‘Can you smell anything? Petrol?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Which floors are the laboratories on?’ Brock whispered, and the man replied, levels three to five. He pointed the way to the stairs, then Brock told him to leave.
The darkness was even more intense inside the stair shaft, and Brock used the torch which one of the patrol officers had given him to find his way up to the third level. He switched off the light when he reached the door, gently eased it open, and, despite his scorched nostrils, was immediately struck by the pungent odour of petrol. He stood motionless in the doorway for some time, but could hear no sounds of movement, nor detect any stray light in the darkness, though there was a faint whistling noise that he couldn’t decipher, that seemed to come from all around. The air-conditioning, presumably.
He went back into the stairway and moved up to the next level and repeated the manoeuvre. Again he heard the whistling sound, but nothing else, and was about to turn back when he caught a flash of light briefly reflected off a distant wall. He began to make his way carefully in that direction, weaving around laboratory benches and furniture by the faint green light of emergency exit signs. Gradually he began to make out the shuffling sounds of movement ahead, the raw, pungent smell of petrol, and perhaps another smell, more subtle and difficult to identify beneath it.
He came to a doorway to the next room and saw the figure with a small flashlight working its way along a line of benches. He felt along the wall at his shoulder for a light switch, found it, and turned it on. The hooded figure gave a little shriek and froze, pinned like a black incubus against the white dazzle of light from the bench lights. Then very slowly it turned, holding in one hand a metal can, and in the other a small, bright green object. A Bic lighter.
‘It’s me, DCI Brock, Briony. I’m on my own. I need to talk to you.’
Briony Kidd stared at him, then past him, checking, recovering from the shock of being discovered. She slowly laid the can on the bench beside her and lowered the cigarette lighter towards it, her thumb on the striker wheel.
‘I will do it,’ she said in a quiet, taut voice. Her face was very pale beneath the hood.
‘Oh, yes, I don’t doubt it. But I want you to do something else first.’
‘What?’
He slowly reached across to one of the stools that stood nearby and pulled it over and sat on it, opening the front of his coat and taking a deep breath as if quite at ease, although the fumes almost made him gag. He realised now what the underlying smell was-gas. She had been working her way along the benches opening the gas taps. That’s what the whistling sound had been. With a shudder he thought how catastrophic his action in switching on the lights might have been. One small spark… Presumably the gas wasn’t sufficiently concentrated. He forced his voice to sound calm, as if they had all the time in the world. ‘I’d like a short tutorial with you, I the student, you the tutor.’
She curled her lip, the muscles tight across her face. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘It won’t take long. And I do feel stupid, it’s true, for taking so long to understand what you and Max were doing. I take it this is your theory of action, is it? The highest form of human activity, taking events into your own hands?’
She said nothing.
‘Only I’m just rather afraid that you can’t repeat history, not really. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Trying to repeat what Max did. Someone said that history happens the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’
‘Marx,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, I thought so. And I’m afraid this will be a farce, Briony. You’ll burn yourself and cause a bit of damage, and it won’t make the least bit of difference. Richard Haygill and his work won’t be stopped.’
‘That’s what you were supposed to do,’ she said bitterly. ‘You arrested him, you had him in your hands, and you let him go.’
‘I had no choice. The case against him was too weak. In the end, Max just hadn’t done a good enough job. I think it was vanity that got in the way; he thought that the shock of his death would be enough to carry all before it. All the same, what he did was, in its own peculiar way, extraordinary, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you first realise how he died?’
Briony shook her head with irritation and began to turn away.
‘It’s all right,’ Brock said quickly. ‘You have plenty of time. None of the people outside will interfere as long as I’m here.’
She hesitated, then shrugged and slumped onto a stool. ‘All right.’ She suddenly looked very tired, and he guessed she hadn’t slept for some time. ‘I didn’t understand at first.’
‘He hadn’t confided in you?’
‘No. He told me very little.’ The faintest trace of bitterness. ‘I was there, on the steps, the evening that he died.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I was terribly shocked. I stayed for a while, then I left. I didn’t want to go home. I needed to talk to someone, so I went to Chandler’s Yard to see Fran and Nargis. Abu was there. He’d only just arrived, and it was obvious that something had happened to him. He was like a spring wound tight, pacing up and down, muttering to himself. The others were asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t speak to them. Then I told them my news, about Max, and as I spoke I saw a terrible change come over Abu. He began trembling all over and staring at me with wide eyes. I asked him if he knew something about Max’s death, but he just turned and ran out of the flat. Later Qasim said he’d found him praying downstairs in the mosque, and asked us if he was all right because he seemed to be acting so strange.’
‘You knew Abu pretty well by that stage, did you, Briony?’
‘Yes. When Nargis went to Kashmir to get married, Abu and I became closer friends. We… we talked a lot.’
Brock detected an edge in her voice as she said this, and said, ‘He was a nice looking boy. Perhaps you hoped for more than friendship?’
‘That would have been stupid, wouldn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘He still loved Nargis, despite everything.’ She said it too quickly, too angrily, and Brock recognised the jealousy behind the words.
‘Well, anyway, you knew him well enough to see that he’d been profoundly affected by something that evening. Did you guess what it was?’
‘Not at first. The idea of Abu being mixed up in Max’s death would have been too awful. Even when I met you the next day and you asked me if Max had ever upset Muslims, I never connected it with Abu. When I thought about it afterwards I decided you must have had suspicions about the other Muslims working at CAB-Tech.’
‘Did you decide to give us a nudge in that direction by telling the press that we were thinking along those lines?’
She flushed, ‘Yes. I thought it would make it impossible for you not to follow that up. And I was sure it must be true. I thought Abu must have discovered something about what the others had done, and that was why he was behaving so strangely. I was in a state of shock over Max. Everyone was talking about him, the papers were full of stories, and I felt as if I’d lost, I don’t know… a close relative or something. Then on Monday morning, when there was that speculation in the paper about an Islamic connection, they also reported that the police were saying that the killer had escaped on a motorbike, and suddenly I realised that it might have been Abu who killed Max. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that it must be true.
‘I went to Chandler’s Yard. I wanted to confront Abu and hear his denial with his own lips. But he wasn’t there. When I went upstairs, no one was there. I went into Nargis’ room and at first I thought I’d wait for them. My head was spinning. On the table was a packet of photographs and I looked through them. Most of them were of Nargis and Abu together. They looked so normal, so happy and untroubled by all the terrible things that had been happening around them. I felt I didn’t understand them at all, and I began to feel this great anger. How could he have done such a thing? How could she protect him? Everything about their lives seemed to be a deception. They must both be fanatics, I thought, to do such a thing. And I thought that if only Nargis hadn’t come back from Pakistan everything might have been different, and I might have saved Abu from ending up like this, a murderer. And suddenly I hated them both, Nargis as much as Abu, and I wanted to hurt them for what they’d done.’