Barry Maitland: Babel

And there he was, waiting for her, a dark hooded figure, silhouetted against the bench lights, and hissing. She froze, and it took her a moment to realise that it was the gas taps hissing, and that he had his back to her, and in the shadows beyond him she could make out Brock, sitting on a stool. They were talking, though their voices were low and she couldn’t make out what they said. She took a deep breath, and almost choked on the fumes of gas and petrol.

She inched silently towards the figure. His right hand was held out and she saw the top of the cigarette lighter held ready to spark. He seemed smaller than she had expected. Was it the wild boy Ahmed? Or one of the Iraqis? Maybe the other was somewhere nearby.

She remembered Leon’s description of the knife one of them had carried in the car, perhaps in his other hand, which she couldn’t see. She had her retractable baton in her coat pocket, but he would hear it snap open, and even if she struck his hand accurately, the flint might still spark.

She would have to smother it with her hand, hang on to it long enough for Brock to get over and help. Meanwhile his other hand, with the knife, would be free.

She could hear Brock’s voice now, calm and reasoned, as if pondering a question of law.

‘I always thought the most powerful bombs in the world were books. I think Abu believed that too. He left his book for us. Have you seen it? Look…’ He began to reach slowly to the pocket of his coat. The hooded figure seemed transfixed by what he was doing, then the all-pervasive hissing abruptly stopped, leaving a deafening silence in its place. The figure gave a cry and began to turn, and as Kathy threw herself at him she had a vision from her memory of him picking her bodily from the bed and throwing her against the wall. She yelled out, a wild cry of protest, and grabbed the hand that held the lighter. The figure wheeled round and Kathy forced herself to meet his face, and was astonished to see Briony Kidd gaping at her.

‘B ut that was such a terrible thing to ask anybody to do!’ Kathy said. ‘Imagine how Abu must have felt when Springer put it to him, to help the man he worshipped to kill himself.’

‘Oh, I think it was much worse than that,’ Brock said, lifting the pint mug to his mouth.

They were in The Three Crowns, a dozen of the team that had been working on the case. It had seemed the most appropriate place to go to celebrate, and a mini-bus had been ordered for closing time to take them all home. Qasim Ali and his brother George had wandered in for a quiet beer during the course of the evening, and had been invited to join them. They and Bren and PC Greg Talbot from the local station were currently locked in a deadly serious struggle at the darts board.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I didn’t say it to Briony, because I was worried how she’d react, but I think Springer intended all along for Abu to be caught. I think he was prepared to sacrifice Abu, and Briony’s betrayal of him to Sanjeev Manzoor and his subsequent death suited his purposes very well.’

‘But why? If he’d saved Abu, and helped him throughout his life. Why destroy him?’

‘To make the case against Haygill stick. He needed to connect Haygill to the assassin, and to do that we had to discover who the killer was. The hints that he’d left us about an Islamic connection led us to Abu, and the gun he’d told Abu to plant in Haygill’s room and the money should have done the rest. And when you think about it, he’d begun to manipulate Abu and use him for his own purposes for some time. If Abu was the child that Max had saved in the camp, then he must have kept in touch with him all those years while he lived with his adopted family, and sent them money for his education. And when Max learned that Haygill was working with people at the University of Qatar, where Abu was studying, he must have arranged for him to approach Haygill and ask for a job here at UCLE. He then used Abu as his spy inside CAB-Tech, to try to get something solid to attack Haygill with, like the BRCA4 protocol. Perhaps it was his failure to find this that drove him to the ultimate solution.’

A roar from the people clustered around the dartboard announced a winning bullseye from Greg Talbot, and Qasim and his brother were sent off to the bar to buy another round.

‘He must have been obsessed with Haygill,’ Kathy said. ‘I could never follow why. I mean, that stuff about truth and freedom, and science being like a fundamentalist religion, I couldn’t understand that.’

‘I think most of the people who reviewed Springer’s last book shared your opinion, Kathy.’ Brock drained his glass in anticipation of the drinks which the barman was stacking on Qasim’s tray. ‘I don’t know how it began, but I think his obsession ended up being purely personal. I think Haygill was right when he said that Springer hated him because he came to realise that what Haygill was doing mattered, and what Springer was doing didn’t. Haygill had achieved everything that Max Springer might have aspired to, and he couldn’t stand it.’

‘Pure spite.’

‘A total obsession. In the end Springer became a victim of the condition he despised. He lost his freedom to think straight because his mind turned a theory into an absolute truth.’

‘I think Abu knew,’ Kathy said suddenly. She was thinking of her first encounter with Abu, the look of recognition and resignation on his face. ‘I think he must have realised the fate that Max had planned for him. Yet he still went through with it.’

‘You may be right. Now that is tragedy, isn’t it? I’d be intrigued to know where Springer got the gun though.’

‘You don’t think Abu got it?’

‘I doubt it. Springer carefully stage-managed every detail of his death. I don’t think he’d have left something as important as that to Abu. He might have messed it up, got caught trying to buy it, and that would have ruined everything.’ Greg Talbot wandered over, face flushed with his success at the dartboard. ‘Here, Kathy,’ he said, ‘I still don’t get it, that weird old bloke setting the whole thing up-setting me up, come to that. But you know what bothers me the most? That day when he came in to Shadwell Road to make his report about being threatened, he stood there for the best part of an hour listening to old man Manzoor ranting on about his missing daughter and how some bloke had abducted her.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, did he know that the bloke was Abu?’

Kathy thought about that. ‘It’s possible,’ she said, ‘if not then, then later. Abu told him enough to know that they needed that money.’

‘That’s what I thought. He could have shown Springer a photo of his girlfriend, and Springer would have seen her picture on the missing persons poster in our front window.’

‘What are you saying, exactly, Greg?’

‘Well, he was such a devious old bugger, that if that student hadn’t told you she did it, I’d have said that he was the one that sent that photo to Manzoor, and got Abu killed, so that he wouldn’t be able to spill the beans after it was all over.’

It was a chilling thought, and Kathy had been pondering Abu’s state of mind at the end, torn between two loyalties. How strongly had he felt about the work of his CAB-Tech colleagues, the generosity of Haygill, which Springer had forced him to betray? ‘But Briony did admit that she was the one who sent the photo to Manzoor.’

‘Oh yes, she said that, but could she be trying to cover up just what a totally ruthless old bastard her hero really was?’

‘Greg, you have a truly devious mind yourself. You’ll be a great loss to the Met.’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, well, I made my choice, Kathy. I’m not going to put that uniform on again. But you? The lads were saying you’re back on board again. I thought you were going to jack it in too?’