Kathy could hear the man’s breathing, suddenly hoarse as if he could taste the gas already filling his lungs. ‘Shit… We can turn the main off… Yeah, and throw the air-conditioning into exhaust. ..’ He lunged towards a row of colour-coded metal wheels.
‘Wait!’ Kathy called out. ‘Hang on. Will they know what you’re doing?’
‘How do you mean?’ The man was shouting at her, almost hysterical.
‘Will they know, when you shut down the gas?’
‘Probably… yes. And they’ll hear the extract fans go on.’
‘Then wait! How long would it take to clear the gas?’
‘Christ knows. Several minutes.’
Kathy stood motionless, thinking, then said, ‘Don’t touch it. Go outside and warn them. Make sure the neighbouring buildings are evacuated. Give me two minutes, then cut off the gas to the whole campus.’
The man stared blankly at her for a moment, as if half his mind was still struggling with the scale of the imminent catastrophe.
‘Give me your torch,’ she said. ‘Where’s the fire escape stair?’
He handed it over and pointed, still in a state of shock.
‘Go!’ she shouted at him, and he seemed to wake up, and turned and ran.
She was opening the door to the fire stair when she heard him call after her, ‘I can see a light on at level four!’
The stairwell was bare concrete, and as soon as she smelled its sour smell, and heard the scuffling sounds of her progress in the half-light, she knew that her nightmare was in there, waiting for her if she allowed it. Her heart began to thump with panic, bile rose in her throat, and she came to a stop, halfway up a flight, forced to grip the handrail with trembling hands just to stay on her feet. She heard her own voice in her head, accusing herself. You can’t do this. You’re going to fail. You can’t even get up the stairs.
‘Stop it,’ she said aloud. He isn’t here. He’s dead. This is a memory of a smell, that’s all, an echo in the head. Move now or you and Brock and a million female cells will be blown into the night.
She stumbled on, upward, numbly watching her feet as they climbed, step by step, level two, level three, level four.
She hesitated in front of the door marked with a large red number four, then turned the handle and went in.
And there he was, waiting for her, a dark hooded figure, silhouetted against the bench lights, and hissing. She froze, and it took her a moment to realise that it was the gas taps hissing, and that he had his back to her, and in the shadows beyond him she could make out Brock, sitting on a stool. They were talking, though their voices were low and she couldn’t make out what they said. She took a deep breath, and almost choked on the fumes of gas and petrol.
She inched silently towards the figure. His right hand was held out and she saw the top of the cigarette lighter held ready to spark. He seemed smaller than she had expected. Was it the wild boy Ahmed? Or one of the Iraqis? Maybe the other was somewhere nearby.
She remembered Leon’s description of the knife one of them had carried in the car, perhaps in his other hand, which she couldn’t see. She had her retractable baton in her coat pocket, but he would hear it snap open, and even if she struck his hand accurately, the flint might still spark.
She would have to smother it with her hand, hang on to it long enough for Brock to get over and help. Meanwhile his other hand, with the knife, would be free.
She could hear Brock’s voice now, calm and reasoned, as if pondering a question of law.
‘I always thought the most powerful bombs in the world were books. I think Abu believed that too. He left his book for us. Have you seen it? Look…’ He began to reach slowly to the pocket of his coat. The hooded figure seemed transfixed by what he was doing, then the all-pervasive hissing abruptly stopped, leaving a deafening silence in its place. The figure gave a cry and began to turn, and as Kathy threw herself at him she had a vision from her memory of him picking her bodily from the bed and throwing her against the wall. She yelled out, a wild cry of protest, and grabbed the hand that held the lighter. The figure wheeled round and Kathy forced herself to meet his face, and was astonished to see Briony Kidd gaping at her.
23
‘B ut that was such a terrible thing to ask anybody to do!’ Kathy said. ‘Imagine how Abu must have felt when Springer put it to him, to help the man he worshipped to kill himself.’
‘Oh, I think it was much worse than that,’ Brock said, lifting the pint mug to his mouth.
They were in The Three Crowns, a dozen of the team that had been working on the case. It had seemed the most appropriate place to go to celebrate, and a mini-bus had been ordered for closing time to take them all home. Qasim Ali and his brother George had wandered in for a quiet beer during the course of the evening, and had been invited to join them. They and Bren and PC Greg Talbot from the local station were currently locked in a deadly serious struggle at the darts board.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I didn’t say it to Briony, because I was worried how she’d react, but I think Springer intended all along for Abu to be caught. I think he was prepared to sacrifice Abu, and Briony’s betrayal of him to Sanjeev Manzoor and his subsequent death suited his purposes very well.’
‘But why? If he’d saved Abu, and helped him throughout his life. Why destroy him?’
‘To make the case against Haygill stick. He needed to connect Haygill to the assassin, and to do that we had to discover who the killer was. The hints that he’d left us about an Islamic connection led us to Abu, and the gun he’d told Abu to plant in Haygill’s room and the money should have done the rest. And when you think about it, he’d begun to manipulate Abu and use him for his own purposes for some time. If Abu was the child that Max had saved in the camp, then he must have kept in touch with him all those years while he lived with his adopted family, and sent them money for his education. And when Max learned that Haygill was working with people at the University of Qatar, where Abu was studying, he must have arranged for him to approach Haygill and ask for a job here at UCLE. He then used Abu as his spy inside CAB-Tech, to try to get something solid to attack Haygill with, like the BRCA4 protocol. Perhaps it was his failure to find this that drove him to the ultimate solution.’
A roar from the people clustered around the dartboard announced a winning bullseye from Greg Talbot, and Qasim and his brother were sent off to the bar to buy another round.
‘He must have been obsessed with Haygill,’ Kathy said. ‘I could never follow why. I mean, that stuff about truth and freedom, and science being like a fundamentalist religion, I couldn’t understand that.’
‘I think most of the people who reviewed Springer’s last book shared your opinion, Kathy.’ Brock drained his glass in anticipation of the drinks which the barman was stacking on Qasim’s tray. ‘I don’t know how it began, but I think his obsession ended up being purely personal. I think Haygill was right when he said that Springer hated him because he came to realise that what Haygill was doing mattered, and what Springer was doing didn’t. Haygill had achieved everything that Max Springer might have aspired to, and he couldn’t stand it.’
‘Pure spite.’
‘A total obsession. In the end Springer became a victim of the condition he despised. He lost his freedom to think straight because his mind turned a theory into an absolute truth.’
‘I think Abu knew,’ Kathy said suddenly. She was thinking of her first encounter with Abu, the look of recognition and resignation on his face. ‘I think he must have realised the fate that Max had planned for him. Yet he still went through with it.’
‘You may be right. Now that is tragedy, isn’t it? I’d be intrigued to know where Springer got the gun though.’
‘You don’t think Abu got it?’
‘I doubt it. Springer carefully stage-managed every detail of his death. I don’t think he’d have left something as important as that to Abu. He might have messed it up, got caught trying to buy it, and that would have ruined everything.’ Greg Talbot wandered over, face flushed with his success at the dartboard. ‘Here, Kathy,’ he said, ‘I still don’t get it, that weird old bloke setting the whole thing up-setting me up, come to that. But you know what bothers me the most? That day when he came in to Shadwell Road to make his report about being threatened, he stood there for the best part of an hour listening to old man Manzoor ranting on about his missing daughter and how some bloke had abducted her.’