Babel

12

T he sense of being invisible grew in Kathy during the following days. As she had anticipated, a new major inquiry team was rapidly established to take over both the Max Springer and Abu Khadra murder investigations, but, although Kathy remained in London in case she was needed, she was not interviewed or contacted by them, presumably because neither Brock nor Bren mentioned her participation. In any case, it was soon clear that the new team would be so inundated by information and advice that its problem would be focusing on the material issues. Abu’s murder had occurred just in time on the Tuesday night to make the first editions of the Wednesday morning papers, and the morning radio and TV news bulletins were dominated by the ‘Shadwell Road Riot’ and its fatal outcome. National and international news services headlined the story for days afterwards, and by the weekend, when interest might have begun to wane, the arrest of half a dozen members of a right-wing white supremacist group brought it back to the front pages.

Throughout these days Kathy was in touch with the unfolding developments, and even pursued some inquiries of her own, yet she felt curiously distanced from them, neither touched nor noticed by the storm of legal, media and political activity, flitting almost like a ghost across the scene, or an unseen shadow in the wake of the new investigation team.

She saw Brock regularly, acting as a kind of domestic help in his first days of incapacity. Apart from a host of relatively superficial wounds to his upper body, arms, head and pride, his knee was badly bruised and had suffered a fracture, probably as a result of a blow from the same thug with the pickaxe handle that he had subsequently felled. Although Suzanne tried to persuade him to come and stay with her in Battle for a while, he had refused on the grounds that he could be needed at short notice in London, which wasn’t true. Kathy had interpreted this as a kind of pride, or perhaps vanity, not wanting to be seen in his battered state, like some veteran boxer staggering from the ring. She could sympathise, especially in view of Brock’s uncertain relations with Suzanne’s two resident grandchildren, but his stubbornness was inconvenient, for whereas he might have had a ground floor room at Battle, in his own house the main rooms were at the top of a winding stair up from the front door, with his bedroom another floor above. Although he wasn’t completely immobile, being able to stomp around on a crutch, in practice he came to rely on Kathy bringing him daily supplies and generally making life more tolerable. She made up a bed for him on the sofa in the living room, and rearranged his key possessions so that he could survive in that room, the kitchen and the bathroom.

He told her that the new team was headed up by a Superintendent by the name of Russell, an experienced, sound detective, he said approvingly, then added, with less enthusiasm, that he was unlikely to be distracted by divergent evidence. Russell had interviewed Brock early on the morning after Abu’s murder and was already fully conversant with both cases. He seemed convinced that forensic evidence would prove decisive in the end.

‘He’s riding Leon hard,’ Brock had said. ‘And who knows, he may be right.’

Kathy just nodded dumbly, feeling even more disconnected from events.

It wasn’t the possibility of bumping into Leon that took her back to Shadwell Road on the late afternoon of that Wednesday, or at least that’s what she told herself. Rather, it was Bren’s perplexity, repeated by Brock, over how the skinheads had known Abu’s name.

After all the media attention she had expected the street to be alive with activity, but instead it was eerily deserted, as if people were ashamed or embarrassed to be seen there. Police barriers had been erected at each end to stop vehicles entering, and many of the shops were closed, some freshly boarded with plywood sheets, the owners apparently afraid of some new outbreak of trouble. Kathy walked to the front of the police station, then retraced the route diagonally across Shadwell Road that Brock and Bren and their prisoner had followed. The road surface and gutters seemed unnaturally clean, and Kathy guessed that the whole area had been vacuumed and scraped by scene of crime teams, though their barriers and screens and tapes had been removed.

The Three Crowns too was deserted. Stan, the same hefty barman who had served her and Brock when they had been there the previous evening, complained that he had only just been allowed to reopen the pub. All day the street had been teeming with thirsty coppers and reporters, and he hadn’t been able to sell a single drink.

‘I suppose they were interested in where the skinheads were sitting, were they?’ Kathy asked, ordering a glass of wine.

‘Yeah. They were over there by the games machine most of the evening, and hanging around the door.’

‘It was a bit cold to have the door open, wasn’t it?’

Stan nodded. ‘They came and went, not all together. I had to ask them at one point to close the door, they were letting all the heat out.’

‘Do you mean they looked organised?’

‘Not organised, exactly. More like they were on the lookout for trouble. And it made me nervous, I tell you. We don’t usually get types like that coming down Shadwell Road unless they’re looking for trouble, and like I told your guvnor yesterday, we’ve had groups of them drop in the last couple of nights, getting bolder, talking louder, drinking more.’

‘When there was the trouble last night, some of the lads reckoned that the skinheads knew the name of the bloke we’d arrested-Abu. Did it look like that to you?’

‘The other coppers asked me that. What I think is that they picked it up from the Pakis out there in the street. See, what happened was that we all began to realise something was going on about ten fifteen or thereabouts. The bovver boys left the machine and gathered round the front window there, looking out to the street where a crowd was building up. Then one of them, a little bloke with a furry parka hood, came running in through the front door, all excited like, and they went into a huddle, and then the bloke went out again. I wanted to see what was going on, so I went after him to the door and looked outside. There was quite a crowd milling around in the street there, some looking down the lane, and I saw the skinhead talking to them.’

‘Talking to the local people?’

‘Yes. Most didn’t like the look of him and turned away, but others spoke to him. That old busybody across the street, Mr Manzoor, he was one. Then the bloke came running back and I got behind the bar again. It was soon after that that they all started to hang around the doorway, and then the trouble started. I gave their descriptions to the other coppers. And I’ll tell you what, they had a mobile phone.’

‘You saw them using it?’

Stan nodded. ‘Several times.’

Kathy finished her drink and went back out into the street. Across the way an illuminated sign advertised Yasmin’s Finest Asian Sweetmeats, next to the deserted window of Bhaskar Gents Hairstylist. V amp; K International Discount Travel on its other side gave Kathy a small squirm of guilt. She should have spoken to Tina to tell her how her interview had gone, and to Suzanne, too. She had avoided telling Suzanne what her plans were for returning to Battle, simply because she’d avoided making any. She knew she must get in touch. Tonight, for sure.

Next to the travel agent was Manzoor Saree Centre, its lights bright, though, like everywhere else, doing little business. She crossed the street and opened the shop door to an accompanying tinkling of a bell. The interior was dazzling, bolts of multi-coloured fabric stacked and cascading everywhere over counters, mannequins and rails. Mr Manzoor himself, in a dark suit, formed the only note of sobriety in all this exuberance. He smoothly closed the order book he was studying and glided forward to greet Kathy with a little bow, his eyes examining her critically as his head dipped.

‘Good evening, madam. How can I be of assistance? You would like a silk business suit, perhaps? Or something for evening wear?’

‘I’m with the police, Mr Manzoor.’

‘Ah.’ He sighed regretfully. ‘But still, the police need affordable clothes of excellent quality just like everyone else. I have given away many cards today. I expect many orders in the fullness of time.’ He offered Kathy a business card.

‘Thank you. I’m just following up one or two loose ends from the day. You were interviewed, weren’t you?’

Manzoor gave a modest little bow of assent. ‘Like all my fellow traders in Shadwell Road, I did my best to assist the officers to reconstruct the shocking events of yesterday.’

‘Because you were there, weren’t you, in the street at the time the man was killed?’

‘Sadly so, although I saw nothing of it, with such a crowd… I am not a tall man, as you see.’ He smiled deprecatingly.

‘And before that, you actually spoke to one of the skinheads, I understand.’

Manzoor looked momentarily startled. ‘Why, yes! You know, I had forgotten that until you reminded me. The riot, the fighting, it was so terrifying that what happened before had faded in my mind. Did the skinhead tell you that?’

‘Another witness mentioned it. What did you talk about?’

‘Well…’ Manzoor thought for a moment. ‘The man was coming through the crowd, asking people what was going on, why we were there. Most people looked away and pretended not to hear him. He was about the only European among us, but more than that, he was a skinhead, an ugly little fellow. People didn’t want to talk to him. He approached me, and I said that we didn’t want any trouble. I have to confess that I was thinking more of my shop windows. I had no idea that anything worse than that might happen.’

‘He mentioned Abu by name, did he?’

Manzoor looked vague. ‘I don’t recall that.’

‘But you knew of the name Abu?’

‘Oh, yes. I was at mosque when the two officers came to speak to Imam Hashimi. He called several of us in to ask if we knew of this Abu Khadra.’

‘Did he say what he was wanted for?’

‘Not in so many words, but we assumed it was to do with the murder at the university.’

‘And did the crowd in the street learn about this?’

‘The imam asked us to be discreet, and to keep it to ourselves, but pretty soon I gathered that the story was going round. Probably the younger men had spread the word.’

‘What story was that?’

‘Why, that the two detectives had gone into Chandler’s Yard to arrest someone called Abu.’

‘For murder?’

‘I would say so.’ The draper shrugged regretfully. ‘It is hard to keep such things quiet. People are such gossips, don’t you know? Now, tell me, before I show you some of my finest cloth, specially discounted in honour of our fine police force, tell me where this Abu lived. I am curious. Some say it was in the university, and others that it was in Chandler’s Yard itself. What is the truth?’

Something greedy, almost prurient about Manzoor’s interest in the details of the tragedy disturbed Kathy. ‘The university,’ she said quickly, and turned to go.

Kathy reported this conversation to Brock that evening over a companionable couple of steaks.

‘Makes sense,’ he nodded stiffly, shifting his weight with a wince. ‘Word travels fast. By the time we got Abu out of Chandler’s Yard half of the East End must have known.’ He thought of the minutes they’d wasted listening to the cafe owner’s history of Yemeni settlement in Britain. ‘Maybe if we’d been a bit quicker, or told them less at the mosque…’ Or been able to understand Urdu, he repeated to himself.

‘It probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The skinheads had been gathering for days, ever since Springer’s murder and the arrest of Ahmed and his mates. They were spoiling for trouble. If it hadn’t been Abu it would have been someone else.’

‘All the same…’ Brock reached for a bottle of pills on a shelf at his elbow, then pushed them away. ‘What’s so frustrating is that Springer’s murder remains a blank. I was itching to sit down with Abu and find out what the hell he thought he was going to achieve, if he was the killer. Come to that, Springer himself remains pretty much a blank. His death kicked up a storm, but the man himself, at the centre, remains a void, at least to me.’ He dropped his fork from two thickly bandaged fingers and sighed with frustration. ‘It seems as if what’s happened almost vindicates what Springer was going on about. Maybe I should make some use of my time sitting here and read some of his books.’

Kathy didn’t like to say that, since he now seemed completely shut out of the Springer inquiry, there didn’t seem very much point. ‘If they’re anything like what his student was trying to explain to me, they’re probably a good cure for insomnia. But I’ll get them for you, if you want. I could go over to the university tomorrow.’

‘Ah, talking about that,’ Brock said, pouring them both another glass of red wine, ‘I was speaking to Suzanne on the phone this afternoon, and she was asking how you were, and when you were going back down there.’

‘Yes, I must ring her. The thing is, I don’t feel I should leave London just at the moment, with all this going on, and you laid up and everything…’

‘Mm,’ Brock nodded. ‘Take your point,’ he murmured carefully. ‘Better not make me your reason though. You’re sure, are you? You feel OK about staying?’

Kathy stared into the deep purple of the wine, as rich as the colours of Mr Manzoor’s fabrics, and nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

Thursday, 27 January was one of those bright, windy, glittering wintry days that remind you that spring will come. When she reached UCLE Kathy parked her car under the viaduct, buttoned up her coat and strode down to the river’s edge of the university concourse where a few other brave souls were sitting on the steel benches, getting some sun on their pale faces and wind through their hair. She made her way along the concourse thinking that she might quickly pick up the books from the library and then get a cappuccino at the student cafeteria. She followed signs to the library, which was vast and circular, with inquiries at the centre. Kathy managed to access the computer index, and track down two of Springer’s books that were on the shelves. She took them to the central checkout point, and tried to explain, as a queue grew restive behind her, that she was from the Metropolitan Police and just wanted to borrow them for reference purposes for a few days. The librarian looked at her as if she must be slightly simple, and explained that if she didn’t have a staff or student number and identity card, well, she’d better apply to the Head of Data Resources. She found the Data Resources inquiry desk and was given a form to fill in, but the assistant seemed to feel that it might take some time, weeks probably, before she would hear.

She decided on another tack, and found her way to the scruffy old wing in which Springer and his doctoral student had their rooms. As always, Briony Kidd was at her desk. She looked up as Kathy knocked and stepped into the little room, and Kathy had the immediate impression that the bright and cheery approach she had been framing wouldn’t be a success. Briony looked terrible, her eyes red, skin blotched around her throat and wrists as if she had been scratching herself raw.

‘Yes?’ she said, as if she expected the effort to earn her a blow.

‘Er… Briony, hi,’ Kathy said, suddenly uncertain. ‘How are you?’

The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

‘You look… tired.’

‘Oh, I wonder why?’ The sarcasm was heavy, too forced to be anything but painful.

Kathy was at a loss, but Briony saved her the problem of finding appropriate words.

‘How could you have been so stupid!’ she said, spitting her despair. ‘Of all the unlikely people in the world, you had to pick on Abu! God!’

‘I don’t understand,’ Kathy said cautiously.

‘Well, I don’t think that will surprise anyone!’ Briony wailed and turned away.

Kathy took a deep breath and tried again. ‘Briony, you were the one who told me we should be talking to the Muslim members of Professor Haygill’s staff.’

‘But not Abu!’ the woman spun back, tears pouring from her eyes. ‘Not Abu!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he would never, never have hurt Max!’

The intensity of her conviction was baffling. Kathy took another deep breath. ‘You knew Abu?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘You didn’t tell me that, Briony. How well did you know him?’

‘Oh…’ She made a wild gesture with her arm. ‘We met… in the cafeteria, and places. He was a gentle, caring man. I can’t believe what’s happened. First Max and now Abu! I think I’m going mad.’

‘Did he and Max know each other?’

‘Yes… Maybe… I don’t know…’

‘Which?’ Kathy insisted. ‘Yes or no? Did they know each other?’

‘I… I…’ Briony seemed caught in some kind of confusion. ‘I don’t know. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that you charged in with your great jackboots and arrested him and dragged him out into the street and let those Nazis kill him!’

Kathy remembered the expression on Abu’s face when she had first seen him, the look of recognition and acceptance. Could it have meant something else? Had she completely misjudged him? She felt a chill of panic and defensiveness and guilt as the possibility occurred to her that she might have engineered Abu’s arrest and murder on the strength of some misread signs from Briony and Abu himself. And then it occurred to her that the source of Briony’s distress was precisely the same as this, the guilt of having inadvertently betrayed her… her what? Friend? Lover even? She tried to picture the two of them together, and found it difficult, but certainly not impossible. The over-serious, lonely, passionate English girl and the Arab with the shining eyes. Both slender, fragile, ready to be broken by life…

She stopped her imagination running away with her.

‘Briony, we all feel terrible about what happened, but I can tell you that neither you nor I am responsible for Abu’s death. The people who are will be caught and punished.’

Briony swung back at her. ‘You are responsible!’ she cried. ‘You killed him!’

The force of her accusation was almost physical, and Kathy felt herself backing away, shaking her head. She found herself outside in the corridor, and realised that she was trembling. She turned and walked slowly away and almost stumbled at the next corner of the corridor into a man whose breath smelled strongly of whisky.

‘Oh, easy there!’ he breathed and squinted at her. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine, yes.’

‘Lost?’

‘A bit, yes.’

He gave her a roguish leer. ‘Well, let me give you a helping hand. Pettifer’s the name. Desmond.’

Kathy remembered Brock mentioning him. ‘Oh. You were a friend of Max Springer’s, weren’t you? I work with DCI Brock.’

Dr Pettifer checked himself. ‘Ah. Interesting developments, eh? Anything you need?’

‘Well, maybe there is something you could help me with. I’m trying to get hold of some of Professor Springer’s books.’

‘What, short of door-stops at the Yard, are you?’ He tried out a wink and a chuckle. ‘Don’t intend to try reading them, do you?’

‘That was the plan. Only the university library say I can’t borrow them without a proper pass. I was hoping to find a friendly academic who would borrow them for me.’

‘What about Max’s own copies, from his room?’

‘The room’s sealed. We’re not supposed to remove anything.’

‘Well, I can do better than the library. I can lend you my own copies. Don’t normally do that, mind. I’ve lost too many of my books to students to ever lend to them any more. But a police woman should be beyond reproach, or am I being naive?’ He twinkled at her boozily.

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I’d be most grateful. Just for a week or two.’

‘No hurry. And in return, you can slake my curiosity. Curiosis fabricavit inferos, eh?’ He led the way down the narrow corridor, speaking back at her over his shoulder. At his door he drew a ring of keys on a chain from his pocket and let her in. There was an unpleasant sweetness in the musty air of the room.

‘What I wondered,’ he said, pulling books down from his crowded shelves, ‘was whether this Abu chap had the weapon on him when you caught him. I’m having a bet with a fellow in Sociology. He reckons that they always throw the thing away down a drain or something after they’ve done the deed, but I feel he would keep it as a kind of security. So which of us is right?’

‘I’d say that usually your friend is right, Desmond, but in this case I couldn’t comment.’

Pettifer looked put out. ‘Oh, come on,’ he wheedled. ‘Just a hint. Which of us would you put your money on?’

‘I really couldn’t say.’

‘Oh, well.’ He turned away in a huff, and after a moment’s search found the last of the books. ‘Was it a big gun? Heavy to carry around?’

Kathy took the books and handed him her card. ‘I don’t think so. Many thanks for these.’

He looked vaguely cheated as she turned and left, wondering why people were so fascinated by the gory details.

She crossed the river, stopping on the way to buy some sandwiches for lunch and a few other supplies that Brock needed. In Matcham High Street she turned through the familiar archway into Warren Lane and parked in a space between other cars in the yard behind the shops. The wind picked at the skirt of her coat as she carried her bags under the dark skeleton of the horse chestnut tree towards the irregular terrace of houses that faced the lane that ran along the top of the railway cutting. She glanced up at the bay window that projected from an upper floor, and thought she recognised the shadow of Brock in the window seat in which he now spent most of his time. She fitted the key he’d given her into the front door, and stepped into the warmth of the small hallway calling out ‘Hello’. There was no reply, but as she climbed up the stairway she thought she caught the sound of a murmur of voices. Perhaps the radio, she thought, and turned from the landing towards the kitchen that overlooked the small courtyard at the back of the house, setting her bags down on the table.

Kathy recognised Suzanne’s perfume a moment before she heard her step on the wooden kitchen floor behind her. She turned and smiled, ‘Suzanne, hello,’ and immediately took in two very strong impressions. The first was that Suzanne had gone to some trouble to look good for her visit; her hair looked recently styled, in a slightly darker shade of her natural auburn, and her clothes had been selected from the more expensive and classy side of her wardrobe. The second was that she was very angry and upset.

‘You OK?’ Kathy said carefully.

‘Why didn’t you tell me he was like this?’ Suzanne’s voice was low and tight. ‘I had no idea, no idea at all that he was in such a state.’

‘He’s coping pretty well.’

‘He’s a wreck,’ Suzanne’s voice rose. ‘He could barely get down the stairs to let me in.’

‘We didn’t want to worry you,’ Kathy said, and immediately knew that the ‘we’ was exactly wrong. She saw the look of betrayal on the other woman’s face, and thought of the phone calls she’d meant to make to her. ‘He looks worse than he is,’ she added unconvincingly.

Suzanne took a step nearer, angry. ‘Don’t patronise me, Kathy. I thought you were a friend. How could you have kept me in the dark?’

Kathy hung her head, feeling defeated by Suzanne’s passion. ‘I’m sorry. He felt he had to stay here for the time being, so then it seemed better not to alarm you. His leg’s the main problem. The doctors say the rest will mend quickly.’

Suzanne shook her head in exasperation. ‘It’s ridiculous! He’s too old to be fighting in the street like a twenty-year-old.’

‘It just came out of the blue. No one expected something like that. He and Bren were caught. It could have happened to anyone. He was rather heroic, actually. You’d have been proud of him.’

But Suzanne wasn’t ready to listen to that. ‘He should never have been in that situation. He shouldn’t be in that job at all.’

Kathy looked at her in surprise. She hadn’t heard this from her before, but she remembered the oddly stilted conversations she had had with Suzanne about her own career choices, and guessed that this was a long-running issue.

‘He should have moved on like everyone else, into senior management. Or if he doesn’t want that, he should get out completely.’ She wasn’t offering a point for discussion. She said it with absolute certainty, as a fact that would be obvious to any right-thinking person, and Kathy felt she was seeing for the first time the underlying tension in the strangely on-off relationship between the two of them.

She imagined them at some point putting their cards on the table, two people of determined views, and, finding that they couldn’t agree, settling on a kind of mutual half-life together. It made her feel vaguely stupid, as if she ought to know how to help, but couldn’t. She’d lived with Suzanne for a couple of weeks, after all, during which time Brock had stayed overnight two or three times, and yet she still didn’t know for sure if they were sleeping together.

‘You don’t agree, of course.’ Suzanne said it flatly, a demand to know if Kathy was an ally or an enemy.

‘I wouldn’t like to say what’s best for him, Suzanne,’ Kathy said cautiously. ‘I don’t think he would be happy in senior management, to be honest. As for doing something else… I don’t know.’

Suzanne turned away, as if Kathy had confirmed her suspicions. ‘Why does he have to stay here, exactly?’ she asked coolly. ‘Someone else has taken over the case, surely? He’s invalided out, isn’t he?’ There was a note of suspicion in Suzanne’s voice now, as if she suspected Kathy of some duplicity, or felt threatened by her professional relationship with Brock.

‘Yes, but the new people have been consulting him-’

‘There’s an invention called a telephone, I believe.’

Kathy hadn’t heard this sharpness from Suzanne before. She was obviously very hurt, and not stupid. ‘There’s also an internal inquiry been set up into what happened. Brock hasn’t said to me, but I think he’s worried about it. It wasn’t his fault, but he’s taken it badly, that the man they had arrested was killed in their charge.’

‘All the more reason he shouldn’t lie around here moping while he waits for things to happen.’ Suzanne turned back to face Kathy. ‘And what about you?’

Kathy felt herself flush, suddenly aware that all this time she’d been holding Brock’s front door key in her hand. ‘Me? I’ve just been looking in from time to time, and doing a bit of shopping for him.’

‘I meant, what are your plans these days? I’ve hardly heard from you since the weekend. Tina wanted to speak to you, but she couldn’t get you at your flat. She had some news about your interview. You should contact her.’

‘Yes, of course. Since I came back up to town, everything’s moved so fast… I’m sorry, I’ll do it straight away. Look, Suzanne, I think you’re right about Brock getting away from here for a while. I can keep my ears open for him here, and there’s Bren and the others. Why don’t you have another go at persuading him to go back with you to Battle?’

‘So you’re staying in London, are you?’

‘I think I will. I’ve got so much to catch up on here,’ she lied. ‘The break with you was fantastic, just what I needed, but I feel OK now.’

Suzanne sighed. ‘Maybe you should tell him. I don’t seem to be having much success at telling him anything at the moment.’

The tension had ebbed from her voice, and Kathy said, hanging the key on a hook above the worktop, ‘Let’s have some lunch. We can both work on him.’