Babel

18

K athy was on her own in the office later that day when her mobile phone rang and the reporter, Clare Hancock, came on.

‘Hi, back on Brock’s team again are you, Kathy?’

It was a question that Kathy had postponed thinking about.

‘Only I was down at UCLE this morning, and I heard that you’re reinterviewing Haygill and his staff, is that right?’

‘Clare, I can’t discuss it with you, I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, come on, off the record. You’re talking to them, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that mean you don’t buy the lone gunman theory any more?’

‘Sorry, Clare. Are you running out of ideas or have you got something for me?’

‘Oh, I’ve got lots of ideas, and trading with you didn’t do me much good last time. But let me run an idea past you, free of charge, and if you feel inclined you can give me a theoretical, off-the-record opinion. You remember how we were torn between the fatwa and Haygill for Springer’s murderer? Well, why not both?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, Haygill orders the fatwa. He’s got some pretty heavy friends overseas. Maybe he decided Springer had to be stopped, and they obliged.’

‘Why would Haygill be so desperate to stop Springer?’

‘Yes, that’s the puzzle, isn’t it? No suggestions?’

‘No suggestions.’

‘Well… suppose Springer had found out that Haygill was doing something scandalous.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, practising human sacrifice, or eugenics or something.’

Kathy hesitated, then said, ‘You’d need to have some solid evidence before you printed anything like that, wouldn’t you, Clare?’

‘Well, it’s only an idea. What do you think of it?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

The reporter laughed and said, ‘That’s better than saying it stinks.’

‘Look,’ Kathy was losing patience, ‘instead of inciting another race riot with wild guesses, why don’t you let us finish our investigations?’

‘Because there’s something else here that hasn’t come out yet. I can smell it, and so can you. Why did Khadra kill Springer? You tell me.’

‘We’re working on it. I’ll let you know as soon as we’re ready to say anything.’

‘Trouble is, Kathy, I’ve always been so impatient. I don’t like waiting for other people to tell me when to move.’

Afterwards Kathy wondered what the call had been all about. A bit of fishing no doubt, but perhaps a warning too. She rang the media office to see if they’d heard anything, but they weren’t aware of anything brewing in the pages of the Herald.

Leon emerged from Bond Street tube station and began walking south. It was a fresh night, the streetlights glistening on pavements wet from a recent shower. The crispness of the breeze blew away any lingering doubts and he marched forward confidently. Perhaps he was doing this for the wrong reasons, because O’Brien had called him a berk in front of everyone, because Brock had kidded him about joining Special Branch, and, most of all, because Kathy had got him into this in the first place and then changed her mind and got it stopped, as if he were some kind of obedient pet to be redirected at will.

No, that wasn’t exactly it. He shook his head angrily, and an oncoming pedestrian stepped warily out of his path. It would be puerile to act simply because he felt goaded. He tried to tell himself that he was doing it for his own sake, because it was unfinished and unresolved and he didn’t like leaving things that way. Soon he would move up to Liverpool, begin his masters degree, and forget about the lot of them. But first he wanted to tie this up. And if he did turn up anything juicy, the look on their faces would be a bonus.

He turned a corner and an easterly blast of icy wind sucked his breath away. Who was he kidding? He was doing it because she seemed to hate the sight of him now, and he couldn’t stand it.

He pushed that painful thought away and strode faster towards the next corner, from where he could see the front door of Thoroughbreds lying ahead.

Towards ten that night Kathy was doing some ironing in front of the TV, only half-listening to the current affairs programme, when she heard them mention Max Springer’s name. She looked up and saw images of troops on the streets of some city. It was night, their vehicles and helmets and riot shields silhouetted against bursts of flame, and she searched for some clue as to where it was, without success. It might have been Belfast or Seattle, Colombo or Jerusalem. Then she realised that the programme was about Springer, with the commentator illustrating his points with news clips. She still wasn’t very sure what Springer’s philosophy actually said, but it did seem to have acquired a sudden currency. You could hardly open a newspaper or turn on a newscast these days without hearing some reference to ‘Springer’s Syndrome’ or ‘Springer’s Nightmare’, whenever some example of extremist violence was being discussed.

Her phone rang, and she flicked off the TV and picked up the receiver. It was Brock.

‘Kathy? You haven’t heard from Leon in the past hour or so have you?’

The tone of his voice made her stomach tighten. ‘No. What’s wrong?’

‘Wayne’s had a call from Rupert, his contact at that club, Thoroughbreds. Apparently Wayne had phoned him earlier to say that Leon wouldn’t be keeping the appointment, and had asked him to give Darr a message that he’d been called back up north. Rupert did that when Darr arrived. Then a few minutes later Leon turned up.’

‘At the club? He kept the appointment?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what the hell he was thinking of. Rupert was serving other customers when he walked in, but he saw him quite clearly. Leon chatted with Darr for a couple of minutes, then they both left.’

‘He didn’t tell anyone?’

‘Not a soul. He didn’t say anything to you, then?’

Kathy thought, I’d be the last one. And then, but he’s doing this because of me.

‘Rupert has no idea where they were going?’

‘No. He gave Wayne the names of some other clubs that he knows Darr takes his guests to, and we’re just starting to check those. But

… Rupert said something else, Kathy. He said, before Leon arrived he was talking with Darr, and Darr asked him if he’d ever met his boss, Haygill. Rupert hadn’t, and Darr then asked him if he’d even heard the name Haygill before. Rupert said no.’

‘Oh God…’ Kathy whispered. The sense of foreboding that had been lurking in her mind throughout the previous night came lurching back with a vengeance, making her feel physically sick. She had to concentrate to hear what Brock was saying.

‘… always believed that lightning never strikes twice in the same place…’

She didn’t follow at first, then realised he was referring to an earlier case of theirs in which Leon had been held hostage for almost twenty-four hours by a gunman. She recalled the state he was in at the end of it. What the hell had been thinking of to do this?

‘… probably sitting in some bloody strip-club guzzling champagne, but we’ve put out an alert for Darr’s car just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately both Leon and Darr have got their mobiles switched off. Any ideas?’

‘Could they have gone back to the lab?’

‘From the West End? Unlikely, I should think, but I can get the UCLE security people to check for us.’

‘I think I’ll head down there myself,’ Kathy said. She couldn’t have offered a rational argument for her choice, but she had to move, to do something, and some obscure corner of her brain, a corner that specialised in ironic references at inappropriate moments, had flashed up a phrase- This is a Springer Nightmare.

As she pulled on her coat and headed for the lift, another thought came into her head, a visual one this time, of the black river which flowed past the university, past the end of the steps on which Springer had died, past the building in which Darr worked, the river now in spate after the recent rain, sucking its debris through the city and out past the Thames Barrage to the great emptiness of the North Sea.

It was an inspired image, and one which Leon Desai also had before him at that same moment, but with a terrifying reality, the boiling swell of black water swirling against the stones of the wall on top of which he was teetering, and though it was not the same place that Kathy had imagined, it was the same river.

He had joined Darr at the bar, breathing deeply like an actor to control his nerves. Darr had seemed pleased to see him, but also surprised, and had explained that Rupert had passed on a message about him not being able to keep their meeting. Leon had immediately realised what had happened, and made up a story about being able to postpone his departure until morning.

Darr had then said that he was bored with Thoroughbreds, and suggested that they go to another place he knew, and Leon found himself agreeing with hardly a qualm, in fact quite pleased with the proposal because he hadn’t liked the idea of Rupert reporting on his unexpected presence to O’Brien.

They had collected their coats and walked a couple of blocks to where Darr’s car was parked in a dark side street. Almost immediately he got in, Leon began to sense that something was badly wrong.

‘Fasten your seatbelt, please,’ Darr had said to him, with a strange tautness in his voice, and of course he had complied, and then seen Darr twist in his seat and press the door lock button that simultaneously locked all the passenger doors, before he started the ignition and set off. Then Leon became aware of a stir of movement from the back seat, and with a nauseating sense of disappointment with himself, of having been through something so very like this before and still not seen it coming, he knew that there were others in the car, so that when the cold blade of a knife was pressed to his neck and a sudden pungent gust of someone else’s bad breath filled his nostrils, he almost said aloud, ‘So lightning can strike the same bloody place twice, if you’re fool enough to stand in it’.

‘My friends are very dangerous men,’ Darr said, without taking his eyes off the road. ‘Please don’t do anything to cause them alarm. I don’t want the inconvenience of your blood on my car seat.’

Leon felt he should protest, play his role of the DNA-test salesman, but somehow he couldn’t bring any conviction to it. He knew from experience that once men had embarked on a course such as this they weren’t going to be put off by any play-acting he could summon up. For a moment he felt an enormous envy for Wayne O’Brien’s smooth way with words. He’d be able to talk his way out of this, he was sure.

There were two of them in the back, he guessed, as hands began to rummage through the pockets of his suit, working down from his jacket to his trousers, pulling everything out. To compound his folly he had removed every indication that he was a police officer-his warrant card, his Federation membership card, his entry card to the gym and pool, his pass for the forensic labs. All they would learn from the contents of his wallet was that he lived in Barnet, not Liverpool. And then they found the tape recorder.

‘Shit!’ one of them said, and they began whispering urgently together. Not in English, he realised, and probably not Hindi, of which he knew a little, but something similar. Maybe Urdu.

Finally, after removing the tape and batteries and testing all the buttons they seemed satisfied, that it wasn’t a transmitter probably, and they moved on to pull his mobile phone apart.

They were heading east, through the West End to the City, then on through light traffic. He caught a glimpse of the Monument, then the silhouette of the Tower, and still they continued eastward, in the general direction of UCLE. But before they got as far as that Darr turned off the main road and into a maze of small lanes hemmed in by tall unlit blocks. He brought the car to an abrupt halt and switched off the engine, opened his door and stuck his head out. There seemed to be no sound at all. Satisfied, Darr and one of the men in the back got out while the third held his knife at Leon’s throat. His door was jerked open and he moved carefully, thinking that this was probably his best chance to run for it, but the thought had barely formed when both his wrists were seized and jerked vertically up his back. He cried at the sudden, excruciating pain in his shoulder blades as the two men pushed him forward to follow Darr who was striding ahead towards a low wall. Out of the corner of his vision, his eyes still unused to the darkness after the car’s headlights had been turned off, Leon thought he made out a cement mixer and scaffolding behind a wire fence. Then they were at the wall and forcing him to stumble up onto it, and in a sudden sickening heave of vertigo he found himself swaying forward over a void. He seesawed back and forward crazily, trying to balance, feeling as if only the burning pain itself was holding him back from flying into the empty dark. And then his vision cleared, and he made out, far below, the sheen of the writhing current.

Darr began shouting at him. He was very angry about something, but Leon couldn’t take in half of what he said; by now he was focused on his certain impending death. As the shouting became more furious he was certain that he had only moments left. The knife would slide in, burning into his kidneys, he would be pitched forward into the swirling black current, and another anonymous corpse would be carried out to sea. With a teetering detachment he considered what his last thoughts should be. He thought regretfully of his mother and her ambition to become a perfect middle-class English lady, and of Kathy, with whom, had he been stronger and more honest, he could have been very happy.

He became aware that Darr was repeating something, again and again.

‘You are a spy! Confess you are a spy!’

Leon sucked in a lungful of freezing air laced with diesel fumes and gasped, ‘Yes, yes.’

‘You’re a detective!’ Darr yelled, and again Leon agreed, yes, it was true, waiting for the blade. Would it be very painful? Was it better to die by stabbing or to drown?

There was a tremendous wrench on his arms and he found himself sprawled on the gravel on the landward side of the wall. The other two men-he thought he recognised them now from the pictures he’d been shown of the two Iraqis from CAB-Tech-hauled him up onto his knees and held his arms while Darr grabbed hold of his tie and began to slap his face, hard enough to make his head spin and his nose bleed. At the same time Darr was talking again, bitter and spitting, though at first Leon couldn’t make out what he was going on about.

‘You want to know about his wife, do you? Well, I’ll tell you about his wife! She pesters me, she rings me up, she wants me to show her where I take our foreign guests. That’s why she was at the club last night, pestering me, wanting me to buy her drinks, then take her somewhere discreet…’

Darr stopped slapping Leon and looked with disgust at the blood on his hands, giving his victim a moment to ponder this strange diatribe. Darr pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands fastidiously, then raised a finger and waggled it in front of Leon’s nose.

‘But you can tell him that I haven’t touched that drunken English bitch! I haven’t laid a finger on her! You tell him that!’

Into Leon’s mind came the image in the mirror behind the bar at Thoroughbreds, of the distant figures of Darr and a blonde woman. Haygill’s wife he thought, his mind suddenly clear. He thinks I’m spying on him for Haygill, a detective.

‘And you can tell him something else, too. You can tell him that I won’t work for a man who treats me like a peasant, who sets spies on me! Eh? Eh?’

Leon mumbled, ‘Yes, yes.’

‘Eh?’ Darr repeated, leaning down, his face close.

‘Yes,’ Leon nodded, and a tremendous blow between his shoulder blades sent him sprawling forward onto his face. He lay stunned on the gravel and heard the crunch of their footsteps receding into the night, the growl of the car engine, then silence.

Kathy had reached Poplar, and was beginning to wonder what she could reasonably expect to do when she got to UCLE, when her phone went. She pressed the button and a voice she barely recognised whispered, ‘Kathy… Kathy…’

‘Leon!’ She skidded the car to the kerb and pressed the phone harder to her ear. ‘Is it you?’

‘Kathy… yes, I’m sorry…’

‘Are you all right?’ she demanded, hearing the panic in her voice. His sounded unnatural, as if he were being strangled, and there were sounds of other people in the background. ‘Where are you?’

‘Kathy… I’m sorry…’

‘For God’s sake, Leon!’ she almost yelled. ‘Never mind about being sorry! Are you all right?’

‘I’ve had a bit of bother. I was wondering if you could come and pick me up.’

He was on Commercial Road in Limehouse he said. She told him not to move and rammed the car into gear. At the next red light she rang Brock and told him she’d made contact and would ring back when she knew more.

Within five minutes she spotted him outside the pub he’d described, leaning in a patch of shadow against the wall. Her headlights caught him as she swerved to the kerb, and he jerked upright, looking dishevelled like a tramp. The lights seemed to alarm him and he stumbled as he turned to run.

‘Leon!’ She raced across the pavement and caught him.

‘Kathy! How… how did you get here so fast?’ He seemed astonished, disoriented.

‘Are you hurt?’ His nose was bloody she could see, and he was moving stiffly, but he was moving, and on his feet.

He shook his head and she threw her arms round him, laughing with relief. Her laughter seemed to drain the remaining tension out of him and he leaned back against the pub wall, holding onto her. They clung together in the shadow like that for a while until she whispered, ‘You’d better tell me what happened, you stupid bastard.’

They went into the pub where Leon had told the landlord that he’d been mugged and had persuaded him to give him coins for the phone. Kathy repaid the money and bought the barman a beer and Leon a brandy while he went to the gents and tried to clean himself up. The bar was glaringly bright and crowded, the music from a jukebox deafening, and she found a small formica table as far from the machine as possible. She watched Leon weave slowly through the beer drinkers towards her and remembered the government scientist’s words, ‘We’re all vulnerable’. Leon was looking very vulnerable at that moment, his hair and clothes more in order but his usual poise gone, his pride a major casualty. He sat opposite her and muttered a thanks and took a gulp of the drink and told her the story.

When he reached the end he paused for another sip of the brandy, his hand trembling as he raised it to his mouth. He choked and coughed, and said, ‘I’m sorry. You must think this is pathetic. I’m still… rattled.’

‘I know,’ Kathy said, and put her hand on his. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

‘You?’ He smiled doubtfully, disbelieving. ‘Not you, Kathy. And the thing was that although I’d been through something like that before, the Sammy Starling thing, it didn’t help. I thought to myself how ridiculous it was, this happening twice, and me even more helpless and terrified the second time.’

‘It’s the same for everyone, Leon,’ Kathy said gently.

‘No.’ Leon shook his head adamantly. ‘Look at Brock and Bren, fighting those skinheads off in Shadwell Road, and you taking on those blokes at the cemetery the other day… I’m not like that. I was afraid.’

She wanted to explain to him that in the cemetery she had reacted without having time to feel afraid, and that afterwards she had suffered for it. She wanted to tell him that she had self-doubts every bit as severe as his own, and that they were more crippling for her, in her position, than for him. But she held back, not sure that she wanted to make a confession to him. And there were things to be done. Later, perhaps, she would decide to tell him ‘So Darr thought you were a private detective hired by Haygill to find out if he was screwing his wife?’

Leon nodded, gulping down the last of the brandy. ‘She is a blonde, isn’t she? I remembered that Darr was with a blonde woman when I arrived at the club yesterday. He put her in a taxi and came to the bar and there I was. When I started asking him questions about her he must have put two and two together and made five.’

Leon shook his head glumly while Kathy smiled.

‘I’m sorry, Leon, but that really takes the biscuit. I wonder what Brock will say?’

‘Oh, we can’t tell him! That’s why I rang you.’

‘Rupert saw you at the club, leaving with Darr. He phoned Wayne, and Brock mobilised the troops. I phoned him on my way here to let him know you were safe. He’s going to need an explanation.’

Leon groaned.

She leaned forward and gently straightened his tie. ‘It hasn’t been your night, has it?’

‘No. But I’ll tell you what, Kathy. You and Brock should be careful. I was lucky, but those blokes, the Iraqis, they’re tough. I’m convinced that they’d have finished me off with one word from Darr. I’d hate to think what they’d do to anyone who really got on the wrong side of them.’

She nodded. ‘Did they keep all your stuff?’

‘Yeah. Probably threw it in the river.’

But in that, at least, he was wrong, for when Kathy finally delivered him to his parents’ house in Barnet, after he had made his explanations on her phone to Brock and silently endured Brock’s scathing assessment of his judgement and prospects, his mother opened the door to him with the news that a terribly nice Asian man had called with his possessions and a message that he must be much more careful in future.