished my whisky and carefully centred the empty glass on its coaster. To myself I thought: a first rebuff from the old man, a warning from beyond the grave. ‘I won’t contest the will.’
‘Good. I was sure of that when I first saw you. The flat is yours, of course.’ Fairfax treated me to a sly smile. ‘People can be surprisingly high-minded when it comes to making their wills. Doctors bequeath their bodies to anatomy schools, even though they know they’ll be cut into tripes. Wives forgive philandering husbands. I’m glad your father didn’t change his will.’
‘Did he say he might?’
‘No. Your father was never impulsive. Except towards the end, perhaps . . . I really can’t say.’
I waited for Fairfax to continue, aware that I was watching a well-rehearsed performance by one of the last actor-managers in Brooklands. Grieving but avaricious relatives were his main audience, and he clearly relished every moment. Looking around his oak-panelled office, I wondered how his cavalier ways fitted into the new Brooklands. Conveyancing office blocks in a fast-food economy of automated cash tills and shopping malls was not Geoffrey Fairfax’s thing. He belonged to a world before the coming of the M25.
Framed photographs on a side table showed him as a half-colonel in the Territorial Army, and on horseback at an outing of the local hunt, before the foxes of west Surrey abandoned their ancestral farmland and took off for a better world of filling-station forecourts and executive housing patios. Like a lot of directors of old-style companies I had known, Fairfax was arrogant, vaguely threatening, and inefficient. One of the papers from my father’s box-file had floated to the floor at his feet, but he ignored it, trusting that the cleaner would return it to his desk. And if she stuffed it into the waste-paper basket, who would know or care? His pink-faced intelligence had a malicious edge. He sat behind his desk in his clubman’s armchair, head barely visible so that his clients were forced to strain to see him.
For a large man in his fifties he had shown quick reflexes when he rescued me from the riot at the police station, propelling me with a firm hand to the rear entrance of the car park, where a roofed pathway led to the section house and a side street off the main road. He sat me in the passenger seat of his Range Rover, and watched the crowd disperse through his wing mirror. He drove pugnaciously, almost running down two elderly women who were slow to get out of his way. Geoffrey Fairfax was an example of a rare species, the middle-class thug. There was a strain of brutality that had little to do with punch-ups on the rugby field and much more to do with teaching the natives a lesson.
‘My father . . . ?’ I reminded him. ‘You were about to say?’
‘A remarkable man. To tell the truth, we hadn’t seen him at the club for a few months. Sadly, he seemed to have changed. He made some new friends, rather unusual company . . .’
‘Who, exactly?’
‘Hard to say. I wouldn’t have thought they were really his type, but there you are. He used to be keen on bridge, liked amusing the ladies, played a wristy game of squash.’ Fairfax pressed his hands against the lid of the box-file, as if concerned that my father’s ghost might escape from its casket. ‘Terrible business, I hope they find whoever was responsible.’
‘I thought they had.’ I sat forward, picking up an odd note in the solicitor’s voice. ‘This fellow the police brought in, the local misfit or mental case . . . ?’
‘Duncan Christie? Misfit, yes. Mental case, no. Two hours in a police van can be quite an assault course. He goes before the magistrate tomorrow.’
‘He looked deranged to me. I take it he’s guilty?’
