Barry Maitland: Babel

Brock and Truck climbed an uneven staircase to a dark landing from which a corridor wound away. A notice board carried class lists and a few curling posters of Christmas parties and items for sale.

‘This is the professor’s room,’ Truck said, opening one of the doors and reaching inside for the light switch.

It looked rather as if a volcano disgorging books, papers and other odd objects instead of lava had erupted in the middle of the tiny room.

‘Someone’s trashed the place,’ Brock said.

Truck laughed. ‘No, no. This is the way he kept it. Doris brought me over here to show me, when she and the prof were having their dispute.’

Standing just inside the doorway, hardly able to advance further into the room, Brock began to see a kind of pattern in the chaotic jumble. It seemed to focus on a chair, itself piled with papers, at a desk mounded with stuff, as if this were the mouth of the volcano, its source from which the debris was scattered around, and Brock guessed that, random as it appeared, the old man seated there probably knew where most things were, and could reach out a hand to find a specific book from where he had last tossed it. He could imagine how Doris’ efforts to create order would completely upset this random filing system.

‘See the desk?’ Truck said at his shoulder, whispering as if in awe at the sight. ‘When so much junk had gathered there, instead of sorting it out and putting it away, he would take that big roll of brown paper over there, see, and spread it right over the top, and pin it down at the ends with drawing pins, and start again.’ Truck sucked in his breath at the sheer outrageousness of the concept. ‘Then, when he’d piled up so many layers that the whole thing became unstable, he’d grab hold of one end and sweep the whole lot crashing to the floor, over there.’ He pointed to a great mound of debris. ‘And you wonder they have mice in here! He said he didn’t mind a few mice around. Said it raised the average IQ of the university.’ He chuckled.

‘Had quite a sense of humour then, did he?’

‘Well, to tell the truth, he wasn’t really noted for his belly laughs. More a sort of acid wit, bitter like.’

‘I’d better try to have a look round,’ Brock said. ‘You don’t have to stay, Mr Truck, if you want to get on.’

‘Fair enough. Just lock the door when you’re finished.’

Brock pulled on a pair of latex gloves and advanced gingerly through the mess, heading for the desk. Its surface was piled with newspapers, books, hand-written notes, official memos and circulars from the university administration, pens and pencils, correction fluid, a coffee mug with some dried sediment at the bottom. A small portable typewriter was half buried in the mess. There was no computer in the room.

A DLR train passed with a loud whine and a rumble, the lower half of its carriages visible through the top of the grimy little window. Brock shifted the pile of files from the seat in front of the desk and sat down, trying to put himself in the mind of the acid-tongued, under-employed, half-famous, wild-haired, chaotically untidy old man who had spent his days here. PC Talbot had been right-a very unlikely victim of anything but a random mugging, and whatever had happened on the university steps it wasn’t that. He stared at the framed pictures around the walls, mementos of Springer’s past; a print map of mediaeval Oxford, a child’s crayon drawing of an apartment block and a palm tree, a photograph of a much younger Springer in the company of a group of elderly men.

Brock’s foot bumped a metal wastepaper bin beneath the desk, and he stooped to examine its contents. He was bent forward, eyes level with the desk top, when he noticed a piece of green paper tucked under the front edge of the typewriter. He tugged it out and unfolded it. Beneath a simplified drawing of a raised clenched fist were some printed words. ‘Surely, hell lies in wait, a resort for the rebellious

… They feared not the reckoning and utterly rejected Our Signs.’

Sura 78: 22 – 31

Brock sat back, rubbing his beard with his knuckles as he considered this. The paper had been folded as if to go into a small envelope, and he began another search of the desk top, then the bin. Near the bottom of the bin, mixed up with a chocolate biscuit wrapping and a crumpled invitation to attend a union meeting, were the parts of an envelope that had been torn in half. The address had been hand printed in simple bold capitals, and as Brock deciphered the postmark date, ten days previous, he was thankful for the absence of cleaners to remove Springer’s rubbish. He slipped the green paper and the envelope into separate evidence pouches and put them in his pocket, then considered the room again. It would have to be searched properly, and it would take a couple of people the best part of a day to do it. He got to his feet, turned towards the door and saw a man standing there, leaning against the jamb watching him.

‘You look like a policeman,’ the man said. He was short, balding, chin thrust forward in an expression that mixed belligerence and amusement, and he spoke with a strong Welsh accent.

‘You’re right,’ Brock replied, peeling off his gloves as he stepped carefully through the obstacles towards him, and showed him his warrant card. ‘And you look like an academic.’

‘Yes, I do, don’t I?’ the man said, looking down at the leather elbow patches on his cardigan, his baggy corduroy trousers, his old brogues, as if considering them for the first time. ‘At least, a sort of academic. The sort that’s practically extinct. Nowadays my colleagues mostly wear suits and look like used car salesmen, so that they’re ready to go out and do a spot of marketing at a moment’s notice, I suppose. Desmond Pettifer’s the name. Classics.’

As he got closer to the man to shake hands Brock caught the whiff of whisky on his breath.

‘What do you make of poor old Max’s room, then, eh?’

‘Chaotic.’

‘Ha!’ A speck of spittle hit Brock’s face. ‘No room to swing a bloody cat, is there? There’s a wonderful description somewhere by Bertrand Russell, of his impression of American universities where he taught in the 1930s. He was amazed at the way the professors were crammed into tiny holes like this, while the presidents of the colleges lorded it in huge offices and behaved like the executives of big business corporations. Frightfully droll the Americans, he thought. But we’re not bloody laughing now. Stultitiam patiuntur opes , as Horace would say; wealth sanctions folly. Russell was a philosopher too, like Max, but of course you’d know that. You went to the same university didn’t you? Same college, in fact.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘Saw your picture in the morning papers, didn’t I? Looked you up. Then I saw Max’s door open and there you were.’

‘When did you hear the news about Max?’

‘Last night, in the pub. Noticed pictures of our noble institution on the TV news and got the landlord to turn up the volume. What a shock that was, eh? Bloody hell! It took a couple of stiff ones to calm me down, I can tell you.’

Brock thought Pettifer made the news of his friend’s death sound like a bit of a lark. ‘Did you have any ideas?’

‘About who did it? Not a clue. It must have been some madman, mustn’t it? Have you found the gun?’

‘Not yet. Max didn’t say anything to you about threats? An angry student? Someone he’d upset? Perhaps some extremist, opposed to his views?’

‘Max? No, no. Good grief, he wasn’t exactly Salman Rushdie. And our students are a tame lot-not a radical among them. All they want is a fast degree and off to the City to earn their first million.’

‘I believe he was interviewed on Radio East London a few months ago and made some controversial comments, do you remember that? Were they about the situation in the Middle East?’