Heaven's Light

by Hurley, Graham

  Bairstow was talking about the arrangements he’d made. The afternoon’s home match against Millwall meant that most police leave had already been cancelled but he’d secured extra manpower from neighbouring forces and with this he’d put a choke hold on all three major roads into the city. Anyone planning a serious demo would have to run the gauntlet of radio-linked patrol cars, and he’d be backing these assets with five hours’ turn-time on one of the headquarters helicopters from Winchester.

  ‘Turn-time?’ Barnaby noticed a waitress approach with a tray of coffee.

  ‘Blade time, time in the air. The chopper gives us extra reach. Bloody expensive, though.’

  ‘What about trains?’

  ‘BR police have been fully briefed. We’ve officers at Waterloo, Woking and Guildford. Stations east and west are covered, too.’

  Barnaby pushed back his chair, making room as the waitress began to unload the tray. ‘Sounds foolproof,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘Impressed?’ Bairstow shot him a look. ‘Bloody sauce.’

  The reception at the hotel was scheduled to start at noon. Zhu had stipulated champagne for the first hour, followed by the banquet. The eight courses were carefully timetabled to end by mid-afternoon, after which bamboo screens towards the rear of the restaurant would be folded back to reveal a series of elaborate tableaux. These would all have a Singaporean theme and the celebrations would end with a traditional Chinese snake dance and a big fireworks display outside on the Common. Given the guest list, more than two hundred of the city’s key players, Barnaby couldn’t imagine a more high-profile launch for the hotel. It would, in every sense, confirm that Raymond Zhu had truly arrived.

  By half past twelve, the reception was in full swing, the foyer and the big lounge bar packed with guests. Barnaby circulated with Zhu, introducing his new client, accepting compliment after compliment from men and women he’d always dreamed of impressing on this scale. He was on his third glass of champagne by now and the tension of the morning was beginning to ease. The Imperial was going to be a huge success – he could feel it in the buzz of conversation around him, the stolen glances at the TV crew, the look of startled admiration when yet another flawless Singaporean waitress appeared with a tray of exquisite canapés.

  Barnaby smiled, joining Harry Wilcox in the big bay window. The editor of the Sentinel, for once upstaged, was generous with his praise. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, ‘bloody marvellous. Bit of class at last. Just what the city needs.’

  Wilcox was with his newly promoted features editor, a young journalist called Donna, and Barnaby was describing his trip to Singapore when he caught sight of three big furniture vans moving towards the hotel along the main road that skirted the Common. Wilcox had interrupted him, wanting to know more about the drug rehabilitation set-up. He’d passed a drugs brief to Donna only the other day. A Far Eastern perspective might sit well with whatever she was planning to do.

  Barnaby heard himself describing the scene he’d witnessed at Changi prison. The Singapore authorities met fire with fire. And who could say that they were wrong? Wilcox took up the theme while Barnaby’s eyes went back to the road. The first of the vans had stopped outside the hotel. The other two were also rolling to a halt. Three abreast, they blocked the traffic in both directions.

  Barnaby knew something was wrong now and his eyes searched the room for Bairstow. The big policeman liked a drink. His height and bulk made him easy to spot but he was nowhere to be seen. Wilcox, his back to the window, nudged Barnaby. He was asking about Zhu. What kind of clout did he have in Singapore? Could he fix access to Changi? Could he help with flights out? Barnaby offered him a grim smile. The rear doors on the nearest van were swinging out, pushed open by unseen hands. Then the trailing board clattered down and as it did so the whole vehicle began to rock. He heard a low chant, almost tribal, then came the sound of stamping boots.

  Wilcox at last turned round and looked out of the window. Bodies were pouring from the back of the furniture van, tattooed skinheads in tight white T-shirts, older men in denim jackets and high-laced Army boots. They milled around in the road for a moment or two before a smaller, slighter figure emerged, clad entirely in black, taking control at once. Barnaby stared at the face beneath the peaked SS cap, the livid scar, the gleam of madness behind the round, wire-rimmed glasses. Haagen. Haagen Schreck. The kid he’d rescued from a near-certain prison sentence. The kid he’d befriended and trusted and given the run of the office. The kid who’d repaid him by turning his daughter into a junkie.

  Barnaby got to the phone, dialled 999. When the operator asked him which service he wanted he told her police. Several seconds later, another voice.

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘I’m at the Imperial Hotel,’ Barnaby announced bleakly. ‘Tell Bairstow he’s got a riot on his hands.’

  He passed the phone to a startled guest and returned to the window. The TV crew were already on the pavement, taping the skinheads as they marched and counter-marched, roaring abuse.

  ‘Chinkie bastards, we are here

  Shag your women, drink your beer,

  Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’

  The first missiles shattered the window beside Wilcox. Women screamed, backing away, and Wilcox began to shake splinters of glass from his jacket, amazed. Suddenly there was rice everywhere, small hard grains underfoot, and Barnaby ducked as another missile came tumbling up from the street below. Unlike the last, it didn’t burst and Barnaby picked up a polythene-wrapped ball the size of his fist, packed tight with rice. He went back to the window, peering round the curtain, feeling the cold wind on his face. From one of the other vans, a giant snake-like creature was emerging. It was painted red, white and blue, a long, wriggling Union Jack, shouldered by a line of bearers. It wound across the road then turned and began to parade to and fro in front of the hotel, the line of Doc Martens at last in step with Haagen’s barked orders.

  From deep in the city came the howl of a police siren and the noise triggered a fresh barrage of missiles, paint-filled this time, the reds, whites and blues splattering the newly painted façade of the hotel. With the vans blocking the road, the traffic had come to a halt but across the Common, on the grass, Barnaby glimpsed a speeding minivan. It was white. He could see faces peering out and as the van bounced to a halt he could read the line of lettering along the side: ‘Wheels for the Disabled. Donated by the Petersfield Lions Club’.

  The men inside piled out and ran headlong into the waiting skinheads. Fighting started in earnest, men wrestling each other to the ground, vicious flurries of violence. One of the newcomers, an older man in jeans and a leather jacket, was attacking the head of the serpent, using his boots, and there was a roar from the skinheads as the long snake began to sag and then collapse. Four or five surrounded the man in the leather jacket, ordered into action by Haagen. A couple had baseball bats and one of the first blows caught the older man high on the side of his head. He staggered, blood pouring from the wound, then his hands went up in a protective gesture as the skinheads tore into him.

  Barnaby watched, sickened. Wilcox was beside him. He seemed to be in shock.

  ‘Scum,’ he kept hissing. ‘Bastard scum.’

  The man in the leather jacket had gone down now and Barnaby caught sight of Haagen again. He was striding up and down the snake, urging the men inside to their feet. Barnaby fought to control himself, then turned away from the window and threaded a path through the watching guests, elbowing them aside. On the reception desk was an empty champagne bottle. He seized it and shouldered his way through the revolving door.

  Outside, on the hotel steps, the TV crew had beaten a retreat. Barnaby paused beside them, glancing back, fuelled by an anger he could almost taste. He glimpsed Liz’s face behind a nearby window. She looked pale and frightened. She was waving to him, beseeching him to come back, but he ignored her, taking the steps two at a time, keeping his eyes on Haagen.

  The line of skinheads on the pavement parted as he plun
ged through. The head of the serpent, with its crude John Bull leer, was still lying in the road. Beside it, under a blur of boots, lay the man in the leather jacket. Haagen was beyond them, urging them on. Barnaby shattered the bottle on the back of the first head he could reach. The youth collapsed and the rest turned to face him. He had the broken throat of the bottle by the neck, and he began to jab at the line of faces, determined to carve himself a path to the small strutting figure beyond. He felt the bottle slice into flesh and pushed harder, twisting it, then lashed out left and right as the line began to tighten into a circle around him. The nearest skinhead lunged at him with a baseball bat, and he felt a searing pain as it smashed against his wrist. The remains of the bottle flew from his grasp and he heard it skidding away across the road.

  Then, quite suddenly, he was surrounded. The first blows numbed him to pain. He rode them as best he could, bellowing with anger and frustration, his arms shielding his face. Boots were coming in too, knee high, and he twisted away from them, knowing with a terrible certainty that going down would probably be fatal. Then, from nowhere, came an explosion of blinding white light that seemed to shatter the inside of his skull, and as the thin daylight drained away and the darkness enveloped him, he heard the wail of the siren again, slowly fading into silence.

  BOOK THREE

  December 1995

  ‘Mutiny brewing at Spithead’ Captain Patton, 13 April 1797, semaphore to the Admiralty

  Chapter Nine

  Hayden Barnaby sat in the darkened editing suite, transfixed. Charlie had told him very little about his plans for the commercial. He knew his friend had been talking to the television people in Southampton. He knew he’d hired post-production facilities, here in the university’s media centre. And he knew he’d been out of circulation for the last couple of days, tucked away with a young video editor, cutting and recutting. But nothing had prepared him for this.

  ‘Show me again.’

  The editor respooled the tape. The screen went black. Then two lines of type appeared. ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?’ Underneath the quote, briefly, appeared a name, Rabbi Hillel. Then came the swelling noise of a riot, voices chanting, glass smashing, and abruptly the text disappeared, submerged beneath a tidal wave of images, each one uglier than the last.

  Barnaby had recognized the scene at once. These were images that still haunted his nightmares – lines of snarling skinheads, the blur of whirling baseball bats, the derisive taunt of an enormous Union Jack – but Charlie had done something to the composition of the pictures, changing their texture and slowing down the motion to give the sequence a strange, almost ageless look.

  Barnaby could date the riot to the second. He’d been there in the Imperial when Haagen’s thugs arrived. He’d been in the firing line when the first missiles shattered windows in the hotel. He’d joined the fighting down in the street, plunging into the thick of it, making things worse. He even appeared in some of the shots. Yet watching the event again, through the prism of Charlie’s special effects, was like watching an episode in a play. It was unreal. It was remote. Yet it somehow carried the assurance of still greater violence to come. Behind the roar of the skinheads, Charlie had laid a slow pulse of music, faint at first, then building and building until it drowned the sounds of the riot, giving the ugly, contorted faces a sense of implacable menace, a sign, perhaps, of things to come. The last image in the sequence, a close-up of a body sprawled in the road, remained on screen for at least five seconds. Then it slowly faded, mixing into a glorious shot of the harbour mouth, the medieval Round Tower silhouetted against the sunset. Finally, another message, shorter this time. POMPEY FIRST, it went, BETTER THAN THE STATE WE’RE IN.

  The picture cut to black. Charlie reached forward and stopped the machine. He glanced round, his face shadowed by the bank of flickering screens behind him. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s incredible. What’s Pompey First?’

  Charlie and the editor exchanged glances. They’d been through this scene before, anticipating the obvious question. Charlie reached for the light switch.

  ‘Our new party,’ he said. ‘The one you’re going to start.’ They had lunch at a pub in Old Portsmouth. Barnaby sat at a table in the corner, letting Charlie order the drinks at the bar, more shaken than he cared to admit. Physically, he’d survived the riot in far better shape than he’d deserved: the blow to his head that had knocked him unconscious had been followed by a flurry of boots, and doctors at the hospital had at first suspected a fracture of the skull, but X-rays had revealed nothing. After an overnight stay under observation, Barnaby had been released to go home.

  The next few weeks had been difficult. Painkillers had masked the worst of the headaches but nothing seemed to ease a profound conviction that the nightmare was about to recur. Everywhere he went, he expected fresh violence. Every stranger in the street was a potential assailant. In company, even with lifelong friends, the slightest movement made him flinch. After a month, the anxiety began to recede and by midsummer, busier than ever with Zhu’s expanding empire, he could count on days when memories of the Imperial’s launch never once crossed his mind. Lock them in a box, he told himself, and throw away the key. This he thought he’d done. Until Charlie’s little treat.

  Charlie was back with the drinks. For months, Barnaby had risked nothing stronger than shandy.

  ‘Where did you get the pictures?’

  ‘From the telly people. They wouldn’t do anything officially but a mate of mine joined them last month. He’s on the post-production side. He has access to the library. I got him to do me a dub of the rushes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’ve got the lot. Everything they shot.’

  Barnaby nodded, toying with his glass. The police had also acquired the TV footage of the riot. They’d invited him to headquarters back in March to identify Haagen Schreck. They’d spared him the full coverage, showing him only a couple of still frames, close-up studies of the thin, scarred face beneath the peaked Sturmbannführer’s hat. Watching the shots, Barnaby had been enveloped again by the choking anger that had taken him down to the street, and he’d readily agreed to act as a prosecution witness, should the police ever lay hands on Haagen. In the immediate aftermath of the riot, he’d disappeared. Wilcox, watching from the hotel, claimed to have seen him commandeer a passing car but whatever his means of escape, the hunt had now been extended to Europe. The smart money was apparently on Amsterdam although, privately, Barnaby saw no reason why he shouldn’t be back in his native Germany. Either way, though, it made little difference. Wherever Haagen went, Barnaby thought grimly, he’d be dripping the same poison.

  Charlie was talking about his brainchild again, a brand new party, locally rooted, serving nothing but the interests of the city. He wanted to call it Pompey First. Hence the final message in the commercial.

  Barnaby reached for the menu. Steak and kidney pudding sounded nice.

  ‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘Who’d be interested?’

  ‘We would. The city would. Anyone who wants a say in their own lives.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Charlie offered an emphatic nod. ‘I do.’

  Barnaby smiled, amused by Charlie’s passion. The last eight months had administered a dose of fervent citizenship, embedding him anew in the city of his childhood. The house in Wimbledon had been sold, his ex-wife had returned to Spain, and he’d finally parted company with the London advertising agency. His consultancy with the city’s Strategy Unit had been judged a success and a busy year had been crowned by a potful of money from the Millennium Fund. By the turn of the century, according to Charlie and his colleagues, Pompey would be showing a new face to the world, no longer a run-down slum at the end of the line but the UK’s most exciting landfall.

  Barnaby was looking for the waitress.

  ‘Pompey First?’ he mused aloud.

&n
bsp; ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What difference would it make?’

  ‘Everything. Every conceivable difference. No more kow-towing to fucking London. No more faxes telling us what we can and can’t do.’ He leaned forward across the table. ‘They’ve kicked us around forever. It’s time to get off our fucking knees. This place is great. You know it. I know it. It’s got an amazing future. Why share it with the rest of the bloody country?’

  For the first time, Barnaby felt a flicker of interest. Over the summer, sheer pressure of work had limited his attention to Zhu’s constant string of acquisitions. After the success of the hotel had come the restaurants. Then the one-stop travel shops. And now, God help us, the naval dockyard. Zhu always kept initial negotiations close to his chest but the small print of each agreed deal had meant an ever-growing mountain of legal work and, on Zhu’s insistence, Barnaby had kept the tightest possible grip on the swelling portfolio. Each new step had incurred fresh risks but Zhu had an uncanny eye for growth opportunities and the revenue streams were broader and deeper than Barnaby had ever dared hope. Pompey was, indeed, on the move. And Zhu was the living proof.

  Charlie was fumbling beneath the table. Lately, he’d taken to carrying a big, shoulder-slung folio case, an elegant Italian design in soft black leather. He produced a sheaf of papers, clearing a space on the table. ‘Roughs,’ he explained, ‘but you’ll get the idea.’ He handed Barnaby a sketch for a poster. The illustration showed the interior of the House of Commons. Politicians crowded the benches. The Speaker sat at one end. A figure stood at the despatch box, ignoring the forest of order papers waving at him across the aisle. Beneath the illustration, two more questions: ‘Real Democracy? Or Just Going Through the Motions?’

  The line brought a smile to Barnaby’s face. Very Charlie Epple, he thought. Clever, barbed, provocative. He looked up. Charlie was ready with another offering. This time, the background was a jigsaw of press headlines, all attacking sleaze and corruption. Tory MPs on the make. Undeclared junkets to exotic locations. Multi-client consultancies. Refusals to toe the Nolan line. Stripped across the poster, in heavy black scrawl, another of Charlie’s copylines: ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END, it announced. VOTE POMPEY FIRST.