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.’
‘He hasn’t confessed?’
‘No, and his two mates are sticking to his alibi. At the moment Brock’s staying with the death threat charge, but if he needs more time he can use the Prevention of Terrorism Act and hold them for forty-eight hours, or five days with extensions. Forensic are going through their clothes, looking for gunshot residue. I reckon the kid’ll crack when they find that.’
Kathy also tried to find out more about his undercover work in Special Branch, but he was gently evasive. Neither of them wanted to dwell on work, it seemed, and they turned to other things. Wayne had travelled a good deal, and Kathy encouraged him to talk about the places he’d visited. He was entertaining and good company. They began with a drink in a pub in the King’s Road, then went on to the curry, which Kathy confirmed was the best she’d ever tasted, thinking as she did so that it was ironic that the last man she’d been out with had been Leon, an Indian, who had never, to the best of her recollection, bought her a curry. Come to think of it, she wasn’t even sure if he liked Indian food. The thought of him still hurt, but less so as the evening passed. The two men weren’t at all alike, Leon seeming even more cool and taciturn in her memory the more relaxed and jolly Wayne made her feel. And of course that was the root of her problem, she decided with the clarity of revelation, as they continued to a little night club Wayne knew, and another bottle of wine took its effect. She simply hadn’t had enough experience, of life, of men, of the world, to know what suited her best and what would make her really happy.
And in the light of this understanding, and the spirit of openness and experimentation it engendered, it perhaps wasn’t necessary for Wayne to spin her the line he did. At least she assumed, when she thought about it the next morning, that it was just a line, but subtly spun, in fascinating little tit-bits of information dropped during the course of the evening, so that by the end of it she was thoroughly taken in. His girlfriend, it seemed, was going through a crisis of the heart. Basically she wasn’t sure whether she loved him or someone else called Kim, who turned out to be a woman. Kathy could imagine, could she not, what that did for Wayne’s sense of self-worth, although in point of fact Kathy hadn’t noticed him at all deficient in that area. The crux was that the girlfriend was meeting with Kim that very evening, in the flat that all three shared, in order to resolve things one way or the other, and Wayne had promised to stay away. So he couldn’t go home. Regardless of what his girlfriend decided however, Wayne had realised that things could never be the same between them again, which made him feel pretty sad, although again Kathy hadn’t noticed that.