Millennium People

I limped after Angela, aware that she would be no match for the outraged breeders. A police sergeant and two constables overtook me through the crowd, ducking their heads as a third thunderflash exploded inside a sales pavilion filled with quilted baskets.

A large cat, a sleekly groomed Maine Coon, streaked towards us, paused to get its bearings in the forest floor of human legs, and darted between the sergeant’s boots. The sight of this liberated creature sent a spasm of rage through the onlookers. One of the constables blundered into me, pushed me aside and ran after Angela. Her ponytailed companion brandished a can of tear gas, holding back a circle of breeders while Angela snapped the cage locks with a pair of cutters.

The sergeant hurled Angela’s colleague aside, struck the cutters from her hands and seized her shoulders from behind. He lifted her into the air like a child and threw her at his feet among the sawdust and scattered rosettes. As he lifted her again, ready to hurl this small and stunned woman to the cement floor, I ran forward and gripped his arm.

Less than a minute later I was lying on the floor, my face in the sawdust, hands cuffed behind me. I had been viciously kicked by the angry breeders, shouting down my pleas that I was defending a Kingston housewife, cat lover and mother of two.

I rolled onto my back, as the sirens sounded in Hammersmith Road and the Olympia loudspeakers urged visitors to remain calm. The protest had ended and the last cordite vapour from the thunderflashes drifted under the ceiling lights. Breeders straightened their cages and comforted their ruffled pets, and a saleswoman rebuilt the pyramid of flea collars. Angela and the ponytailed man had slipped away, but the police bundled several handcuffed demonstrators towards the exit.

Two police officers lifted me to my feet. The younger, a black constable baffled by the huge menagerie of cats and the attention lavished on them, dusted the straw from my jacket. He waited as I tried to breathe through my bruised ribs.

‘You have something against cats?’ he asked.

‘Just against cages.’

‘Too bad. You’re going into one.’

I inhaled deeply, looking at the overhead lights. I realized that a second odour had replaced the tang of cordite. As the thunderflashes exploded, a thousand terrified creatures had joined in a collective act of panic, and the exhibition hall was filled with the potent stench of feline urine.

6 Rescue (#ulink_fafaf553-4f2b-5954-92a4-b72d5606ff83)

A LESS BRACING scent, the odour of the guilty and unwashed, hung over the magistrates’ court in Hammersmith Grove. I waited in the back row of the public seats, trying to hear the bench’s verdict on a mother of three accused of soliciting outside Queen’s Tennis Club. She was a depressed woman in her early forties, barely literate and in desperate need of remedial care. Her mumbled plea was drowned by the ceaseless activity in the court as solicitors, accused, police officers, ushers and witnesses roamed up and down the aisles, a cast straight from the pages of Lewis Carroll. What was being dispensed was not justice but a series of tired compromises with the inevitable, the calls of a harassed referee at a chaotic football match.

I had been fined £100 and bound over to keep the peace. My solicitor’s claim that I was an innocent visitor to Olympia who had tried to defend a woman demonstrator from unprovoked police violence was ignored by the magistrates. The guilt of everyone brought before the court – petty thieves, drink drivers, animal rights protesters – was taken for granted. Only contrition carried the slightest weight. My solicitor rattled off my professional qualifications, lack of a criminal record and good standing in the community. But a police sergeant I had never seen before testified that I featured in numerous surveillance films and frequently attended violent street demonstrations.

The magistrates stared at me darkly, assuming that I was one of those middle-class professionals who was a traitor to the civil order and deserved the sharpest of short, sharp shocks. Before sentence I explained that I was searching for the murderers of my first wife, at which point the chief magistrate closed his eyes.

‘At a cat show?’

Afterwards my solicitor offered me a lift to central London, but to his relief I declined. I needed to find somewhere to rest, even in the bedlam of the magistrates’ court. The vicious kicks that the cat lovers had aimed at my chest and genitals three days earlier, and rough handling in the police van, had left me with badly bruised arms and ribs, and a swollen testicle that startled Sally. Standing in the dock was deeply embarrassing, but I was too exhausted to sense any real shame. Many of the patients treated at the Adler felt a vast sourceless guilt, but none of those convicted by the magistrates showed the slightest remorse. Justice achieved nothing, wasted police time and trivialized itself.

I rested on the punitive wooden pew, as the court heard a plea that the next case be referred to a jury trial. A confident woman in a tailored suit stood before the bench, gesturing in a theatrical way with a sheaf of documents in her hand. Behind her, standing at the altar table that served as a dock, were the accused, a young Chinese woman with black bangs and a combative expression, and an uneasy clergyman in dog collar and motorcycle jacket, eyes lowered over unshaven cheeks. Together they were charged with a breach of the peace in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping mall, causing damage estimated at £27.

I had seen the group on the steps of the courthouse when I arrived, and assumed that the well-dressed woman was their lawyer. She strode up and down before the magistrates, now and then pausing to give these three worthies time to catch up with her. She swung on a high heel, ash-grey hair swirling around her shoulders, showing off her hips to the attentive court, and confident enough of her good looks to wear her glasses on the tip of her nose.

Intrigued by her command of the stage, I wished I had asked her to represent me. People in the public benches were already laughing at her sallies, and she played up to the applause like a skilled actress. When the chief magistrate dismissed her plea for a jury trial she threw aside her papers and strode to the bench in an almost threatening way. A policeman restrained her and led her back to the dock, where she stood defiantly with the Chinese girl and the downcast clergyman.

So this spirited advocate was not a solicitor but one of the accused. She stared defiantly at the magistrates, aware that her moment was over. She took off her glasses in a petulant way, like a child separated from her toy. I guessed that she and her fellow-accused were part of some evangelical group, a cranky New Age cult trying to perform a stone-age solstice ritual in the atrium of a shopping mall.

I made my way out of the courtroom, keen to get back to sanity, Sally and my work at the Institute. Sally had agreed not to attend the hearing, saving me any further embarrassment. The search for Laura’s killers would have to take some other course, or be left to the police and the antiterrorist units.

I eased myself through the crowd of relatives and witnesses in the lobby, conscious of the unpleasant scent that rose from my shirt, a medley of sweat and guilt. In front of me was a uniformed chauffeur who had testified against his boss, a local businessman convicted of kerb-crawling. He turned suddenly and collided into me, his elbow catching my chest, then gripped my arms in apology and plunged away through the crowd.

A rush of pain tore at my breastbone, as if my bruised ribs had been opened to the air. Barely able to breathe, I stepped into the daylight of Hammersmith Grove, and tried to flag down a passing taxi, but the effort of raising my arm left me winded. I leaned against the stone lion on the balustrade, and the policeman on duty waved me away from the courthouse steps as if I were a tottering wino.

I stepped into the crowded lunch hour, filled with office staff heading for the sandwich bars. All the air in the street had vanished. I was about to faint, and had the desperate notion that if I lay on the pavement someone would think that I was dying and call an ambulance.

Hands on my knees, I rested against a parked car, and managed to draw a little air into my lungs. Then a woman’s arm gripped me around the waist. Resting against her hip, I could smell a heady blend of perfume and woollen suiting, overlaid by perspiration brought on by sheer indignation, an unsettling aura that made me look up at her.

‘Mr Markham? I think you could use some help. You’re not drunk?’

‘Not yet. I can’t breathe…’

I stared into the strong face of the woman who had harangued the magistrates. She was watching me with genuine concern, but also an element of calculation, one hand on the mobile phone in her bag, as if I were a possible recruit to her evangelical cell.

‘Now, try to stand.’ She propped me against the car, and waved cheerily to the watching constable. ‘I’m parked somewhere here, if the car hasn’t been stolen. Police courts create their own crime waves. You look awful – what happened to you?’

‘I bruised a rib,’ I explained. ‘Someone kicked me.’

‘At Olympia? A police boot, I bet.’

‘Cat lovers. They’re very violent.’

‘Really? What were you doing to the poor mogs?’ Almost carrying me, she searched the lines of parked cars. ‘Let’s get you somewhere safe. I know a doctor who can look at you. Believe me, nothing brings out violence like a peaceful demonstration.’

7 Odd Man Out (#ulink_e76a48e2-8d0f-5143-ace6-593fa09a6847)

STRONG HANDS STEERED my head from the car and helped me towards a front door beside a bay window covered with protest stickers. Kay Churchill, the woman who had come to my aid, put her shoulder to the door and forced it open, as if leading a police raid. I assumed that we were breaking into an unoccupied house somewhere in Chelsea, but she strode confidently into the hall and tossed her car keys onto the coat stand. She sniffed the air, clearly unsure whether she liked her own body scent, and beckoned me to follow her.

Framed film posters hung in the living room, scowling samurai from a Kurosawa epic, a screaming woman from Battleship Potemkin. Kay lifted a pile of scripts from a leather armchair and eased me among the cushions, waiting with an encouraging smile until I started to breathe. Eager to care for a fellow demonstrator who had been brutalized by the police, she found a small bottle of whisky among the scripts and produced a tumbler from her desk drawer. She nodded approvingly as I inhaled the heady vapour.

‘Poor man – you needed that. Those bastards really had a go.’

‘It’s kind of you…’ I leaned back, trying not to breathe. ‘If you ring my wife, she’ll come and collect me.’

‘Let’s get the doctor here first. I’m not sure your wife ought to see you now.’ She leaned forward. ‘Mr Markham? Still there?’

‘Right. You know my name?’

‘I heard the clerk call you.’ She sat on the arm of the settee, tight skirt exposing her thighs. She was generous and likeable, if overly self-conscious, and used to being the centre of attention. For all her friendliness, she was curious about me, as if I failed somehow to convince her. During the journey from the magistrates’ court she drove with one hand on the wheel of her Polo, the other reaching between the front seats to hold my shoulder, checking that I was still alive. After introducing herself, she kept a close eye on the rear-view mirror.

‘The clerk?’ I sipped the sharp whisky. ‘The court was a madhouse. Whatever they dish out there, it isn’t justice.’

‘You didn’t do too badly. Criminal damage, setting off explosives, assaulting the police? Even for a first offence, a fine was pretty lenient.’

‘I can’t explain it. Believe me, I don’t work for the security services.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ She nodded to herself, giving me the benefit of the doubt. ‘Still, we can’t be too careful. Our ancient democracy has its eyes and ears everywhere – cameras in teapots, microphones behind the chintz. Every time you take a pee some security man at MI5 is making a note of your manhood. We all do it. Those old togs you’re wearing – I take it they’re your disguise?’

‘In a way.’ I tried to straighten the lapels of the shiny herringbone suit. ‘I bought it from our gardener. I didn’t want to look too…’

‘Middle class?’

‘We’re supposed to know better. Anyway, we’re deeply unfashionable now. People think we need a good kicking.’

‘We do.’ She spoke matter-of-factly, as if confirming a change in the weather. ‘Your solicitor gave the game away. David Markham, consultant psychologist to Unilever and BP. Now you’re fighting with the police and trying to change the world. You’re lucky you weren’t locked up.’

‘And what about you? The Chinese girl and the clergyman?’