Babel Read online

  ‘Exactly. Now, Imam Hashimi, can you tell me where we can find Ahmed and his friends?’

  The imam sighed. ‘I suppose I can. It wouldn’t be hard to find out, anyway.’ He referred to a thick office notebook filled with names and addresses in alphabetic order, and wrote three down for Brock.

  On the way out they stopped for a moment in the main hall of the mosque, where Brock asked about the carpet pattern. ‘It points to Mecca?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Imam Hashimi handed Brock a small publication about the history of the building. ‘In the nineteenth century it was used as a Methodist Hall for sailors and dock workers, then it became a synagogue, and now it’s a mosque. But the joke is that it was originally built as a brewery.’ His eyes twinkled behind the glasses and he lowered his voice. ‘That’s been left out of the official history. I dare say Ahmed would be offended.’ Then his face became serious again. ‘The trouble is that people don’t take care with words. It’s so dangerous. This word “fatwa”, for example. A fatwa is simply a ruling on some question or in a dispute, issued by a specialist in Islamic law, a mufti. In a Muslim state, for example, the judge in a court of law would be assisted by such a mufti who would issue fatwas for his guidance in a case. But now, you see, in the newspapers a fatwa means the insane death-lust of fiendish Islamic fundamentalists—another dangerous word. It’s all so dangerous. That is why I will do what I can to help you, Chief Inspector. To restore calm and good sense.’

  They shook hands, and Brock padded down the stairs to retrieve his shoes.

  If Ahmed Sharif still had dreadlocks, as PC Talbot had described, they were now hidden beneath a grubby-looking strip of material wound round his head in the style of a Taliban guerrilla, a look reinforced by his unkempt wispy beard, his pinched, underfed build, and his large unblinking eyes.

  ‘Again, what’s your real surname, sunshine?’ Bren asked. ‘Nathaniel what?’

  Ahmed’s eyes grew marginally larger and wilder.

  ‘Nathaniel being your correct Christian name, right?’

  Brock wondered whether Bren intended being quite so offensively crass. It wasn’t his real nature, but he was doing it very convincingly. He decided to stop him. Apart from anything else, it seemed to be counter-productive, since the boy had said nothing since Bren had started on him, and had progressed from rigid to trembling.

  ‘Em . . .’ Brock interposed gently. ‘I’m sure Inspector Gurney didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded, Ahmed. We know you’re a devout Muslim. And I’m sure Ahmed Sharif will do very well for the record just now, Bren. You are a regular at mosque, aren’t you, Ahmed?’

  The lad looked at Brock suspiciously, but still said nothing.

  ‘Only, if you don’t want the services of a solicitor at present, I wondered if you’d feel more comfortable if we had someone here from the mosque while we interview you? Imam Hashimi, perhaps? Or someone else?’

  ‘I object to that, sir,’ Bren said, in his best imitation of recalcitrant constabulary.

  ‘Overruled, Inspector,’ Brock said firmly. ‘What do you say, son?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Only I may be called away soon, and I may have to leave you and Inspector Gurney to battle on without me.’

  Ahmed blinked, the first time for some while, and then spoke. ‘How long’s this going to take then?’

  ‘Up to you, son. As long as necessary, I suppose.’ Brock glanced at his watch again. At least the lad had spoken. The thought of being left alone with Bren clearly didn’t appeal.

  ‘Yeah, all right. Imam Hashimi.’

  ‘Fine, fine. In point of fact, we may not even need to trouble the Imam, who I imagine is a very busy man, with a big flock to tend to. If you’d just answer the inspector’s questions, we could get this over very quickly, eh?’

  He nodded at Bren who said, ‘Where were you on the afternoon of last Thursday the twentieth of January, between four o’clock and six?’

  Ahmed gave this some thought, then answered suspiciously, ‘With two of my friends, at my place.’

  ‘Did your mum see you there?’

  ‘No, she was at work.’

  ‘Anyone else see you there?’

  ‘No. Where am I supposed to have been? And who am I supposed to have threatened, anyway?’ He turned to Brock angrily. Now the silence had been broken, the words were coming out fast and angry. ‘He said I was under suspicion of issuing a threat. Well, who did I threaten? This is crap, this is. This is your kafir justice, this is. You’re just trying to stitch me up, ’cos I’m not white, ’cos I’m a Muslim!’

  Brock raised a calming hand. ‘No, no, Ahmed. We’re not trying to do that. Tell me, do you know anyone down at the new university in the docklands, UCLE?’

  There was a slight but definite reaction, Brock thought, but then Ahmed might well have been following the Springer case. ‘You do?’

  ‘No, I don’t know anyone there. I wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘Why not? You’re a bright lad. You’d get on with the students, I should think. In fact I’m surprised you didn’t go there yourself.’

  ‘They’re stuck-up kafir trash!’ Ahmed burst out. ‘They just learn error and lies in that place.’

  ‘Do they?’ Brock said softly, beginning to feel close to something at last.

  ‘And they wouldn’t let the likes of me in anyway, on account of their prejudice and discrimination.’

  ‘But I thought they had quite a lot of Islamic students there, from many countries . . .’

  ‘Oh, yeah! Paying fees! Of course they take them if they pay! The greed of Satan knows no bounds!’

  ‘No, no,’ Brock shook his head sceptically. ‘I’m sure that’s not true. They wouldn’t be allowed to have a discriminatory policy, surely?’

  ‘It’s true! They speak lies and favour their own. I know. They turned me away.’

  ‘Really? When was that, Ahmed?’ Brock was aware of Bren sitting very still.

  ‘Four years ago! Before I took my A levels. I went for an interview, but they wouldn’t offer me a place, because I was a Muslim.’

  Brock shook his head, looking shocked. ‘That’s hard to believe, these days. What subjects were you interested in, as a matter of fact? What did you apply for?’

  ‘PPE. But they wouldn’t have me, a Muslim from the East End.’

  Brock sat back and nodded at Bren. ‘PPE. That’s philosophy, politics and economics, isn’t it? You’d have been one of Professor Springer’s students, only they closed down his undergraduate course. Was he the one who interviewed you?’

  A look of confusion slowly filled Ahmed’s face, as if something had just surfaced in his mind. ‘I’m not going to say any more. Not until Imam Hashimi gets here.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve changed my mind about that,’ Brock said. ‘I really would advise you to accept a solicitor. As I said, it won’t cost you anything.’

  ‘I don’t want a Christian lawyer speaking for me.’

  ‘Well, we can see if a Muslim one is available. But you really do need the advice of someone who understands the law. Shall I arrange that? And while we’re waiting for that to happen, can we just confirm one little matter . . .’ He reached across to open the file lying on the table in front of him. Inside, in a plastic bag, was the green leaflet from Springer’s study. ‘This is one of yours, isn’t it, Ahmed?’

  The young man looked carefully at it, then nodded defiantly. ‘Yeah, that’s ours.’

  ‘And you sent it to Professor Springer, didn’t you?’

  ‘Eh?’ Again the look of confusion, turning into alarm. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who is this Professor Springer?’

  Brock smiled. ‘If you don’t know, Ahmed, you must be just about the last one left in the country who doesn’t. You sent him this as a death threat, didn’t you?’

  Ahmed’s mouth snapped shut, his eyes startled and wide.

  ‘One of the interesting things about making a death threat, Ahmed, is that you’re guilty of a crime even if you don’t
actually intend to carry out your threat, so long as the victim believes you do, and we know that Professor Springer believed the threat was a genuine one, because he told us about it. But then, you did intend to carry out your threat, didn’t you? You weren’t playing games.’

  8

  After the event, Kathy found it hard to work out exactly how she ended up sleeping with Wayne O’Brien.

  After their lunch in Shadwell Road, a fish kebab at the Banglatown Balti House, they had arranged to meet that evening for a meal at what Wayne described as his favourite curry palace, Chutney Mary’s in Chelsea. Then Kathy had strolled along Shadwell Road, wondering at the number of travel agencies advertising flights to places she’d never heard of, and she’d bought a few unfamiliar goods along the way, including jackfruits and some black seed oil, irresistibly promoted as ‘able to cure every disease but death’.

  She was putting these goodies in the back seat of her car when her mobile rang. It was Clare Hancock.

  ‘Well, have you discussed it with Brock?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes, Clare.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s not sure. He wants to think about it. Maybe a day or two.’

  Silence for a moment, then, ‘He didn’t buy it, did he? He thinks it’s a waste of time.’

  ‘It’s not that, but he’s got a lot of other pressing things at the moment, and you haven’t given us much to go on. He has no idea how credible your other lead might be.’

  Another silence while the reporter thought it over, then she came back with, ‘All right. I’ll let you look at it, Kathy, or at least a photocopy of it. I won’t give it to you, because I’m not supposed to have it, and if you put me in a corner I’ll deny I ever did have it. But you can read it, and judge for yourself.’

  ‘Clare, you really would be far better dealing directly with Brock.’

  ‘No way. Where can we meet?’

  She said where she was, and Kathy agreed to drive to a place nearby where she could park. It wasn’t really taking her far out of her way home to Finchley anyway. When she rang off, Kathy wondered at this insistence on dealing with her. Not just sisterly solidarity, surely. Did Clare think she would be more easily persuaded than Brock? Or was it something more devious? If she but not Brock viewed this piece of evidence, might that put her credibility or judgement on the line at some future date, when everybody was denying its existence? The same way Clare Hancock seemed to feel that her reputation was at risk. Kathy decided to ring Brock and let him know what she was doing, but she was told that he was interviewing a suspect and wasn’t available.

  She spotted the reporter standing in a doorway as soon as she turned into the street. The woman was talking into a phone, but snapped it away as soon as she saw Kathy’s fair hair and ran over to the car and got in.

  ‘Well . . .’ She took a deep breath, like someone bracing for a big jump. ‘I hope I’m not going to regret this.’

  Kathy waited, unable to offer any comfort.

  ‘OK. The reason my paper’s being coy is that we got a letter from Springer two weeks ago, and did nothing about it. He claimed, among other things, that his life was at risk. The letter was obviously libellous and unprintable, and the sub-editor who read it didn’t even bother to run it past the lawyers. He put it in the reject box and it didn’t get entered into the computer or anything. Then he went skiing. When he came back on Monday morning and read the fatwa story, he remembered the letter, dug it out of the box and showed it to my boss, who showed it to me. The letter didn’t seem to support the fatwa idea, and we were in a spot. Here we were pursuing this murder theory when the victim himself had tried to get in touch with us with a different story, and we’d ignored him. We’d look stupid. My boss decided we’d best pretend we never saw the letter, and just hope it hadn’t been sent to any other paper too. So far that seems to be holding up.’

  She handed Kathy several photocopied sheets of paper. The letter had been typed, badly, on what looked, from the irregular letters, like an old manual machine, on UCLE letterhead.

  The Editor

  Dear Sir,

  In recent years it has become commonplace to read letters to the newspapers complaining about the current state of our universities. These refer to inadequate government funding, overcrowded lecture theatres, low staff morale, and so on. Rarely however do they discuss the fundamental issue underlying these symptoms, which is the extent to which the whole ethos of the universities has been corrupted and betrayed by those who were its guardians. The purpose of the university is scholarship and the cultivation of diverse and creative thought, not the enlargement of the gross national product or the private incomes of its senior managers.

  Among those centres of learning which have led the charge into prostitution of their talent, my own university, UCLE, is an outstanding leader in whoredom. On the one hand it adopts a breathtaking promiscuity in soliciting commercial funding for research which distorts and corrupts genuine scholarly activity, and on the other it ruthlessly stifles dissent and debate among its academic staff, who are reduced to the role of intellectual harlots, required to service the needs of whichever drooling customers their glossy senior management mesdames can lure off the street.

  The glamorous star of our particular bordello is a siren by the name of CAB-Tech, the Centre of Advanced Biotechnology, a model of its alluring kind, whose groping assignations with commercial interests are not open to public scrutiny, which has produced no tangible benefits for its host university, and whose prime purpose appears to be the enrichment of its sponsors.

  All this would be merely distasteful were it not coupled with an arrogance which elevates it to the level of tragedy. For CAB-Tech is so driven by the greed of its clients as to pervert the very nature of human inquiry and human life itself. Under the guidance of its Svengali-like director, Professor Richard Haygill, the whore aspires to the role of God, with results that will surely be catastrophic for us all.

  One cannot say these things within the university, which has shut down its forums of debate, yet there comes a point where they must be said, and the intolerable hubris of fundamentalist science exposed. I do not do so lightly, knowing full well the risks involved. Those who speak out against tyranny must offer their very lives to the cause.

  Yours sincerely,

  Professor Max Springer

  ‘I can see why you couldn’t print it. It sounds mad.’

  ‘Yes. When the sub-editor first read it he thought it was one of those crazy feuds you hear about among academics who are supposedly very bright but have no common sense. Like the old joke, “Why are disputes in universities so bitter? Because the stakes are so low.” Only the stakes here aren’t necessarily low, at least as far as CAB-Tech is concerned. From what little I’ve been able to find published about it, it seems to be a very successful outfit, and this Professor Haygill is a highly respected scientist. My editor’s reasoning was that we hadn’t published the letter, and as far as we knew Springer hadn’t denounced CAB-Tech anywhere else, so why would he be at risk from them?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kathy thought about what she knew about Brock’s case, and about him already interviewing a suspect. ‘I think he’s right.’

  ‘Do you?’ Clare Hancock looked at Kathy hopefully.

  ‘Well, the idea of sinister scientists bumping people off to protect their research . . .’ She smiled, and Clare grinned back.

  ‘That’s what I hoped you’d say. And they wouldn’t do it like that anyway, would they, have him shot in public? They’d put some fiendish chemical in his tea or something, wouldn’t they?’

  They both chuckled. ‘I don’t know,’ Kathy said. ‘It just all sounds so hysterical and unlikely. I’ll tell Brock about this if you like, but I really don’t think it’s going to interest him.’

  ‘Good.’ The reporter took the sheets of paper back from Kathy and turned to open the car door. ‘No one would have given this a second thought if Springer hadn’t died like that. And . . .’ she paused with
the door half open, ‘. . . I suppose I also had a lurking worry that we’d been given the fatwa story to put us off this, if this was for real.’

  Kathy didn’t really follow that, but waved goodbye and drove on to Finchley where she collected the bills and junk mail from her letterbox and took the lift up to her flat. It seemed hollow and cold when she opened the door, the first time she’d been there for over a week, and the view from the twelfth floor window of suburbs stretching into the distance seemed sodden and bleak. She remembered with regret the bustle and warmth of Suzanne’s house with the children. That was a home, she thought, while this was just a filing cabinet for lonely people. She had two rooms, and her heart sank at the thought of the other, the bedroom, almost filled by the big bed she’d bought when Leon had moved in, briefly, before Christmas. Now that bed seemed like a big, bad, empty joke she’d played upon herself. This is just self-pity, she thought. She made herself a cup of tea, sat at the little dining table and wrote down a paraphrase of Springer’s letter, together with a brief report for Brock, and put it in an envelope which she gave to Wayne later that evening.

  He filled her in on Brock’s progress, and she asked him one or two questions about the case. It had occurred to her that it shouldn’t be hard to confirm Springer’s obvious obsession about the scientists at UCLE and his mental state when he’d written the letter to the Herald. Wayne told her that, as far as they’d been able to gather, Springer was a solitary man with few friends. Brock had said that he’d found only one person who seemed genuinely upset by his death, his sole student, Briony Kidd.

  ‘And this Muslim gang that Brock’s arrested. What are they like?’

  ‘Three kids. Well hard, or thought they were. In a panic now though. I didn’t think they could have done it until we discovered that one of them had met Springer, and believed that he’d refused him a university place. The tragic thing was that it wasn’t Springer who’d done that, it was the university closing down Springer’s course. There certainly never was a fatwa—that idea was always crap. Just some kid in a rage, lashing out at injustice and the fact that nobody would take him seriously. We reckon he acted alone. I’d sure like to know what bastard sold him the gun though.’