Barry Maitland: Babel

‘Male.’

‘You said he was a customer. The man who bought the gun was a customer of this drug-dealer friend of yours.’

‘Not a friend of mine, Kathy, no way!’ Qasim protested, a look of determined innocence on his face. Kathy was wondering what sideline Qasim had developed to take the place of his grandfather’s business in qat. But something else was itching in her mind.

‘What was he buying?’

Qasim puffed his cigarette and looked vacantly at the motionless ceiling fan.

‘Let me guess. It was coke.’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘Good guess.’

‘One of the teachers at the university acquired a taste for it when he had a spell at a university in California. He was caught trying to bring some home with him. His first name is Desmond. Am I getting warm?’

Qasim beamed. ‘I think I’d better turn the bleedin’ fans on, Kathy. You’re practically on fire.’

As she walked across the cobbles of Chandler’s Yard, Kathy recalled the little Welshman, Desmond Pettifer, Reader in Classics, mischief-maker and last remaining friend of Max Springer. She remembered his innocent inquiries about the calibre of the murder weapon, and wondered what story Springer had told him, and what had possessed him to help Springer buy a pistol. Did he imagine that Max was going to storm into Haygill’s office and gun him down? Or the University President, perhaps, Roderick Young? Or had Max explained that it wasn’t their lives that he wanted but their reputations, their place in history. And in a way he had succeeded, for he was now more widely discussed and read than he ever had been while he was alive, while they would probably remain tainted by what had happened.

It would depend on the coroner, she imagined, and what he would make of Brock’s theory of elaborate suicide. For although both Brock and Briony had come by their separate ways to believe it, it still wasn’t proved. The events could still be seen as consistent with Abu having acted alone, or with some other, unknown party.

She stepped out of the lane into the stream of shoppers on Shadwell Road. Someone was causing an obstruction ahead, and she recognised the youth Ahmed Sharif, thrusting green pamphlets into the hands of reluctant passers-by with a burning intensity in his eyes. She took one and read it. ‘In effect you deny the Judgement. But there are guardians over you, honoured recorders, who know all that you do.’

Sura 82: 10

It was a reassuring thought. Leave it to the guardians. She moved on to the window of a travel agent, and looked for a moment at the notices of cut-price fares. Some things at least had become clear; the pensioners from Pontefract would not figure in her life. She was doing what she was best at, what she most wanted to do. Music was coming from the doorway of the shop, a bouncy number from Bollywood Flashback, and she thought of Wayne O’Brien and wondered where he was now. He had helped her at a critical moment, in a way that perhaps no one else could have, not Brock, nor Suzanne, nor Leon. They had been too much tangled in what had happened to her, and now that she was free again she could return to them on her own terms.

She turned on her heel and strode off. There was a letter in a drawer of Brock’s desk that she wanted to retrieve.