Babel (34 page)

‘How did he seem?’

‘I’ve thought about that, but I can’t remember. I mean, I didn’t know anything had happened and I had no special reason to remember that day. I suppose he must have been normal or I would have remembered something, wouldn’t I?’

Brock turned his collar up against the wind, and stared morosely at the icy water. He had knocked his knee getting out of the car, and the pain which had eased over the past week had returned whenever he put weight on his left leg. The pond was almost precisely circular as if it had been deliberately constructed by a landscaper, although it had in fact been formed by a bomb crater during the war, at a time when the surrounding wood was much larger than the present copse. It wasn’t deep, at its centre no more than waist high to the two divers in black wetsuits working across it, but the leafy silt of the bottom was treacherous to sift through, and there was a wealth of miscellaneous objects beneath the surface—bottles, cans, a bicycle frame, a milk crate—to confuse the search. Two other men in rubber boots were working around the edge, and behind him a line of uniforms was working through the copse. At least the wind and drizzle were keeping curious spectators away.

The four men working the pond were converging on the furthest quarter when one of the pair in the water gave a cry and held something up above his head. He turned and moved in slow motion through the sucking mud towards the bank, handing it to one of the men there who slipped it into a clear bag and hurried back to the path where Brock was standing.

‘A gun, sir,’ he grinned.

Through the mud smearing the pistol, Brock made out some of the letters cast into its side, CESKA. ‘Good,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s get some lunch.’

Haygill stumbled as he was led into the room. They had waited until the following day to arrest him while tests were done on the gun, a Czech-made service issue pistol, probably about twenty years old, and confirmation received that it had indeed fired the rounds that had killed Springer.

‘Are you all right, Professor?’ Brock asked. The man looked even greyer and more harried than when he’d last seen him.

‘Am I all right?’ Haygill repeated, as if he were giving the question serious consideration. ‘Well, yesterday my wife left me, my principal assistant resigned, and my university president stabbed me in the back. This morning I woke up with toothache, then I was arrested for murder. But otherwise I’m fine, thank you.’ He ran a hand distractedly through his hair, adjusted his glasses, and sat down.

As gallows humour went, Brock had heard better. He wondered how Haygill would cope with jail. Perhaps it would be a relief, the weight of all those frequent flier points lifted from his shoulders. More likely it would destroy him.

‘Can we get you something for the toothache?’

Haygill shook his head wearily, the bravado gone. ‘I took an aspirin, thanks.’

His solicitor came in with Bren. Brock started the recording equipment, stated the formalities, then said, ‘When did you first hear of the murder of Max Springer, Professor Haygill?’

‘First hear of it?’ It didn’t seem to be the question Haygill expected, and he frowned in thought. ‘Well, er, it would have been that weekend, I think. Probably the Sunday, while I was in the Gulf.’

‘Yes, that’s what you told me when we first met, on the following Tuesday, the twenty-fifth. How did you hear about it?’

‘Phone call, I think, or perhaps an e-mail. From my secretary perhaps, or Darr. I can’t remember. Is it important? Yes, I think my secretary phoned, because of the fuss they were making in the Sunday papers.’

‘She phoned on a Sunday?’

‘Yes. She thought I should know.’

Brock paused, letting this hang in the air for a moment, then said quietly, ‘Only your wife tells us that you discussed the murder with her on the Saturday morning, over breakfast.’

Haygill looked shocked. ‘My wife? You’ve spoken to my wife?’ He turned to his solicitor. ‘I thought wives couldn’t testify against husbands.’

The lawyer shook his head, looking very unhappy with the inference that could be drawn from this, which Brock duly pushed home. ‘Oh, they’re quite at liberty to testify against their husbands, Professor. So you’re saying that causes you to change your story, are you?’

‘No! I’m not saying that. I mean . . . yes, she may be right. We may have discussed it on the Saturday. I may be getting confused. Maybe my secretary phoned to tell me about the Sunday papers, but I’d already heard the news.’

‘Let’s try again, shall we? Think carefully please, and tell me when you first heard about Max Springer’s murder.’

Haygill exhaled deeply, took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s quite hot in here, isn’t it?’ His forehead was shiny, his face pale.

Bren got up and poured him a plastic cup of water.

‘Thanks.’ He gulped it and took off his jacket.

‘Take your time,’ Brock said. ‘Tell us if you’re not feeling well.’

‘No, no, I’m all right. Er, I think it may have been on the Friday I first heard. I had to go up to Glasgow that morning, and I believe I read about it in the morning paper. I’m not absolutely sure . . . I had so much else on my mind . . .’

‘But the spectacular murder of a colleague on the university steps, surely that must have registered? And a colleague who was such a bitter enemy of yours?’

Haygill took another deep breath but didn’t reply, and Brock went on, ‘Tell us your movements from the time you flew back from Glasgow on Friday up until you left for the Gulf on Saturday, please.’

In a halting voice Haygill said he’d picked up his car at Stansted airport and driven home on the Friday evening by way of UCLE, where he had to leave some papers for his staff following the Glasgow trip, and pick up others for the Gulf visit. The following morning he had packed, done some work on his laptop, then left for Heathrow with his wife around midday.

‘Did you take a walk on Saturday morning?’

‘Er, yes, that’s right, I did. Sorry, I forgot that. I had a headache and I had to do a bit of thinking about the trip, so I went out for a short walk, oh, about ten thirty. I dare say my wife told you.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Just . . . just round the block.’

Again Brock let his words hang, while he sat in silence, staring morosely at his notepad. The solicitor shifted in his seat. Haygill cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

Then Brock reached down to the briefcase by his feet and lifted out a clear plastic bag containing the gun, and laid it on the table in front of Haygill.

‘I am showing Professor Haygill the handgun listed as evidence L4327/1010, a semi-automatic pistol of Czech manufacture, known as a Model 52. Have you ever seen this before, Professor?’

Haygill was transfixed, eyes wide, body rigid. He stared at the gun for a long moment of silence, then, eyes still abnormally wide, rose slowly to his feet and turned towards the door.

‘I take it that means yes,’ Brock said quietly. Then, for the benefit of the tape, ‘Professor Haygill has got up to leave. I am suspending this interview at ten twenty-three hours.’

They reconvened an hour later, after Haygill had had time to recover and confer with his solicitor. To Brock it was like looking at a man in the ring, slowly registering with every blow that he was out of his weight. He wanted to apologise, he said, so softly that Brock had to ask him to speak up. He wanted to set the record straight. He had been very disturbed to read the newspaper reports of Max Springer’s death, that morning on the flight up to Glasgow. The account of Springer being shot dead on the university steps had seemed utterly incredible, impossibly melodramatic, and yet it had actually happened. The people he met at the University of Strathclyde that day had heard the news too, and kept asking him about it. He couldn’t get it out of his mind, and at some point an awful possibility had occurred to him, one that at first he dismissed, but gradually began to haunt him. Suppose Springer’s death was connected to his feud with himself? Suppose someone on his side, on his team, had decided to put an end to Springer’s slanders for his sake?

‘So you considered that a definite possibility?’ Brock said, just for the record, disappointed with the line Haygill was taking.

‘Only because the prospect was so appalling. I have a tendency to imagine the worst. Anyone will tell you. When we look at a new experiment, my first question is, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, this seemed to me the worst possibility. I would never have imagined it before that day, but then, I would never have imagined that Max Springer could die like that.’

‘Yes, but you did think it a realistic possibility?’

‘There have been times, over the past year, when some of my people have become very emotional, very angry, about racist and bigoted intolerance that they have encountered in certain quarters. You know some of it, I think. I wondered if perhaps Max Springer’s outrageous attacks upon our work had finally provoked a reaction that had gone tragically too far.’

‘I thought he was passionately opposed to bigotry and racism?’

‘So he said. The irony had not escaped me.’

‘So, what did you do?’

‘As I said before, I drove to UCLE that evening when I returned to London. It was true what I said about the papers I needed, but I also hoped to see Darr there and find out about developments, and hopefully put my mind to rest. Unfortunately he wasn’t there, and I wasn’t able to get him on the phone. I went up to the labs. It’s habit, I always do that, to get an idea of the progress of work. There was an
Evening Standard
on one of the benches, lying open at a spread on Springer’s murder. They’d obviously been discussing it. I looked at it, and read that the police were still searching for the murder weapon, and the horrible thought occurred to me that, if one of the team really had been involved, it might even be there, in our building. I even thought, for a moment, that I might search for it, just to reassure myself, until I realised how impossible that would be. If somebody wanted to hide something in that building, I might search for weeks and never find it. And anyway, I was ashamed of the thought. Standing there in the familiar surroundings of our laboratories, the very idea of one of my team being involved just seemed ridiculous.

‘I went back to my office to sign letters my secretary had left and sort out the papers I’d need for the next trip, and at some point I must have looked up and noticed that the volumes on the book shelves on the wall facing me were out of order.’

Haygill gave an apologetic little frown. ‘Sorry. That must sound unlikely. It was my bound volumes of the
Journal of
Medical Genetics
, for which I was editor for several years. I was staring at them, thinking about something else, when I suddenly thought, “Why is 1990 in front of 1989?” So I got up, still thinking about this other thing, and walked over and pulled out the two volumes to switch them round, and then I saw a white plastic carrier bag rolled up in the space behind them.’

He stopped and took a deep breath. His colour had faded again, the gleam of sweat returned to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. I realise this must all sound totally unlikely. It still seems like that to me, like a bad dream, but it is the truth you see.’ Another deep breath. ‘I picked up the bag . . . it obviously contained something solid. Inside I found a brown paper bag, and when I lifted that out . . .’

He came to a halt, and his solicitor looked at him in concern and half rose from his chair.

‘No, no . . . it’s all right.’ Haygill raised his hand to reassure him. ‘Inside was that gun.’

They waited while he took a gulp of water.

‘What were your thoughts?’ Brock said.

‘What could I think? It seemed to confirm all my worst fears. But then I tried to reason my way out of it. I didn’t know if it was the gun that had killed Springer—is it in fact?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Oh, God . . . Well, I couldn’t be sure. I thought, maybe if one of these characters owns a gun, and is afraid you might search their belongings after this murder, then they might want to find a hiding place for it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more plausible that idea seemed, because surely the murderer would want to get rid of his gun completely—throw it in the Thames, for instance? Whereas whoever had hidden this gun obviously wanted to keep it, and recover it later.’

‘By “one of these characters” you mean your staff, do you?’

Haygill nodded reluctantly.

‘And why would they choose that place?’

‘Yes, that’s what I asked myself. I became quite angry thinking about how they had put me at risk. But then I reasoned that they had probably assumed that the boss’s office, behind the volumes that nobody ever looks at, was just about the safest place in the whole building. But clearly I couldn’t leave it there. I considered the options, and decided to dispose of it myself.’

‘You didn’t feel it your duty to bring it to us?’

‘I’m sorry. The implications, the consequences, were too . . . expensive. I felt we had too much at stake to allow this to derail everything.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I thought of the river, but then I remembered the cameras on campus, and the possibility of someone seeing me, so I put it into my bag, with the idea of taking it as far away as possible. Well, you know where I finally threw it, into the pond not far from our house. I thought I had been careful. I had no idea that anyone had seen me do it.’