Cruise, however, refused to give in. He waved to the crowd, but he had switched off his smile, a gesture that seemed to say he was switching off his audience. He turned his back on the noisy square, forced his way between Maxted and Sangster, and left the balcony.

There were catcalls as the mayor took the microphone. Football rattles whirled, unheard in any stadium for years, their grating clatter like the chitter of monkeys. The crowd was restless and on the edge of its patience. Beside me, a woman and her teenage daughter, both in ice-hockey shirts, began to whistle in disgust. They needed action, without any idea what form this might take. They had waited for David Cruise to tell them and lead them forward. They would follow him, but they were just as ready to jeer and deride him. They needed violence, and realized that David Cruise was too unreal, too much an electronic illusion, a confection of afternoon television at its blandest and sweetest. They hungered for reality, a rare event in their lives, a product that Cruise could never endorse or supply.

Hoots and cheers rose around the square as Tony Maxted spoke into the microphone. But he was too thuggish, with his Roman head and mask-like face that revealed everything. The crowd wanted to be used, but in their own way. An ironic Mexican wave moved around the square in a blizzard of whistles trained by years of practice at the decisions of blind referees. A group of youths set fire to a park bench, tearing branches from the municipal shrubbery to feed the flames.

A blow struck the side of my head, almost knocking me from my feet. A huge explosion sounded from a nearby street. Everyone ducked as the flash lit the trembling windows around the square. The aftershock thrashed the trees, sucking at the air in my lungs and straining my ribs. A vacuum engulfed the night, then hurtled back into itself.

EVERYONE WAS RUNNING, as if trying to chase down their fears. Panic and anger raced in a hundred directions. Within a minute the square was empty, though the town hall and nearby law offices were unharmed. The explosion jarred clouds of dust from the elderly pointing, and wraiths of vapour floated like the palest smoke, the bestirred ghosts of these antique piles.

The bomb had exploded in a narrow side street of lock-up garages, but no one was hurt, as if Brooklands was a stage set, an adventure playground haunted by malicious and incendiary children. I listened to the ambulance sirens swerving through the streets, the seesaw wail of police klaxons. Beyond them rose a louder and deeper sound, the baying of a crowd around an enemy goalmouth.

RIOT STALKED THEstreets of Brooklands for the next hour. It wore two costumes, farce and cruelty. Gangs of football supporters broke into every Asian supermarket and looted the alcohol counters, making off with crates of beer that they stacked in the streets and turned into free bars for the roaming crowd. The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols. Frantic attack dogs hurled themselves at the chain-link fencing, driven to a frenzy by the banner-waving marchers who tossed their looted burgers over the wire.

Waiting for the police to arrive, I followed this barely disciplined private army to a gypsy hostel beside a bus depot. The aggressive whistles and chanting terrified the exhausted Roma women trying to restrain their husbands. I left them to it, and walked back to the town hall. An overturned car burned outside the ballet school as a breakaway group of boxing supporters tried to provoke the students, whom they saw as a pampered and idle breed of dubious sexuality.

Beyond the football stadium a hard core of violent demonstrators invaded a Bangladeshi housing estate. They burned a football banner in the garden of a shabby bungalow, a fiery cross doused in petrol siphoned from the old Mercedes in the drive. When the bungalow’s owner, an Asian dentist I had seen in the hospital, opened his door to protest, he met a hail of beer cans.

Through all this pointless mayhem moved Dr Tony Maxted in his Mazda sports car, still wearing his dinner jacket like a playboy revolutionary. Whenever the riot seemed to slacken he left his car and roamed through the crowd, sharing a can of beer and leading the singsongs, filming the scene on his mobile phone. As I expected, few police appeared through the smoke and noise. They remained on the perimeter of Brooklands, keeping out any curious visitors. On the roof of the town hall I saw Sangster standing beside Superintendent Leighton, surveying the riot with the calm gaze of landowners observing their tenants at play, as if burning cars and racial brawls were boisterous recreations that suited the brutal peasantry of the motorway towns.

But the outside world had begun to take notice. Behind the town hall two police motorcyclists intercepted a BBC news team setting up their camera. They ordered the crew back into their van, told the driver to reverse and escorted the vehicle back to the M25.

A small crowd watched them go, disappointed that the Brooklands riot, the town’s only claim to fame since the 1930s, would not be on the breakfast news. In the brief silence before they found something else to attack I listened to the latest bulletin on a radio shared by two teenage girls in St George’s shirts. Street fights between rival sports fans were taking place, the reporter noted, an outbreak of England’s traditional pastime, football hooliganism. The town’s police force, he added, was on alert but was being kept in reserve.

Disappointed by their enemies, the rioters began to turn on themselves, and the night wound down into a series of drunken brawls and bored attacks on already looted premises. Turning my back on all this, I set off through the quieter side streets. I was lost, and I wanted to be. I hated the riot and the racist violence, but I knew that the crowd was disappointed by the failure of the evening to ignite and set the motorway towns ablaze. Already I guessed that the bomb placed in my Jensen had been an attempt to light a fuse. But a vital element was missing from the minds of the bored consumers who made up the Brooklands population. Marooned in their retail paradise, they lacked the courage to bring about their own destruction. The crowd outside the town hall had wanted David Cruise to lead them, but the cable presenter was too unsure of himself. The riot had ended with the frustrated mob glaring at itself in the mirror and breaking its bloodied forehead against the glass.

I knew now that we had all been manipulated by a small set of inept puppeteers. A group of prominent local citizens who felt threatened by the Metro-Centre had mounted an amateurish putsch, an attempt to turn back the clock and reclaim their ancient county from a plague of retailers. Geoffrey Fairfax, Dr Maxted, William Sangster among others, probably with the connivance of Superintendent Leighton and senior police officers, had seized the chance given them by the Metro-Centre shooting that led to my father’s death. Only a direct attack on the great shopping mall would rouse a deeply sedated population. No vandalized church or library, no ransacked school or heritage site, would touch a nerve. A violent revolt, the cordite of civil strife in suburban Surrey, would force the county council and the Home Office to react. The retail parks would close, the fox would return to his haunts, and the hunt would gallop again over abandoned dual carriageways and through the forecourts of forgotten filling stations.

Meanwhile, my martyred Jensen was on its way to the police forensics lab, and I might find myself arraigned as the instigator of a failed revolution . . .