Barry Maitland: Babel

‘And did you inquire as to the nature of his opinions?’

‘Yes, sir. I thought he might be a nutter. Maybe a racist. But he said he’d been speaking out against extremists of all persuasions.’

‘Extremists.’

‘Yes, sir. And fundamentalists. His words.’

‘Hm. And he was quite specific about the date? Not “about the twentieth” or “within three weeks” or something like that?’ Brock noticed the lad blink involuntarily. There was the briefest hesitation before he replied.

‘The twentieth, sir. Exactly.’

‘Yes…’ Brock gave him a sympathetic smile, but held his eyes, saying nothing until the constable abruptly said, ‘We worked that out, you see, sir. That’s how he could be so specific.’

‘Worked it out?’

‘He claimed the caller had said, “within two weeks of the end of Ramadan”, and we worked out that was the twentieth. I didn’t put all that in the report,’ Talbot said speaking faster now. ‘Would have taken too long, and anyway, around here you don’t think twice about Ramadan…’

Brock nodded understandingly. Ever since the Stephen Lawrence case and the McPherson report that followed it, condemning endemic racism in the Metropolitan Police, a tidal wave of political correctness had swept over the force. Greg Talbot had omitted the words ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Ramadan’ from his report because they had a flavour that he would prefer to keep out of his account. He would have done this automatically, as part of a self-correcting editorial process, presenting the facts in a more neutral way, just to be on the safe side. But it did change things, by God it did. He felt Bren stir at his side.

‘Greg, what I’m going to ask you to do is to write out for me as full a description as you can possibly recall, of everything that you and Professor Springer said, word for word.’

Talbot hesitated, no doubt seeing this as an invitation to weave the rope that he would be hanged by. ‘I’m not sure, sir…’ he said hesitantly, and Brock saw the lad’s brain working, perhaps trying to remember where he could get the phone number of the Police Federation for help.

Brock felt momentarily helpless. He was too old, too highly ranked, altogether too heavy for this. Clearly the lad felt threatened by him. Bren on his own wouldn’t have been much better, either, just another, younger version of the same. Kathy could have done it, got the kid on side, talking informally, sympathetically. He felt a little stab of pain and loss at the thought of her. She would probably see the case mentioned in the papers, on TV, and she might be tempted to return too soon. He’d have to phone Suzanne later and warn her.

‘Greg, this will only be for my personal use, to further our investigation into the Springer murder, I can assure you of that. I will keep the original, and no copies will be made. As I said, I have no criticism of the way you handled this, and I take it your supervisors feel the same way?’ He glanced at the inspector, who looked uncomfortable, as if wanting to keep his options open, depending on how this turned out, but he gave a nod all the same.

‘He just didn’t seem kosher, sir!’ Talbot blurted out. ‘He looked sort of weird, with his hair sticking out all over the place, and he was so bleedin’ calm. He stood there for twenty minutes listening to Mr Manzoor going on about his daughter and how we weren’t doing enough and he was going to go back to the justice to issue a new warrant, and all the time Springer just stood there, listening and nodding, and by the end Manzoor was talking more to him, appealing to him, like he was the magistrate! Then when finally Manzoor left, Springer told me what he’d come for, that someone had threatened to kill him, in the same, calm way, as if he was talking about someone else altogether.’

‘So you didn’t really believe him?’

Talbot lowered his head. ‘When he said he was a teacher at the university, I thought one of his students was having a lark, winding him up, pretending to be a terrorist or something. Well, he didn’t seem like the sort of man anyone would want to kill, a polite old bloke like that. And when he said how he was a widower and lived on his own, and had no close family, I thought the poor old bugger had probably had a miserable Christmas and New Year and just wanted to talk to someone. So I talked to him, and I told him his best plan was to get on to BT and get them to intercept his incoming calls, but if he got any evidence, like a threatening note or something, he should come back and we’d make out a formal report and take some sort of action. But he insisted on making a proper statement then, and that I got it recorded on file. That way, he said, if it happened again, the next person he spoke to would take it seriously. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was frightened or anything. He’d have been more bothered if he’d been reporting a lost budgie.’

‘I understand. We could hardly put an armed guard on everyone who thinks someone’s out to get them, could we? Then something like this happens, and you think, “if only”. No fault of yours, son. Just the luck of the game. But now we have to find the killer, and I do want that detailed report. We owe the old man that, don’t we?’

‘Yes, sir.’ PC Talbot met Brock’s eyes again and added quietly, ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Good.’ They got to their feet, and Brock shook hands with the inspector and then said to the constable, ‘See us to the door will you, son?’

Outside on the pavement, with the lad on his own, Brock gave Talbot his card and said quietly, ‘Call me direct if anything else occurs to you, Greg. And if they try to put any blame on you, get in touch, OK? I’ll sort it out.’

The rain had stopped, and as they stood in front of the postered window one of the broadsheets caught Brock’s eye. One of the Missing Persons, a picture of an attractive young South Asian woman, and the name, Nargis Manzoor.

‘The same Manzoor?’ Brock asked.

‘Yes, sir. She’s been missing now for over three months. Mr Manzoor doesn’t think we’re doing enough to find her. He got a warrant issued last year for us to carry out a search.’

‘How come?’

‘She’s only seventeen. He claimed he had grounds to believe that she had been taken out of the possession of her parent for the purpose of extra-marital sex, against his will. Section nineteen of the Sexual Offences Act, sir.’

Brock smiled. ‘You’ve been swotting up for your exams, eh?’

Talbot grinned back. ‘Believe me, sir, after three months of Mr Manzoor going at us day and night, we all know the Sexual Offences Act 1956 backwards. The thing that gets me is that the abduction doesn’t need to be against her will, only against his. And that’s pretty much what happened in this case, we reckon. They’d been fighting, her and her dad, and we reckon she’d had enough and ran away, but he won’t have it.’

At that moment a small, dapper looking man in a dark suit and tie stepped out of the adjoining shop. Seeing them he called out, ‘Ah, PC Talbot. Been looking for her, have you? I do hope so.’

‘Yes, Mr Manzoor. As always.’

Brock left them to it. As he got into the car Bren was finishing a conversation on his phone. On the point of giving up for the night, the searchers at the university had found a cartridge case, dropped in the area where students parked their motorbikes.

T he following morning, Friday, 21 January, while Kathy was reading about the case in a Hastings cafe, Brock returned to the UCLE campus. After inspecting the area under the DLR viaduct where the student motorbikes were parked, he got Truck the security chief to open up Max Springer’s room for him. It was located at the back of the university site, furthest from the waterfront in one of a cluster of old buildings which had been incorporated by the university as a temporary relief for its expanding accommodation needs. Previously workshops and small offices, the old buildings had had just enough money spent on them to satisfy the building inspector and were crammed against the DLR track, whose passing trains made their windows rattle.