Babel

5

T he officer from the Islamic Desk of Special Branch had dark curly hair and a cheerful grin. He was wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans and had an easy, relaxed manner and an unobtrusive way about him that would suit him well, Brock thought, to the role of intelligence gatherer, which the Special Branch played. They shook hands.

‘Sergeant O’Brien, sir.’

‘You don’t bother with ranks and sirs over there, do you? Neither do we. What do they call you?’

‘Wayne.’

‘I’m Brock.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’ve heard about you, Brock. And I’ve heard about this place, too. Always wanted to visit the infamous rabbit warren. There’s even a rumour that you keep your own pub in this place, did you know that?’

‘You’re not serious? A pub, in an office of the Metropolitan Police?’

‘Yeah, likely, eh?’ He gave a cheeky grin. ‘Good story though. Adds to the myth, right? And I brought my copy of the Qur’an, like you asked.’

‘Good. Tell you what, let’s go downstairs and meet Bren Gurney. I’ve ordered some sandwiches. Come across him before?’

‘Did he play rugby for the Met?’

‘He did. Wing three-quarter. Put on a bit of weight since then. Follow me.’

Brock led the way through the confusing maze of corridors and flights of stairs which connected the rooms of what had once been separate terrace houses, then the converted offices of a publishing company, gradually working his way down into the basement. They passed under an arch, turned a corner and suddenly found themselves in the snug of an ancient public house.

‘Struth!’ The Special Branch officer stared around him at the ornate frosted glass, the tiny mahogany bar, and the huge stuffed salmon mounted in a glass case on the wall. ‘It’s true then! Wicked.’

‘Keep it to yourself, though, won’t you Wayne? Welcome to The Bride of Denmark.’ He lifted a flap in the counter and squeezed behind the bar, stooping to inspect the shelves beneath. ‘What’s your poison, old son? Whisky, beer? No draught beer, I’m afraid.’

‘Blimey.’

Bren came through the arch at that moment, bearing a tray of sandwiches, which he placed on a small table. They settled themselves around it with bottles of beer.

‘Well, now, Wayne,’ Brock began. ‘This may be a waste of your time, but we’d appreciate a bit of advice on one of our current cases.’

‘The murder down at UCLE?’ O’Brien asked hopefully. ‘I’ve seen it on TV and in the papers, of course. Choice one by the sound of it.’

‘That’s the one. A couple of things have come up that make us wonder if there might be some Islamic connection. Recently the victim reported that he’d received a threatening phone call which he connected with a radio interview he’d made speaking out against extremists and fundamentalists. Apparently the caller threatened to kill him within two weeks of the end of Ramadan if he didn’t pipe down. Then in his room we found this…’

He showed O’Brien a colour photocopy of the green handbill.

He read it over, cocking his head to one side. ‘The Qur’an. Let’s have a look…’ He pulled a well-worn hardback book from the bag he’d had slung over his shoulder and thumbed through to chapter seventy-eight.

‘Of course, we don’t know the context, how it came to be in the victim’s room, but it sounds threatening, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, here we go, about the Day of Judgement.’

He handed the book to Brock who read the passage, then pointed to the words that followed. ‘“We have recorded everything in a Book.” The victim apparently said something about “the people of the book”. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ O’Brien took the volume back and turned to the index at the back. ‘Here we go… Chapter four… “People of the Book! Exceed not the limits in the matter of your religion, and say not of Allah anything but the truth.” The book it’s referring to is the Bible, and the people of the Book are the Jews and Christians who follow it.’

‘I see.’ Brock frowned in thought. ‘The victim, Max Springer, professor of philosophy at UCLE, had strong opinions about fundamentalists, apparently, though not only Muslims. He doesn’t seem to have had a particularly high profile in recent years, and everyone seems very surprised that he should have been murdered, let alone in such a public and conspicuous way. He was sixty-six, at the end of his career, highly regarded for his past work, especially overseas, but not very active now. So one theory might be, if an extremist group was responsible, that it was intended as a provocative act, to strike down a figurehead. Something like that.’

O’Brien took this in, munching on his sandwich. ‘He was shot, wasn’t he? Anything on the gun?’

‘We haven’t found it yet,’ Bren said. ‘But we did find one of the two cartridge cases, and both bullets, one still in the body and reasonably intact. So far the best information we have is 7.62 millimetre, of East European make.’

‘No hint of any drugs in this? He wasn’t making a fuss about student drug use, dealers on campus, anything like that?’

‘Not as far as we know.’

‘I was thinking of a possible Turkish connection. Since the Turkish mafia moved into London they’ve cornered a big slice of the drug market, of course. I just thought, if he’d upset someone, the style of killing fits. Giving a public warning to people to keep their heads down. But I suppose the same would apply with your religious extremists. Nobody’s claimed responsibility, then?’

‘No, but they wouldn’t necessarily need to,’ Brock said. ‘The timing was significant. Springer was just about to deliver a public lecture in which he was going to compare religious fundamentalists to Nazis. He was killed as he approached the lecture theatre. The killers may have thought that speaks for itself, and they don’t need to risk making a further statement.’

‘If it was a religious thing,’ Bren said, ‘you’d have to assume it was an international group, wouldn’t you, not UK based? There’s been nothing like this before, has there? I mean, we’re not talking about our own migrant community, are we?’

O’Brien sat back and wiped his mouth. ‘There’s no real distinction, Bren. If your family’s been settled in Brentwood for three generations, your picture of the world is London, know what I mean? But for new immigrants, with stacks of close family connections back in the old country, the world is London plus Jamaica, or Bradford plus Karachi. You can’t put a wall around, say, the Mujahadin or the Tamil Tigers, and say they’re foreign and far away. They’ve got brothers and cousins in the next street to you, like as not.’

‘So you think there might be a local connection?’

‘Could be. It ain’t easy to walk into a foreign country and find your way around, and discover all about your victim’s movements and habits, without getting noticed. A bit of local help goes a long way.’

Brock’s phone burbled. He listened for a minute, then rang off. ‘How would you like to have a look at our killer, Wayne? They’ve been working at enhancing the security video and they reckon they’ve done about as much as they can. They’re setting it up upstairs.’

They met Leon Desai and a technician from the electronics laboratory in one of the upstairs rooms, and sat down around the screen. The small and fuzzy images which they had seen previously were now transformed, the face of the gunman filling the picture.

‘Is that colour right?’ Brock asked, pointing at the areas of skin that showed around his lips and eyes. They were distinctly brown rather than white.

‘So-so,’ the technician replied. ‘I had to manipulate the colours, and that was as close as I could get, using the glimpses of teeth and tongue and the whites of the eyes as parameters. But it wouldn’t be reliable enough to use in court.’

‘We spent the last hour with a lip-reader,’ Leon said, ‘trying to make out what he was saying. Unfortunately the victim’s head obscures part of his mouth towards the end. She wasn’t all that happy about it, but this is her best guess.’

He looked uneasy as he handed Brock a folded sheet of paper.

Brock unfolded it and stared, his frown deepening. ‘Good grief,’ he murmured.

He handed it to Bren, who read out loud, ‘“Allan, you bastard”.’ He looked at Brock in astonishment. ‘What does that mean? He got the wrong man? He meant to kill someone called Allan?’

‘How could he?’ Brock said. ‘He was three feet away. How could he mistake Springer for someone else?’

‘Hang on,’ the Special Branch man broke in. ‘Suppose he wasn’t speaking in English? I’m thinking, could it be “Allah” instead of “Allan”, like “Allah-u-Akbar” maybe? “God is most great”. It’s the traditional call to prayer, and it’s also the battle cry of the shaheed, the religious martyrs. Saddam Hussein had it stitched onto the Iraqi flag during the Gulf War.’

‘That sounds more like it. And that would mean that we’re looking for someone who speaks Arabic.’

‘Interesting,’ Wayne said. ‘Very interesting. I guess you want what I can give you on London activists, then, Brock?’

‘I believe we do, Wayne. And let’s keep this to ourselves for the moment. If we’re right, this is going to be explosive.’

That afternoon Brock returned to the university campus to check on the progress of the more rigorous search of Springer’s room which was going on, in parallel with a similar search of the philosopher’s home, a modest semi in the Essex suburbs. While he was talking to the searchers, warning them to inform him immediately they came across anything with an Islamic connotation, there was a discreet cough at his back and he turned to see the University President’s Executive Officer standing in the corridor, regarding them with a quiet smile. Brock wondered how long the young man had been there.

‘Pardon me, but Professor Young heard that you were on campus, Chief Inspector, and wondered if he might have a word, when you’re free.’

‘I’m busy here at the moment.’

‘Of course. Shall I say an hour?’

‘All right.’ Brock turned back to a pile of papers he had been studying. They were handwritten notes, in Springer’s almost indecipherable scrawl, for lectures or essays.

An hour later he was shown into the President’s office. Young sat in shirtsleeves in front of the broad window, the view even more distracting in daylight, studying a single document on his otherwise paperless desk. The impression given was that a vast support apparatus of filing systems and office drones must exist in order to sustain this emptiness and space, leaving the great man uncluttered, free to take decisive action. Brock thought of the contrast with Springer’s tip, or, come to that, his own untidy office. Against the bright panorama it was difficult to make out Young’s expression as he raised his eyes, a significant few seconds after Brock had entered the room.

‘Take a seat, Chief Inspector. Thanks for coming up. I thought I’d better take the opportunity to be briefed on current progress. I’m told that you’re pursuing an interesting line of inquiry.’

‘Are you?’

‘You’re looking for Islamic connections, I understand.’

Brock didn’t try to hide his annoyance. ‘That’s just one of a number of things we’re checking on.’

‘But what on earth leads you in that direction, may I ask?’ he said smoothly, unfazed by Brock’s obvious reluctance.

Brock began to frame a suitable phrase to mind his own damn business, then thought better of it. The man might, after all, be aware of something relevant. ‘If I could have your assurance that this won’t go beyond this room for the moment, Professor Young. The inquiry is speculative at this stage.’

Young waved a hand dismissively, as if the demand were insulting. ‘Of course.’

‘It seems that Professor Springer may have received a threatening message of some kind during the past month, possibly from someone of extreme Islamic views. And in the lecture he was about to give when he was killed, he apparently intended to attack religious fundamentalists in uncompromising terms.’

‘Oh, dear. Max was prone to that sort of thing, I have to say. His lecture, eh? Yes, I’ve been told about that. That is very unfortunate. He didn’t inform us beforehand about it.’

Brock was surprised. ‘Do the professors have to get clearance for their lectures?’

Young smiled. ‘Not clearance. But it was a public lecture, I understand, and they are expected to inform the administration about any public utterances they intend to make. It’s a matter of the university speaking with one voice, and protecting its reputation. Max gave an interview on local radio a few months back, and some of his remarks then were intemperate. The feedback we got from the local ethnic communities was not positive.’

‘Really? What form did the feedback take? Were there specific complaints?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Only our media people keep their ears open, and that was the impression they got. We have to be sensitive to our neighbours beyond the DLR, you see. I mean, we’re the newest immigrants around here.’ He chuckled. ‘But there’s never been any question of our staff being threatened. That does concern me.’

‘We don’t know where the threat, if it really existed, came from. Do you have many Muslim students at the university?’

‘Ah, the deranged student theory again, eh? Well, yes, we have quite a number, certainly-Malaysians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Egyptians… We depend considerably on our fee-paying international students for our funding base. But no militancy, that I’m aware of. Do you want me to inquire?’

Brock thought about that. He would have preferred to do his own investigation, but a direct police approach to student representatives might set off alarm bells around the campus. ‘You must have some staff who work with student organisations, do you?’

‘Several. The student ombudsman, the inter-faith chaplain, the international student counsellors. Shall I put out feelers? See if we’ve got any firebrands I don’t know about?’

‘Please. But very discreetly. Perhaps it could be done without making any connection with the Springer case.’

‘Good idea. Though I’m almost sure it’s a waste of time, to be frank. The more I think about it, if there is some young hothead out there, affronted by some of Max’s remarks, wanting to make a name for himself and taking the law into his own hands, he’s much more likely to be outside the university entirely… And of course, Max was a Jew. Ironic though. Max, a Jew by birth, was actually very sympathetic to the Arab cause.’

‘Was he?’

‘Oh, yes. He travelled there, and I’m told he’s written quite passionately about their predicament. I tried to get him involved in our marketing effort in the Arab countries on the strength of it, but he wasn’t interested. Well now…’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Good hunting, Chief Inspector. Do keep in touch, won’t you?’ His attention returned to the document on his desk, as if Brock had already left.

As Brock got to his feet he decided that he hadn’t been unfair in his first assessment of the man. He thought he knew the type, the little boy who discovered a craving for dominance in the primary school playground, and had changed only in developing more subtle and effective techniques than fists. He had met versions of Young among businessmen, lawyers in the courtroom, and in the police force, but never, until now, in a university. But then, it had been a very long time since he had been in a university, and why should it be any different from the rest of the world?

On his return to the lower concourse he thought he should get a better picture of the whole place, and began to walk along the waterfront towards the part of the campus that lay beyond the administration tower. Buildings that he hadn’t seen before appeared, like gigantic versions of the simple primary coloured blocks their designer might have played with at nursery school-a red cube, two yellow cylinders, a green pyramid and, most spectacular of all, a circular tiered ziggurat, stepping skyward in blue mirrored glass. He followed a cluster of students towards doors in the stone wall that formed a giant podium for some of these toy shapes, and stepped into a huge cafeteria. He bought a cup of tea and a Chelsea bun at the counter and sat at one of the hundreds of tables, eyeing the other customers, and was surprised by their variety, young people of every shade of skin and hair colour and dress. Listening carefully he was able to pick up many languages too, Swedish from a group of enormous blonde youths at one table, Spanish from a passing cluster of beautiful black-haired girls. Two wiry black women were clearing and wiping the adjoining tables and were talking in some dialect that sounded even more exotic, until he realised that it was broad Scouse, from Liverpool.

His stomach felt vaguely queasy, and he knew it wasn’t just the Chelsea bun. He felt unsettled, adrift, unexpectedly indecisive, although he knew that time was short. If the Islamic line was a false trail then he was wasting valuable time in a case whose notoriety and public interest seemed to be ballooning with every newscast. If it was true, on the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to keep it from public knowledge for long, and the killer, if he hadn’t already done so, would be on the first flight back to whichever state would shelter him. And soon now there would be the inevitable call to share this with the Anti-terrorist Branch, SO13, or, more likely, hand the whole thing over to MI5.

But the problem was more personal than that. Something vital was missing, and he recognised, reluctantly, what it was. Kathy. He wanted her here, covering the parts of the ground that he couldn’t, making him think more clearly, giving him energy. Bren and the rest of the team were completely dedicated, of course, and highly competent, but somehow they didn’t fill the gap. And he didn’t like the notion that he might, over the years, have come to rely on her too much. Suzanne hadn’t said anything directly, but she’d dropped a couple of hints, as if preparing him for the possibility of losing Kathy. Well, one thing you learned in an institution like the Met was that everyone was dispensable and everyone, at some point, moved on. Whatever relationship he had built up with her had arisen from the work, that was all. The idea that the reverse might have become true, that his taste for the job might now be dependent on her, was more than a little disconcerting.