Babel

by Barry Maitland

  He gave a little shiver of excitement. Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, it happened this way. You have dug up all the information you’re likely to get; you have struggled without success for a convincing solution; exhaustion sets in; you put it aside, have a bath, fall asleep, then, bang, it comes. The answer—complete, clear, inevitable, obvious.

  He had fallen asleep thinking of Haygill and his wife, reconciled, tucked up now in bed together, but with what lingering doubts? And he knew that his own doubts about Haygill’s guilt had been there from the start, and for the same reasons that he had expressed to Russell, that the extravagance of the assassination on the university steps would have been as out of character for the cautious Haygill as for the gentle Abu. But someone had choreographed the event, someone with an eye for theatre, who wanted to make a public statement. He thought of Darr again, the resentful lieutenant; might he have wanted to discredit Haygill in order to take over his position? Or the two Iraqis, jealous of Abu’s standing with their boss. But what hold did any of them have over Abu to make him do such a desperate thing?

  Brock had been trying to read Springer’s autobiography, A Man in Dark Times, and had been finding it heavy going. The book was saturated with a mood of pessimism and despair, with mankind and its injustices, with fate and the death of his wife, and most of all, Brock suspected, with the author himself and his failure to quite fulfil the golden promise which his famous teachers had seen in him. On the whole, Brock felt, he could do without a bombastic midlifecrisis confession masquerading as a humanist manifesto, especially at this stage of the week.

  There was one chapter however which he had found gripping. It described a period when Springer had been caught up in events so powerful that his own ego had little chance to take over the story. In September of 1982 he had accompanied his wife Charlotte to Beirut, where she had been invited to perform in a series of concerts in aid of refugees. The timing could hardly have been worse, for on the morning after their arrival Israeli shells began to rain down on the city. Nevertheless Charlotte insisted on fulfilling her engagements, and they remained in Beirut under extremely difficult conditions. Their hotel was frequently hit by shell and sniper fire, and travelling to the concert venues, many of them changed at the last minute, was a nightmare.

  Other Europeans were trapped in the hotel, and a sense of solidarity grew among them. Springer became particularly friendly with a group of French medical staff from Médecins Sans Frontières, and on the morning of Saturday, 18 September he came across them in the lobby of the hotel, hurriedly preparing to leave. They had been told of a major emergency in another part of the city, they explained, and their help was needed. On the spur of the moment he offered to join them. Afterwards he reflected that he had given it no thought at all, almost as if the decision was made for him.

  They jumped into a couple of cars and sped off through the deserted streets and arrived eventually at the gates of the Shatila camp for Palestinian refugees. Nothing had prepared Springer for the horrors which he witnessed in the camp following the savage massacre which had begun on the evening of the sixteenth and continued through the seventeenth. After some hours he staggered out carrying a small boy survivor, whom he had found huddled in his ruined home with the bodies of his mother and sisters. Springer took the boy back to the hotel, uncertain what to do. The boy hadn’t spoken a word since he had been found, and Springer had no idea of his name or whether he had any other family alive. For a time he had entertained the idea of adopting him and taking him back to England, but Charlotte had dissuaded him. She said that he was acting from a sense of guilt rather than love, and that the boy would be better remaining among his own people. Eventually they handed him over to a charity, and left the city. They never saw the boy again.

  It was a dramatic story, one of the few in the book in which Springer wrote movingly of another single human being, rather than of humanity in the mass. And the description of the awful experience at Shatila was vivid, much more so than most of the writing. Brock turned the pages and found the passage.

  I entered the camp on the Saturday morning with the French medical team. The scene was overwhelming, devastating. Survivors were still being discovered beneath the ruins of demolished shelters, and all of the effort was going into finding them. That and putting out the fires whose oily smoke hung heavy in the air, blotting out the sun.

  Reading it again, he could almost smell the acrid smoke of the fires. He looked up suddenly and breathed in. He could smell the smoke of the fires. Sniffing the air in disbelief, he rose from his chair and went over to the door to the landing. As he pulled it open, a cloud of thick smoke billowed into the room. He backed away, coughing as the fumes caught his throat. Eyes streaming, he pulled out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose and pushed the door closed again, then scrambled for the phone.

  An hour later Kathy ran up the lane and spotted him standing beneath the chestnut tree, watching the firemen rolling up their hoses.

  ‘Kathy?’ he said. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  She was relieved to see that he seemed unhurt. ‘The duty sergeant picked up your call and gave me a ring. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. I was lucky that there wasn’t much flammable in the bottom hallway inside the door. God knows what the smoke and water have done to my books upstairs on the landing though.’

  ‘Was it a bomb?’

  ‘No. I heard nothing. But you can smell the petrol, can’t you? I reckon someone poured it through the letter box.’

  ‘Your threatening letter . . . Didn’t it say something about a fire?’

  Brock nodded, taking it out of his pocket. ‘It seems I should have taken it more seriously. “When will the Day of Judgement be? It will be on the day when they are afflicted with the Fire, and are told: Suffer your torment.”’

  ‘You think it’s the Sharif kid and his mates?’

  ‘I think it’s his pamphlet . . . It was certainly a pretty amateurish attempt.’ He frowned and rubbed the side of his beard. ‘I hope it wasn’t just a warning. Have you got your phone with you, Kathy? Mine’s still inside.’

  She handed it to him and he consulted his notebook which he had brought out with him and rang the number for the UCLE security office. When he’d identified himself he asked them if there had been any disturbance on campus that night. The duty guard said that there had been nothing.

  ‘What about the CAB-Tech building?’ Brock insisted. ‘No attempted break-ins, nothing like that?’

  ‘Absolutely not. The place is alarmed.’

  ‘Good. Look, I think you should keep a special watch on it for the next few nights. Do me a favour and check it now will you?’

  The guard agreed to do it and ring him back. Ten minutes later he reported that the doors were secure and the building in darkness. ‘There’s no way anyone could break in there without a swipe-card and the alarm code.’

  ‘Do you have a record of who enters the building?’

  ‘From their cards, yes. We get it here on the computer.’

  ‘Check it now, will you? Who was the last one in?’

  The line went silent while the man consulted his machine, then he came back, his voice doubtful. ‘Funny. According to this someone went in ten minutes ago, and hasn’t checked out.’

  ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘A Mr Abu Khadra. You know him, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know him well. The trouble is, he’s dead. Look, I want you to watch the door of the building, but don’t try to enter it, OK? I’ll be there as soon as I can, maybe twenty minutes.’

  They ran towards Kathy’s car, then saw a patrol car turning into the courtyard and chose it instead. They set off for the docklands, siren howling.

  The security guard was waiting for them in the shadows at the entrance to the CAB-Tech ziggurat, which loomed massively overhead in the darkness. No one had attempted to leave the building, and there was no sign of activity inside. A fire engine had arrived, and an ARV, and Br
ock instructed Kathy to stay with them and keep people away from the perimeter of the building. She began to object as he turned to go in alone, but he raised his hand and said, ‘If this is what I think it is, Kathy, one of us will be more than enough.’

  The guard opened the front door and pointed to the lights of the alarm indicator just inside, which had been switched off. Otherwise there was no sign of an intruder. Brock sniffed the air in the lobby. It seemed temperate and fresh, the airconditioning humming softly in the background, but his sense of smell had been badly impaired by the smoke he’d inhaled at his home.

  ‘Can you smell anything? Petrol?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Which floors are the laboratories on?’ Brock whispered, and the man replied, levels three to five. He pointed the way to the stairs, then Brock told him to leave.

  The darkness was even more intense inside the stair shaft, and Brock used the torch which one of the patrol officers had given him to find his way up to the third level. He switched off the light when he reached the door, gently eased it open, and, despite his scorched nostrils, was immediately struck by the pungent odour of petrol. He stood motionless in the doorway for some time, but could hear no sounds of movement, nor detect any stray light in the darkness, though there was a faint whistling noise that he couldn’t decipher, that seemed to come from all around. The air-conditioning, presumably.

  He went back into the stairway and moved up to the next level and repeated the manoeuvre. Again he heard the whistling sound, but nothing else, and was about to turn back when he caught a flash of light briefly reflected off a distant wall. He began to make his way carefully in that direction, weaving around laboratory benches and furniture by the faint green light of emergency exit signs. Gradually he began to make out the shuffling sounds of movement ahead, the raw, pungent smell of petrol, and perhaps another smell, more subtle and difficult to identify beneath it.

  He came to a doorway to the next room and saw the figure with a small flashlight working its way along a line of benches. He felt along the wall at his shoulder for a light switch, found it, and turned it on. The hooded figure gave a little shriek and froze, pinned like a black incubus against the white dazzle of light from the bench lights. Then very slowly it turned, holding in one hand a metal can, and in the other a small, bright green object. A Bic lighter.

  ‘It’s me, DCI Brock, Briony. I’m on my own. I need to talk to you.’

  Briony Kidd stared at him, then past him, checking, recovering from the shock of being discovered. She slowly laid the can on the bench beside her and lowered the cigarette lighter towards it, her thumb on the striker wheel.

  ‘I will do it,’ she said in a quiet, taut voice. Her face was very pale beneath the hood.

  ‘Oh, yes, I don’t doubt it. But I want you to do something else first.’

  ‘What?’

  He slowly reached across to one of the stools that stood nearby and pulled it over and sat on it, opening the front of his coat and taking a deep breath as if quite at ease, although the fumes almost made him gag. He realised now what the underlying smell was—gas. She had been working her way along the benches opening the gas taps. That’s what the whistling sound had been. With a shudder he thought how catastrophic his action in switching on the lights might have been. One small spark . . . Presumably the gas wasn’t sufficiently concentrated. He forced his voice to sound calm, as if they had all the time in the world. ‘I’d like a short tutorial with you, I the student, you the tutor.’

  She curled her lip, the muscles tight across her face. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘It won’t take long. And I do feel stupid, it’s true, for taking so long to understand what you and Max were doing. I take it this is your theory of action, is it? The highest form of human activity, taking events into your own hands?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Only I’m just rather afraid that you can’t repeat history, not really. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Trying to repeat what Max did. Someone said that history happens the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’

  ‘Marx,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, I thought so. And I’m afraid this will be a farce, Briony. You’ll burn yourself and cause a bit of damage, and it won’t make the least bit of difference. Richard Haygill and his work won’t be stopped.’

  ‘That’s what you were supposed to do,’ she said bitterly. ‘You arrested him, you had him in your hands, and you let him go.’

  ‘I had no choice. The case against him was too weak. In the end, Max just hadn’t done a good enough job. I think it was vanity that got in the way; he thought that the shock of his death would be enough to carry all before it. All the same, what he did was, in its own peculiar way, extraordinary, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did you first realise how he died?’

  Briony shook her head with irritation and began to turn away.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Brock said quickly. ‘You have plenty of time. None of the people outside will interfere as long as I’m here.’

  She hesitated, then shrugged and slumped onto a stool. ‘All right.’ She suddenly looked very tired, and he guessed she hadn’t slept for some time. ‘I didn’t understand at first.’

  ‘He hadn’t confided in you?’

  ‘No. He told me very little.’ The faintest trace of bitterness. ‘I was there, on the steps, the evening that he died.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘I was terribly shocked. I stayed for a while, then I left. I didn’t want to go home. I needed to talk to someone, so I went to Chandler’s Yard to see Fran and Nargis. Abu was there. He’d only just arrived, and it was obvious that something had happened to him. He was like a spring wound tight, pacing up and down, muttering to himself. The others were asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t speak to them. Then I told them my news, about Max, and as I spoke I saw a terrible change come over Abu. He began trembling all over and staring at me with wide eyes. I asked him if he knew something about Max’s death, but he just turned and ran out of the flat. Later Qasim said he’d found him praying downstairs in the mosque, and asked us if he was all right because he seemed to be acting so strange.’

  ‘You knew Abu pretty well by that stage, did you, Briony?’

  ‘Yes. When Nargis went to Kashmir to get married, Abu and I became closer friends. We . . . we talked a lot.’

  Brock detected an edge in her voice as she said this, and said, ‘He was a nice looking boy. Perhaps you hoped for more than friendship?’

  ‘That would have been stupid, wouldn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘He still loved Nargis, despite everything.’ She said it too quickly, too angrily, and Brock recognised the jealousy behind the words.

  ‘Well, anyway, you knew him well enough to see that he’d been profoundly affected by something that evening. Did you guess what it was?’

  ‘Not at first. The idea of Abu being mixed up in Max’s death would have been too awful. Even when I met you the next day and you asked me if Max had ever upset Muslims, I never connected it with Abu. When I thought about it afterwards I decided you must have had suspicions about the other Muslims working at CAB-Tech.’

  ‘Did you decide to give us a nudge in that direction by telling the press that we were thinking along those lines?’

  She flushed, ‘Yes. I thought it would make it impossible for you not to follow that up. And I was sure it must be true. I thought Abu must have discovered something about what the others had done, and that was why he was behaving so strangely. I was in a state of shock over Max. Everyone was talking about him, the papers were full of stories, and I felt as if I’d lost, I don’t know . . . a close relative or something. Then on Monday morning, when there was that speculation in the paper about an Islamic connection, they also reported that the police were saying that the killer had escaped on a motorbike, and suddenly I realised that it might have been Abu who killed Max. In fact, the more I thought about it, the
more convinced I was that it must be true.

  ‘I went to Chandler’s Yard. I wanted to confront Abu and hear his denial with his own lips. But he wasn’t there. When I went upstairs, no one was there. I went into Nargis’ room and at first I thought I’d wait for them. My head was spinning. On the table was a packet of photographs and I looked through them. Most of them were of Nargis and Abu together. They looked so normal, so happy and untroubled by all the terrible things that had been happening around them. I felt I didn’t understand them at all, and I began to feel this great anger. How could he have done such a thing? How could she protect him? Everything about their lives seemed to be a deception. They must both be fanatics, I thought, to do such a thing. And I thought that if only Nargis hadn’t come back from Pakistan everything might have been different, and I might have saved Abu from ending up like this, a murderer. And suddenly I hated them both, Nargis as much as Abu, and I wanted to hurt them for what they’d done.’

  She wiped the back of her free hand across her face, and Brock saw the glint of tears.

  ‘So what did you do?’ he urged softly.

  She shook her head as if she wanted rid of something stuck inside. ‘I took one of the photographs, and an envelope from the drawer, and I went out into Shadwell Road and posted it to Nargis’ father. I betrayed them. I killed Abu.’

  ‘Well, now, you couldn’t have known that would be the result. Why didn’t you come to us?’

  ‘I had no evidence. I just wanted to hurt them . . .’ Her tears were flowing freely. ‘It was the most terrible, the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.’

  ‘Until now, Briony. You can’t put it right by doing this. When did you begin to suspect that it wasn’t as simple as that?’

  Briony sucked in a sobbing breath which turned into a choking cough. She recovered and gasped, ‘On the day after Abu died, I went to Chandler’s Yard again. I almost couldn’t show my face, and yet I couldn’t stay away. I had to hear for myself what had happened. I met Fran there, and she had been trying to console Nargis, who had told her something very strange. She had said that Abu had been very troubled, and had finally confessed to her that he’d been obliged to do something very terrible. There was a man he knew, to whom he owed a great debt. This man had once saved his life, and had given him an education, like a father. Now he wanted Abu to repay the debt with a single act.He wanted Abu to commit a murder.