Barry Maitland: Babel

It was a dramatic story, one of the few in the book in which Springer wrote movingly of another single human being, rather than of humanity in the mass. And the description of the awful experience at Shatila was vivid, much more so than most of the writing. Brock turned the pages and found the passage. I entered the camp on the Saturday morning with the French medical team. The scene was overwhelming, devastating. Survivors were still being discovered beneath the ruins of demolished shelters, and all of the effort was going into finding them. That and putting out the fires whose oily smoke hung heavy in the air, blotting out the sun.

Reading it again, he could almost smell the acrid smoke of the fires. He looked up suddenly and breathed in. He could smell the smoke of the fires. Sniffing the air in disbelief, he rose from his chair and went over to the door to the landing. As he pulled it open, a cloud of thick smoke billowed into the room. He backed away, coughing as the fumes caught his throat. Eyes streaming, he pulled out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose and pushed the door closed again, then scrambled for the phone.

An hour later Kathy ran up the lane and spotted him standing beneath the chestnut tree, watching the firemen rolling up their hoses.

‘Kathy?’ he said. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

She was relieved to see that he seemed unhurt. ‘The duty sergeant picked up your call and gave me a ring. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. I was lucky that there wasn’t much flammable in the bottom hallway inside the door. God knows what the smoke and water have done to my books upstairs on the landing though.’

‘Was it a bomb?’

‘No. I heard nothing. But you can smell the petrol, can’t you? I reckon someone poured it through the letter box.’

‘Your threatening letter… Didn’t it say something about a fire?’

Brock nodded, taking it out of his pocket. ‘It seems I should have taken it more seriously. “When will the Day of Judgement be? It will be on the day when they are afflicted with the Fire, and are told: Suffer your torment.”’

‘You think it’s the Sharif kid and his mates?’

‘I think it’s his pamphlet… It was certainly a pretty amateurish attempt.’ He frowned and rubbed the side of his beard. ‘I hope it wasn’t just a warning. Have you got your phone with you, Kathy? Mine’s still inside.’

She handed it to him and he consulted his notebook which he had brought out with him and rang the number for the UCLE security office. When he’d identified himself he asked them if there had been any disturbance on campus that night. The duty guard said that there had been nothing.

‘What about the CAB-Tech building?’ Brock insisted. ‘No attempted break-ins, nothing like that?’

‘Absolutely not. The place is alarmed.’

‘Good. Look, I think you should keep a special watch on it for the next few nights. Do me a favour and check it now will you?’

The guard agreed to do it and ring him back. Ten minutes later he reported that the doors were secure and the building in darkness. ‘There’s no way anyone could break in there without a swipe-card and the alarm code.’

‘Do you have a record of who enters the building?’

‘From their cards, yes. We get it here on the computer.’

‘Check it now, will you? Who was the last one in?’

The line went silent while the man consulted his machine, then he came back, his voice doubtful. ‘Funny. According to this someone went in ten minutes ago, and hasn’t checked out.’

‘What’s the name?’

‘A Mr Abu Khadra. You know him, sir?’

‘Oh yes, I know him well. The trouble is, he’s dead. Look, I want you to watch the door of the building, but don’t try to enter it, OK? I’ll be there as soon as I can, maybe twenty minutes.’

They ran towards Kathy’s car, then saw a patrol car turning into the courtyard and chose it instead. They set off for the docklands, siren howling.

The security guard was waiting for them in the shadows at the entrance to the CAB-Tech ziggurat, which loomed massively overhead in the darkness. No one had attempted to leave the building, and there was no sign of activity inside. A fire engine had arrived, and an ARV, and Brock instructed Kathy to stay with them and keep people away from the perimeter of the building. She began to object as he turned to go in alone, but he raised his hand and said, ‘If this is what I think it is, Kathy, one of us will be more than enough.’

The guard opened the front door and pointed to the lights of the alarm indicator just inside, which had been switched off. Otherwise there was no sign of an intruder. Brock sniffed the air in the lobby. It seemed temperate and fresh, the airconditioning humming softly in the background, but his sense of smell had been badly impaired by the smoke he’d inhaled at his home.

‘Can you smell anything? Petrol?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Which floors are the laboratories on?’ Brock whispered, and the man replied, levels three to five. He pointed the way to the stairs, then Brock told him to leave.

The darkness was even more intense inside the stair shaft, and Brock used the torch which one of the patrol officers had given him to find his way up to the third level. He switched off the light when he reached the door, gently eased it open, and, despite his scorched nostrils, was immediately struck by the pungent odour of petrol. He stood motionless in the doorway for some time, but could hear no sounds of movement, nor detect any stray light in the darkness, though there was a faint whistling noise that he couldn’t decipher, that seemed to come from all around. The air-conditioning, presumably.

He went back into the stairway and moved up to the next level and repeated the manoeuvre. Again he heard the whistling sound, but nothing else, and was about to turn back when he caught a flash of light briefly reflected off a distant wall. He began to make his way carefully in that direction, weaving around laboratory benches and furniture by the faint green light of emergency exit signs. Gradually he began to make out the shuffling sounds of movement ahead, the raw, pungent smell of petrol, and perhaps another smell, more subtle and difficult to identify beneath it.

He came to a doorway to the next room and saw the figure with a small flashlight working its way along a line of benches. He felt along the wall at his shoulder for a light switch, found it, and turned it on. The hooded figure gave a little shriek and froze, pinned like a black incubus against the white dazzle of light from the bench lights. Then very slowly it turned, holding in one hand a metal can, and in the other a small, bright green object. A Bic lighter.

‘It’s me, DCI Brock, Briony. I’m on my own. I need to talk to you.’

Briony Kidd stared at him, then past him, checking, recovering from the shock of being discovered. She slowly laid the can on the bench beside her and lowered the cigarette lighter towards it, her thumb on the striker wheel.

‘I will do it,’ she said in a quiet, taut voice. Her face was very pale beneath the hood.

‘Oh, yes, I don’t doubt it. But I want you to do something else first.’

‘What?’

He slowly reached across to one of the stools that stood nearby and pulled it over and sat on it, opening the front of his coat and taking a deep breath as if quite at ease, although the fumes almost made him gag. He realised now what the underlying smell was-gas. She had been working her way along the benches opening the gas taps. That’s what the whistling sound had been. With a shudder he thought how catastrophic his action in switching on the lights might have been. One small spark… Presumably the gas wasn’t sufficiently concentrated. He forced his voice to sound calm, as if they had all the time in the world. ‘I’d like a short tutorial with you, I the student, you the tutor.’