Kingdom Come (12 page)

‘But if reason and light have triumphed?’

‘They haven’t. Because we’re not reasonable and rational creatures. Far from it. We resort to reason when it suits us. For most people life is comfortable today, and we have the spare time to be unreasonable if we choose to be. We’re like bored children. We’ve been on holiday for too long, and we’ve been given too many presents. Anyone who’s had children knows that the greatest danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure in one’s own malice. Together they can spur a remarkable ingenuity.’

‘Let’s stuff baby’s mouth with sweets and see if he stops breathing?’

‘Exactly.’ Maxted watched me smiling into my drink. ‘I hope you were an only child. You’ve seen the people around here. Their lives are empty. Install a new kitchen, buy another car, take a trip to some beach hotel. All these sports clubs financed by the Metro-Centre are an attempt to boost sales. It hasn’t worked. People are bored, even though they don’t realize it.’

‘So a lot of babies are going to turn blue in the face?’

‘Not just babies. What’s happening here involves entire communities. All these satellite towns around Heathrow and along the motorways. There’s one thing left that can put some energy into their lives, give them a sense of direction. You’ve run advertising campaigns—any ideas?’

‘None. Narcotics? A complete drug culture?’

‘Too destructive. Think of . . .’

‘War? It makes for good television.’

‘Difficult to organize. The Thames Valley can’t make territorial demands and invade Belgium. What I have in mind comes free, and is readily to hand.’

‘Sex?’

‘They’ve tried sex. Sooner or later, sex becomes hard work. Wife swapping is fun, but you meet too many people you look down on. Decadence demands a certain degree of innocence.’

‘So that leaves . . . ?’

‘Madness.’ Maxted lowered his voice and spoke more clearly, leaving behind his usual rush of words. ‘A voluntary insanity, whatever you want to call it. As a psychiatrist I’d use the term elective psychopathy. Not the kind of madness we deal with here. I’m talking about a willed insanity, the sort that we higher primates thrive on. Watch a troupe of chimpanzees. They’re bored with chewing twigs and picking the fleas out of each other’s armpits. They want meat, the bloodier the better, they want to taste their enemies’ fear in the flesh they grind. So they start beating their chests and shrieking at the sky. They work themselves into a frenzy, then set off in a hunting party. They come across a tribe of colobus monkeys and literally tear them limb from limb. Very nasty, but voluntary madness brought them a tasty supper. They sleep it off, and go back to chewing twigs and picking fleas.’

‘And then the cycle repeats itself.’ I lay back, aware of Maxted’s hot breath on the air. ‘More race riots and arson attacks, more immigrant hostels put to the torch. So the people of the motorway towns are tired of chewing twigs. One question, though. Who organizes these attacks of madness?’

‘No one. That’s the beauty of it. Elective insanity is waiting inside us, ready to come out when we need it. We’re talking primate behaviour at its most extreme. Witch-hunts, auto-da-fés, heretic burnings, the hot poker shoved up the enemy’s rear, gibbets along the skyline. Willed madness can infect a housing estate or a whole nation.’

‘Thirties Germany?’

‘A good example. People still think the Nazi leaders led the German people into the horrors of race war. Not true. The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party. That’s why they stayed together till the end. They needed a psychopathic god to worship, so they recruited a nobody and stood him on the high altar. The great religions have been at it for millennia.’

‘States of willed madness? Christianity? Islam?’

‘Vast systems of psychopathic delusion that murdered millions, launched crusades and founded empires. A great religion spells danger. Today people are desperate to believe, but they can only reach God through psychopathology. Look at the most religious areas of the world at present—the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they’re going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God.’

‘But what else
is
there to believe in?’ I waited for Maxted to reply, but the psychiatrist was staring through the picture window at the dome of the Metro-Centre, fists gripping the air as if trying to steady the world around him. ‘Dr Maxted . . . ?’

‘Nothing. Except madness.’ Maxted rallied himself and turned back to me. ‘People feel they can rely on the irrational. It offers the only guarantee of freedom from all the cant and bullshit and sales commercials fed to us by politicians, bishops and academics. People are deliberately re-primitivizing themselves. They yearn for magic and unreason, which served them well in the past, and might help them again. They’re keen to enter a new Dark Age. The lights are on, but they’re retreating into the inner darkness, into superstition and unreason. The future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism.’

‘Consumerism leads to social pathology? Hard to believe.’

‘It paves the way. Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisles, the signs and banners, the whole theatrical aspect.’

‘No jackboots, though,’ I pointed out. ‘No ranting führers.’

‘Not yet. Anyway, they belong to the politics of the street. Our “streets” are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness. You can see it here already.’

‘In bosky Surrey? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s coming, Richard.’ Maxted pursed his lips, as if to shut out all possibility of a smile. ‘Here and in the towns around Heathrow. You can feel it in the air.’

‘And the führer figure?’

‘He hasn’t arrived yet. He’ll appear, though, walking out of some shopping mall or retail park. Messiahs always emerge from the desert. Everybody will be waiting for him, and he’ll seize his chance.’

‘Parliament, the civil service, the police? They’ll stop him.’

‘Unlikely. They aren’t directly challenged, so they’ll look the other way. This is a new kind of totalitarianism that operates at the checkout and the cash counter. What happens in the suburbs has never bothered the people in Whitehall.’

‘A new Dark Age . . . What do we do?’

‘We try to control it. Steer it onto the beach. A monster is stirring in the deep, and we need to get it onto the shore while it’s still drowsy. Now is the time to act, Richard.’

‘Right.’ I finished the last of my whisky, trying not to meet Maxted’s eyes. He was an impressive figure, with his huge head and powerful hands, but I too was being steered into the shallow water. He had begun to look at his watch, and I half expected the doors to burst open and admit a resistance unit led by Geoffrey Fairfax. In an offhand way, I said: ‘I take it you’re not alone? There are others who think like you?’

‘A few of us. We can see what’s coming and we’re concerned.’

‘Geoffrey Fairfax, William Sangster? Superintendent Leighton?’

‘As it happens, yes.’ Maxted seemed unsurprised. ‘There are others.’

‘Dr Goodwin?’

‘In her left-handed way. Julia is less nervy as a doctor than she is as a young woman. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s interesting that you’re the same group who happened to be in the Metro-Centre.’

‘And saw Duncan Christie in the South Gate entrance? That’s right.’

‘Lucky for him. His doctor, his psychiatrist, his head teacher . . .’

‘We met in the car park, and strolled in together.’

‘Fair enough. And your plans now?’

‘To nip this thing in the bud. If we wait much longer we’ll be overwhelmed.’

‘Willed madness . . .’ I repeated the phrase, already a slogan in a teaser campaign. ‘You think my father was killed by someone so bored he decided to choose insanity?’

‘For a few seconds. Long enough to pull the trigger.’ Maxted took off his leather jacket to free his arms, then reached out and gripped my shoulders in a sudden show of confidence. I could smell the sweat on his shirt, a blend of stale deodorant and sheer unease. He had been perspiring freely since we arrived at the penthouse, but the careful exposition of his fears had been more than a public health warning. He had been hiding his discomfort at having to expose his private guilt to someone who was watching him a little too closely. The bullheaded swagger was a screen carried by a thoughtful and unsure man. I remembered him sitting in the Range Rover outside the Odeon cinema, within earshot of a vicious riot that he and Fairfax had been orchestrating. Yet he had done nothing to stop it.

He released his grip on my shoulders, and did his best to straighten my suit. ‘Think about it, Richard. You could help us in all kinds of ways. While you’re thinking, I need to make a phone call. Help yourself to whisky and take in the view. It’s going to be a hot night . . .’

‘Dr Maxted, tell me.’ I waited until he reached the door. ‘Do you know who killed my father?’

‘I think so.’ Maxted studied me as if I were a dejected patient for whom the truth would be the ultimate lethal dose. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘But . . . ?’

‘I’ll be with you in five minutes. There’s a lot you don’t know
.’

15

THE PRISONER IN THE TOWER

I LAY BACK
on the sofa, watching the lights come on over the motorway flatlands, the desert wastes of retail England. It was a night of important sports matches: the arrays of arc lights above the football and athletics stadiums blazed through a hazy glare that caught every insect in the Thames Valley. Already thousands of spectators in St George’s shirts would be taking their seats, ready to work themselves into a frenzy before they seized the placid town.

I sat with my whisky, in this penthouse correctly sited above a lunatic asylum. Maxted had impressed me, but I discounted his claim that he knew who had shot my father. His motives were ambiguous even for a suburban psychiatrist who appeared too often on television. There he played the same role, the tough-but-tender physician moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, but even the television audience had failed to be taken in. He was trying to recruit me into his ‘resistance’ group, but I could hear the communal singing from the stadiums, great war hymns that seemed to lift the night, and I knew that Maxted and his posse of eccentric professionals were doomed.

I stepped onto the balcony and gazed at the silver back of the Metro-Centre, a self-supporting structure far more impressive than the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, a glorified tent filled with patronizing tat. The Metro-Centre was a house of treasure that enriched the lives of its visitors. Like an unimportant but hard-working merchant in a souk, I had given my entire career to the task of displaying that treasure at its best.

I RETURNED TO
the living room and listened to the silence. It was easy to imagine Maxted with a prostate the size of a cricket ball, legs astride the lavatory pan, discussing a difficult patient on his mobile as he conjured the sluggish urine from his bladder.

I opened the door to the hallway. A corridor ran to the bathroom and bedroom, but there was no sound of Maxted’s voice on a telephone. The flat was silent, light flaring against the windows from the display screens at the football stadium. I was alone in the penthouse, and assumed that Maxted had hurried away to deal with an emergency call, too distracted to warn me.

I pressed the lift button and watched the indicator panel, then pressed again and waited. There was no response, and the red warning light glowed steadily in the swipe unit. Without a pass card the lift was closed to me, part of the elaborate security that guarded the research laboratories and their drug stores from escaped patients.

‘Maxted . . . for God’s sake!’

Irritated by the endless series of charades that seemed to unfold within each other, I pounded the lift doors and pressed my ears to the metal panels. Annoyed with myself for letting Maxted play his devious games, I walked back to the kitchen. A plate-glass door led to a narrow balcony, where a short stairway joined the main fire escape.

Cautiously, giving the security system time to think, I turned the handle on the door, but it failed to open. Somewhere in the penthouse lay the fuse box and the switching unit that controlled the security locks, but my temper was up. Holding the kitchen chair by its legs, I raised it above my head and drove the steel frame into the plate-glass door. The violent blows echoed like gunfire through the empty rooms, but left the barest marks on the toughened glass. Then, after the third blow, I heard an alarm shrill far below me.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER
I was sitting in Maxted’s black armchair, finishing the last of the whisky in the decanter and mulling over the almost deliberate way in which everyone I visited in Brooklands had plied me with alcohol. Even my father had left a substantial supply of gin and whisky, as if keen to ease the culture shock awaiting me. Fairfax, Sangster and Dr Maxted had been as quick with a bottle as an over-attentive sommelier in an unpopular restaurant.

I was staring gloomily at the decanter when the lift doors at last opened. Two security men emerged, carrying a leather restraining harness. They approached me without speaking, feinting around the furniture like dog handlers cornering an alcoholic pit bull, but I was sure that they knew who I was. After checking the flat they beckoned me to the lift.

‘Mr Pearson, we’ll have to see you out.’

‘Good. I’ll come quietly. I take it you’re the Rapid Response Unit?’

‘Dr Maxted said—’

‘Don’t tell me. I couldn’t cope . . .’

I assumed that Maxted had slipped away on some errand of his own, knowing that I would set off the alarm, and had told the security men to release me half an hour later. I entered the lift, the guards behind me with their harness, ready to throw it over me at the first sign of dementia.

The doors closed. In the pause before the lift moved there was the distant sound of a powerful explosion, a loud percussive boom that entered the shaft above our heads and rocked the lift.

I stepped into the night air, and searched the sky for the burning debris of this huge firework. A police car was parked beside the rhododendron screen. The headlights were on full beam, and the distracted woman constable at the wheel was trying to speak through a blizzard of radio chatter. She saw me walk to the security barrier and signalled me to stop.

As I approached the police car a blonde-haired woman in a blue tracksuit and trainers emerged from the admin offices. She strode past me, and caught the tang of whisky on the dark air.

‘Mr Pearson?’ Sergeant Mary Falconer seemed surprised to find me. She pointed to the security men still watching me from the elevator. ‘What are you doing here? Did you break in?’

‘Break in?’ I raised my hands to seize her shoulders, and then let her step back. ‘This place really is a madhouse. For the last hour I’ve been trying to break out.’

‘Break out?’ She fussed with a stray hair. ‘Why? How did you get in?’

‘Forget it. No wonder the crime rate is soaring. Dr Maxted brought me here.’

‘Dr Maxted? Are you a patient of his?’

‘At this rate I soon will be. Now, I need to find a taxi.’

‘Hold on a moment. Just wait there . . .’

Sergeant Falconer listened to the radio chatter and rubbed the dial of her watch. She was dressed for the athletics field, or at least a run around the neighbourhood, though scarcely a hair or eyelash was out of place. At the same time she seemed ill at ease, like a supporting actor assigned the wrong role. Once again she reminded me of a strait-laced but vulnerable teacher aware that her class had seen her in a piece of questionable behaviour.

A second police car turned off the main road and approached the security barrier, but Sergeant Falconer was too distracted to notice it. She listened to the ambulance sirens in the distance and drew a mobile phone from her tracksuit top. She stared at the text message, then crossed the road to the second police car. She took the radio earpiece from the driver, listened briefly and ran back to me. For the first time she was alert and focused, as if the script she had been following now synchronized with reality.

‘Sergeant Falconer . . . ?’ I held her arm. ‘Something’s going on. What are you people playing at?’

‘Get into the car.’ Avoiding my breath, she pushed me through the rear door. ‘We’ll give you a lift.’

‘What is it?’ I watched the second police car reverse and speed away. ‘Have they caught the gunman?’

‘Who? Which gunman?’

‘The man who killed my father. They’ve arrested him?’

‘No.’ She fastened her seat belt, beckoning the woman driver to climb the grass embankment around the security barrier. ‘It’s the Metro-Centre. There’s been a bomb attack. Heavy damage, but no casualties. So far . . .’