hovered in front of us, ready to spill over in a torrent.
‘Julia, sit down . . .’ Maxted offered her a chair, and beckoned to me, trying to enlist my help in calming this enraged woman. ‘Context is important. Richard has to understand what our intentions were . . .’
‘Never mind our intentions!’ Julia waited until she could control herself. ‘Tell him who killed his father.’
‘Christie did.’ I spoke as matter-of-factly as I could. ‘I know that, Julia. It was obvious from day one.’
Julia nodded, then raised the knife to quieten me. ‘Yes, Christie pulled the trigger. He fired the shots. I’m sorry, Richard, desperately sorry for that. So many people killed and badly wounded. It was a blunder from the start. But Duncan Christie didn’t kill your father.’
‘Who did?’
‘We did.’ Julia pointed to herself and Maxted. ‘We planned it, and we gave the order.’
‘Hold on . . .’ Maxted took the knife from Julia’s hand. ‘Julia and I were on the fringe. There were a lot of others.’
‘Sangster, Geoffrey Fairfax, Sergeant Falconer . . .’ I recited the names. ‘Various other people who gave their support, but preferred to stay in the shadows. The mayor and one or two councillors, Superintendent Leighton and senior police officers . . .’
‘The old Brooklands establishment,’ Julia commented wearily. ‘Terrible bores, the lot of them. Dangerous bores. There was even a clergyman, but Maxted frightened him off. All that talk about elective insanity.’
‘He thought I meant the Christian Church.’ Maxted added: ‘They’d already had one assassination too many, and weren’t looking for a second.’
‘Assassination?’ I pushed myself away from the table. ‘You planned to kill my father. Why?’
‘Not your father. He was never the target.’ Maxted sank his exhausted face into his hands. ‘Go back six months, Richard. Brooklands was in turmoil, along with all the other motorway towns. More than a million people were directly involved. Racist attacks, Asian families terrorized out of their homes, immigrant hostels burnt down. Football matches every weekend that were really political rallies, though no one there ever realized it. Sport was just an excuse for street violence. And it all seemed to spring from the Metro-Centre. A new kind of fascism, a cult of violence rising from this wilderness of retail parks and cable TV stations. People were so bored, they wanted drama in their lives. They wanted to strut and shout and kick the hell out of anyone with a strange face. They wanted to hero-worship a leader.’
‘David Cruise? Hard to believe.’
‘Right. But this was a new kind of fascism, and it needed a new kind of leader—a smiley, ingratiating, afternoon TV kind of fuhrer. No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite. For most people it was just soccer hooliganism.’
‘But the bodies kept arriving at the morgue.’ Julia reached across the table and gripped my wrist, angry with me even for being a victim. ‘I counted them, Richard.’
‘Asian and Kosovan bodies.’ Maxted wiped a fleck of spit from his mouth. He stared at it, as if disgusted with himself. ‘Julia had to deal with the relatives. Weeping Bangladeshi wives and deranged fathers of children with third-degree burns . . .’
Thinking of the Kumars, I said: ‘So you decided to do something?’
‘We had to move fast, while the whole nasty business was still controllable. A soft fascism was spreading through middle England, and no one in authority was concerned. Politicians, church leaders, Whitehall turned their noses up. For them it was just a brawl in a retail park off some ghastly motorway.’
‘But you knew they were wrong?’
‘Absolutely. Think of Germany in the nineteen-thirties. When good men do nothing . . . We needed a target, so we picked David Cruise. He wasn’t ideal, but shooting him down in the Metro-Centre, in the middle of one of his television rants, would make a powerful point. People would think hard about where they were going.’
‘So you needed a triggerman. And you came up with Duncan Christie?’
‘I found him.’ Maxted waited as Julia raised her hands in mock wonder. ‘He was sitting in a secure ward at Northfield. A misfit who’d twice been sectioned, a borderline schizophrenic with a fierce hatred of the Metro-Centre. His daughter had been injured and he wanted revenge. He was a missile primed to launch. All we had to do was point him at the target.’
‘You weren’t worried about the . . . ?’
‘Ethics of it all? Of course, we were planning a murder! We talked it through a hundred times. I kept Julia out of it—I knew I’d never convince her.’
‘I thought Christie was letting off a bomb. A smoke bomb.’ Julia pressed her hand to her bruised scalp, forcing herself to wince with pain. ‘So I gave my support. Madness—how did I think it would ever work?’
‘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,
