Vicious Circle

“—in what has rapidly turned into a siege situation.” Finally! The tone as much as the words told me that I’d found what I was looking for. I stopped the channel search, again with a fair bit of fumbling, and turned up the volume. I also switched on the back wipers and the hazard lights along the way, but this was no time to worry about fine details. A man’s voice, solemn but with an undertone of excitement, blared out of the speakers, the car’s crummy sound system giving him a tinny echo. “It’s thought that there could be as many as twenty people still inside the shopping center, but we don’t have any idea as yet how many of them are being held against their will, or even who their attackers are. The fires are mostly out now, and the immediate danger is passed, but these armed men and women have issued no demands and given no indication of what their agenda is. The earlier destruction seemed almost random, and from the sounds we can hear it’s still going on inside the center. Only five minutes ago, an exercise machine came flying through a window on the upper level and fell onto a police car parked on the street below. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it’s a very tense situation here and there’s little prospect of it being resolved anytime soon.”

A sudden absence of street sounds in the background made it clear that we’d gone back to the studio, as a second voice, female this time but with the same titillated solemnity, took up the story—or rather, hijacked it away into rarefied realms of speculation about terrorist cells and soft economic targets. I tuned it out. This wasn’t about terrorism, I felt that in my guts: it was about Nicky’s bell-shaped curve. And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you’re not going to like the answer.

My phone went off and I took it in case it was Pen, wanting to know where the hell I’d scooted off to in such a hurry. But it wasn’t.

“Hey,” said Nicky. “Catch you at a bad moment?”

The Civic was an automatic: I could manage with just the one hand, but I had enough to concentrate on without shooting the breeze with Nicky on top of it all.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

“Sure. You watching TV?”

“I was. Now I’m listening to the radio.”

“Interesting times, eh? Call me when you’ve got a moment. But make it quick. This shit you need to hear. Actually don’t call me, because I’m going out to the Ice-Maker’s. You can meet me down there.”

“Peckham? Nicky, it’s been a long day—”

“Fine. Wait until tomorrow. It’s your call. But if I were you, I’d want this particular dish served hot.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I’d almost reached the Westway, which meant I had to be getting close to the action now. I slowed just a little as I came around the underpass, in case I ran into any of those police roadblocks. Nothing to see, but as I passed White City Stadium I caught sight of the flashing lights of the black-and-whites a couple of hundred yards up the road. Okay, “X” presumably marked the spot. I took the first left, then a right—past a closed-up nursery school whose deserted swings and climbing frames leaped into the bleaching glow of my headlights: in the harsh light they were divorced from their functions in a way that was frankly sinister, looking more or less like the contents of a torture chamber.

I was counting off the distance roughly in my head, but long before I got to the next intersection I could see exactly what I was aiming for. Up ahead of me was a wall of red brick that was already familiar from the TV news bulletin: the giveaway, though, was the wide strip-sign hanging out over the road, which proclaimed WHITELEAF SHOPPING centre in an italic font with plenty of scrolling. Heavy coils of smoke hung above and around it, wearing out their welcome in the damp, still spring air.

I turned off the lights and pulled over. Up ahead of me the street was packed with people: cops in uniform, ambulance crews, passers-by who’d stopped to watch the drama play itself out. I walked up, skirting the edges of the crowd as I looked for a way to move in a little closer without drawing unwelcome attention to myself. I didn’t have any definite plans past that point, except that I wanted to get inside the building and take a look for myself at what was going down in there. And that I wanted Susan the verger to get out of this intact, with all her doubts and hesitations. A modest enough goal, I thought. The police could sort out the rest of it: that was what they were paid for.