Read Online Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard - Free Book Online Page B

Falconer’s arm and pointed to me as I stood alone outside the courthouse.
    I WALKED BACK to my car, waving away the traffic warden who had placed a penalty ticket under the windscreen wiper and was waiting to see how I would react. For once, I was thinking about matters even more urgent than parking fines. As I started the engine I had already made my decision. Rather than return to London, I would become a temporary resident of Brooklands. These suburban streets beside the Metro-Centre and the M25 were the gaming board that my father’s killer was still moving across. I was suspicious of the police, who would soon lose interest in the case. They had arrested the wrong man, and could easily do so again. Sergeant Falconer had done her best to confuse me, but the Metro-Centre seemed to disorient everyone in its shadow.
    I might have been alone on the steps of the courthouse, but I had one important ally: my father. By drawing closer to him I would begin to see Brooklands through his eyes. I would live in his flat, cook in his kitchen, and even perhaps sleep in his bed. He and I were together now, and he would help me to find his murderer.
    I was going home.
    I moved away from the kerb, my eyes on the rear-view mirror. Thirty yards behind me, also parked on a double yellow line but free from the attentions of the traffic warden, was a familiar Range Rover, bull bars and hubcaps splashed with the best of Surrey mud. Out of curiosity, I made a sharp U-turn, and drove back past the courthouse.
    Geoffrey Fairfax sat behind his steering wheel, head partly hidden inside a copy of Country Life , a solicitor keeping careful watch over his client.

7
    SNAKES AND LADDERS
     
    THE SNAKES ON THE Brooklands board were only pretending to be asleep, and the ladders led anywhere.
    I unlocked the front door and stepped into the darkened flat, lowering my suitcase to the floor. Around me were the few rooms, the now silent spaces of my father’s life, even more unfamiliar than they had been four days earlier. I felt like a student returning after a year at a foreign university, unsettled by the strange shapes of the rooms in the family home.
    No one was here to greet me, uncork a bottle of champagne or hand me the keys of my first sports car. But there was a welcome of another kind. I recognized my father’s scent on the air, an old man’s soft breath, the sweet tang of tobacco steeped into the curtains and carpets.
    A presence I scarcely knew was already arraying itself around me. Should I sleep in my father’s bed? I hesitated before entering his bedroom. Sleeping on his mattress, my head on his pillow as I dreamed of him, was too close for comfort. I left my suitcase in the hall and drew the curtains, aware that too much daylight would unnerve the ghosts.
    In the bookcase beside the bed was a shelf of logbooks tracking his transits of the globe. There were biographies of test pilots of the 1960s, privately published by long-ago aircraft companies—Fairey, De Havilland, Avro—signed and dedicated to my father: ‘For Stuart, who always kept flying speed . . .’
    Amazingly, there was a copy of Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars , signed by my mother, sent to him two years after their divorce, a desperate attempt to reach out to him. As she lived with me in our large but sparsely furnished house, with the second-hand Mercedes and the need at all costs to keep up appearances, my father’s life must have seemed effortlessly glamorous, exotic horizons coming up like an unending series of travel films.
    I poured myself a small whisky before exploring his chest of drawers. Everyone had a sex life, and their own little habits, not all endearing. But there was nothing on the shelf of the bedside table, apart from a bottle of eye drops and a sachet of beta-blockers, with its line of foil punctures ending on the morning of his death. There were no sleeping pills or tranquillizers. The old pilot slept easily, and sleep was something to be