Barry Maitland: Babel

‘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?’