Vicious Circle

But the crowd was a solid wedge, and even if I could get past them there was a police cordon all around this face of the building. To the right that cordon stretched all the way up the street back as far as I could see—probably all the way to the roadblock on the Westway. On the other side the houses came right up to the wall of the shopping center, the last one facing it at an oblique angle like a dinghy that had collided with an ocean liner and been knocked spinning. I was going to have to try elsewhere.

That last house offered a possibility, though. It had a strip of garden to the side, bordering right up against the wall of the shopping center. I slipped in through the gate, trying to look like I owned the place, and trotted around to the side. There was a fence at the back that was low enough to vault over; then another strip of garden, helpfully shielded from the house it belonged to by a clothesline full of washing. Unfortunately there was a stout, hatchet-faced brunette in the midst of the washing, presumably evacuating it to the safety of the house. She had two or three clothes pegs in her mouth, but she gaped when she saw me and they fell out. Her shriek of surprise and protest pursued me across the narrow lawn to the higher brick wall on the far side. I took a flying jump and scrambled up using elbows and feet.

I found I was looking down into a delivery bay where a dozen or so lorries in red and silver livery were parked. No sign of any police cars, or any rioters for that matter. Straight ahead of me there was a loading bay, and its corrugated steel rolling door was only three-quarters shut. That’s an open invitation to a thief. I jumped down lightly on the farther side, hearing a woman’s voice behind me yell, “There was a man, Arthur! There was a man in the yard!” and a male voice truculently reply “What effing man? I can’t see a man.”

I glanced around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then crossed quickly to the loading bay. There was a lorry drawn up there, its back doors wide open and its loading ramp lowered. An overturned pallet nearby had spilled brown cardboard boxes across the concrete apron in front of the rolling door. Whoever had been working here had downed tools pretty abruptly; hopefully that meant they’d fled when the riot started, but it was also possible that they were among the hostages inside. I wondered belatedly what the hell I was getting myself into here, but it seemed a little late to start having second thoughts. Probably the trick is to rule out stunts like this at the first-thoughts stage.

The rolling door would probably lift if I got my hands underneath it and pulled, but there was no way of telling how much noise it would make. Instead, I went down on hands and knees and went under it.

If someone had been waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have been an easy target as I crawled through on all fours and scrambled to my feet again on the far side: this wasn’t exactly covert infiltration. But the room I found myself in, long and narrow, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side with boxes and crates, was thankfully devoid of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with broken pieces of furniture. I stood still for a moment or two, listening, but the silence was absolute. All the action was clearly happening somewhere else.

But as I moved forward into the room, I started to become aware of a whole range of sounds almost at the limits of my hearing: dull thumps and muffled shouts, softened by the distance, so that if you closed your eyes you could almost convince yourself you were listening to a cricket match on the village green.

There was no door at the farther end of the room—just a square arch that led out into a larger warehouse space. I threaded my way cautiously through this, the back of my neck prickling every time I passed a darkened aisle. I came across an elevator shaft big enough to take me and the Civic I’d rode in on, but the elevator itself was elsewhere: the gaping doors opened onto a vertical corridor of gray cinder blocks whose bottom I couldn’t see. I kept on going, until finally a pair of black rubberized swing doors let me out into a tiled corridor. The posters on the wall here, advertising designer jeans at less than half price and three hundred top-up minutes with every new phone, told me that I wasn’t backstage anymore: I was in the mall itself.