‘That’s too bad,’ he said, ‘I was beginning to enjoy it. That last one was promising, I reckon. I know I’ve seen him around.’
Kathy nodded agreement. More than promising, she thought, trying to put aside her sense of misgiving. She wondered how Wayne O’Brien’s research was going, but couldn’t reach him on her phone and left a message. Then she and Greg bought some fish and chips and settled down in her car beneath the track of the Docklands Light Rail to wait for Brock’s instructions.
They got Brock’s call to meet him at Haygill’s office at 8:15 p.m., sooner than Kathy had expected. Darr had adopted a defensive position behind the director’s right side, and scowled at them as they entered the room. His boss looked grey and exhausted, and it was this that got things moving. Once the initial conciliatory sentiments had been expressed, Haygill and Brock quickly agreed that they should jointly witness the remaining interviews, and when Darr began to repeat all his grounds for objecting to Kathy’s questions Haygill silenced him by asking him to get Abu Khadra.
While they waited, Brock passed Kathy a note. She opened it and read the fax, from Wayne O’Brien to Brock.
‘One result only so far. Abu Khadra was arrested by Israeli army in south Lebanon under emergency powers in 1989. Then aged fifteen years. Held for twenty-one days. No further record.’
Darr returned shortly to say that Abu wasn’t answering his phone, and that he’d sent the two Iraqis over to his room to fetch him. They rang back a few minutes later with the news that there was a light on in C-210 but the door was locked and there was no response to their knocks.
‘He’s probably just popped out to visit someone,’ Darr suggested huffily, but Kathy knew otherwise and Brock saw the look on her face and said quietly to Haygill, ‘Maybe it would be wise to go over there, and get security to meet us there with a key. What do you think?’
For a moment Haygill looked confused and uncomprehending, then Brock’s tone registered and anxiety brought him to his feet. ‘Yes.. . Yes, you’re right.’
They hurried across the windswept campus, heels clattering on the wet concrete paving slabs, to find the corridor to room C-210 now filled with people. Other CAB-Tech team members had joined the Iraqis, and a number of residents had been attracted out of their rooms by their shouts and the banging on Abu’s door. Two of Mr Truck’s security men were there too, bulky in thickly padded jackets and military style caps. Haygill exchanged a few terse words with them, and the gathering fell silent as one of them pulled out a bunch of keys.
Whatever worse fears the spectators might have had didn’t just evaporate when the door swung open and they saw into the empty room, for although there was no Abu lying unconscious on the little bed or slumped with a rope around his neck, there was still something immediately disconcerting about the room’s bareness which gave an almost supernatural dimension to his vanishing. There were no postcards on the pinboard, no creases on the bedcover, and no curtains on the window to hide the sinister blackness of the river beyond. Only the book lying open on the bare table confirmed that he had once been there.
Brock stepped forward to examine it. No one else seemed inclined to follow him into the room. After a moment he called back over his shoulder, ‘Dr Darr. Do you or one of your colleagues read Arabic?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Darr declared, and waved one of the Iraqis to step with him to Brock’s side.
‘It is the Qur’an, sir.’
‘Yes. He’s underlined one of the verses, here. What does it say?’
The Iraqi stooped to read, then straightened and stared meaningfully at Darr and murmured something. Darr whispered in return, then took a deep breath.
‘It concerns the fate of martyrs, sir,’ he said at last, reluctantly, clinging to the formal mode of address like a shield.
‘Could you translate it, please?’
Darr muttered to the Iraqi, who began to recite.
‘‘‘Don’t think that those who are slain in the cause of Allah are dead. They are alive and in the presence of their Lord, who looks after them and heaps gifts upon them. They are happy that those they have left behind suffer neither fear nor grief. They rejoice in Allah’s grace and bounty…’’’
A murmuring broke out among the people in the corridor as they picked this up, and phrases were repeated for those who hadn’t heard. Some men began to press forward into the room to see the book for themselves. Brock spoke to the security guards, asking them to clear the crowd, which they began to try to do, with some difficulty. He turned to Darr and the Iraqi again. ‘Where could he have gone?’ he demanded.
They shook their heads. Abu was always the outsider in the team, Darr explained, because of his work, in computers rather than the science. He worked to a different pattern, a different timetable. He attended a different mosque.
‘In Shadwell Road? Why there? Did he know people there? Friends?’
They shook their heads, uncertain.
‘’Ang on.’ PC Talbot spoke up. ‘I’ve got ’im now. He drove a motorbike, didn’t he? A little yellow Yamaha.’
They nodded, yes. His pride and joy.
‘Yeah, I can picture ’im now. With a black helmet. I’ve seen ’im down the Road a lot. I thought he lived there.’
Brock turned to Haygill, who was hovering just inside the door to the room as if he wanted to be anywhere but there. ‘Anything you can add, Professor?’
The scientist cleared his throat. ‘Er… Excellent worker. Good computer people are like hen’s teeth these days, and Abu is outstanding. A brilliant young man. He’s had offers from other places, but he’s stayed with us. Believes in the work.’
‘Any relatives in this country?’
‘Not to my knowledge. His family is all in Lebanon, I understand. He went to the Gulf to study. University of Qatar.’
That seemed to be all that they knew of Abu, or were prepared to tell, and Brock asked them to leave while he and Kathy carried out a search of the room. Its emptiness extended into all its corners, no hangers in the wardrobe, no fluff beneath the bed.
‘I don’t think he did live here,’ Kathy said finally. ‘He didn’t have enough time to clean it out this thoroughly.’
Only the book seemed to bear any signs of vital human life, its pages interleaved with small fragments of Abu’s past, an old postcard of the Roman ruins at Ba’albek in the Beqa’a Valley of Lebanon, some letters in spidery Arabic, some photographs, an elderly smiling woman wearing traditional headdress, a family group at a table, two little girls, a middle-aged European.
‘Bloody hell,’ Brock said, lifting up the last picture for Kathy to see.
It had been cut from a glossy printed page, and the face was younger by ten or fifteen years, the unruly bush of hair thicker and darker, the face plumper, but it was certainly him.
‘Springer?’ Kathy asked.
‘Springer,’ Brock nodded. ‘Our victim.’
He turned the paper over but the back was blank.
‘Looks like it’s come from the dust-cover of a book,’ Brock suggested. ‘His autobiography maybe.’
He put the picture back between the leaves and stared at Kathy. ‘The book of his life.’
11
T hey went first to Shadwell Road police station and made arrangements with the duty inspector to call in additional officers from surrounding divisional stations. Soon they were joined by Bren Gurney and a carload of people from Serious Crime, including Leon Desai.
Bren cornered Kathy soon after he arrived. ‘Leon insisted on coming over with us, Kathy. What do you want me to do? Send him off somewhere?’
Kathy’s heart sank. So her break-up with Leon was common knowledge. And she had fondly hoped that people didn’t even know they’d been having an affair. Some hope.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, aiming for total indifference but hearing herself sound snappy. ‘Not an issue.’