to get them right. No answer.
His mind started racing, imagining the worst. He thought of them hearing gunfire in the street outside, going to a window to investigate, or, worse, stepping outside the door, to be caught instantly in a fusillade of bullets. His father was an instinctive intervener: he never ran away from trouble.
Nick's dominant feeling continued to be disbelief Terrible events reported in the news traditionally happen to other people, or are carried out in places you know of but are nowhere near, or they don't directly concern you at all. When all these selfima 'ned rules are broken, you find 91
yourself emotionally exposed.
lt was hard for Nick to believe that it had happened in the dull little place he knew, where he had grown up and 1
1
which
was full of people he knew. He couldn't take in the fact that it was happening now, that he was one of the people who
were going to have to deal with it in some way, that he was already an indirect victim.
The radio programme was interrupted again, with another hastily arranged call from somewhere close to the incident. This was from a senior police officer, but again he was not on the spot, not there in Bulverton.
After this, it was clear that the shootings had become the main, the only, news story of that evening. Gradually, the BBC's news organization responded to the sudden incident, and information began to come through more coherently, and therefore more immediately and terrifyingly.
Nick switched stations, though, irrationally trying to find more news, or better news, some message that would cushion the shock. He discovered, of course, that all the London and national stations were concentrating on Bulverton. They seemed to be reporting at diffierent stages of the incident. He retuned to the BBC, and continued to drive in a state of numbness and inattention. He was aware that drivers of the other cars around him would be listening to the news on their own radios, but to almost all of them it must have been as if it was happening to someone else, in a place they had only heard of The other drivers' faces were neutral. Were they listening? Was he the only one? Unreality surged around him, coming and going.
At this time Nick was living alone in London, but he had a girlfriend called Jodie Quennell.
He usually saw jodie at weekends and on odd evenings in the week. That evening, that fateful day, he and jodie had arranged as they often did to meet for a meal and a drink, but while he was in his car he had no way of contacting her. She too drove home from work at this time, but she had no mobile in her car. He would have to call her later. He distracted himself for a few seconds with an imagined conversation with her, but predominating were thoughts of the quiet and familiar streets of his home town and of people he probably knew being fired on in them.
At last he reached the Hangar Lane interchange, where the North Circular Road crossed the A40. He turned left, heading south, but was still heavily delayed by the slowmoving traffic.
He was trying to think ahead, work out which would be the best route to the Bexhill region of the coast from this part of London, but all the time the radio was distracting him. He had driven this way dozens of times before, but usually timed h's departure to miss the worst of the rushhour traffic. He could easily imagine what the M25 would be like at this time of the early evening. He was in no mental condition to deal with that sort of stressful driving.
Nick had been born in Bulverton, the only child of James and Michaela Surtees. His parents lived and worked in the White Dragon for most of their adult lives, first as tenants of the large brewery chain that ran the place, then latterly, when the brewery started shedding its less prosperous sites, as the owners.
Bulverton had been in decline through all their years, but they had never given tip trying to make the place profitable. What started out as a large white elephant of a pub on an unfashionable part of the coast had gradually been modernized and improved. When it was clear that Bulverton had no future as a holiday resort, his father took the difficult decision to move the White Dragon upmarket and concentrate on the business and weekend markets.
All the guest rooms were expensively refurbished, satellite and cable TV went into every room, the hotel installed fax, cellular phone
and internet nodes, teleconferencing facilities, a small but well-equipped business conference suite. The rooms were centrally heated and airconditioned, they had minibar facilities, the bathrooms had needle showers As well as pressurejet tubs, and so on. For a time, James Surtees employed a gourmet chef, and he built up what he claimed was t e finest small wine cellar on the South Coast.
All to only temporary avail. The economy of the area was not dynamic enough to support a hotel of that kind, and although there were good years the decline was measurable. At the same time, the public bar continued to be popular with the locals, and it would have been foolish to take away this core business. The White Dragon for years had a split personality, in the kinds of custom it sought.
None of this had been of much concern to Nick, although he knew better than anyone the amount of work, and the huge investment, that his parents put into making the place what it had become. He grew up taking it all for granted, as any child would. When he was old enough his father made it clear to him that the business would be his one day, but Nick was going through his own adolescent insecurities. Although he learnt the basics of the hotel trade, and helped out around the hotel in the evenings and at weekends, his heart was never in it.
Habitually lazy at school, at the age of sixteen Nick at last started to take his schooling a little more seriously. lt was computers and programming that did it for him. After years of messing around with the school computers he suddenly became interested, and soon transformed himself into a typically obsessive computer freak. Programming came as naturally to him as French or German came to some of his friends, and within a few weeks it was clear where his career would lie. The only problem was that jobs were almost impossible to find locally.
He found the tasks around the hotel increasingly irksome, and tensions grew between him and his parents. A solution presented itself when Nick saw some computing jobs in London being advertised in the Courier; he applied, and within a few days was offered a fulltime job as a software engineer.
The break from Bulverton, sought by so many other young people of his generation, had come quickly
