the place, and he was so bleedin’ calm. He stood there for twenty minutes listening to Mr Manzoor going on about his daughter and how we weren’t doing enough and he was going to go back to the justice to issue a new warrant, and all the time Springer just stood there, listening and nodding, and by the end Manzoor was talking more to him, appealing to him, like he was the magistrate! Then when finally Manzoor left, Springer told me what he’d come for, that someone had threatened to kill him, in the same, calm way, as if he was talking about someone else altogether.’
‘So you didn’t really believe him?’
Talbot lowered his head. ‘When he said he was a teacher at the university, I thought one of his students was having a lark, winding him up, pretending to be a terrorist or something. Well, he didn’t seem like the sort of man anyone would want to kill, a polite old bloke like that. And when he said how he was a widower and lived on his own, and had no close family, I thought the poor old bugger had probably had a miserable Christmas and New Year and just wanted to talk to someone. So I talked to him, and I told him his best plan was to get on to BT and get them to intercept his incoming calls, but if he got any evidence, like a threatening note or something, he should come back and we’d make out a formal report and take some sort of action. But he insisted on making a proper statement then, and that I got it recorded on file. That way, he said, if it happened again, the next person he spoke to would take it seriously. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was frightened or anything. He’d have been more bothered if he’d been reporting a lost budgie.’
‘I understand. We could hardly put an armed guard on everyone who thinks someone’s out to get them, could we? Then something like this happens, and you think, “if only”. No fault of yours, son. Just the luck of the game. But now we have to find the killer, and I do want that detailed report. We owe the old man that, don’t we?’
‘Yes, sir.’ PC Talbot met Brock’s eyes again and added quietly, ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Good.’ They got to their feet, and Brock shook hands with the inspector and then said to the constable, ‘See us to the door will you, son?’
Outside on the pavement, with the lad on his own, Brock gave Talbot his card and said quietly, ‘Call me direct if anything else occurs to you, Greg. And if they try to put any blame on you, get in touch, OK? I’ll sort it out.’
The rain had stopped, and as they stood in front of the postered window one of the broadsheets caught Brock’s eye. One of the Missing Persons, a picture of an attractive young South Asian woman, and the name, Nargis Manzoor.
‘The same Manzoor?’ Brock asked.
‘Yes, sir. She’s been missing now for over three months. Mr Manzoor doesn’t think we’re doing enough to find her. He got a warrant issued last year for us to carry out a search.’
‘How come?’
‘She’s only seventeen. He claimed he had grounds to believe that she had been taken out of the possession of her parent for the purpose of extra-marital sex, against his will. Section nineteen of the Sexual Offences Act, sir.’
Brock smiled. ‘You’ve been swotting up for your exams, eh?’
Talbot grinned back. ‘Believe me, sir, after three months of Mr Manzoor going at us day and night, we all know the Sexual Offences Act 1956 backwards. The thing that gets me is that the abduction doesn’t need to be against her will, only against his. And that’s pretty much what happened in this case, we reckon. They’d been fighting, her and her dad, and we reckon she’d had enough and ran away, but he won’t have it.’
At that moment a small, dapper looking man in a dark suit and tie stepped out of the adjoining shop. Seeing them he called out, ‘Ah, PC Talbot. Been looking for her, have you? I do hope so.’
‘Yes, Mr Manzoor. As always.’
Brock left them to it. As he got into the car Bren was finishing a conversation on his phone. On the point of giving up for the night, the searchers at the university had found a cartridge case, dropped in the area where students parked their motorbikes.
4
T he following morning, Friday, 21 January, while Kathy was reading about the case in a Hastings cafe, Brock returned to the UCLE campus. After inspecting the area under the DLR viaduct where the student motorbikes were parked, he got Truck the security chief to open up Max Springer’s room for him. It was located at the back of the university site, furthest from the waterfront in one of a cluster of old buildings which had been incorporated by the university as a temporary relief for its expanding accommodation needs. Previously workshops and small offices, the old buildings had had just enough money spent on them to satisfy the building inspector and were crammed against the DLR track, whose passing trains made their windows rattle.
Brock and Truck climbed an uneven staircase to a dark landing from which a corridor wound away. A notice board carried class lists and a few curling posters of Christmas parties and items for sale.
‘This is the professor’s room,’ Truck said, opening one of the doors and reaching inside for the light switch.
It looked rather as if a volcano disgorging books, papers and other odd objects instead of lava had erupted in the middle of the tiny room.
‘Someone’s trashed the place,’ Brock said.
Truck laughed. ‘No, no. This is the way he kept it. Doris brought me over here to show me, when she and the prof were having their dispute.’
Standing just inside the doorway, hardly able to advance further into the room, Brock began to see a kind of pattern in the chaotic jumble. It seemed to focus on a chair, itself piled with papers, at a desk mounded with stuff, as if this were the mouth of the volcano, its source from which the debris was scattered around, and Brock guessed that, random as it appeared, the old man seated there probably knew where most things were, and could reach out a hand to find a specific book from where he had last tossed it. He could imagine how Doris’ efforts to create order would completely upset this random filing system.
‘See the desk?’ Truck said at his shoulder, whispering as if in awe at the sight. ‘When so much junk had gathered there, instead of sorting it out and putting it away, he would take that big roll of brown paper over there, see, and spread it right over the top, and pin it down at the ends with drawing pins, and start again.’ Truck sucked in his breath at the sheer outrageousness of the concept. ‘Then, when he’d piled up so many layers that the whole thing became unstable, he’d grab hold of one end and sweep the whole lot crashing to the floor, over there.’ He pointed to a great mound of debris. ‘And you wonder they have mice in here! He said he didn’t mind a few mice around. Said it raised the average IQ of the university.’ He chuckled.
‘Had quite a sense of humour then, did he?’
‘Well, to tell the truth, he wasn’t really noted for his belly laughs. More a sort of acid wit, bitter like.’
‘I’d better try to have a look round,’ Brock said. ‘You don’t have to stay, Mr Truck, if you want to get on.’
‘Fair enough. Just lock the door when you’re finished.’
Brock pulled on a pair of latex gloves and advanced gingerly through the mess, heading for the desk. Its surface was piled with newspapers, books, hand-written notes, official memos and circulars from the university administration, pens and pencils, correction fluid, a coffee mug with some dried sediment at the bottom. A small portable typewriter was half buried in the mess. There was no computer in the room.
A DLR train passed with a loud whine and a rumble, the lower half of its carriages visible through the top of the grimy little window. Brock shifted the pile of files from the seat in front of the desk and sat down, trying to put himself in the mind of the acid-tongued, under-employed, half-famous, wild-haired, chaotically untidy old man who had spent his days here. PC Talbot had been right-a very unlikely victim of anything but a random mugging, and whatever had happened on the university steps it wasn’t that. He stared at the framed pictures around the walls, mementos of Springer’s past; a print map of mediaeval Oxford, a child’s crayon drawing of an apartment block and a palm tree, a photograph of a much younger Springer in the company of a group of elderly men.
Brock’s foot bumped a metal wastepaper bin beneath the desk, and he stooped to examine its contents. He was bent forward, eyes level with the desk top, when he noticed a piece of green paper tucked under the front edge of the typewriter. He tugged it out and unfolded it. Beneath a simplified drawing of a raised clenched fist were some printed words. ‘Surely, hell lies in wait, a resort for the rebellious
