‘Consumerism leads to social pathology? Hard to believe.’

‘It paves the way. Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisles, the signs and banners, the whole theatrical aspect.’

‘No jackboots, though,’ I pointed out. ‘No ranting führers.’

‘Not yet. Anyway, they belong to the politics of the street. Our “streets” are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness. You can see it here already.’

‘In bosky Surrey? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s coming, Richard.’ Maxted pursed his lips, as if to shut out all possibility of a smile. ‘Here and in the towns around Heathrow. You can feel it in the air.’

‘And the führer figure?’

‘He hasn’t arrived yet. He’ll appear, though, walking out of some shopping mall or retail park. Messiahs always emerge from the desert. Everybody will be waiting for him, and he’ll seize his chance.’

‘Parliament, the civil service, the police? They’ll stop him.’

‘Unlikely. They aren’t directly challenged, so they’ll look the other way. This is a new kind of totalitarianism that operates at the checkout and the cash counter. What happens in the suburbs has never bothered the people in Whitehall.’

‘A new Dark Age . . . What do we do?’

‘We try to control it. Steer it onto the beach. A monster is stirring in the deep, and we need to get it onto the shore while it’s still drowsy. Now is the time to act, Richard.’

‘Right.’ I finished the last of my whisky, trying not to meet Maxted’s eyes. He was an impressive figure, with his huge head and powerful hands, but I too was being steered into the shallow water. He had begun to look at his watch, and I half expected the doors to burst open and admit a resistance unit led by Geoffrey Fairfax. In an offhand way, I said: ‘I take it you’re not alone? There are others who think like you?’

‘A few of us. We can see what’s coming and we’re concerned.’

‘Geoffrey Fairfax, William Sangster? Superintendent Leighton?’

‘As it happens, yes.’ Maxted seemed unsurprised. ‘There are others.’

‘Dr Goodwin?’

‘In her left-handed way. Julia is less nervy as a doctor than she is as a young woman. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s interesting that you’re the same group who happened to be in the Metro-Centre.’

‘And saw Duncan Christie in the South Gate entrance? That’s right.’

‘Lucky for him. His doctor, his psychiatrist, his head teacher . . .’

‘We met in the car park, and strolled in together.’

‘Fair enough. And your plans now?’

‘To nip this thing in the bud. If we wait much longer we’ll be overwhelmed.’

‘Willed madness . . .’ I repeated the phrase, already a slogan in a teaser campaign. ‘You think my father was killed by someone so bored he decided to choose insanity?’

‘For a few seconds. Long enough to pull the trigger.’ Maxted took off his leather jacket to free his arms, then reached out and gripped my shoulders in a sudden show of confidence. I could smell the sweat on his shirt, a blend of stale deodorant and sheer unease. He had been perspiring freely since we arrived at the penthouse, but the careful exposition of his fears had been more than a public health warning. He had been hiding his discomfort at having to expose his private guilt to someone who was watching him a little too closely. The bullheaded swagger was a screen carried by a thoughtful and unsure man. I remembered him sitting in the Range Rover outside the Odeon cinema, within earshot of a vicious riot that he and Fairfax had been orchestrating. Yet he had done nothing to stop it.

He released his grip on my shoulders, and did his best to straighten my suit. ‘Think about it, Richard. You could help us in all kinds of ways. While you’re thinking, I need to make a phone call. Help yourself to whisky and take in the view. It’s going to be a hot night . . .’

‘Dr Maxted, tell me.’ I waited until he reached the door. ‘Do you know who killed my father?’

‘I think so.’ Maxted studied me as if I were a dejected patient for whom the truth would be the ultimate lethal dose. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘But . . . ?’

‘I’ll be with you in five minutes. There’s a lot you don’t know.’

I LAY BACK on the sofa, watching the lights come on over the motorway flatlands, the desert wastes of retail England. It was a night of important sports matches: the arrays of arc lights above the football and athletics stadiums blazed through a hazy glare that caught every insect in the Thames Valley. Already thousands of spectators in St George’s shirts would be taking their seats, ready to work themselves into a frenzy before they seized the placid town.

I sat with my whisky, in this penthouse correctly sited above a lunatic asylum. Maxted had impressed me, but I discounted his claim that he knew who had shot my father. His motives were ambiguous even for a suburban psychiatrist who appeared too often on television. There he played the same role, the tough-but-tender physician moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, but even the television audience had failed to be taken in. He was trying to recruit me into his ‘resistance’ group, but I could hear the communal singing from the stadiums, great war hymns that seemed to lift the night, and I knew that Maxted and his posse of eccentric professionals were doomed.

I stepped onto the balcony and gazed at the silver back of the Metro-Centre, a self-supporting structure far more impressive than the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, a glorified tent filled with patronizing tat. The Metro-Centre was a house of treasure that enriched the lives of its visitors. Like an unimportant but hard-working merchant in a souk, I had given my entire career to the task of displaying that treasure at its best.

I RETURNED TOthe living room and listened to the silence. It was easy to imagine Maxted with a prostate the size of a cricket ball, legs astride the lavatory pan, discussing a difficult patient on his mobile as he conjured the sluggish urine from his bladder.

I opened the door to the hallway. A corridor ran to the bathroom and bedroom, but there was no sound of Maxted’s voice on a telephone. The flat was silent, light flaring against the windows from the display screens at the football stadium. I was alone in the penthouse, and assumed that Maxted had hurried away to deal with an emergency call, too distracted to warn me.

I pressed the lift button and watched the indicator panel, then pressed again and waited. There was no response, and the red warning light glowed steadily in the swipe unit. Without a pass card the lift was closed to me, part of the elaborate security that guarded the research laboratories and their drug stores from escaped patients.

‘Maxted . . . for God’s sake!’

Irritated by the endless series of charades that seemed to unfold within each other, I pounded the lift doors and pressed my ears to the metal panels. Annoyed with myself for letting Maxted play his devious games, I walked back to the kitchen. A plate-glass door led to a narrow balcony, where a short stairway joined the main fire escape.

Cautiously, giving the security system time to think, I turned the handle on the door, but it failed to open. Somewhere in the penthouse lay the fuse box and the switching unit that controlled the security locks, but my temper was up. Holding the kitchen chair by its legs, I raised it above my head and drove the steel frame into the plate-glass door. The violent blows echoed like gunfire through the empty rooms, but left the barest marks on the toughened glass. Then, after the third blow, I heard an alarm shrill far below me.