The Bonfire of the Volvos

 

at dawn we were woken by a terror-storm of noise. I was lying in bed with Kay, my hand on her breast, smelling the sweet, sleepy scent of an unwashed woman, when a police helicopter descended from the sky and hovered fifty feet above the roof. Megaphones blared at each other, a babel of threats and incomprehensible orders. The seesaw wail of sirens shook the windows, drowned by the helicopter’s engines as it soared over Grosvenor Place, spotlight flashing at the startled faces between the curtains.

‘Right!’ Kay sat up, like a corpse on a funeral pyre. ‘David, it’s started.’

I tried to shake off my dream as Kay leapt from the bed, heavy foot stepping on my knee. ‘Kay? Wait

‘At last!’ Fiercely calm, she stripped off her nightdress and stood by the window. She flung back the curtains, hungrily scratching her breasts as she bared them to the hostile sky. ‘Come on, Markham. You can’t sit this one out.’

Kay swerved into the bathroom and squatted across the lavatory, impatient to empty her bladder. She stepped into the shower stall and spun the taps, staring down at the dispirited drizzle that splashed her toes.

‘The bastards! They’ve cut off the water.’ She flicked the light switch. ‘Can you believe it?’

‘What now?’

‘There’s no electricity. David! Say something . . .’

 

 

I hobbled into the bathroom and held her shoulders, trying to calm her. After twiddling the taps and light switch, I sat on the bath. ‘Kay, it looks like they mean business.’

‘No water . . .’ Kay stared at herself in the mirror. ‘How do they think we’ll . . .’

‘They don’t. It’s a little crude, but good psychology. No middle-class revolutionary can defend the barricades without a shower and a large cappuccino. You might as well fight them in yesterday’s underwear.’

‘Get dressed! And try to look involved,’

‘I am.’ I held her wrists as she pummelled the mirror. ‘Kay, don’t expect too much. This isn’t Northern Ireland. In the end, the police will ...”

‘You’re too defeatist.’ Kay looked me up and down as she pulled on jeans and a heavy pullover. ‘This is our chance. We can move the revolution out of Chelsea Marina and into the streets of London. People will start joining us. Thousands, even millions.’

‘Right, millions. But

The helicopter drifted away, an ugly beast that seemed to devour the sunlight and spit it out as noise. Somewhere a large diesel engine was accelerating above a clatter of steel tracks, followed by the tearing metal of a car being dragged across a road.

We left the house a few minutes later. Grosvenor Place was filled with unshaven men, wan-faced adolescents and uncombed women. Small children still in their pyjamas gazed down from the windows, girls clutching their teddy bears, brothers unsure of their parents and the adult world for the first time. Many of the residents carried token weapons - baseball bats, golf putters and hockey sticks. But others were more practical. A neighbour of Kay’s, an elderly solicitor and archery enthusiast, held two Molotov cocktails, burgundy bottles filled with petrol into which he had stuffed his regimental ties.

 

Despite the dawn ambush by the forces of law and order, and the cowardly complicity of the local utility companies, everyone around me was alert and determined. Kay and her fellow block-leaders had done their jobs well. At least half of Chelsea Marina’s residents had taken to the streets. They waved their weapons at the helicopter, cheering the pilot when he descended to within fifty feet of the ground so that the police cameraman could take the clearest possible pictures of the more prominent rebels.

In Beaufort Avenue, the central concourse of the estate, almost every resident was out on the pavement and ready to defend the first of the barricades, twenty yards from the gatehouse. A large force of police in helmets and riot gear had massed inside the entrance, next to the shuttered office of the estate manager. They were backed by some thirty bailiffs, itching to secure the dozen houses whose seizure they had announced.

Confident of success, the police had alerted three television crews, and the cameras were already transmitting pictures of the action to the breakfast audiences. A Home Office minister was touring the studios, stressing the government’s reluctant decision to bring this misguided demonstration to a halt.

A bulldozer was manoeuvring itself against the barricade of cars in Beaufort Avenue. Its scoop thrust clumsily at a Fiat Uno, the smallest vehicle in the barricade, but the residents clung to its doors and window pillars, distracting the hapless driver with their boos and jeers. Many of the women carried children on their shoulders. Frightened by the menacing helicopter and the bedlam of megaphones, the smaller infants were crying openly, their sobs drowned by the din of the bulldozer’s engine but not lost to the television viewers watching aghast across a million breakfast tables.

Urged on by a senior social worker, a police inspector remonstrated with the parents and tried to climb the barricade. A flurry of hockey sticks drove him back with bruised knuckles. A young constable, seeing a quick way through the barricade, opened the front passenger door of a Volvo estate and climbed into the car, truncheon at the ready as he tried to open the driver’s door. A dozen residents seized the car and rocked it fiercely, backed by a chant of ’Out, out, out . . . !’ Within a minute the constable was shaken insensible, flung from the front seat and tipped dazed into the road at his colleagues’ feet. The police watched patiently, waiting beside their armoured vans with chain-link visors over the windscreens, making clear that the Chelsea Marina action differed in no way from the riot-control measures they used in the East End’s less savoury estates. They tightened their chin-straps, rapped their clubs against their shields and moved forward when the bulldozer at last seized the Fiat Uno and lifted it into the air. Forming into a double file, they were ready to pour through the breach in the barricade and set upon the protesters.

But the inspector threw up his arms and halted them as the toylike Fiat teetered on the upraised scoop, ready to fall onto the jeering residents. Hatless in his concern, the inspector climbed the ladder to the bulldozer’s cab and ordered the driver to shut down his engine.

There was a brief stand-off, while the inspector retrieved his cap and megaphone. Petrol was dripping from the Fiat’s fuel tank, drops dancing around his feet. He called on the crowd to think of their children, who were now laughing happily at the car swaying over their heads. Chortling toddlers were lifted into the air to give them a better view and, more to the point, expose them to the breakfast TV audiences watching open-mouthed over their toast racks.

The inspector shook his head in despair, but he had reckoned without the long-engrained ruthlessness of the middle class towards its own children. As I knew full well, any social group that would exile its offspring to the deforming rigours regarding-school life would think nothing of exposing them to the hazards of an exploding bonfire.

Exhausted by all the emotion surging around me, I edged through the crowd and reached the pavement. I leaned against a damaged parking meter and searched for any signs of Kay Churchill. I soon noticed that a fellow observer was keeping watch on the action.

Standing behind the television vans was the familiar figure of Major Tulloch, barrel chest and burly arms concealed inside another short tweed jacket, ginger moustache bristling at the scent of battle. As always, he seemed to be bored by the civil uprising that unfolded around him, and watched the helicopter hovering a hundred yards away, its downdraught emptying a dozen litter bins and driving their contents across the rooftops like confetti. I assumed that he was the Home Secretary’s man on the ground, and was probably in charge of the entire police action.

The crowd seemed to sense that the Chelsea Marina protest was virtually over, quietening as the driver of the bulldozer reversed his vehicle, subtracting a small but significant element from the barricade. The inspector stood solemnly in front of the protesters, smiling at the small children and satisfied that he had acted as humanely as his orders allowed. Faced by the waiting phalanx of riot police and bailiffs, the protesters began to disperse, lowering their baseball bats and croquet mallets, unable at the last moment to resist an appeal to restraint and good sense.

Then a shout went up from a window overlooking the street. People stepped aside, cheering as a car approached, horn sounding an urgent call to arms. Kay Churchill’s little Polo sped towards us, Kay herself at the wheel, headlamps full on and fiercely punching the horn as she forced her way through the crowd. Her grey hair flew like a battle banner, the spectral mane of a Norn rousing her defeated troops.

 

She reached the barricade, braked sharply and drove into the gap left by the Fiat Uno, forcing back a constable who fell across the bonnet. Shouting defiance at the police, two-finger salutes in either hand, Kay leapt from the car. Within seconds the Polo was overturned and set ablaze, the elderly solicitor igniting his regimental ties with a Garrick Club lighter and dashing his Molotov cocktails against the exposed engine.

Already a second car was burning. Flames played around its wheels and then leapt high into the air. Fanned by the nearby helicopter, the orange billows swayed across the advancing police and touched the raised scoop of the bulldozer, where the pooling petrol from the Fiat’s tank exploded in a vio­lent blaze.

Everyone stepped back, looking at the burning car held up to the sky in the bulldozer’s claw. The police snatch squads retreated to the shelter of their vans, while the inspector spoke on his radio to his superiors and Major Tulloch put out his cigarette. Sirens sounded from the King’s Road, and a fire engine eased itself through the watching crowds who blocked both lanes of the thoroughfare. The flames from the burning barricade glowed in the headlamps and polished brass.

Emboldened now, and determined to defend Chelsea Marina to the last Volvo and BMW, Kay ordered the residents to make a tactical retreat. Brushing away the oily smuts on her cheeks and forehead, one arm bandaged after petrol flashed back from an overturned car, Kay led the protesters to a second barricade fifty yards down Beaufort Avenue. When she stopped to wave the stragglers on, she noticed me in the tail of the retreat. I raised my fists, urging her forward, as always driven by her confused and restless spell. The street was on fire, but Chelsea Marina had begun to transcend itself, its rent arrears and credit-card debts. Already I could see London burning, a bonfire of bank statements as cleansing as the Great Fire.

An acid cloud of steam and smoke rose from the first barricade as the firemen played their hoses on the burning cars. The vehicles glowered to themselves, doors bursting open as they unfurled like gaudy flowers. Whorls of flame swirled into the downdraught of the helicopter and raced around the eaves of the nearby houses.

Visored police leapt the garden walls beside the barricade and raced down Beaufort Avenue towards us. They were met by a hail of roof-tiles, but pressed on to the second barricade, sheltering behind the burning skips that Kay had ordered to be set alight. The bulldozer clanked forward, shook the blackened shell of the Fiat from its scoop, and rammed Kay’s smouldering Polo onto the pavement. It moved down the street, followed by the fire engine and the television vans, all under the watchful gaze of Major Tulloch, strolling along behind a group of uneasy press photographers.

The second barricade was hosed and breached. The police advanced through the cloud of steam and a black, almost liquid smoke that lay over Chelsea Marina, drifting across the Thames to the Battersea shore. Crouching behind the modest barricade of three family estates blocking the entrance to Grosvenor Place, a cricket bat in my hand, I knew that the Chelsea Marina uprising was almost over. The police had reached the top of Beaufort Avenue and would soon control Cadogan Circle. After picking off the side streets one by one, they would arrest the ringleaders and wait for the remaining residents to come to their senses. An occupying army of social workers, do-gooders and carpetbagging estate agents on the prowl for a quick bargain would soon move in. The kingdom of the double yellow line would be restored, and the realm of sanity and exorbitant school fees would return.

Nonetheless, something had changed. I pressed a handker­chief to my mouth, trying to protect my lungs from the Dripping smoke, and watched one of Kay’s neighbours, a BBC radio actress, filling a Perrier bottle with lighter fuel. I was dazed and exhausted, but still excited by the camaraderie, by the sense of a shared enemy. For the first time I fully believed that Kay was right, that we were on the edge of a social revolution with the power to seize the nation. Peering through the steam and smoke, I listened to the bulldozer and waited for the police to make their pointless seizure of a side street in Chelsea.

Then, as abruptly as they had arrived, the police began to withdraw. I leaned wearily against an overturned Toyota, cheering with Kay and her team as a sergeant listened to his radio and ordered his men to fall back. The bulldozer abandoned its victory lap around Cadogan Circle and returned to the gatehouse. Dozens of police raised their visors and lowered their batons, striding through the smoke to the marshalling point in the King’s Road. They boarded their vans and set off through the morning traffic. The helicopter withdrew, and the air began to clear as the smoke dispersed. Within fifteen minutes, the entire force of police had left Chelsea Marina.

A second fire engine arrived on the scene, followed by breakdown trucks from the local council, whose workmen began clearing away the burnt-out barricades in Beaufort Avenue. Two repossessed houses had been set on fire, and I assumed that this had forced the police to call off their action. As the bailiffs had battered their way through the front doors, their owners had poured petrol over their living room rugs, tossed burning tapers through the garden windows and waved goodbye to their pleasant homes of many years.

Faced with the prospect of a general conflagration, and the spectacle on the evening news of Chelsea Marina transformed into a vast funeral pyre, the Home Office had reined in the police and called a truce. That afternoon, a residents’ delegation led by Kay Churchill sat down with the police and local council in the estate manager’s office. As they spoke, emergency crews put out the fires in the two Beaufort Avenue houses nearby.

‘The police inspector agreed that no arson charges would be brought, and promised to urge the bailiffs to delay any further repossessions. Water and power were to be reconnected, and a team of Home Office conciliators promised to look into the residents’ grievances.

At six o’clock that evening, when Kay returned to Grosvenor Place, she waved her bloodied bandage at us, her face flushed with victory. As she explained in the dozen TV interviews that followed, the only demand to be rejected was her insistence that all the streets in Chelsea Marina be rechristened. She had wanted to drop the bogus Mayfair and Knightsbridge names and replace them with those of Japanese film directors, but had been warned by far-seeing fellow residents that this might damage property values. So Beaufort, Cadogan, Grosvenor and Nelson remained.

What else had changed was hard to elicit. Already the first families were leaving Chelsea Marina. Unconvinced by the bailiffs’ change of heart, and unsure that the truce would hold, several residents with small children packed up, locked their front doors behind them and drove off to stay with friends. They promised to return if they were needed, but their departure was a small admission of defeat.

Kay stood on her doorstep, fist raised, undismayed by their defection. The rest of us watched them go, children crammed among the suitcases in the rear seats. Responsibly, we dismantled the modest barricade in Grosvenor Place, pushed the overturned cars into the parking bays, brushed up the broken glass and did what we could to tidy the street. The ^S1ngle intact meter soon received its first coin.

 

 

When I entered the house, broom under my arm, I could hear sound of taps running in the bathroom and kitchen. Kay lay in her armchair, grimy bandage unravelled from her arm  sleeping deeply in front of the television news that showed her breathless with victory beside the shell of the Beaufort Avenue barricade. I kissed her fondly, turned down the sound and went upstairs to switch off the taps. In the medicine cabinet, filled with enough tranquillizers to sedate Manhattan, I found a fresh roll of bandage and antiseptic cream.

Watching from the window as another resident’s car took’ off, it occurred to me that Kay should join them, leave Chelsea Marina and stay with friends elsewhere in London, at least until the police interest died down. Plainclothes officers were almost certainly keeping an eye on the entrance to the estate, and sooner or later the Home Office would demand a scapegoat. There was only one exit from Chelsea Marina for motor vehicles, but several pedestrian alleyways led out of the estate into nearby side streets. In one of these I had parked the Range Rover, and could easily smuggle Kay and a suitcase to safety.

I returned to the living room with a bowl of warm water, ready to bathe and dress her burn. But when I tried to unwind the bandage she briefly woke and pushed me away, clinging to the blood-stained lint like a comfort blanket.

I was proud of her, and she had earned the right to her trophy. As I took a shower, I was only sorry that Joan Chang and Stephen Dexter had not been present at her triumph. Above all, I missed Richard Gould, who had inspired the Chelsea Marina rebellion and who had now lost interest in it.

 

Vital Clues

 

wisps of smoke and steam still rose from the fire-damaged houses in Beaufort Avenue, but the rescue services had done their job. Curious to visit the battlefield before it passed into folklore, I walked towards the gatehouse. Water dripped from the charred eaves, and the crazed window-glass reflected a fractured sky. In a reversion to type, their instinct for order and good housekeeping, the residents had swept the street and straightened the protest banners thrown askew by the helicopter. Many of the cars in the parking bays were overturned, but Beaufort Avenue almost resembled its usual self, a street of middle-class housing with a mild hangover.

A group of police officers patrolled the entrance to the estate, answering the queries of any passing pedestrians like tour guides at a newly opened theme park. They had made the manager’s looted office into their station house, and a council employee handed out cups of tea through a broken window. Without a trace of rancour, the constables amiably saluted the residents on their way to shoplift in the King’s Road. A TV crew sat by their van, eating bacon sandwiches and listening to a pop radio station, but their cameras and sound equipment were still unpacked. By this reliable measure, the revolution at Chelsea Marina was over.

Walking back to Cadogan Circle, I found it hard to believe that only a week earlier Chelsea Marina had been the site of the most violent civil clash since the Northern Ireland troubles. Already the uprising led by Kay Churchill seemed closer to a student rag. The infantilizing consumer society filled any gaps in the status quo as quickly as Kay had driven her Polo into the collapsing barricade.

At the junction with Grosvenor Place, two ten-year-old boys played with their airguns, dressed in camouflage fatigues and military webbing, part of the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina that had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread. A Haydn symphony floated gently through a kitchen window, below a protest banner whose damp slogan had dissolved into a Tachiste painting.

We had won, but what exactly? Gazing at the quiet streets, I was conscious of an emotional vacuum. Our victory had been a little too easy, and like Kay I had been looking forward to my day in court. I had overturned cars and helped to fill Perrier bottles with lighter fuel, but a tolerant and liberal society had smiled at me and walked away, leaving me with the two boys in their camouflage jackets, pointing their toy guns at me with menacing frowns.

I understood now why Richard Gould had despaired of Chelsea Marina and the revolution he had launched. Without his radicalizing presence the estate would revert to type. Each morning I rang Vera Blackburn’s doorbell, hoping that Gould had returned, and had recovered from the horrific experience of seeing a young woman shot to death by a deranged clergyman in a quiet west London street. A fault line had opened, and swallowed sanity and pity, though Stephen Dexter’s motives were as mysterious as those of the pudgy weapons fanatic due to be tried for the murder.

I rang Vera’s doorbell, listened for any sounds from the empty flat, and then rode the lift down to the ground floor. Kay was out for the day, helping to make a television docu­mentary about middle-class radicalism in the London suburbs. Confident that a new world was on the march, she hoped that the programme would trigger uprisings in Barnet and Purley, Twickenham and Wimbledon, the bastions of moderation and good sense.

I had heard no more from Sally, and assumed that she was waiting for me to return to St John’s Wood. I wanted to see her, but I knew that once I crossed the doorstep I would be committing myself to the past and its endless needs, to my father-in-law, the Institute and Professor Arnold.

I strolled down Nelson Lane towards the marina and the clearer air that lifted off the river, free of the soot and smuts and kerosene tang of helicopter exhaust. A solitary yachtswoman was coiling ropes on the deck of her sloop, watched by her two-year-old son. I had seen them at the barricade in Beaufort Avenue, the boy on his mother’s shoulders as she abused the police. I assumed that she was about to raise anchor and set sail for the Thames estuary, away from Chelsea Marina and its harbour of lost hopes. I waved to her, thinking that I might ship aboard as deck hand and marine psychologist, dream-rider and tide-reader . . .

Behind me a front door opened in Nelson Lane, close to the Reverend Dexter’s chapel. A woman hesitated on the threshold, fumbled with the keys and set off quickly down the steps, leaving the door ajar behind her. She wore a patent leather coat and high heels that flicked in a familiar mincing step. She hurried along the pavement, pausing to hide from me behind the school minibus, a Land Cruiser donated by the soft-porn publisher who was Chelsea Marina’s richest resident.

‘Vera! Hold on!’

I followed her among the parked cars, and saw her turn into a pedestrian alleyway that led from the estate into the nearby side street. Head down, she scuttled towards the security gate, slipped through and closed it behind her.

When I reached the gate she had disappeared among the tourists strolling past the antique shops and small boutiques. I caught my breath, leaning against the wrought-iron bars. Head-high, the gate was topped by a fan of metal spikes, and could be opened by a resident’s swipe card.

Someone had tampered with the mechanism, using a power tool to cut cleanly through the brass pinion. The exposed metal was already dull, suggesting that the lock had been penetrated at least a week earlier.

I pulled back the gate and stepped into the street, watching the passing shoppers. Fifty feet away, three police vans were parked against the kerb. Each carried six constables, sitting upright beside the windows while the driver listened to his radio.

I closed the gate behind me and walked back to the marina. In the narrow alleyway there was a hint of Vera’s perfume, a spoor I no longer wanted to follow. I was thinking about the gate, and the police waiting in their vans. At any time during the riot they had been free to enter Chelsea Marina in force and attack the residents from the rear. The entire confrontation might well have ended within minutes rather than hours, long before any cars were overturned and the tempers of the rioters rose into open violence.

I left the alleyway and returned to Dexter’s house, standing on the pavement below the front door. A helicopter circled above Wandsworth Bridge, and two launches of the river police sat in midstream, crews watching the entrance to the marina. A combined air, sea and land assault on Chelsea Marina might easily have been mounted, but the police, or whoever controlled them, had held back, restricting themselves to a show of strength in Beaufort Avenue.

Had the entire confrontation, which so lifted our spirits, been staged to test the resolve of the Chelsea Marina residents? By confining their action to a single street the police had kept the revolution within acceptable limits and tested its temper. I thought of the ever-watchful Major Tulloch with his tweed sports jackets and ‘links’ to the Home Office, clearly bored by the petrol bombs and hysteria. For Scotland Yard the confrontation across the burning Fiats and Volvos had been a ploy to tease out the residents and their possible access to more dangerous weapons than croquet mallets and moral indignation. I guessed that Henry Kendall had known that a large police action was being mounted, and that he and Sally had visited Chelsea Marina in an attempt to warn me.

I climbed the steps and pushed back the front door, listening to the drone of the helicopter, then closed it behind me and entered the living room. The clergyman’s house had been ransacked, drawers pulled from the desk, carpet rolled back, hymn books swept from the mantelpiece. The pup tent in which Dexter had camped, the primus stove and trestle bed had been flung against the fireplace. Food cans, a Harley owner’s manual and his Philippine photographs lay scattered across the floor. In the kitchen Dexter’s motorcycle leathers were exposed across the wooden table, seams ripped apart by a carving knife taken from a drawer, eviscerated in a fury that seemed to be aimed at their one-time wearer.

Upstairs, in the cell-like rooms, Vera had carried out the same whirlwind hunt, wrenching Dexter’s cotton flying suit and academic gown from their hangers and throwing them to the floor beside the bed. Frustrated by the spartan bathroom and its meagre hiding places, Vera had smashed a jar of expensive bath salts into the washbasin, a gift from a parishioner that formed a lurid turquoise pool.

I sat on the bare mattress, the flying overall in my hands. Vera’s perfume hung in the air, a sharp mineral tang of an exotic explosive. Beside me, laid out like his dark shadow, was Dexter’s cassock, black sleeves at its side. I assumed that Dexter had placed the cassock there after Joan Chang’s death, knowing that they would never again sleep together in this modest bed.

 

Almost in sympathy, I reached out and touched the coarse fabric, in some way hoping to conjure the unhappy clergyman from its unforgiving weave, and tried to guess what valuable trophy Vera Blackburn had been hunting down in frenzy. My palm moved across the cassock to its breast pocket, and I felt a clutch of small metal objects.

I drew out a yellow silk handkerchief, tightly folded and secured with an elastic band. I opened this miniature parcel and found a set of car ignition keys. They were old and discoloured, engrained with grime, attached to a Jaguar dealer’s medallion.

I reached into the pocket again and pulled out a strip of printed card. Holding it to the light, I recognized a ticket issued by a long-term car park at Heathrow. Across it Dexter had scribbled with a green ball point pen: B 41, and what I assumed was the number of his parking space: 1487.

Did Dexter own an old Jaguar, for some reason parked at Heathrow? I scanned the punch-holes, trying to see if the ticket had been cancelled. My eyes played over the black magnetic strip, but my mind was fixed on something far more easily read, the time-stamped issue date on the edge of the ticket: 11.20 a.m., May 17.

This was the date of the Terminal 2 bomb. The time was almost exactly two hours before the baggage carousel explosion that had killed Laura.

 

The Long-term Car Park

 

memories of revolution fell swiftly behind me, lost among the marker lines receding in the rear-view mirror. I reached the roundabout near Hogarth House and accel­erated towards the motorway and Heathrow. For the first time I had tangible evidence linking someone at Chelsea Marina with Laura’s death. A priest brain-damaged by repeated beatings had waded like a sleepwalker into the ever-deeper violence that could alone give a desperate meaning to his life.

Ignoring the gantry cameras, I sped along the overpass, a great stone dream at last waking from its sleep. The slipstream roared past my head, blowing away all doubts, though I knew there were other explanations. The parking ticket and the Jaguar in long-term bay 1487 might belong to one of the Terminal 2 victims, perhaps a senior cleric returning from Zurich on the same flight as Laura who had mailed the ticket to Dexter and asked him to pick up the car and collect him from the arrival lounge.

Or was the priest whom Chelsea Marina knew as the Reverend Stephen Dexter in fact an imposter, an illegal immigrant on the run from the customs officers? He had helped a dying clergyman in the baggage-reclaim area, then seized his chance, stealing the dead man’s documents and letter of appointment to Chelsea Marina. At any other parish, the motorcycle, Chinese girlfriend and uncertain faith would have led to his exposure, but at Chelsea Marina they were seen as normal and almost obligatory qualifications.

Whatever their source, the parking ticket and ignition keys had been lying in Dexter’s cassock. As I entered the Heathrow perimeter at Hatton Cross I was thinking of Laura, whose fading presence had woken in my mind, and seemed to hover above the signposts pointing to the airport terminals. I waited as a tractor towed a 747 across the perimeter road to the British Airways maintenance hangar. Acres of car parks stretched around me, areas for airline crews, security personnel, business travellers, an almost planetary expanse of waiting vehicles. They sat patiently in the caged pens as their drivers circled the world. Days lost for ever would expire until they dismounted from the courtesy buses and reclaimed their cars.

An airliner came in to land, turbofans sighing as it eased itself onto the runway, a whisper of dreams bruised by time. Laura had emerged from this mirage for a few last min­utes, and then slipped away into a mystery greater than flight.

I took my ticket from the dispenser, and drove past the administration office towards the B section of the car park. Despite the rapacious charges, almost every space was filled, a vast congregation of cars pointing towards their Mecca, the Heathrow control tower. I turned into B 41 and drove between the lines of vehicles, scanning the numbers on the tarmac. Despite myself, I imagined the assassin still sitting in his Jaguar, waiting for me to arrive.

Bay 1487 was occupied. An imposing Mercedes saloon filled the space, its polished body like black ceremonial armour. I stopped the Range Rover and walked across to it. Through the windows I could see the white leather upholstery, and the control panel with its satellite-navigation screen. A week-old copy of the Evening Standard lay on the rear seat. The Mercedes had been parked here for no more than a few days.

I found the Jaguar twenty minutes later, in a small holding on the north side of section E. Thwarted by the Mercedes, I had returned to the administration offices near the exit gate. A helpful Asian manager explained that any vehicles unclaimed after two months were towed to the holding area and left there until the company’s legal department had tracked down the owners. Joyriders, criminals escaping abroad, even overdue air travellers unwilling to pay the surcharges often abandoned their cars, assuming they would remain for ever in this automotive limbo.

I showed the manager the ticket from Stephen Dexter’s cassock, and said that I had found it trapped behind a seat in a Terminal 2 boarding lounge.

‘There might be a reward,’ I ventured. ‘It’s possible.’

‘I’ll check it for you.’ Smiling at my eagerness, he tapped the ticket and parking bay numbers into his computer. ‘Right -Jaguar 4-door saloon, X registration, 1981 model. We’re contacting the present owner through the Vehicle Licensing Office.’

‘You have his name? He’ll be glad to see the ticket.’

‘It’s unlikely, sir. There’s an outstanding charge of £870. Plus VAT.’ When I winced, he spoke with pride. ‘Parking is a luxury activity, factored into business and holiday price structures. If you wish to save money, there are the public highways.’

‘I’ll remember that. Any phone number where I can reach the owner?’

‘No phone number.’ He hesitated, watching my hand slide a twenty-pound note across the desk. ‘His address is Chelsea Marina, King’s Road, Fulham, London SW6.’

‘And the name?’     

‘Gould. Dr Richard Gould. You’re lucky, sir. Very few doctors forget their cars.’

I stood beside the ancient Jaguar, parked by the perimeter fence in the line of uncollected vehicles. Many sat on flattened tyres, covered with bird droppings and speckled with oil from the aircraft flying into Heathrow.

Next to the Jaguar was a pick-up truck with a frosted windscreen and damaged bumpers, perhaps the casualty of a road accident abandoned while the driver made his getaway. The Jaguar’s windows were thick with dirt but intact, and I could read the titles of the medical brochures stacked on the rear seat. Two small teddy bears sat together by the armrest, like children waiting for an overdue parent to return, button eyes hopeful but wary.

I slid one of the keys into the lock, hoping that I had found the wrong car. But the lock turned, and I pulled open the driver’s door, freeing it from the seal of grime and dust. I eased myself into the seat and gripped the steering wheel. I could scent Gould’s presence in the shabby interior, with its worn leather, broken cigar lighter and overflowing ashtray. The glove drawer was stuffed with pharmaceutical leaflets, sample boxes of a new child sedative and an uneaten sandwich in a plastic wrapper, mummified by the airless heat.

I turned the ignition key, and heard the faint answering click of an engine servo responding to a brief flow of current from an almost dead battery. On the passenger seat was a copy of a large-format paperback, the BBC’s edition of its television series A Neurosdentist Looks at God. I leafed through the full-colour photographs of Egyptian temples, Hindu deities and CT scans of frontal lobes. Among the contributors’ photos was a portrait of myself, taken in the White City studios only eighteen months earlier. Adjusting the rear-view mirror, I compared my drawn features and bruised forehead, my police line up stare, with the confident and fresh-faced figure looking back at me from the glossy pages. I seemed youthful and knowing, practised patter almost visible on my lips.

I smoothed the yellowing cover, and noticed a telephone number written in green ballpoint below the title. The defensive slope of the numerals, the smudges of ink in the scrawled loops, reminded me of another set of numerals penned by the same hand, the parking-bay number scribbled on the ticket I had shown to the Asian manager.

As I stared at the book, thinking of Stephen Dexter, a shadow fell across the instrument panel. A man was strolling around the Jaguar, his face hidden by the dust and dirt on the windscreen. He tried to raise the bonnet, and then walked to the driver’s door and tapped on the window.

‘David, open up. Dear chap, you’ve locked yourself in again

 

 

Amateurs and Revolutions

 

‘richard . . . ?’ using my shoulder, I forced back the door and took his hand, glad to see him. ‘Locked myself in? God knows why.’

‘You’ll have to work that one out. It was always you, David

Gould greeted me confidently and helped me from the Jaguar, waving to the teddy bears in the rear seat. He seemed calm and rested, glancing at the rows of parked cars like a colonel surveying his armoured cavalry. I was relieved that he looked so well. He wore the same frayed black suit, which I had last seen soaked by his sweat in the grounds of the bishop’s palace at Fulham. But the suit had been cleaned and pressed, and he had put on a white shirt and tie, as if he had come to the airport in order to apply for a job as a concourse doctor.

We smiled at each other in the sunlight, waiting for the noise of a landing airliner to fade among the terminal buildings. Once again I was struck by how this restless and unsettled man could stabilize everything around him. Even as he sniffed at the kerosene-stained air I felt that he made sense of the world by sheer will, like a physician leading a one-man charity in a blighted corner of Africa, his presence alone giving hope to the natives. He watched the airliner land, and his tolerant gaze seemed to bless an infinity of arrivals lounges.

‘Richard, we need to talk. I’m glad you feel better.’ I stood with my back to the sun, and tried to see past his raised hand. At Fulham Palace you were pretty shaky.

‘I was tired out.’ Gould grimaced at the memory. ‘All those trees they’re like surveillance cameras. It was a difficult day. That strange shooting.’

‘The Hammersmith murder? We were nearby.’

‘Right. They say she was a beautiful woman. It was good of you to help me.’ Gould leaned against the Jaguar and looked me up and down. ‘You’re drained, David. Chelsea Marina is hard on people. I hear there was a trial of strength last week.’

‘The police put on a show. I think we fell into a trap.’

‘That’s no bad thing. It sharpens the focus. At least everyone rallied round.’

‘Absolutely. We manned the barricades together. The revo­lution finally started. We took on the forces of the state and fought them to a standstill. The police backed off, though why, no one knows.’

‘They were testing you. It used to be the proles who were pushed around, and now they’re trying the same bully-boy tactics on the middle class. Still, you won the day.’ Gould beamed at me like a proud parent listening to an account of a school sports match. ‘How was Boadicea?’

‘Kay? She drove her chariot into the fiery furnace. You would have been proud of her. It was really your show. You dreamed of it, Richard.’

‘I know . . .’ Gould gestured at the air, as if conducting the sunlight. ‘I have to concentrate on so many other things - the overall strategy, then Stephen Dexter. He could be dangerous.’

He was here.’ I raised my voice above the mushy drone of a Cathay Pacific jumbo sweeping in to land. ‘Stephen was in Your car.’

 

 ‘When?’ Gould glanced over my shoulder, his attention sharpening. ‘Today? David — wake up.’

‘Not today. I found your ignition keys in his house this morning. There was a parking ticket date-stamped May 17. He must have taken your car and driven here a couple of hours before the Terminal 2 bomb. I think he -‘

‘That’s right.’ Gould spoke matter-of-factly. ‘He drove the Jag to Heathrow. We need to warn him, before he goes to the police.’

‘Warn him? He left the bomb on the baggage carousel. He killed my wife. Why?’

‘It’s hard to imagine.’ Gould studied me, eyes moving around the abrasions on my face. He was less sure of me, as if the battle at Chelsea Marina had separated us. ‘How did Stephen get through security?’

‘He wore the cassock. The police would let a priest through if he said a passenger was dying. I saw the cassock at his house this morning, laid out on the bed like something from a black mass.’

‘Weird. I thought he’d lost his faith.’

‘He’s found another - sudden death. Vera was there, ransacking the place. She and Stephen may be in this together.’ I tried to rouse Gould. ‘Richard, you could be in danger. Stephen killed my wife, and then the television woman. You saw it happen

‘Yes. I saw her die.’ Gould’s voice had faded. Like a child trying to distract itself, he drew a stick-man in the windscreen dust. ‘Still, we can’t go to the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re too close to everything.’ He pointed to my Range Rover, parked outside the entrance to the pound. ‘A security camera in Putney High Street caught us going by. It’s lucky they couldn’t read the licence number. We’re accomplices, David.’

I tried to  remonstrate with him, surprised for once by his passivity. A car was approaching along the perimeter road , a grey Citroen estate, moving slowly as if on patrol, road. It paused by the pound, a woman driver at the wheel. As she stared at us I recognized the vivid eye make-up and forehead, the faintly smirking mouth with its violet lipstick.

‘Vera Blackburn?’

‘Right.’ Gould waved to her and she moved on, resuming her patrol. ‘Lady Macbeth off to Wal-Mart.’

‘Richard, for God’s sake . . .’ Impatient with his offhand humour, I asked: ‘How did you get here?’

‘Today? Vera drove me. She enjoys the Heathrow run.’

‘You were sure I’d find the Jaguar? I take it our meeting isn’t a coincidence?’

‘Hardly.’ Gould held my arm to calm me. ‘I’m sorry, David. I hate tricking you. You’ve always been so straight - with everyone except yourself. I thought it was time to bring things to a head. All this police activity, the security people closing in. There’s a lot to talk over.’

‘I can guess.’ I caught a last glimpse of the Citroen. ‘So Vera was waiting for me at Stephen’s house? She knows I walk down to the marina every day.’

‘Something like that. You’re surprisingly punctual. It’s all that bourgeois conditioning, years of seeing that the trains run on time.’

‘She pretended to ransack the house, and planted the keys and ticket in the cassock. You assumed I’d find them.’

‘We hoped you would. Vera gave you a little help. The cassock was her idea.’

‘A nice touch. Women are shrewd at these things.’

‘Did you try it on?’

‘The cassock? I was tempted. Let’s say I’m in the wrong Priesthood.’ I watched Gould smile to himself, like a schoolboy relieved that the truth had come out. ‘Is Stephen Dexter still alive?’

‘David . . . ?’ Gould turned to me in surprise. ‘He’s gone to ground somewhere. He won’t kill himself. Believe me, he feels much too guilty. What happened in Terminal 2 nearly restored his faith.’

‘What did happen? You know, Richard.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Gould hung his head, staring at his scuffed shoes. ‘I wanted to tell you, because you understand, you can see what we’re doing

‘I don’t understand the Heathrow deaths. Killing people? For heaven’s sake . . .’

That’s a problem. It’s a deep river to cross. But there’s a bridge, David. We’re trapped by categories, by walls that stop us from seeing around corners.’ Gould pointed to the wrecked pick-up truck. ‘We accept deaths when we feel they’re justified - wars, climbing Everest, putting up a skyscraper, building a bridge.’

‘True . . .’ I pointed towards Terminal 2. ‘But I can’t see a bridge there.’

‘There are bridges in the mind.’ Gould raised a white hand, gesturing me towards the runway. ‘They carry us to a more real world, a richer sense of who we are. Once those bridges are there, it’s our duty to cross them.’

‘By blowing apart a young Chinese woman? Was Dexter involved in the Heathrow bomb?’

Gould seemed to slump inside his shabby suit. ‘Yes, David. He was involved.’

‘He planted the bomb?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘Then who did?’

‘David . . .’ Gould bared his uneven teeth. ‘I’m not being evasive. You have to see the Heathrow attack as part of a larger picture.’

‘Richard! My wife died in Terminal 2.’ ‘I know. That was a tragedy. First, though . . .’ He turned u _ck staring at the rusting cars, then swung to face ‘What do you think has been going on at Chelsea Marina?’

‘A middle-class revolution. The one you worked for. No?’

‘Not really. The middle-class protest is just a symptom. It’s part of a much larger movement, a current running through all our lives, though most people don’t realize it. There’s a deep need for meaningless action, the more vio­lent the better. People know their lives are pointless, and they realize there’s nothing they can do about it. Or almost nothing.’

‘Not true.’ Impatient with this familiar argument, I said: ‘Your life isn’t pointless. Once you’re cleared by the CMC you’ll be walking the children’s wards again, designing an even better shunt

‘Feel-good caring. I get more out of it than they do.’

‘Gliding? You booked a course of lessons.’

‘I cancelled them. Too close to occupational therapy.’ Gould shielded his eyes, watching an airliner lift itself from the runway. It braced its wings against the sky, a titanic effort of steel and will. As it rose over Bedfont and turned towards the west Gould waved admiringly. ‘Heroic, but

‘Not pointless enough?’

‘Exactly. Think of all those passengers, every one of them buzzing like a hive with plans and projects. Holidays, business conferences, weddings - so much purpose and energy, so many small ambitions that no one will ever remember.’

‘It would be better if the plane crashed?’

‘Yes! That would mean something. An empty space we could stare into with real awe. Senseless, inexplicable, as mysterious as the Grand Canyon. We can’t see the road for all the signposts. Let’s clear them away, so we can gaze at the mystery of an empty road. We need more demolition jobs

‘Even if people are killed?’

‘Yes, sadly.’

‘Like Heathrow? And the Hammersmith murder? As a matter of interest, did Dexter shoot her?’

‘No. He was nowhere near.’

‘And Terminal 2?’ I took the parking ticket from my wallet and held it in front of Gould’s face. ‘He arrived in your car two hours before the bomb exploded. What was he doing when it went off?’

‘He was sitting in the Jag.’ Gould peered at me, curious why I was so slow to grasp the truth. ‘He might even have been thinking about you.’

‘Richard!’ Angrily, I punched his shoulder. ‘I need to know!’

‘Calm down . . .’ Gould rubbed his arm, then reached into the Jaguar and retrieved the copy of A Neurosdentist Looks at God. He thumbed through the pages and found my photograph, smiling at my confident expression. ‘Stephen drove me to Heathrow that morning. I had some . . . business to deal with.’

‘Medical?’

‘In a sense. His job was to wait here.’

‘Job? What exactly? Taking communion in a car park?’

‘He had a phone call to make.’ Gould pointed to the scrawled digits in green ballpoint. ‘Call the number, David. You’ve got your mobile. It should explain a lot.’

I took out the mobile and waited until the airport was silent. Gould leaned against the car, picking at his nails, a mentor already bored with a once promising pupil. I stared at the numerals on the BBC paperback and dialled.

A voice spoke promptly. ’Heathrow Security. . .Terminal. Hello, caller?’

‘Hello? Sorry?’

‘Terminal 2 Security. Can I help you, caller?’

I rang off and gripped the phone like a grenade. The •, around me was clearer. The lines of parked cars, the chain-link fencing and the tail fins of taxiing aircraft had drawn closer, part of a conspiracy to attack the sky. Heathrow was a huge illusion, the centre of a world of signs that pointed to nothing.

‘David?’ Gould looked up from his nails. ‘Any answer?’

‘Terminal 2 Security.’ I thought back to the Bishop of Chichester’s mobile that I had found in Joan Chang’s car outside Tate Modern. ‘Why would Stephen ring them?’

‘Go on. Think about it.’

‘His job was to make the warning call. While someone else planted the bomb. There had to be enough time for the security people to clear everyone out of Terminal 2.’

‘But there was no warning call. The police were certain about that.’ Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘Stephen never rang security. Why not?’

‘Because the bomber was supposed to call Stephen once he’d set the device. But the bomber didn’t call.’

‘Exactly. So . . . ?’

‘Stephen assumed there was some kind of delay.’ I noticed the paperback in my hand and tossed it into the car. ‘He sat here, reading about God and the neurosciences. Then he heard the explosion. He guessed the device had gone off before the bomber could reach him. He switched on the car radio and learned about the casualties. He must have been appalled.’

He was.’ Gould pushed himself away from the car and made a half-circle around me. ‘He was deeply shocked. In fact, he never got over it.’

So that’s when he lost his faith. He left the car here and somehow went back to Chelsea Marina. Poor man - but how did he justify being involved in a bomb attack?’

‘It was part of Kay Churchill’s anti-tourism campaign. It was supposed to close Heathrow for days and make people think about the Third World. They’d cancel their holidays and send the money to Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres.’ Gould raised his pale hands to the sun. ‘A tragic mistake. There was meant to be a warning. We didn’t intend to kill anyone.’

‘Who was the bomber? Vera Blackburn?’

‘Far too nervy.’

‘Kay? I can’t see her doing it.’

‘Never. Stephen and I drove here alone.’

‘You and Stephen arrived together? So you were the bomber?’ I turned to stare at Gould, as if seeing him for the first time, this shabby little doctor with his strange obsessions. ‘You killed those people . . . and my wife.’

‘It was an accident.’ Gould’s eyeballs tilted upwards under their lids, as they had done in the park at Fulham Palace. ‘No one was meant to die. You were at the NFT, David, you’ve left fire bombs in video stores. I didn’t know your wife was on the plane.’

‘You planted the bomb . . .’ I turned away, my fingers touching the dust on the Jaguar’s windscreen, as if this film of dirt and aviation grease could shield me from what I had learned about Laura’s death. With an effort, I controlled my anger. I needed Gould to speak freely, even at the cost of telling the truth. I was shocked and depressed by myself. For months I had been the dupe of a small coterie at Chelsea Marina. I knew now why Kay had always been uneasy over my growing involvement with Gould. Surprisingly, I still felt concerned for him.

‘David?’ Gould looked into my face. ‘You’re shaking. Sit in the car.’

‘No thanks. That Jaguar - I know how Dexter must have felt . I pushed him away, and then caught his sleeve. ‘One question . How did you get in ? Security in the baggage area is tight .

“not so tight on the arrivals side. An architect at Chelsea Marina works for a firm carrying out airport maintenance. He supplied me with an identity pass. I put on my white coat  and doctor’s badge. The bomb was in my medical case. A low-yield device, I thought. But Vera gets carried away -it’s all that anger.’

‘Then you left it on the carousel? Why that one?’

‘A baggage handler told me there were illegal stowaways on the Zurich flight. The passengers were held on the plane and wouldn’t be through immigration for at least half an hour.’ Gould spoke softly, voice barely audible above the traffic on the perimeter road. ‘I set the fuse for fifteen minutes and slipped the valise onto the carousel as the Zurich baggage came out of the chute.’

‘Next to Laura’s suitcase. A complete coincidence.’

‘No. It wasn’t a coincidence. I’m sorry, David.’ Before I could speak, Gould went on: ‘There was a baggage tag on the handle. I noticed the surname. I thought it belonged to someone else.’

‘Who, exactly?’

‘You, David.’ Gould managed a flicker of sympathy, try­ing to mask his smile. ‘I’d been reading A Neuroscientist Looks at God. A hotel sticker on the suitcase mentioned a psychiatric conference two years ago. I assumed it was you.’

‘Me? So I was . . . ?’

‘The real target.’ Gould touched my shoulder, like a doctor telling me that an earlier, unfavourable diagnosis had proved correct after all. ‘I’ve always felt that the bomb brought us together. In a sense, our friendship was fused in that terrible tragedy.’

 

 ‘I don’t think so. But why me?’

‘I’d seen you on television, talking about elective disease: self-inflicted paralysis, imaginary handicaps, states of voluntary madness - I think you put religions into that category. Fear of the void, which only the genuinely insane can contem­plate without flinching. I thought I’d jolt you out of your complacency. A useful lesson, not the sort of thing you learn at Swiss conferences.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Everything. Now I know why professionals always leave revolution to the amateurs. Customs were checking the suit­cases of a pregnant Jamaican woman working as a drug mule. She went into an hysterical fit and started to give birth. They asked me to help, and I ended up in an ambulance on the way to Ashford. I tried to ring Dexter and then Heathrow Security but we were stuck in the tunnel. It turned out the baggage handler had been talking about the wrong plane. The Zurich passengers reached the carousel as the bomb went off. I was shocked, David. I heard your name on the news and assumed you were dead.’

‘And then I turned up at Kay’s house.’

‘Risen from the grave. In a sense I’d already killed you, for the most idealistic reasons. I liked you, David. You were serious but flexible, and searching for some kind of truth. Laura was the door into your real self, and I’d opened it.’

‘You stayed out of sight for a long time.’

‘I was watching you. The middle-class revolution was up and running, and Kay was our Joan of Arc. She’d switched off the voices in her head, all those idiotic Hollywood films. Fifty years ago she’d have been married to some strapping young curate, arranging whist drives and spicing up his sex life. She couldn’t understand why I lost interest in smoke-bombing video stores and travel agencies.’

‘But after Heathrow everything changed.’ Still controlling myself I kept my hands at my sides, avoiding eye contact with Gould and encouraging him to talk on. ‘You’d glimpsed something important there, even though people had died.’

 

‘Well put, David. Very well put.’ Gould patted my shoulder, and then searched his pockets as if looking for some little token to give me. ‘Remember, I was working with these desperate children. I was their delegate, and I wanted an answer. If you’re faced with a two-year-old dying from brain cancer, what do you say? It’s not enough to talk about the grand design of nature. Either the world is at fault, or we’re looking for meaning in the wrong places.’

‘And you started looking back to Heathrow?’ ‘Right - the deaths there were pointless and inexplicable, but maybe that was the point. A motiveless act stops the universe in its tracks. If I’d set out to kill you, that would have been just another squalid crime. But if I killed you by accident, or for no reason at all, your death would have a unique significance. To keep the world sane we depend on motive, we rely on cause and effect. Kick those props away and we see that the meaningless act is the only one that has any meaning. It took me a while to grasp, but your “death” was the green light I’d been waiting for.’

‘Then I rose from the grave, and you needed another victim.’

‘Not victim.’ Gould raised his hand to correct me. He seemed finally to have relaxed, convinced again that I under­stood him and was on his side. Standing in his threadbare suit beside his rusting car, he was a kind of mendicant physician, haunting airport car parks with his cure-all nostrum. Putting ^me straight, he said: ‘”Victim” implies some sort of malign intention. Whatever else, David, I’m not malign. I needed a partner, a collaborator who could join me in the search for absolute truth.’

‘Someone you didn’t know, and had never met?’

 

 ‘Absolutely. If possible, someone famous of whom I’d never even heard. Famous, but utterly unimportant.’ Gould stared at the child’s stick-man he had drawn on the Jaguar’s windscreen. ‘Someone like a minor television presenter . . .’

 

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