Barry Maitland - Babel

‘No! I’m not saying that. I mean… yes, she may be right. We may have discussed it on the Saturday. I may be getting confused. Maybe my secretary phoned to tell me about the Sunday papers, but I’d already heard the news.’

‘Let’s try again, shall we? Think carefully please, and tell me when you first heard about Max Springer’s murder.’

Haygill exhaled deeply, took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s quite hot in here, isn’t it?’ His forehead was shiny, his face pale.

Bren got up and poured him a plastic cup of water.

‘Thanks.’ He gulped it and took off his jacket.

‘Take your time,’ Brock said. ‘Tell us if you’re not feeling well.’

‘No, no, I’m all right. Er, I think it may have been on the Friday I first heard. I had to go up to Glasgow that morning, and I believe I read about it in the morning paper. I’m not absolutely sure… I had so much else on my mind…’

‘But the spectacular murder of a colleague on the university steps, surely that must have registered? And a colleague who was such a bitter enemy of yours?’

Haygill took another deep breath but didn’t reply, and Brock went on, ‘Tell us your movements from the time you flew back from Glasgow on Friday up until you left for the Gulf on Saturday, please.’

In a halting voice Haygill said he’d picked up his car at Stansted airport and driven home on the Friday evening by way of UCLE, where he had to leave some papers for his staff following the Glasgow trip, and pick up others for the Gulf visit. The following morning he had packed, done some work on his laptop, then left for Heathrow with his wife around midday.

‘Did you take a walk on Saturday morning?’

‘Er, yes, that’s right, I did. Sorry, I forgot that. I had a headache and I had to do a bit of thinking about the trip, so I went out for a short walk, oh, about ten thirty. I dare say my wife told you.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Just… just round the block.’

Again Brock let his words hang, while he sat in silence, staring morosely at his notepad. The solicitor shifted in his seat. Haygill cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

Then Brock reached down to the briefcase by his feet and lifted out a clear plastic bag containing the gun, and laid it on the table in front of Haygill.

‘I am showing Professor Haygill the handgun listed as evidence L4327/1010, a semi-automatic pistol of Czech manufacture, known as a Model 52. Have you ever seen this before, Professor?’

Haygill was transfixed, eyes wide, body rigid. He stared at the gun for a long moment of silence, then, eyes still abnormally wide, rose slowly to his feet and turned towards the door.

‘I take it that means yes,’ Brock said quietly. Then, for the benefit of the tape, ‘Professor Haygill has got up to leave. I am suspending this interview at ten twenty-three hours.’

They reconvened an hour later, after Haygill had had time to recover and confer with his solicitor. To Brock it was like looking at a man in the ring, slowly registering with every blow that he was out of his weight. He wanted to apologise, he said, so softly that Brock had to ask him to speak up. He wanted to set the record straight. He had been very disturbed to read the newspaper reports of Max Springer’s death, that morning on the flight up to Glasgow. The account of Springer being shot dead on the university steps had seemed utterly incredible, impossibly melodramatic, and yet it had actually happened. The people he met at the University of Strathclyde that day had heard the news too, and kept asking him about it. He couldn’t get it out of his mind, and at some point an awful possibility had occurred to him, one that at first he dismissed, but gradually began to haunt him. Suppose Springer’s death was connected to his feud with himself? Suppose someone on his side, on his team, had decided to put an end to Springer’s slanders for his sake?

‘So you considered that a definite possibility?’ Brock said, just for the record, disappointed with the line Haygill was taking.

‘Only because the prospect was so appalling. I have a tendency to imagine the worst. Anyone will tell you. When we look at a new experiment, my first question is, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, this seemed to me the worst possibility. I would never have imagined it before that day, but then, I would never have imagined that Max Springer could die like that.’

‘Yes, but you did think it a realistic possibility?’

‘There have been times, over the past year, when some of my people have become very emotional, very angry, about racist and bigoted intolerance that they have encountered in certain quarters. You know some of it, I think. I wondered if perhaps Max Springer’s outrageous attacks upon our work had finally provoked a reaction that had gone tragically too far.’

‘I thought he was passionately opposed to bigotry and racism?’

‘So he said. The irony had not escaped me.’

‘So, what did you do?’

‘As I said before, I drove to UCLE that evening when I returned to London. It was true what I said about the papers I needed, but I also hoped to see Darr there and find out about developments, and hopefully put my mind to rest. Unfortunately he wasn’t there, and I wasn’t able to get him on the phone. I went up to the labs. It’s habit, I always do that, to get an idea of the progress of work. There was an Evening Standard on one of the benches, lying open at a spread on Springer’s murder. They’d obviously been discussing it. I looked at it, and read that the police were still searching for the murder weapon, and the horrible thought occurred to me that, if one of the team really had been involved, it might even be there, in our building. I even thought, for a moment, that I might search for it, just to reassure myself, until I realised how impossible that would be. If somebody wanted to hide something in that building, I might search for weeks and never find it. And anyway, I was ashamed of the thought. Standing there in the familiar surroundings of our laboratories, the very idea of one of my team being involved just seemed ridiculous.

‘I went back to my office to sign letters my secretary had left and sort out the papers I’d need for the next trip, and at some point I must have looked up and noticed that the volumes on the book shelves on the wall facing me were out of order.’

Haygill gave an apologetic little frown. ‘Sorry. That must sound unlikely. It was my bound volumes of the Journal of Medical Genetics, for which I was editor for several years. I was staring at them, thinking about something else, when I suddenly thought, “Why is 1990 in front of 1989?” So I got up, still thinking about this other thing, and walked over and pulled out the two volumes to switch them round, and then I saw a white plastic carrier bag rolled up in the space behind them.’

He stopped and took a deep breath. His colour had faded again, the gleam of sweat returned to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. I realise this must all sound totally unlikely. It still seems like that to me, like a bad dream, but it is the truth you see.’ Another deep breath. ‘I picked up the bag… it obviously contained something solid. Inside I found a brown paper bag, and when I lifted that out…’

He came to a halt, and his solicitor looked at him in concern and half rose from his chair.

‘No, no… it’s all right.’ Haygill raised his hand to reassure him. ‘Inside was that gun.’

They waited while he took a gulp of water.

‘What were your thoughts?’ Brock said.

‘What could I think? It seemed to confirm all my worst fears. But then I tried to reason my way out of it. I didn’t know if it was the gun that had killed Springer-is it in fact?’