ice cream of the day. They sat at the cafe tables in the central atrium, like passengers abandoned by their airlines. I strolled among them as they checked their watches, reassuring each other that they would be home in an hour.
Carradine and his marshals had other ideas. They realized that once they survived the period immediately after the dome’s seizure the crisis would pass and their power would grow. The concern of both the general public and the Home Office would move from the future of the Metro-Centre to the safety of the hostages. Carradine’s engineers were working hard on the Metro-Centre’s power supply, ensuring the most efficient use of its oil reserves. Carradine ordered that the under-roof lighting arrays should be switched off. Many of the shops and stores seemed to recede into an inner darkness, an uncanny transformation. As people moved down the unlit aisles, searching for tin-openers and disposable wipes, the strange gloom gave the impression that an air raid was imminent. Entering one of the larger hardware stores, I felt my way past the counters, surrounded by hundreds of knives, saws and chisels, their blades forming a silver forest in the darkness. A more primitive world was biding its time.
By late afternoon of the second day everyone realized that a further night lay ahead, and that all of them were now hostages. At this point, as the police negotiators lost their patience and the lights faded into the dusk, Carradine made an astute move. He was being closely advised by Sangster, whose huge and shambling figure with its babyish face followed the young manager around like an ambitious fight promoter with a promising featherweight. Tony Maxted approved of the head teacher’s involvement. ‘He’ll keep an eye on things, hold a tight rein on the hotheads,’ he assured me, but I had heard this before. I sensed that Sangster saw the seizure of the Metro-Centre as an interesting social experiment, and was in no hurry to see it end.
When the army helicopters resumed their tiresome patrols above the dome, Carradine called a public meeting in the South Gate entrance hall. Taking up a suggestion made by Sangster, he notified the police negotiators that he would release five hundred hostages on each of the next three days, and demand no concessions in return.
Immediately the crisis eased. The police postponed any attempt to invade the dome. Skilfully finessed by Carradine and Sangster, they were forced to wait until the last of the hostages had stumbled through the emergency hatch into freedom. The mutineers, meanwhile, had rid themselves of a large part of their security problem, lessened the drain on the dome’s resources, and raised the hope of further releases and a peaceful end to the siege.
At seven o’clock that evening, the first tranche of hostages stepped from the dome into a blizzard of flashbulbs. Mostly elderly customers, young mothers and their toddlers, and several dozen teenage mall rats, they were sent by bus to Brooklands Hospital and then rejoined their families. The rest of us selected our suppers from the supermarket shelves and retired to our stifling hotel rooms, exhausted enough to sleep through the helicopters and searchlights.
Forgotten in all this was the lonely figure whose attempted assassination had triggered the uprising. David Cruise still lay in his intensive care unit in a back room at the first-aid station, carefully tended by Julia Goodwin and two off-duty nurses who volunteered to help her. Barely conscious and unable to speak, he hovered in a medical nowhere zone of tubes, drips and ventilator pumps, at once forgotten and the most important person in the dome. Julia protested to Carradine, but the young manager refused to release him, claiming that he would soon recover and take over the leadership of the revolt.
The police, meanwhile, had arrested his would-be assassins, two Bosnian brothers whose motorcycle repair shop had been torched by a gang of football rioters. They walked into the Brooklands police station, confessed to the crime and surrendered the weapon, a gun-club target rifle they had smuggled onto one of the upper-level retail decks above the mezzanine studio. No one needed to question their motives, but whatever their motives were, they clearly fitted the crime.
SITTING IN MY chair on the beach, I finished the whisky in my flask. Part of me was drunk, but at the same time I felt queasily sober, like someone trapped on a runaway roller-coaster. I needed to leave for the South Gate entrance hall and hide myself among the hostages due to be released within the next half-hour. My foot was still badly infected, but in my mind I had detached myself from it, as if the throbbing wound was a tiresome relative who insisted on tagging after me. At the same time I felt reluctant to leave the Metro- Centre, though it was difficult to find a reason for staying. But did I need a reason . . . ?
I lay back in the chair, gathering my strength for the short walk. High above me were the upper decks of the shopping mall, railed terraces filled with fading palms and potted plants, a botanical garden running towards its death in the sky. Now that the lifts and escalators were out of action, almost no one made the long climb to the seventh floor, where the saturated air seemed to perspire into a heavy mist.
But someone was looking down from the seventh-floor railing, partly hidden behind the yellowing fronds of a large yucca. A man stared steadily at me, uninterested in the activity taking place on the floor of the dome, the hostages window-shopping or sitting at the cafes with their week-old newspapers.
I sat up and eased myself from the chair, aware that I was a conspicuous target as I sat alone on my private beach. Was the intruder a police marksman, smuggled into the dome through one of the dozens of ventilator and sewage pipes, with a hit list of prominenti to be disposed of? The man who was watching me carried a small firearm, and a black barrel emerged from his leather jacket. Unlike the police snatch squads, he wore no helmet or chin-strap.
Aware that I had noticed him, he leaned forward over the railing. I could see his face, as sharp as an axe blade, and the odd plates of his forehead, a geometry of disjointed thoughts. A pallid and undernourished skin stretched over the pointed bones, bruised by more than camouflage paste.
‘Christie . . . ? What the hell are we doing . . . ?’
I stood up, speaking to myself in a slurred mutter. Bowing his head, the man stepped back. For a few seconds he vanished behind the yucca, and then reappeared with a hand raised over his shoulder.
‘Christie . . . !’ My voice seemed to dent the dark water that lay listlessly against the beach. ‘Come down, man . . . You’re a target . . . !’
As I stumbled against the chair, knocking it onto the sand, the man hurled something towards me. I lost sight of the object as it flew through the misty air, but it landed ten feet from me, a bronze node that glinted in the scruffy sand.
I tried to steady myself, and felt the strong hands of a marshal grip my arms.
‘Mr Pearson?’ One of the burly weightlifters detailed to keep an eye on me had been sitting in the terrace bar when he heard my shout. ‘You’re not hurt?’
‘He missed me. It’s over there.’
‘I didn’t hear a shot. Let’s get you indoors.’
‘Indoors? We’re already indoors. Aren’t we?’ I was mulling this over as he steered me to the terrace steps. I had lost my chance of joining the hostage release from the South Gate entrance, but I needed to see the object on the beach.
In the moments before the marshal’s heavy foot stamped it into the sand I managed to clear my eyes, and recognized the same bullet and cartridge case that Duncan Christie had pressed into my palm outside the Metro- Centre.
34
WORK MAKES YOU FREE
VERY LITTLE HAD CHANGED, I told myself, but nothing was quite the same. By the end of the second week we were still convinced that we would soon be released from the Metro-Centre. That morning the remaining hostages emerged from their hotels, sleepless and dishevelled, and looking as if their dreams had attacked them. They selected a breakfast of sorts from the soft drink and confectionery shelves of the nearest supermarket, washed themselves in a litre of Perrier water, and then assembled in the South Gate entrance hall, ready to play their roles in an eternal baggage handlers’ strike.
By now nearly two thousand hostages had been freed, but those who remained were aware that their value to Tom Carradine and his mutineers had risen steeply. Barely a dozen were released each day, and Julia Goodwin
