The Blasphemer: A Novel (21 page)

‘I know, I’ve left another message with the hotel manager in Quito. He’s promised to FedEx them to us. I’ll check my credit card bill to see if he has charged us yet.’

‘OK. I just thought I’d mention it. You know what a state he gets in.’

*

The only indication that Bruce was a doctor was the photo ID badge dangling from a chain around his neck. In his black jeans and tight black polo shirt he looked more like a bouncer.

‘There’s something different about you,’ Daniel said.

Without taking his eyes off the screen, Bruce held up a hand.

‘Don’t you ever do any work?’ Daniel continued.

Bruce continued playing for a few seconds, weaving the console from side to side, before saying, ‘Bollocks!’ and tossing it down on his desk. He looked up. ‘Don’t you ever knock?’

‘I did.’

‘Hear the bomb?’

‘Saw it,’ Daniel said. ‘I was driving towards it at the time.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Fuck indeed.’

‘You OK?’

‘Fine. A little freaked, but fine.’

‘They took them to the Chelsea and Westminster. This place is on terrorism alert in case there are more. Had to clear a few beds.’

‘Police think it was an isolated incident.’

‘Yeah.’ Bruce rubbed his hands together. ‘Well, let’s get on with it then. Pop your trousers and pants down. Have you brought a credit card?’

Daniel acknowledged the joke by putting his hand to his mouth, as if to cover a yawn.

‘For some bizarre reason they won’t let me charge for these scans. They should. When I’m running this place I’ll make sure we do.’ As he talked, Bruce flashed a light in his friend’s eyes and ears. ‘Actually, I do need you to take off your shirt.’ He sounded his chest with latex-gloved fingers, pressed his fingers at various points on his back and neck and took his blood pressure. ‘Normal,’ he said, wrapping up the pump and applying an elastic tourniquet on the other arm. ‘Better take some bloods. You OK with needles?’

‘Fine, unless I’m having to stick them into Martha.’

‘How is she? Any more hypos?’

‘Not since the ice rink. Seems fine physically. We’re a bit worried about her, about how the crash might have affected her, made her feel insecure.’

‘You up to a pee sample?’

‘Sure.’

‘Through there then. There’s a small plastic bottle with a label on by the sink. Leave it in there when you’re done.’

Two minutes later, when Daniel reappeared, Bruce said, ‘Follow me.’ He held the door open and led the way to the lift. ‘How you feeling generally?’

‘OK. Still getting the headaches. What happened to the beard?’

‘Peter decided he didn’t like it.’

‘Peter?’

Bruce turned and raised his eyebrows significantly. ‘My new tenant.’

‘How’s that going?’

The lift door opened and they stood to one side as a bed was wheeled out.

‘I’m in love.’ Bruce’s monotone did not change as he said this.

‘Oh shit.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s early days yet. He might be straight for all I know. He had some little slapper with him the other night, but it was obvious their relationship was platonic.’

‘You were spying on him?’

Bruce drew himself up. ‘I happened to be at my window when he came home with her. Wasn’t what you would call, you know, a looker. Certainly not as beautiful as he is. Did I tell you he has big, sleepy brown eyes and cheekbones like wing mirrors?’

‘Have you told Rob about him yet?’

Bruce raised a disdainful eyebrow. ‘Robert and I are no longer speaking, other than through our lawyers.’ The lift made a pinging noise and the doors opened. When they reached the scanning room, Bruce introduced Daniel to a radiographer, a round-faced woman with a bubble perm spilling over her green hospital gown. Bruce said goodbye, giving Daniel a reassuring pat on the back as he left.

The radiographer gathered her perm into a green paper hairnet and went through a medical checklist with the patient.

‘Do you want me to change?’ Daniel asked when she had finished.

‘Not for a brain scan, but the MRI uses a very powerful magnet so it is best to empty your pockets. And it takes an hour, so if you need to go to the bathroom best go now.’

‘Just been actually. Into a bottle.’

Daniel lay on his back and tilted his chin up so that he could see the mouth of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner behind his head. It looked like a giant white doughnut at the opening of a tunnel. He felt he was about to be swallowed whole.

‘Lie as still as you can,’ the radiographer said, ‘but breathe normally. Any movement can blur the scan. You’d better put these in.’

Daniel was handed some earplugs.

The radiographer went out to the control panel where she could see the scanning room through a window. ‘OK, Daniel?’ she said through an intercom.

Though Daniel felt lonely and anxious, he raised a thumb and a loud humming noise began. He felt himself being carried slowly backwards. Once his head was in the cylinder he heard a loud clanging. He closed his eyes and felt a sensation of tightness around the temples. As he lay there, claustrophobia stole over him: a flashback to the air pocket on the plane.

In a blank-walled room in a glass and chrome office on the bank of the Thames, James Bloom, a thirty-eight-year-old, shavenheaded surveillance specialist on secondment from the CIA, clicked his mouse and froze the image on his screen. With a flick of his wrist and a second click, he zoomed in on a face in the crowd of Muslim demonstrators and simultaneously enlarged it so that it filled half his screen. He cocked his head and the blue glow of the
screen reflected in his metal-framed glasses. ‘Geoff?’ he said without his eyes leaving the image. ‘Come and look at this one.’

A lean, older man with a buzz cut appeared at his side and stared at the screen. His weathered face was cross-hatched with lines. He was wearing a suit and open-necked shirt. Geoff Turner was Bloom’s liaison to the counter-terrorist section of the Metropolitan Police.

‘Haven’t seen him before. You?’

‘Can’t say I recognize him,’Turner said, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his left cheek. ‘Don’t think he’s a player. Would have noticed the shirt and tie. But send him over to me and I’ll run a check.’

While Turner ran the image of the man in the shirt and tie against the hundreds of thousands in the database, Bloom tried to get audio on him.

Ten minutes later Turner said: ‘He’s a clean skin. The Passport Office have him. Second-generation British. Grandparents from Karbala. Not getting a criminal record. Doesn’t even have a driving endorsement. He’s a teacher. Should we do a nibble on him?’

‘Can’t hurt. One of the 7/7 virgin hunters was a teacher.’

Turner was studying the CCTV footage again. He tapped the screen. ‘See this bloke here, the one getting out of the car? I know him. His name is Daniel Kennedy. He’s the son of a friend of mine.’

That evening, feeling nervous and excited, Daniel laid three shirts out on the bed before settling on a blue one. He would wear it with an open neck, he decided, under a charcoal-grey suit. He checked his watch. Kate Johnson had still not rung to brief him. As the BBC car was not due to arrive for an hour, he flicked on to
News 24
. There was an item about the car bomb that the police thought had been detonated by accident. There was also footage of the demonstration. He scanned the faces of the protesters but could not see the young man he had recognized. The protest, according
to the newsreader, was supposed to be a peaceful march by Muslim teachers but Islamist militants intent on provoking the police had hijacked it. It had also been co-ordinated with demonstrations in Damascus and Jakarta. And in Pakistan, the foreign ministry had called in ambassadors from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Norway and the Czech Republic to explain that his government thought the sacking of the Muslim teacher an unjustifiable provocation against the Muslim world. In London meanwhile, the headmaster who had sacked the Muslim teacher had been receiving death threats and had been given twenty-four-hour police protection.

A reporter came on and spoke to camera: ‘Muslim fury over the sacking erupted on to the streets of London today as politicians and religious leaders argued that there must be limits to free speech. The extremist faction that infiltrated today’s protest is believed to be Hizb Ut-Tahrir, an Islamist splinter group. One of the protesters, originally from Pakistan but now living in London, said the sacking …’ he looked down at his notes: ‘“degraded Islam”.’ The item cut to the protester, a young man. He was waving a placard bearing the slogan:
BEHEAD THE ONES WHO INSULT THE PROPHET
.

‘The blasphemer who sacked this teacher should be punished!’ he was shouting. ‘If we had Sharia law in this country an insult like this would not happen.’The reporter turned to the chief rabbi, who said: ‘The only way to have both freedom of speech and freedom from religious hatred is to exercise restraint. Without that, we can have one freedom or the other but not both.’ He turned to a bearded spokesman for Lambeth Palace and asked if he thought the headmaster of the school could be prosecuted for unfair dismissal. ‘We believe there is no case for doing that,’ the spokesman said, nodding sympathetically. ‘What the headmaster did was not gratuitously inflammatory. That said, we are truly sorry if we have caused any offence to the Muslim community. We believe the right to freedom of thought and expression cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish.’

As he watched, Daniel muttered the word ‘tosser’ under his
breath. How typical of the Church of England to be so inclusive they employed a Muslim teacher in the first place – then so woolly they apologize for sacking him after he offended them. He reached for a notepad and began jotting down some ideas in preparation for his appearance on
Forum
, circling keywords and linking them with arrows. He would begin by arguing that it was up to Muslim leaders to caution their followers not to allow themselves to be provoked. Through their silence they were allowing extremists to hijack the controversy. He would argue that the government, as usual, was trying to deal with Muslim radicals by aiming its measures at the rest of us – religious hatred legislation, banning crosses because of concerns about veils, attacking all faith schools because they couldn’t single out the madrassas. The present laws, he would argue, were aimed at a symptom of Muslim disaffection, not the malady itself. The problem was not that some excitable young men had set fire to the Union Jack – sorry, Union flag – but that they were defying the normal pattern of evolution by becoming less assimilated than their parents. This, he would conclude, was to do with changes within Islam. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was an epochal event that began to replicate itself across the world through a process of mimetic natural selection. This would bring the debate back to the biological ground where Daniel felt safest. He was feeling a rush of adrenalin at the prospect of his television appearance.

He checked his watch with a double tap of its face, got dressed and stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His nose and forehead looked shiny. Would they use face powder in the studio? Where was Nancy’s? He found her brush and dusted himself with it before taking several deep breaths to steady his nerves. He went downstairs, opened the fridge and took out some cooked sausages in a bowl covered with clingfilm and a bottle of HP sauce. He was running over some arguments in his head when his iPhone rang.

‘Hi Daniel, it’s Kate. Look, sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier but you’ll be relieved to hear you can stand down.’

‘The debate is cancelled?’

‘Um, actually we’ve got Richard Dawkins coming in now. We
double-booked because we didn’t think he would be available.’ Daniel closed his eyes. ‘No worries.’

‘Sorry to mess you about. Let’s get you on soon.’

Daniel sat at the kitchen table and began picking at the label of the HP bottle.

Northern France. Last Wednesday of April, 1918

THREE DAYS PASS BEFORE ANDREW AND MADAME CAMIER TOUCH
again. It is evening. They are sitting with their chairs facing the fire, though he keeps shifting position so that he can cast a sideways glance at her, without her noticing. She is too present. The atmosphere around her too charged. It is as if her molecules extend towards him, spilling out, disturbing the air. The ticking of the longcase clock is excessively loud tonight. Each pulse fills the room, as if thickening the particles of dust. ‘It is slow,’ Madame Camier says, rising to her feet in one liquid movement. She adjusts the time by a fraction, and, as she closes the glass face, Andrew’s hand covers hers. They are standing so close to one another he can smell her hair. His heart is hammering with such force it is rocking his whole body. She must be able to feel it. He wants to put his arm around her waist but its heaviness prevents him. She is breathing through her nose again – rapid, shallow breaths. Is she nervous? She yawns, frees her hand and stretches. If she turns and smiles, he thinks, it will be my permission to kiss her. She turns and smiles. He does not move. Cannot speak. The silence is raw. It is Madame Camier who breaks it. ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

‘
Bonne nuit
,’ he says.

*

A thick, steel gramophone needle is scratching against a 78-rpm disk. Major Peter Morris VC, MC & bar, DSO & bar, DFC, Mons Star, BWM, VM, does not notice it as he sharpens his razor on a strop of smooth leather hanging from the coat hook on the back of the door. After testing the blade with the side of his thumb he works his shaving brush up into lather and, eyeing his reflection in a small mirror, begins applying the white foam to his brokenveined cheeks. The act of tilting back his head to shave under his chin makes him wince and, once he has splashed his face with cold water and dabbed it with a thin khaki towel, he stares at the deep weal that follows his jaw line from chin to ear. This is his morning ritual. The scar has taken on a totemic significance for him, a savage reminder whenever he looks in the mirror of who he is now and what he stands for. The German who tried to cut his throat had not lived long. Morris had hacked his head off with an entrenching tool and tossed it, helmet still attached, over the parapet.