Brock had been trying to read Springer’s autobiography, A Man in Dark Times, and had been finding it heavy going. The book was saturated with a mood of pessimism and despair, with mankind and its injustices, with fate and the death of his wife, and most of all, Brock suspected, with the author himself and his failure to quite fulfil the golden promise which his famous teachers had seen in him. On the whole, Brock felt, he could do without a bombastic midlifecrisis confession masquerading as a humanist manifesto, especially at this stage of the week.
There was one chapter however which he had found gripping. It described a period when Springer had been caught up in events so powerful that his own ego had little chance to take over the story. In September of 1982 he had accompanied his wife Charlotte to Beirut, where she had been invited to perform in a series of concerts in aid of refugees. The timing could hardly have been worse, for on the morning after their arrival Israeli shells began to rain down on the city. Nevertheless Charlotte insisted on fulfilling her engagements, and they remained in Beirut under extremely difficult conditions. Their hotel was frequently hit by shell and sniper fire, and travelling to the concert venues, many of them changed at the last minute, was a nightmare.
Other Europeans were trapped in the hotel, and a sense of solidarity grew among them. Springer became particularly friendly with a group of French medical staff from Medecins Sans Frontieres, and on the morning of Saturday, 18 September he came across them in the lobby of the hotel, hurriedly preparing to leave. They had been told of a major emergency in another part of the city, they explained, and their help was needed. On the spur of the moment he offered to join them. Afterwards he reflected that he had given it no thought at all, almost as if the decision was made for him.
They jumped into a couple of cars and sped off through the deserted streets and arrived eventually at the gates of the Shatila camp for Palestinian refugees. Nothing had prepared Springer for the horrors which he witnessed in the camp following the savage massacre which had begun on the evening of the sixteenth and continued through the seventeenth. After some hours he staggered out carrying a small boy survivor, whom he had found huddled in his ruined home with the bodies of his mother and sisters. Springer took the boy back to the hotel, uncertain what to do. The boy hadn’t spoken a word since he had been found, and Springer had no idea of his name or whether he had any other family alive. For a time he had entertained the idea of adopting him and taking him back to England, but Charlotte had dissuaded him. She said that he was acting from a sense of guilt rather than love, and that the boy would be better remaining among his own people. Eventually they handed him over to a charity, and left the city. They never saw the boy again.
It was a dramatic story, one of the few in the book in which Springer wrote movingly of another single human being, rather than of humanity in the mass. And the description of the awful experience at Shatila was vivid, much more so than most of the writing. Brock turned the pages and found the passage. I entered the camp on the Saturday morning with the French medical team. The scene was overwhelming, devastating. Survivors were still being discovered beneath the ruins of demolished shelters, and all of the effort was going into finding them. That and putting out the fires whose oily smoke hung heavy in the air, blotting out the sun.
Reading it again, he could almost smell the acrid smoke of the fires. He looked up suddenly and breathed in. He could smell the smoke of the fires. Sniffing the air in disbelief, he rose from his chair and went over to the door to the landing. As he pulled it open, a cloud of thick smoke billowed into the room. He backed away, coughing as the fumes caught his throat. Eyes streaming, he pulled out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose and pushed the door closed again, then scrambled for the phone.
An hour later Kathy ran up the lane and spotted him standing beneath the chestnut tree, watching the firemen rolling up their hoses.
‘Kathy?’ he said. ‘How the hell did you get here?’
She was relieved to see that he seemed unhurt. ‘The duty sergeant picked up your call and gave me a ring. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I was lucky that there wasn’t much flammable in the bottom hallway inside the door. God knows what the smoke and water have done to my books upstairs on the landing though.’
‘Was it a bomb?’
‘No. I heard nothing. But you can smell the petrol, can’t you? I reckon someone poured it through the letter box.’
‘Your threatening letter… Didn’t it say something about a fire?’
Brock nodded, taking it out of his pocket. ‘It seems I should have taken it more seriously. “When will the Day of Judgement be? It will be on the day when they are afflicted with the Fire, and are told: Suffer your torment.”’
‘You think it’s the Sharif kid and his mates?’
‘I think it’s his pamphlet… It was certainly a pretty amateurish attempt.’ He frowned and rubbed the side of his beard. ‘I hope it wasn’t just a warning. Have you got your phone with you, Kathy? Mine’s still inside.’
She handed it to him and he consulted his notebook which he had brought out with him and rang the number for the UCLE security office. When he’d identified himself he asked them if there had been any disturbance on campus that night. The duty guard said that there had been nothing.
‘What about the CAB-Tech building?’ Brock insisted. ‘No attempted break-ins, nothing like that?’
‘Absolutely not. The place is alarmed.’
‘Good. Look, I think you should keep a special watch on it for the next few nights. Do me a favour and check it now will you?’
The guard agreed to do it and ring him back. Ten minutes later he reported that the doors were secure and the building in darkness. ‘There’s no way anyone could break in there without a swipe-card and the alarm code.’
‘Do you have a record of who enters the building?’
‘From their cards, yes. We get it here on the computer.’
‘Check it now, will you? Who was the last one in?’
The line went silent while the man consulted his machine, then he came back, his voice doubtful. ‘Funny. According to this someone went in ten minutes ago, and hasn’t checked out.’
‘What’s the name?’
‘A Mr Abu Khadra. You know him, sir?’
‘Oh yes, I know him well. The trouble is, he’s dead. Look, I want you to watch the door of the building, but don’t try to enter it, OK? I’ll be there as soon as I can, maybe twenty minutes.’
They ran towards Kathy’s car, then saw a patrol car turning into the courtyard and chose it instead. They set off for the docklands, siren howling.
The security guard was waiting for them in the shadows at the entrance to the CAB-Tech ziggurat, which loomed massively overhead in the darkness. No one had attempted to leave the building, and there was no sign of activity inside. A fire engine had arrived, and an ARV, and Brock instructed Kathy to stay with them and keep people away from the perimeter of the building. She began to object as he turned to go in alone, but he raised his hand and said, ‘If this is what I think it is, Kathy, one of us will be more than enough.’
The guard opened the front door and pointed to the lights of the alarm indicator just inside, which had been switched off. Otherwise there was no sign of an intruder. Brock sniffed the air in the lobby. It seemed temperate and fresh, the airconditioning humming softly in the background, but his sense of smell had been badly impaired by the smoke he’d inhaled at his home.