‘Christie, we need to go.’

She was quiet but determined, watching over her husband like a tired mental nurse. Her eyes met mine, then looked away, as if used to dealing with the human strays that Christie’s aimless garrulity drew to him.

A LARGE AMERICANcar had stopped by the kerb fifty feet away, a silver Lincoln with a cable-company logo emblazoned on its doors. A chauffeur in Metro-Centre livery stepped out, and strode around the car to the rear passenger door. A waiting television unit approached the car, guided through the watching crowd by three uniformed stewards. The Steadicam operator crouched inside his harness, filming the rear-seat passenger, a familiar handsome figure who was inspecting his deep tan in a vanity mirror.

David Cruise was wearing studio make-up, ready for the tracking shot that opened his Saturday show. The camera would film him stepping from the silver Lincoln, saluting the cheering customers and drum majorettes, and then entering the consumer palace over which he presided.

A band struck up ‘Hail to the Chief’, and a smile touched Cruise’s upper lip, a faint tremor that spread outwards to annex the muscles of his face. Energized by this grimace, he leapt nimbly from the passenger seat. He greeted the spectators like a practised politician, pinching the cheek of a delighted old lady, exchanging quips with two workmen in overalls, picking out people in the crowd and treating them to their own personal smile. I noticed his lack of aggression, and the softness of his hands, which were everywhere, fluttering around him like well-trained birds, squeezing, patting, waving and saluting.

With his lipstick, blusher and pancake make-up, Cruise seemed even more real than he did on television. He reminded me of all the minor actors I had coached while filming their commercials. The TV ad jumped the gap between reality and illusion, creating a world where the false became real and the real false. The crowd watching Cruise as he made his regal progress to the South Gate entrance expected him to wear make-up, and took for granted that he made exaggerated claims for the products they were so easily persuaded to buy. David Cruise, supporting actor in television serials that he always joined as their ratings slumped, was a complete fiction, from his corseted waist to his boyish smile. But he was a fake they could believe in.

‘You’re right,’ I said to Christie. ‘Nothing is true, and nothing is untrue. What was it? Say nothing, believe everything . . . ?’

Christie stood beside me, so close that I could hear his laboured breathing. His lungs moved in sudden starts, as if his body was trying desperately to uncouple itself from his brain. In a deep fugue, he stared at the retreating figure of David Cruise, parting the crowd like a cut-price messiah. I assumed that Christie was on the edge of an epileptic fit, surrounded by the warning aura that preceded an attack. I put my hands on his sweating shoulders, ready to catch him when he fell. But he pushed me away, straightened his back and gazed at the drifting blimp above our heads. He had willed himself into the fugue, expressing all his hatred of the fleshy actor who incarnated everything he loathed about the mall.

‘Christie—it’s time to go.’ His wife took his arm, and whispered loudly enough for me to hear, ‘Baby’s getting tired.’

‘Baby not tired. Baby waking up . . .’

I turned, glad to leave them to their marital games, and found myself facing a thuggish group of stewards in St George’s shirts. They pushed through the crowd, grappling with each other like wrestlers in a ruck. A child screamed, setting off a deranged Airedale that started barking and biting. Trying to escape, husbands collided into their wives, and a scuffle broke out as the cabinet refrigerator toppled to the ground. Stewards shouted above the pipe band.

‘Right! Let’s have you! Off with this rubbish!’

Fists pounded on the side panels of the pick-up. Clutching her daughter, Mrs Christie flailed with her free hand at the brawling stewards. Fully awake now, her husband wrestled with their leader, a blond-haired bruiser with ice-hockey armour under his shirt.

I stepped back, and lost my balance when I was shoulder-charged by a heavily built woman wearing a biker’s crash helmet. Through the mêlée of legs, knees and fists I saw an open-topped car draw up behind the pick-up. The driver sprang from his seat, fastening a leather jacket around his midriff, apparently eager to join the brawl.

He searched the crowd, forcefully pushing aside anyone who approached him. He was well into his fifties, with an almost jocular scowl, a boxer’s rolling shoulders and the shaven scalp of a nightclub bouncer. He often appeared on television, but the last time I had seen him he was sitting beside Geoffrey Fairfax in the front of the lawyer’s Range Rover. This was Christie’s psychiatrist, Dr Tony Maxted, and the third of his helpful witnesses.

He saw me kneeling by the rear wheel of the pick-up and came straight towards me. He gripped my shoulders, like a well-muscled orderly with a mental patient, and laughed good-humouredly when I tried to wrench his hands away. He lifted me to my feet, and propelled me towards his car.

‘Richard Pearson? We ought to leave before you beat anyone up. I think the Christies can look after themselves . . .’

THE THIRD WITNESS.

Biding my time, I crouched in the bucket seat of the frisky Mazda as Dr Maxted steered us erratically through the streets of east Brooklands. We passed a young offenders’ prison, then veered through a business park where the research laboratories of Siemens, Motorola and Astra Computers tried to outstare each other across untrodden lawns and beds of subdued daffodils that had given up waiting for their Wordsworth. Emerging into a street of glass and metal warehousing, we joined a dual carriageway that led past a marina and water-skiing club built beside a reclaimed gravel lake.

I assumed that Maxted was trying to confuse me, constructing a maze around my head from a jumbled atlas of back streets and slip roads. When we passed the young offenders’ prison for the second time I tapped Maxted’s shoulder, but he pointed to the road ahead, as if the car needed my full attention.

I decided to humour him, and studied the heavy muscles of his neck, and the close-cropped hair over his broad skull. He drove the powerful car with a surprising lack of grace, his fingers barely touching the wheel, bruising the gearbox as he stamped the clutch pedal with a heavy foot. Like many psychiatrists, he needed to play games with anyone who entered his professional space, performing the private rituals of the modern-day shaman.

At last we approached Northfield Hospital, the mental asylum where Duncan Christie had been held. We paused by the gate, and Maxted punched the horn to rouse the security guard dozing over his evening paper. We moved past a gym and sports centre, blocks of staff apartments and an inter-denominational chapel that resembled an avant-garde pissoir. We parked outside the main admin building, and walked to a side entrance behind a screen of rhododendrons. Using his swipe card, Maxted led us into a coffin-like lift.

As we climbed towards the roof he looked me up and down, nodding without comment.

‘Thanks for the mystery tour,’ I said. ‘Quite a car, especially the way you drive it.’

‘Is that a compliment?’ Maxted loosened his tie. ‘I wasn’t trying to confuse you. Driving straight here would have done that. I’m impressed you ever found your way to Brooklands in the first place.’

‘I’m not sure I did . . .’

We stepped from the lift into a windowless lobby. After dialling an entry code, Maxted beckoned me into the hallway of an airy penthouse, apparently built as an afterthought from sections of glass and aluminium panelling. Deep balconies looked out over the hospital buildings below. A mile away, across a terrain of dual carriageways and industrial estates, rose the dome of the Metro-Centre, its blimp lazing above it like a tethered soul.