Read Kingdom Come for Free Online Page B

foot tapped restlessly on the floor.
    We walked through to the reception area. The desk was unattended, and a young black woman sat on a bench, her daughter asleep across her lap. Mrs Christie was scarcely aware of the child, her eyes above bruised cheeks staring at the hunting scenes on the walls. One lapel of her jacket had been torn from its seams, and her hand fretted over the loose fabric, trying to hold it in place. Her face had a beaten but still determined set. She had been punched and spat upon by the crowd, but some inner conviction kept her going. Watching her, it occurred to me that she believed her husband was innocent.
    Behind the reception desk a narrow passage led to a pantry. Sergeant Mary Falconer stood by a gas element, pouring warm milk from a saucepan into two cups.
    ‘Mr Pearson . . .’ Fairfax beckoned me to the door, impatient for me to leave. ‘You’ll drive back to London tonight?’
    ‘If I can find the way. Brooklands seems to be off all the maps . . .’ I looked back at Sergeant Falconer, who was wiping spilled milk from the gas ring, trying to fit her into the larger events that had brought me to this curious town, and this even stranger firm of solicitors. I hailed an approaching taxi, and as it stopped I shook Fairfax’s hand. Before he could turn away, I said: ‘Mrs Christie—she’s sitting in there . . . ?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mrs Christie. The wife of the man who killed my father. You’re not representing her?’
    ‘No, no.’ Fairfax signalled to the taxi driver. ‘Someone needs to look after her. She and the child are as much victims of all this as you are.’
    ‘Right.’ I walked down the steps and then turned to look up at Fairfax. ‘One last question. Did Duncan Christie shoot my father?’
    Fairfax avoided my eyes and stared hard at the dome. ‘I’m afraid so. It certainly looks like it . . .’
    It was the only thing that Geoffrey Fairfax had said that I was ready to take at face value.

    THE METRO-CENTRE withdrew behind me as I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point. ‘Metro-Centre South Gate . . . West Surrey Retail Park . . . Brooklands Convention Centre . . . Metro-Centre North Gate . . .’
    I was lost, and the AA guide I scanned at a deserted crossroads made sure that I was completely adrift. I passed tracts of middle-income housing, all-night superstores surrounded by acres of brightly lit parking. I thought of my confused day at Brooklands, a catalogue of missed arrivals. A father I had hardly known was dead, and the place of his last days was covering its tracks and rearranging itself into a maze.
    I crossed the perimeter of the old Brooklands racing circuit. Giant floes of black concrete emerged from the darkness, a geometry of shadows and memories, a stone dream that would never awake. I could almost smell the exhaust drifting on the mist, and hear the roar of deep-chested engines, a vision of speed that long predated the shotgun and jodhpur fantasies of Geoffrey Fairfax and his squadrons of heavy hunters.
    I opened the window to catch the sounds in my head, the rumble and burble of exhaust. But another noise drummed across the night air, coming from a football stadium half a mile away. Lighting arrays rose into the night sky, blurred by the heat and breathy vapour of the crowd.
    I left the racetrack at the next turning, and joined the traffic moving past the stadium. The match had ended, and the crowd was spilling into the nearby streets. Men and women in St George’s shirts emerged from the exits and searched for their parked cars. High above the stadium, the electronic display screens faced each other at opposite ends of the ground, as the giant image of the match commentator addressed himself across the empty stands. Fragments of his voice boomed above the traffic