Millennium People

‘Good. By the way, Laura’s handbag…?’

‘It’s in my car. I’ll give it to you.’

‘Fair enough. Did you open it?’

‘No.’

‘I know the feeling. There are some secrets that none of us can face.’

I watched him drive off, leaving me alone with Tulloch. Wisps of smoke rose from the crematorium chimney while the combustion chamber warmed to its fiercest temperature. There was a puff of darker smoke, as if part of Laura had freed itself from the drag-anchor of her body – perhaps a hand that had once caressed me, or the soft foot that would touch mine while she slept. I watched the smoke rising, a series of bursts as if this dead woman was signalling to me. Under my dark suit my shirt was drenched with sweat. Her death had freed me from all resentments, all pain of memory. I remembered the quirky young woman I had met in the bar at the National Film Theatre, and invited to a late-night screening of Antonioni’s Passenger.

Major Tulloch was watching me from his car, while the smoke rose rapidly into the sky. I resented the presence of this thuggish policeman, sitting in his slaughterman’s coat as my wife’s body dispersed into the sky. But he knew that I needed to find her killer, hunting down the secret love of Laura’s life, and my last rival.

5 Confrontation at Olympia (#ulink_0e047d7c-6f27-5d85-a40c-65dad943cd57)

AROUND ME EVERYONE was calm, a sure sign that the moment of crisis had come. Cheered by the arrival of a television camera crew, the demonstrators were resolute, their confidence boosted by the sense that a larger audience was sharing their indignation. They waved their hand-lettered placards and jeered good-humouredly at the visitors entering the Olympia exhibition. But the police seemed bored, usually an omen of violent action. Already they were tired of this pointless protest, one group of cat lovers ranged against another.

Locking arms with two middle-aged women from Wimbledon, I stood in the front row of demonstrators in Hammersmith Road. As the traffic cleared, we surged across the eastbound lane towards the watching police, like an advancing chorus in an agit-prop musical. Behind me, a young woman held aloft a banner.

‘A CAT IN HELL’S CHANCE? STOP BREEDING NOW!’

Leaning back, I tried to restrain my Wimbledon partners from colliding into the nearest group of constables. By now, two months after Laura’s funeral, I was a veteran of a dozen demos. I knew that however difficult it was to read the shifts in crowd psychology, the mood of the police was impossible to predict. In a few seconds, with the departure of a radio van or the arrival of a senior officer, friendly banter could turn into outright hostility. After a flurry of concealed blows, we would be forced to withdraw, leaving some grey-haired man on the pavement with a broken placard and a bloody nose.

‘Moggie, moggie, moggie…out, out, out!’

We surged across the road again, fists drumming on the roof of a taxi bringing more visitors to the cat show. As we reached the line of surly constables I noticed once again how huge the police seemed when one stepped up to them, and how they construed almost any behaviour as threatening. Pushed forward by the scrum of demonstrators, I brushed against a small policewoman dwarfed by her male colleagues. She was looking over my shoulder, quite unfrightened by the noisy crowd. Barely changing her stance, she kicked me twice in the right shin.

‘Mr Markham? Are you all right? Lean on me…’

The young woman with the ‘CAT IN HELL’S CHANCE’ banner gripped me around the waist. Bent double in the scrum of police and protesters, I joined the retreat across Hammersmith Road, limping and hopping on one leg.

‘That was vicious. Totally unprovoked. Mr Markham, can you breathe?’

Likeable and intense, Angela was a computer programmer in Kingston with a husband and two children. We had teamed up soon after our arrival at Olympia, bought tickets and carried out a reconnaissance of the vast cat show, with its five hundred exhibitors and its population of the world’s most pampered pets.

I gripped her hand and sat on the entrance steps of a block of mansion flats. Rolling up my trousers, I touched the huge blood-bruises already forming.

‘I’ll walk again. I think…’ I pointed to the policewoman, now efficiently on traffic duty, moving the lines of waiting cars towards Kensington and Hammersmith Broadway. ‘She was nasty. I hate to imagine what’s she’s like in bed.’

‘Unspeakable. Don’t even think about it.’ Angela stared across the road with narrowed eyes and all a suburbanite’s unlimited capacity for moral outrage. Walking around the exhibition two hours earlier, I was impressed by her unswerving commitment to the welfare of these luxurious pets. The protest rallies I had recently attended against globalization, nuclear power and the World Bank were violent but well thought out. By contrast, this demonstration against the Olympia cat show seemed endearingly Quixotic in its detachment from reality. I tried to point this out to Angela as we strolled along the lines of cages.

‘Angela, they look so happy…’ I gestured at the exquisite creatures – Persians, Korats and Russian blues, Burmese and colourpoint short-hairs, drowsing on their immaculate straw, coats puffed and gleaming after their shampoos and sets. ‘They’re wonderfully cared for. We’re trying to rescue them from heaven.’

Angela never varied her step. ‘How do you know?’

‘Just watch them.’ We stopped in front of a row of Abyssinians so deeply immersed in the luxury of being themselves that they barely noticed the admiring crowds. ‘They’re not exactly unhappy. They’d be prowling around, trying to get out of the cages.’

‘They’re drugged.’ Angela’s brows knotted. ‘Mr Markham, no living creature should be caged. This isn’t a cat show, it’s a concentration camp.’

‘Still, they are rather gorgeous.’

‘They’re bred for death, not life. The rest of the litter are drowned at birth. It’s a vicious eugenic experiment, the sort of thing Dr Mengele got up to. Think about that, Mr Markham.’

‘I do, Angela…’

We completed our circuit of the upper gallery. Angela noted the exits, the ancient elevators and stairs, the fire escapes and surveillance cameras. The ground floor was dominated by manufacturers’ stands, displays of health tonics for cats, toys and climbing frames, cosmetics and grooming kits. Every worldly pleasure a cat could experience was lavishly provided.

But logic was not the strongest suit of the protest movements, as I had found during the past two months. On the day after Laura’s funeral I began to scan the listings magazines and internet sites for details of the more extreme protest rallies, searching for fringe groups with a taste for violence. One of these fanatical sects, frustrated by its failure to puncture the soft underbelly of bourgeois life, might have set off the Heathrow bomb.

I decided not to contact Major Tulloch and the Home Office, who would have an agenda of their own and write off the Heathrow atrocity when it no longer served their purpose. The police, Henry Kendall told me, were making little progress in their investigation. They now discounted the holdall with its audio-cassette stuffed into the lavatory air vent near the Terminal 2 carousel. The muddled threats about Third-World tourism belonged to the deluded mind-set of some backpacker returning from Goa or Kathmandu, head clouded by pot and amphetamines.

The forensic teams had combed through every fragment of glass, metal and plastic. Curiously, they found no trace of a barometric device designed to set off a mid-air explosion. The bomb had been furnished with an acid-capsule trigger, probably primed no more than five minutes before the explosion. Not only had Laura’s death been meaningless, but the killer was almost certainly among the fleeing crowd we had watched on television.

Protest movements, sane and insane, sensible and absurd, touched almost every aspect of life in London, a vast web of demonstrations that tapped a desperate need for a more meaningful world. There was scarcely a human activity that was not the target of a concerned group ready to spend its weekends picketing laboratories, merchant banks and nuclear-fuel depots, trudging up muddy lanes to defend a badger sett, lying across a motorway to halt the reviled race enemy of all demonstrators, the internal combustion engine.

Far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country’s civic traditions, along with the Lord Mayor’s parade, Ascot week and Henley Regatta. At times, as I joined a demonstration against animal experiments or Third-World debt, I sensed that a primitive religion was being born, a faith in search of a god to worship. Congregations roamed the streets, hungry for a charismatic figure who would emerge sooner or later from the wilderness of a suburban shopping mall and scent a promising wind of passion and credulity.

Sally was my field researcher, scanning the net for advance news of obscure protest rallies, and only too keen to help. Both of us had been shaken by Laura’s death, Sally more than I expected. Using her sticks again, she moved around the house with the same wristy determination she had shown in the physiotherapy unit at St Mary’s where I had first courted her. She was returning to the period of wounded time when she was obsessed with Frida Kahlo and their shared tram accidents. If only for Sally’s sake, I needed to crack the conundrum of Laura’s death.

From the backs of halls, and behind the barricades at protest meetings, I searched the rows of determined faces for a genuinely disturbed mind, some deranged loner eager to live out a dream of violence. But in fact almost all the demonstrators were good-humoured members of the middle class – level-headed students and health-care professionals, doctors’ widows and grandmothers working on Open University degree courses. Some prick of conscience, some long-dormant commitment to principle, brought them out into the cold and rain.

The only frightening people I met were the police and television crews. The police were morose and unpredictable, paranoid about any challenge to their authority. The television reporters were little more than agents provocateurs, forever trying to propel the peaceful protests into violent action. Neutrality was the most confrontational stance of all, while the nearest I came to an exponent of political violence was Angela, the Kingston housewife and cat lover.

As I sat on the steps of the mansion block, she produced antiseptic spray and surgical lint from her jacket. She cleaned my wounds and sprayed the stinging vapour over the weals. All the while she kept a baleful eye on the policewoman, now threatening to arrest two cyclists who had stopped to observe the demo.

‘Feel better?’ Angela flexed my knee. ‘I’d visit your doctor pronto.’

‘I’m fine. I ought to bring a complaint, but I didn’t see her move.’

‘You never do.’

I pointed to the medical kit. ‘You were expecting trouble?’

‘Of course. People feel very strongly.’

‘For the cats?’

‘They’re political prisoners. Start experimenting on animals and human beings will be next.’ She smiled with surprising sweetness and kissed my forehead, a field decoration for a valiant trooper. With a wave, she left me to look after myself.

Touched by her warmth, I watched the protesters regroup and make a second attempt to block the exhibition hall’s entrance foyer and ticket office. Placards rose into the air, and a pole carried a small cage occupied by a stuffed marmalade cat, paws handcuffed through the bars. A stream of yellow plastic confetti struck the policewoman, dribbling across her uniform jacket. Brushing the sticky threads from her chin, she stepped into the group of demonstrators and tried to seize the aerosol can from a young man in a tiger mask.

An ugly struggle broke out, blocking the traffic in Hammersmith Road, a series of running scuffles that left half a dozen middle-aged protesters sitting stunned beside the wheels of stalled taxis. But I was watching Angela as she crossed the road, hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. She ignored the demonstrators wrestling with the police, and held the arm of a ponytailed man who stepped from the pavement to join her.

I stood up and made my way towards the exhibition hall, walking through the startled tourists and curious passers-by who were milling about in the centre of the road. Angela and her ponytailed companion moved through the entrance foyer, arms around each other’s waists, like lovers immersed in their own world.

I was following them past the ticket office when I heard a thunderflash explode in the exhibition hall. Startled by the harsh air burst, and the re-echo of slammed doors, the visitors around me flinched and ducked behind each other. A second thunderflash detonated in the overhead gallery, lighting up the mirrors in the antique lifts. An elderly couple in front of me stumbled into a pyramid of jewelled flea collars, throwing it to the floor in a gaudy sprawl.

A violent struggle was taking place among the cages on the main floor. Angela and the ponytailed man forced their way through the confused breeders and wrenched the doors off the display hutches. I guessed that a group of infiltrators had been waiting for the police to be distracted by the commotion in Hammersmith Road, giving them time to carry out their action.