Kingdom Come Read Online Free PDF

hostile crowd and stared over the glaring faces at the police station windows.
    ‘Mrs Christie, and their bairn. Did she have to bring her along?’ Sergeant Falconer frowned at her watch. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Pearson. I didn’t want you exposed to all this . . .’
    ‘Don’t worry.’ I stood next to her at the window, inhaling her scent, a heady mix of Calèche and oestrogen. I stared at the young black woman, standing alone with her anger and fierce intelligence. ‘She’s got guts of a kind.’
    ‘Don’t feel sorry for her. I’ll get you out into a side street.’
    Flashbulbs flickered near the gates to the car park. People in the crowd were hurling bouquets of torn flowers at Mrs Christie. As she brushed away the blood-red petals a set of TV lights lit her tired face.
    ‘Sergeant . . . the crowd’s working itself up. You’re going to have a riot.’
    ‘A riot?’ She beckoned me to the staircase outside the canteen. ‘Mr Pearson, people don’t riot in Surrey. They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous . . .’
    WE PASSED THE empty CID offices, where computer screens glimmered at each other across untidy desks. The staircase windows looked out over the station car park, where the crowd pressed against the cordon of constables. Uniformed officers filled the hallway below us, ready to receive the prisoner.
    Already spectators were running across the car park. A police car forced its way through, siren keening, followed by a white van with a wire-mesh windscreen guard lowered like a visor. A bottle of mineral water burst against it, sending a spume of frothing Perrier across the glass.
    There was a roar from the spectators already inside the gates, the visceral baying of a mob who had scented a nearby guillotine. The police officers in the reception area moved into the yard, forming a cordon around the van as its rear doors opened.
    Swept into the centre of the mêlée was the young black woman, daughter clasped in her arms. I waited for someone to rescue her, but my eyes were fixed on the man who was stepping from the van. A constable threw a grey blanket over him, but for a few seconds I saw his sallow, unshaved face, scarred chin pockmarked by acne, forehead flushed by recent punches. He was unaware of the crowd and the policemen jostling him, and stared at the radio aerials above the station, as if expecting a message from a distant star to be relayed to him. His head swayed drunkenly, a vacancy of mind coupled with a deep inner hunger that was almost messianic. I could see years of poor nutrition, self-neglect and arrogance, the face of assassins through the ages, of rootless metropolitan men from an earlier era who had survived into the twenty-first century, as out of place among the four-wheel drives and school runs of prosperous suburbia as Neanderthal Man discovered in a sun lounger beside a Costa Blanca swimming pool. Somehow this misfit and dement had evaded the juvenile courts and social-service inspectors, and had taught himself to hate a shopping mall so intensely that he could steal a weapon and fire at random into a lunch-hour crowd, killing a retired airline pilot about to buy his favourite tobacco.
    A scrum of police surrounded him, arms locked together as they propelled the prisoner towards the station. On the outer edge of the scrum was Sergeant Falconer, arms outstretched to calm the shouting spectators. She was watching me as I stood in the staircase window, and I was certain that she had left me on the stairs so that I could see clearly the man who had killed my father.
    The reception area was empty now, except for two civilian typists who had left their desks. I stepped past them, and stood by the open doorway as the police readied themselves to rush Christie into the station. I searched my pockets for a weapon, and came up with my car keys. I gripped them inside my fist, the largest key between my index and middle fingers. One lucky blow to Christie’s temple would rid the world of