The Defence of Grosvenor Place

 

Chelsea marina was ready to make its last stand. Three weeks later, from the windows of Kay’s living room, I watched the residents’ committee organize the defence of Grosvenor Place. Fifty adults, almost every neighbour in the cul de sac, had gathered in front of number 27, all talking at the tops of their confident voices. Indignation was working itself towards critical mass, and the explosion threatened the entire civic order of Chelsea and Fulham.

The bailiffs were due to arrive in minutes, determined to evict Alan and Rosemary Turner, both entomologists at the Natural History Museum, and their three teenage children. The Turners were one of the many families who refused to pay their maintenance charges, defaulted on their mortgage and ignored all demands from the utility companies and the local council. The Turners were now a test case, and a formidable coalition of banks and building societies, council officials and property executives were determined to make an example of them.

I had met the Turners, a high-minded but pleasant couple, and sometimes helped the younger son with the algebra problems his mother set him. For a month they had been without water or electricity, but their neighbours rallied round, feeding cable and hose-pipe extensions over their garden walls. Unable to afford the children’s school fees, the Turners hung a large banner -‘ we are The new poor’ - from their bedroom balcony.

Sadly, this was all too true. Kay organized a whip-round, but a week later Mrs. Turner and her daughter were caught shoplifting in the King’s Road Safeway. Listening to the list of pilfered items, from breakfast cereals to orange juice, the magistrates were ready to let Mrs. Turner off with a caution. On hearing that she lived in Chelsea Marina, they closed their minds to clemency and talked darkly of Fagin gangs on the prowl, flaunting their Hermes scarves and Prada handbags. The chief magistrate, the headmistress of a local comprehensive school, lectured Mrs. Turner on the perils of the middle class abdicating their responsibilities, and fined her £50. I paid this, and Mrs. Turner returned to a cheerful street party, the first martyr of Grosvenor Place.

As it happened, Mrs. Turner was not alone. The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the sur­rounding neighbourhood. As executives and middle managers gave up their jobs, there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalized, and the council street cleaners, traditional working class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Sloane Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

The location vans of Japanese and American television channels cruised around Chelsea Marina, waiting for blood. But the police held back, under orders from the Home Office not to provoke an outright confrontation. Cabinet ministers were now well aware that if the middle class withdrew their goodwill, society would collapse.

Meanwhile, law and order had returned, ready to make a small push. From Kay’s window I counted three police vans parked in the entrance to Grosvenor Place. The constables sat by the windows, accepting cups of tea from nearby resi­dents. One policewoman dropped a pound coin into a biscuit tin  labelled ‘community poor box’. The sergeant in charge conferred with a firm of bailiffs, a thuggish group eager to evict the  Turners. A local security firm stood by, ready to change the Turners’ locks and board up the ground-floor windows.

A Newsnight TV crew waited keenly, camera trained on the Turners, who stood bravely by their front door, pale but unbowed, like a miner’s family during a pithead lock­out. Their neighbours linked arms around the gate, and a second banner flew from the balcony - ‘free the new proletariat’.

The sergeant raised his megaphone and urged the crowd to disperse, his words lost in the jeers and shouts. Kay Churchill pushed tirelessly through the throng, urging everyone on, kissing the cheeks of husbands and wives. Her face flushed with pride, she broke off to run back to her house. I admired her, as always, for her passion and wrongheadedness. She was often lonely, writing long letters to her daughter in Australia, but nothing roused her spirits like the prospect of heroic failure.

‘David? I’m glad you’re here. We may need you.’ She embraced me fiercely, her body trembling against me.

‘Kay? What are you doing?’

‘Changing my underwear. Believe me, the police can be brutal.’

‘Not that brutal . . .’ I followed her into the kitchen where she towelled her arms and poured herself a large gin. ‘What exactly is happening?’

‘Nothing, yet. It’s about to start. It could be rough, David.’ Don’t sound so pleased. I take it you have a plan?’

Kay threw the towel at me, a heady bouquet of fear and sex ‘Only a few people know. Watch the news tonight.’ A sit-down? A mass strip?’ You’d like that.’ She blew me a kiss, tugging off her thong. this is our first confrontation, hand to hand with the police. This is the Odessa Steps, this is Tolpuddle.’

‘All these lawyers and ad-men?’ ‘Who cares what they do? It’s what they are that matters. This is the first time we’ve defended our ground. They want to evict an entire community. It’s time for you to be serious, David. No more observer status.’

‘Kay . . .’ I tried to settle her chaotic hair. ‘Don’t expect too much of yourself. Bailiffs repossess houses every day in London.’;]

‘But we’ve chosen not to pay the mortgage. We’re forcing a showdown, so everyone in Harrow and Purley and Wimbledon can look hard at themselves. Every schoolteacher and GP and branch manager. They’ll realize they’re just a new kind of serf. Coolies in trainers and tracksuits.’ Kay snatched the towel from me and dried her armpits. ‘Stop sniffing that. The sidelines have been abolished, David. No one can stand and watch any more. Buying an olive ciabatta is a political act. We need everyone to help.’

‘Right . . . I’ll join you when the action starts.’ I tapped the mobile phone in my shirt pocket. ‘I’m waiting for a call from Richard Gould. He has some project on.’

‘He ought to be here. Without him it’s difficult to hold ] things together.’ Irritated by the mention of Gould’s name, Kay glanced at the corners of the sitting room. ‘Where is he? No one’s seen him for days.’

‘He still supports us, but

‘It’s all a bit too quaint? Sit-ins, picket lines, raw emotion. He’s a cold fish.’

‘He’s trying to track down Stephen Dexter before the police do. The Tate bomb could derail everything.’

‘Joan? The world’s mad.’ Kay grimaced and pressed her worn hands to her face, trying to smooth away her lines. ‘Poor Stephen, I can’t believe he set off the bomb.’

She raced upstairs, eager to change and return to her riot.

 

A megaphone was blaring when I returned to the win­dow, its ponderous message lost on the crowd, orotund phrases bouncing off the rooftops. The police dismounted from their vans and secured the chin-straps of their helmets. They formed up behind the bailiffs, six stocky men in leather jackets.

The residents turned to face them, arms linked. There was a flurry of blows when the bailiffs tried to shoulder them aside, and a balding orthodontist fell to his knees with a bloodied nose, comforted by his outraged wife. From an upstairs window a sound system began to play a Verdi extract, the prisoners’ chorus from Nabucco. At this signal, like an audience who had stood for the national anthem, the residents sat down in the street.

Unimpressed, the police moved in, strong hands wrenching the protesters apart and dragging them away. A fierce ululation rose from Grosvenor Place, the outrage of professional men and women who had never known pain and whose soft bodies had been pummelled only by their lovers and osteopaths.

I turned towards the front door, ready to join in, and heard my mobile ring in my shirt pocket.

‘Markham?’ A flat voice spoke, faint and metallic, the recording of a recording. ‘David, can you hear me?’

‘Who is this?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Richard . . . ?’ Relieved that Gould had called, I closed the front door. ‘Nothing much. Kay’s organized a small riot. Meanwhile, the police are evicting the Turners.’

‘Right . . .’ Gould seemed distracted, his voice fading and surging. ‘I need you to help me. I’ve seen Stephen Dexter.’

‘Stephen? Where? Can you talk to him?’

‘He’s all right. Later, if I get a chance.’

A hum of background noise drowned his voice, the sound of a busy airport concourse.

 

 ‘Richard? Where are you? Heathrow?’

‘These security cameras ... I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’

‘What about Stephen?’

‘He’s looking at glassware, in the local Habitat. I’m trying to move closer. There’s another bloody camera

I pressed the mobile to my ear, picking up a hubbub of pedestrian noise. Gould sounded aroused but curiously dreamy, as if an attractive young woman was sharing his phone booth. He had been shocked by Joan Chang’s death, dismayed by the real violence that had taken place after his relaxed talk of meaningless acts. Violence, I wanted to tell him, was never meaningless. Now I thought of Stephen Dexter, this haunted clergyman prowling the shopping mall, perhaps with another bomb, hoping to drive away his grief for Joan. ‘Richard? Is Dexter still there?’ ‘Plain as daylight.’ ‘You’re sure? You recognize him?’

‘It’s . . . him. I need you over here. Can you get to the Range Rover?’

‘It’s parked round the corner.’

‘Good man. Give me an hour. Wait for me in Rainville Road, near the River Cafe. Off the Fulham Palace Road.’ ‘Right. Be careful. He’ll see you if you get too close.’ ‘Don’t worry. The world has too many cameras . . .’

When I left the house a few minutes later the protest was almost over. Kay’s riot, which she hoped would engulf Chelsea Marina, had become a local brawl between the police and a few of the more aggressive residents. The others sat on the ground, exchanging insults with the constables trying to clear the street. Too reliant, as always, on argument and social stance,

he Chelsea Marina rebels were no match for the heavy squad. Property rights were involved, unlike the CND marches of the 19605 or the cruise-missile protests. A seat in the great British lifeboat was sacrosanct, however cramped and whatever posterior occupied it.

The bailiffs had reached the front door of the Turners’ house and were trying the locks with a set of skeleton picks. I searched for Kay, expecting to see her in the forefront of the action, berating the sergeant or dressing down some junior woman constable. The Turners had taken refuge with neighbours and their house seemed empty, but I glimpsed a swirl of ash-grey hair in the front bedroom. I assumed that Kay had returned to the house by a garden window, and was retrieving some memento of Mrs. Turner’s before it disappeared into the bailiffs’ pockets.

As I walked towards Beaufort Avenue, ignition keys in hand, I noticed a thickset man with a brush moustache and ginger hair standing near the police vans. I had last seen him among the mourners at Laura’s cremation. Major Tulloch, once of the Gibraltar police and Henry’s contact at the Home Office, was keeping an eye on Chelsea Marina, on these opinionated wives and their idle husbands. His face had the bored, hard-nosed stare of an ambitious rugby coach in charge of a third-rate team. He took in the vandalized parking meters and unswept streets, the amateurish banners hanging from bedroom windows, with the weary patience of all police officers faced with pointless criminality.

Behind me, the crowd fell silent, and the sergeant’s mega­phone died on the air. The bailiffs stepped into the street and stared at the roof. Smoke rose from the upstairs windows of the Turners’ house. The ropes of dark vapour threaded themselves through the open transoms, knotted into ever thicker coils and raced up the mock-Tudor gable. Inside the bedroom, a fierce yellow glow expanded across the ceiling.

 

 

The first house in Chelsea Marina to be torched by its owners was now on fire, a mark of true rebellion that would baffle Major Tulloch and the Home Office. I reached Beaufort Avenue and looked back for the last time, aware that a significant step had been taken. The protest movement was no longer a glorified rent strike, but a full-scale insurrection. Well aware of this, Kay Churchill stood outside her front door, shrieking at the bailiffs and police, arms raised in triumph.

I parked in Rainville Road, fifty yards from the entrance to the River Cafe. The glass barrel vault of Richard Rogers’s design office rose beside the Thames, a transparent canopy that cleverly concealed the architect’s wayward plans for London’s future. It was four o’clock, but the sleek patrons of the res­taurant, the television chieftains and fifteen-minute celebrities of the political world, were still leaving after their lunches, an aroma of boozy fame dispersing through the stolid streets of west London.

I searched the low rooftops for any sight of the smoke from Chelsea Marina. Farce and tragedy embraced each other like long-lost friends, but the Turners had read the wind. The middle-income residents of the estate had long outstayed their welcome. The Home Office might fear this outbreak of social unease, but the property developers who dominated the economy of London would be glad to see the entire population of Chelsea Marina exiled to the duller suburbs, the grim and bricky enclaves around Heathrow and Gatwick. The ceaseless roar of aircraft would drive out any future thoughts of revolution.

Richard Gould had been right. Inexplicable and senseless protests were the only way to hold the public’s attention. During the past month, inspired by Richard, action groups had attacked a number of ‘absurd’ targets - the Penguin pool at London Zoo, Liberty’s, the Soane Museum and the Karl Marx tomb at Highgate Cemetery. Home Office ministers and newspaper columnists were baffled, and dismissed the attacks as misguided pranks. Yet the targets were important elements in maintaining the middle class’s herd mentality, from Lubetkin’s too-precious penguin walkways to the over-busy prints in Liberty’s airless emporium. No one was injured, and little damage was done by Vera Blackburn’s smoke and paint bombs. But the public was unsettled, aware of a deranged fifth column in its midst, motiveless and impenetrable, Dada come to town.

I had last seen Gould on the evening of the smoke bomb attack on the Albert Hall. He had been away for a week, helping a team of volunteers to give a seaside holiday to a group of Down’s teenagers, and asked me to collect him from the hostel in Tooting. As the happy children tottered home with their funfair trophies and monster masks, Gould collapsed into the Range Rover, reeking of carbolic and exhausted after spending his nights scrubbing out lavatories. He slept against the window, face tubercularly pale.

He revived after a shower and a change of clothes in Vera’s flat, where he was now staying, and then suggested we drive to Kensington Gardens. Leaving Chelsea Marina, we picked up two young residents on their way to the last night of the Proms, dressed in Union Jack hats and Robin Hood cloaks, ready to join in the orgy of Elgar choruses and pantomime Britishness.

We dropped them off and then strolled through the evening park, where Gould talked over his worries for Stephen Dexter. The clergyman had still not returned to his house near the marina, and the coroner had released Joan Chang’s body for its lonely flight back to Singapore. Gould feared that the •Fate attack would be blamed on Chelsea Marina and used to discredit the revolution. From now on, only meaningless targets should be chosen, each one a conundrum that the public would struggle to solve.

As we walked near the Round Pond I heard the sound of fire engines and saw cerise smoke rising from the roof of the Albert Hall. By the time we reached Kensington Gore the entire street was filled with promenaders in their end-of-season costumes, orchestra players holding their instruments, police and firemen. The promenaders launched into a spirited singsong, refusing to let their patriotism be cowed, while billows of smoke rose from the upper galleries of the concert hall and a bedlam of horns sounded from the stalled traffic.

Later I learned that the two residents we had driven from Chelsea Marina were acting with Gould’s blessing. They had smuggled their smoke bombs into the auditorium and left them in the lavatories, timed to go off at the opening bars of ’Land of Hope and Glory’. But Gould seemed too tired and distracted to enjoy the spectacle, however childish and absurd. He left me by the steps of the Albert Memorial, and disappeared into the crowd, cadging a lift from the driver of a catering van. I assumed he was thinking of the Down’s children, bobbing cheerfully down the Bognor front, and the larger absurdity to which nature would never provide an answer.

I was still waiting for Gould as the last of the River Cafe patrons eased himself into his limousine. My parking meter had expired; feeding in more coins, I almost missed my ringing mobile.

‘David? What’s happened?’ Gould was panting, his voice high-pitched, as if he had seized himself by the throat. ‘Markham . . . ?’

‘I’m outside the River Cafe. Nothing’s happened. Have you seen Dexter?’

‘He . . . got away. Too many cameras.’

‘You didn’t catch him?’ ‘Stay away from cameras, David.’ ‘Right- Where are you?’

‘Fulham Palace. Meet me there now.’ He spoke breathlessly, a I could hear an ambulance siren above the traffic, and the ices of women talking in a queue. ‘David? Dexter’s here somewhere

I reached Fulham Palace within five minutes, and waited in the visitor’s car park, listening to the clamour of traffic in the Fulham Palace Road. Police cars sped across Putney Bridge, sirens cutting through the air. A lane had been cleared for them, and buses stood nose to tail on the span of the bridge, passengers peering from the windows.

Had Gould tipped off the police? He was far too slight and undernourished to restrain Stephen Dexter, and I remembered how the clergyman had shaken me roughly in Joan Chang’s Beetle outside Tate Modern. Seeing Gould hovering behind him like an incompetent detective, the clergyman might well have left the shopping mall and caught a bus down the Fulham Palace Road, yielding to some atavistic urge to find sanctuary in the precincts of the bishop’s palace.

I stepped from the Range Rover, and approached a family picnicking around the tailgate of their Shogun. The parents confirmed that no one resembling Gould or Stephen Dexter had walked up the approach road to the car park in the past hour.

Entering Bishop’s Park, which lay between the palace and the Thames, I scanned the wide lawns and the wooden benches for  a distraught cleric, perhaps still carrying his carrier bag filled with Habitat tumblers. An elderly couple circled the perimeter path, buttoned up safely in the warm September weather. The V other visitor was near the embankment, a small man in a dark suit pacing between the high beeches and sycamores than grew along the river. He paused after a few steps and raised hit hands to search the topmost branches. Even across the park l could see his pale hands held against the light.

I walked along the path, hiding myself behind the elderly] couple. I recognized Gould when I was thirty feet from him.) He stood with his back to me, head craning at the swaying branches, hands clutching at the air like a devout seminary] student gazing at a rose window in a great cathedral.

Disturbed by the strolling couple, he waited until they had! passed, and then turned towards me. His bony face was lit! by the sun, a pale lantern swaying among the tree trunks.! He stared over my head, his attention fixed on a point far beyond the focus of his eyes. All the bones in his face had come forward, their sharp ridges cutting against the transparent skin, as if his skull was desperate for the light. His threadbare suit was soaked with sweat, his shirt so damp that I could see his ribs through the shabby cotton. His expression was numbed but almost ecstatic, and his eyes followed the swirling branches in a childlike way, apparently in the throes of a warning aura’ before an epileptic fit.

‘David . . .’ He spoke softly, introducing me to the trees and to the light. Behind him, the sirens keened through the traffic, as if the streets around us were in mourning.

 

A Celebrity Murder

 

the sirens sounded for many days, a melancholy tocsin that became the aural signature of west London, eclipsing the revolution at Chelsea Marina. Every newsreel unit and press photographer in the capital converged on Woodlawn Road, the residential street in Hammersmith only a few hundred yards from where I had parked near the River Cafe. The cruel murder of the young television performer pressed hard on one of the nation’s exposed nerves. The problems of the middle class, unwilling to pay their school fees and private medical bills, sank into insignificance.

A likeable blonde in her mid-thirties, the presenter was one of the most admired personalities in television. For a decade she had introduced breakfast magazine programmes, family discussion panels and childcare investigations, always ready with sensible advice and good-humoured charm. I had never seen her on screen and could never remember her name, but her death on her own doorstep prompted an outpouring of grief that reminded me of Princess Diana.

The security cameras in the King Street shopping mall showed her leaving the Habitat store soon after four o’clock. She then took the escalator and collected her Nissan Cherry from the multi-storey car park behind the mall. The supervisor ^at the exit failed to remember her, but the ticket she pushed into  the barrier machine bore her thumbprint. She drove to Road, where she lived alone in a two-storey terraced house. Her neighbours were civil servants and actors, middle-class professionals like those at Chelsea Marina, almost all at work during the day.

No one observed her murder, but her next-door neighbour, a self-employed film technician, told the police that he heard the backfire of a motorcycle exhaust at or around four thirty. Minutes later, he noticed two distressed women standing by the garden gate, pointing to the front door. He went out and found the presenter lying on her doorstep. Her white linen suit was soaked with blood, but he tried to revive her. A nearby neighbour, a midwife at Charing Cross Hospital in Fulham Palace Road, joined him and applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but was forced to confirm that she was dead.

She had been shot in the back of the head as she opened the front door, dying almost instantly. The key to the front door was still in its lock, and the police were puzzled why her killer had shot her in daylight, in full view of dozens of nearby houses, rather than follow her into the privacy of the hallway.

No one saw the killer arrive at the murder scene, or remembered a possible assailant loitering in Woodlawn Road and waiting for the victim to drive up in her car. How he managed to avoid everyone’s attention was a mystery that would never be solved.

The presenter had several male friends and was often away j for days during the location shooting of her programmes. That the killer was able to arrive just as she returned from the King Street mall suggested that the assailant was closely aware of her movements. Staff and co-workers at the BBC Television Centre in White City were carefully questioned, but no one had known of her plans for the day. The longstanding lover with whom she spent the previous night at his Netting Hill flat stated that after a morning’s shopping she had booked a manicure at her favourite Knightsbridge salon.

Once the killer had carried out the murder, he walked away _or was picked up by an accomplice in a car. Several witnesses agreed that a black Range Rover was circling the nearby streets _an hour before the shooting. A security camera in Putney High Street caught a similar Range Rover passing the local Burger King, but computer enhancement failed to yield the licence number.

Some days later, a Webley revolver was found at low tide on the exposed riverbed below Putney Bridge. The weapon, of World War II army issue, was entangled in a fishing net wrapped around a deflated rubber dinghy. Matching the metallic traces on the barrel with the bullet fragments found in the victim’s skull strongly indicated that the Webley pistol was the killer’s weapon.

The callous murder of this attractive and wholesome young woman led to a huge police operation. As a successful television celebrity, she had mastered a good-natured blandness that audiences especially prized. She had millions of admirers but no enemies. Her death was inexplicable, a random killing made all the more meaningless by her celebrity.

Three weeks after the murder I watched the funeral service on the TV set in Kay Churchill’s kitchen. Saddened like everyone else by the death, Kay held my hand across the table as the service was relayed from Brompton Oratory. She had never seen one of the victim’s programmes, and failed to recognize her photograph on the front page of the Guardian, but fame defined its own needs.

Who . . . ? Who could . . . ?’ Kay wiped the salt from her cheeks with a damp tissue. ‘Who could kill like that? Shoot down another human being . . . ?’

A maniac . . . it’s hard to imagine. At least they’ve arrested a  man.’

 

 ‘This misfit living in the next street?’ Kay threw her tissue into the sink. ‘I don’t believe it. They had to find someone. What was his motive?’

‘The police don’t say. These days, there doesn’t need to be a motive.’ I pointed to the screen. ‘There he is - behind the police van.’

The parade of famous television faces, unsure whether to smile at the crowd outside the Oratory or stare solemnly at their feet, was interrupted by a cutaway to shots of the accused being moved between police stations. A zoom lens mounted on a roof above West End Central showed him bundled from an armoured van. He was an overweight youth with lardy white arms, a blanket over his head. When he stumbled there was a glimpse of round cheeks and an unsavoury beard.

‘Grim . . .’ Kay shuddered in disgust. ‘He’s prepubescent, like a huge child. Who is he?’

‘I missed his name. His flat is around the corner from Woodlawn Road. He’s a gun enthusiast. The police found an arsenal of replica firearms. He liked photographing celebrities leaving the River Cafe.’

‘Fame . . . it’s too close, standing next to you in the checkout queue. He probably saw her getting out of her car. Some people can’t cope with the idea of fame . . .’

Kay leaned against me, gripping the remote control, ready to hurl it at the screen. The murder had shocked her deeply. The sight of the Turners’ burnt-out house across the road reminded her of the palpable presence of evil, and made her even more determined to right any injustice within her reach.

I pressed Kay’s careworn hand to my cheek, feeling a surge of affection for this passionate woman, with her hopeless dreams and careless sex. Kay had many lives — lover, incendiarist, fomenter of pocket revolutions, suburban Joan of Arc, which she struggled to control like a team of unruly mares. If I were to walk out of her life she would miss me intensely, for ten minutes. Then the next lodger would arrive and join the game f emotional snakes and ladders that led to her bedroom.

The funeral service began, a solemn ritual that played to the worst needs of television. Kay, vaguely religious but fiercely anti-clerical, switched off the set. She paced into the living room, and stared at the Turners’ scorched timbers. There was a death to be avenged, video stores to be bombed, middle-class housewives in Barnes and Wimbledon to be jolted out of their servitude.

I sat in the kitchen, with the silent screen for company. Already I suspected that I knew who had killed the television presenter. Richard Gould had hinted as much after I found him in the park at Fulham Palace. Somewhere in London a priest was sitting in a rented room, watching the service on another television set, trying to wring from his mind all memory of the meaningless murder he had committed. Had Stephen Dexter killed the young presenter in an attempt to erase his memories of Joan Chang’s death at the Tate? And had Gould, exhausted after following him from the King Street mall, stumbled onto the murder scene as the crime took place?

I remembered the hard soil under my feet in the park at Fulham Palace. I had taken Gould’s elbow and guided him away from the great trees that trapped the sky in their branches. He tripped in his cheap shoes, and I put my arm around his shoulders, feeling the damp fabric of his suit and the cold fever that burned beneath his skin. The elderly couple stopped to watch us, clearly assuming that Gould was a drug addict in the last stages of withdrawal.

Slumped in the rear seat of the Range Rover, he briefly roused himself and pointed to Putney Bridge. We left the park and turned onto Fulham Palace Road, and crossed the river in the heavy traffic. Sirens wailing, police cars sped past us towards Hammersmith. Gould slept as we drove along the Upper Richmond Road and returned to Chelsea Marina by Wandsworth Bridge. I steered him into the coffinlike elevator at the Cadogan Circle apartments, found his keys in his sodden pockets and left him outside the door of Vera Blackburn’s flat. In the empty elevator, the sweatprints of his palms glistened on the faded mirror.

Before we parted, he noticed me, his depthless eyes suddenly in focus.

‘David, be careful with Stephen Dexter.’ He gripped my hands, trying to wake me from a deep sleep. ‘No police. He’ll kill, David. He’ll kill again

This was the last I saw of Richard Gould. He and Vera left Chelsea Marina that evening. When I returned to Kay’s house the entire population of Grosvenor Place stood silently in the street, watching as two fire engines doused the embers that remained of the Turner home. Already the first reports of a murder in Hammersmith were coming through on the firemen’s radios. On hearing who the victim was, everyone drifted away, as if there was some unconscious connection between the murder and the events at Chelsea Marina.

The next day the police and bailiffs withdrew from Grosvenor Place. Outside the Cadogan Circle apartments a neighbour told me that Gould and Vera had driven away in the Citroen estate. I said nothing to Kay, but I assumed that Gould had seen Dexter shoot his victim. Too late to save the young woman, he followed the deranged clergyman to Fulham Palace, where Dexter had thrown the revolver into the Thames and disappeared into the infinite space of Greater London, a terrain beyond all maps.

I was tempted, briefly, to go to the police, using Henry Kendall to arrange a meeting with a senior officer at Scotland Yard. But my friendship with Stephen Dexter, the sightings of the Range Rover near Woodlawn Road and in Putney High street our meeting at the Tate, would soon turn me into the chief accomplice of this grounded priest and pilot. Given time Dexter’s conscience would rally him, and he would turn himself in, ready to face the coming decades in Broadmoor.

Soon afterwards, a flabby loner and celebrity stalker was charged with the murder of the television presenter. He said nothing to the magistrate who committed him for trial, a vacuum of a human being who seemed almost brain-dead in his passivity. His star-struck camera, his obsessive collecting of replica guns, and a personality so blank that no one would have noticed him outside the fatal doorstep, together hinted at an extreme form of Asperger’s syndrome.

His arrest took days to leave the headlines. Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous was itself an incitement to anger and revenge, playing on the uneasy dreams of a submerged world, a dark iceberg of impotence and hostility.

But I was thinking of Richard Gould, shivering and exhausted under the trees in Bishop’s Park. I thought of the dying children in the Bedfont hospice, and the Down’s teenagers he had helped to take on holiday, and his attempt to find a desperate meaning in nature’s failings. The world had retreated from Stephen Dexter, but it rushed towards Richard Gould with all the hunger of space and time.

 

 

A Wife’s Concern

 

MEANWHILE, SMALLER CONFRONTATIONS loomed. Quietly and stealthily, the barricades were going up in Chelsea Marina. The lull in police activity after the Hammersmith murder had given the residents time to organize their defences. The bailiffs’ attempt to seize the Turners’ house was a threat to every property on the estate. As in the past, we all agreed, the police were doing the dirty work for a ruthless venture capitalism that perpetuated the class system in order to divide the opposition and preserve its own privileges.

Crossing Cadogan Circle on my way to Vera Blackburn’s apartment, I noticed that almost every avenue was now blocked by residents’ cars, leaving a narrow space for traffic that could quickly be sealed. Banners hung from dozens of balconies, sheets of best Egyptian cotton from Peter Jones, gladly sac­rificed for the revolution.

‘Visit Chelsea marina - your nearest poorhouse.’

‘You can’t repossess the soul.’

 ‘Welcome to London’s newest sink estate.’

‘Freedom has no barcode.’

Vandalized parking meters lined the kerbs. I passed a metal skip into which a family had despatched their tribal totems - school blazers and jodhpurs, Elizabeth David’s cookbooks, guides to the Lot and Auvergne, a set of croquet mallets.

I was impressed by the self-sacrifice of a threatened salariat, but it belonged to the past. I was thinking only of Richard Gould as the lift carried me to Vera’s third-floor flat. I called in each afternoon, hoping they had returned, pressing the doorbell long enough for Vera’s temper to snap. My chief fear _was that Gould, still feverish and exhausted, might confess to the Hammersmith murder in a selfless attempt to save Stephen Dexter.

As I stepped from the lift I saw that Vera’s door was open. I crossed the landing and peered into the empty lounge. Someone had disturbed the air, and the sunlight caught a faint drift of motes carried by the dust.

‘Richard . . . ? Dr Gould . . . ?’

I walked into the lounge, staring at the discarded suitcases and a pile of medical journals on the sofa. Then I heard a distinctive, blind man’s tapping from the bedroom. The sounds were distant but familiar, echoes from a never-forgotten past.

‘Sally?’

She stood by the bedroom door, blonde hair over the collar of her tweed coat, gloved hands gripping her walking sticks. She had made an effort to dress down for her visit to Chelsea Marina, as if she were a member of a delegation of civic worthies inspecting a condemned tenement. Her groomed hair, modest but expensive make-up and air of confidence made me realize how far the residents of Chelsea Marina had declined.

A diet of indignation and insecurity had turned us into more of an underclass than we realized. I was fond of Kay, but compared to Sally the former film lecturer was an intel­lectual fishwife, a Bloomsbury slattern. Without thinking, I turned to the mirror above the leather sofa and saw myself, shifty and shabby, with badly shaven cheeks and self-cut hair.

‘David . . . ?’ Surprised to find me, Sally moved across the airless room, unsure that I was her husband. ‘Are you living here now?’

 

‘It belongs to friends. I’m staying with Kay Churchill - she has one or two lodgers.’

‘Kay?’ Sally nodded to herself, eyes scanning my sallow cheeks with wifely concern. ‘Did you take the lift?’

‘Why?’

‘You look tired. Absolutely exhausted.’ She smiled with unfeigned warmth, the sun in her hair. ‘It’s good to see you, David.’

Briefly, we embraced. I was glad of the affection I felt for her. I missed her schoolgirl contrariness and her sidelong glances at the world. It seemed as if I was meeting an old and well-liked friend, someone I had first encountered on a safari holiday. We had camped together on the slopes of a rich man’s hill, shared an insulated tent and forded the choppy stream of her illness. Our marriage belonged to an adventure playground where real danger and real possibility never existed. The revolution at Chelsea Marina was against more than ground rents and maintenance charges.

Unsure that we were alone, I stepped past Sally to the bedroom door. An empty suitcase lay on the black silk coverlet. In the wardrobe a rack of mannish suits hung skewed from the rail.

‘There’s no one there,’ Sally told me. ‘I had a sniff round. People’s bedrooms are such a giveaway.’

‘What did you find?’

‘Nothing much. They’re rather odd - Dr Gould and this Vera woman.’ She frowned at the black curtains. ‘Are they into S&M?

‘I didn’t ask.’ Trying to take charge, I said: ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

‘I wrote out a cheque for a mother with a charity box — some architect’s wife with a couple of kids to feed. When she saw my name she said you used to run errands for Dr Gould.’

‘Right. Did you come alone?’

‘Henry drove me. He’s parking the car, somewhere off the King’s Road. You people at Chelsea Marina make him _nervous.’

‘I bet we do. How is he?’

‘Same as ever.’ She dusted the sofa and sat down, glancing _at one of the medical journals. ‘That’s the trouble with Henry — he’s always the same as ever. What about you, David?’

‘Busy.’ I watched her stow the walking sticks. Their reappearance meant that Henry Kendall’s days were numbered. ‘There’s a lot going on.’

‘I know. It’s all rather frightening. Direct action isn’t really your thing.’

‘Is that why you’re here - to rescue me?’

‘Before it’s too late. We’re all worried for you, David. You resigned from the Institute.’

‘I wasn’t spending any time there. It didn’t seem fair to Professor Arnold.’

‘Daddy says he’ll increase your retainer, give you a chance to do research, or write a book.’

‘More useless activity. Thank him for me, but it’s what I was trying to get away from. I’m too involved here.’

‘With this revolution? How serious is it?’

‘Very serious. Wait till you need a dentist or a solicitor and they’re all out on the picket line. Things are starting to go bang.’

‘I know.’ Sally shuddered, then opened her compact to check that the emotion had not distorted her make-up. ‘We heard the explosion two nights ago. The Peter Pan statue. Anything to do with you?’

‘Nothing. Sally, I hate violence.’

‘You’re drawn to it, though. The Heathrow bomb - it wasn’t just Laura. That bomb touched something off. Is Peter Pan such a threat?’

 

‘In a way. J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne, brain-rotting senti­mentality that saps the middle-class will. We’re trying to do something about it.’

‘By letting off a bomb? That’s even more childish. Henry says that a lot of people here are going to prison.’

‘Probably true. They’re serious, though. They’re ready to give up their jobs and lose their houses.’

‘A shame.’ She reached out to me, mustering a bleak smile. ‘You’ve still got your house. You’ll come home, David, when you’ve worked everything out.’

‘I will.’

I sat on the sofa and took her hands, surprised by how ner­vous she seemed. I was glad to be with her again, but St John’s Wood was a long way from Chelsea Marina. I had changed. The guinea pigs had lured the experimenter into the maze.

I said: ‘I’m glad you came. Did the architect’s wife give you this flat’s number?’

‘No. Gould told me.’

‘What?’ I felt a shift in the air, a cold front moving across the airless room. ‘When was this?’

‘Yesterday. He knocked on the front door. A strange little man. Very pale and intense. I recognized him from the picture on his website.’

‘Gould? What did he want?’

‘Relax.’ She leaned against my shoulder. ‘I can see why he has such a hold on you. He’s focused on some idee fixe, and nothing else matters. He doesn’t care about himself, and that really appeals to you. In men, anyway. You rather like selfish women.’

‘Did you let him in?’

‘Of course. He looked so hungry, I thought he was going to faint. He stood there swaying, eyes miles away, as if I was some kind of vision.’

‘You are. And then?’

‘I asked him in. I knew he was a friend of yours. He wolfed down some Stilton and a glass of wine. This girlfriend, Vera, does a pretty awful job of looking after him. The poor man _was starving.’

‘She prefers him like that. It keeps him on his toes. What did he talk about?’

‘Nothing. He looked at me in a very odd way. I almost had the feeling that he wanted to rape me. Be careful, David. He could be dangerous.’

‘He is.’ I stood up and paced the living room. Gould’s motives for calling on Sally were hard to read: some kind of threat, or even a suspicion that I was sheltering Stephen Dexter. The activists at Chelsea Marina were deeply possessive, and resentful of outside loyalties.

Glancing through the window, I noticed Henry Kendall walking down Beaufort Avenue from the gatehouse. Like all professional visitors to the estate, he seemed embarrassed by the protest banners and vandalized parking meters. Henry was slumming, ready to bestow his patronizing concern on a fellow professional who had fallen on unhappy times.

‘David? Is there a problem?’

‘Yes. Your boyfriend. I can’t cope with all that kindly forbearance.’ I bent down and kissed her unlined forehead. ‘I’ll come home in a couple of days. Watch out for Richard Gould. Don’t open the door to him.’

‘Why not?’

‘These are passionate days. The police might think you helped to blow up Peter Pan.’

‘That was silly. What’s the matter with you people?’

‘Nothing. But tempers are high. One or two hotheads want to blow up Hodge’s statue outside Johnson’s house.’

‘God ... I hope you stopped them.’

‘It was a close thing. I persuaded them not to. Any nation that puts up a statue to a writer’s cat can’t be all bad.’

 

I helped Sally from the sofa, and she followed me to the door, her sticks forgotten. In her mind, the pointlessness of the Chelsea Marina protests eased her resentment, and reconciled her to a capricious world.

‘David, tell me . . .’ She waited as I drummed the elevator button. ‘Is Dr Gould in danger?’

‘No. Why?’

‘He was holding something inside his jacket. He had a peculiar smell and I didn’t want to get too close. But I think it was a gun . . .’

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