Babel bak-6

by Barry Maitland

  ‘And it is part of the university, is it? Its staff are your staff?’

  ‘It is semi-autonomous. Its Director, Professor Haygill, is a professor of the university, and Dr Darr there is a senior lecturer. Other research staff are appointed directly by CAB-Tech.’

  ‘From its income which comes from where?’

  Young examined his nails. ‘Can I ask what this has to do with your inquiries, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Just interested.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a secret. CAB-Tech attracts the major part of its funding from private sources.’ He reached forward and slid the brochures across the table to Brock.

  ‘Overseas?’

  ‘Largely.’

  ‘From the Gulf?’

  Young nodded.

  ‘And the staff, are they from the Middle East?’

  ‘Oh, good Lord, they come from all over I should think. Stepney to Singapore.’

  ‘But specifically, they include a number of Muslims?’

  ‘Professor Haygill has links with several Middle East universities and his connections in that region make it natural that he should attract staff from there.’

  Kathy noticed that both his phrasing and his body language were becoming more guarded.

  ‘Are they militant?’

  ‘Oh, really, what does that mean? I dare say they practise their religion, but they haven’t tried storming the Administration Building with Kalashnikovs as far as I’ve noticed.’ His laugh was a sarcastic bark.

  ‘What about the business with the Christmas e-mail?’

  That shook Young. ‘You’ve heard about that? What gossip merchants have you been talking to, I wonder?’

  ‘What really happened then?’

  ‘It was simply a storm in a teacup. One of the secretaries on this floor sent out an e-mail to all staff, quite innocently, wishing everyone a happy Christmas, and some of the Muslim researchers objected on the grounds that it was discriminatory and insulting.’

  Brock frowned sceptically. ‘And?’

  ‘And we instituted conciliation procedures and everything was resolved amicably. End of story.’

  ‘Did you leak that fatwa story to the press, Professor Young?’

  Young didn’t move, his face lost all expression. He said softly, ‘Now, why would I do that? It has the potential to be extremely damaging to us. Already, this morning, Haygill phoned me to say that his partners over there had got wind of it and were disturbed. If I were you, Chief Inspector, I’d concentrate on the job at hand. Find the maniac who killed Springer and let us get on with our work.’

  At that moment the door opened and a man bustled in. He had thinning sandy hair, glasses, a slight stoop made worse by the heavy black hand luggage he was carrying, and he wore a lightweight cream suit that seemed exotic in the darkening English winter afternoon.

  Young got to his feet and said, ‘Ah, Richard. You made it. Let me introduce you.’

  Professor Haygill shook hands, slightly breathless, a worried frown on his face. ‘I only heard about the dreadful business with Springer on Sunday. And then this report in the papers. I can’t believe it. And…’ he peered more closely at Brock, ‘… you’re interested in CAB-Tech? How come?’

  Young checked his watch. ‘I’d be fascinated to hear the reply to that, gentlemen, but I’m ten minutes late for another meeting. I must go. I’ll speak to you later, Richard.’ He shook Brock’s hand abruptly and walked out, ignoring Kathy.

  The side door opened again as Haygill and the two detectives sat down, and the secretary glided in with a mug of coffee that she placed in front of the scientist. ‘Ah, lifesaver,’ he sighed. ‘Will you.. .?’ he asked Brock, also ignoring Kathy. Brock shook his head and the woman left once more.

  ‘Two things,’ Brock said. ‘Much of what you’ll have read in the newspaper reports is speculative, but it is true that we have information that suggests that Professor Springer may have been murdered by someone with an Islamic background.’

  Haygill looked sombre as he sipped at his drink. ‘Extraordinary.’

  ‘So we’re interviewing such people who may have had a connection with him, through the university, for example. We understand that a number of your staff are Muslim.’

  ‘Well, that’s true, but I doubt they ever had any contact with Springer. But you’re welcome to speak to them, of course.’

  ‘The second reason for us coming here is that we’d like to talk to you about the dispute you had with Professor Springer. We understand it was fairly acrimonious.’

  Haygill set down the mug wearily. Kathy had the impression of someone weighed down with difficulties.

  ‘On his part, not mine. I have enough real problems to deal with without indulging in misguided philosophical wranglings with the likes of Max.’

  ‘That’s what it was, was it? Philosophical? Nothing personal?’

  Haygill pursed his lips with exasperation. ‘He framed his objections to what we do here in high-flown philosophical terms, but, yes, he frequently expressed himself, publicly, in a very personal and offensive way. It was paradoxical, I thought, that someone supposedly dedicated to clear and objective thought should be so emotional and subjective. But that sort of thing does happen in universities sometimes. I’ve been around long enough to know that.’

  ‘You didn’t respond?’

  ‘As little as possible. From time to time I had to set the record straight and refute his wilder and more slanderous suggestions. I wasn’t bothered for myself, but I couldn’t let some of the things he said go unchecked, for the sake of my team here, as well as our sponsors and my family.’

  Haygill frowned intently at his coffee as if trying to puzzle out some truth hidden in its depths. ‘To begin with there were some solid and practical reasons why Springer and I might find ourselves in opposite camps in this institution. Things to do with resources, university policies, academic standing and so on. But after a while those things ceased to matter.’ He narrowed his eyes and nodded as if he’d found what he was looking for. ‘The real tragedy in all this, the root of the matter, was that what we are doing here matters, and what Max Springer was doing doesn’t. That was the plain fact that, at the end of the day, he simply couldn’t face.’

  Brock said, ‘And what is it that you do here, Professor, that matters?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that we’re editors…’ Haygill regarded him with a weary little smile, and Kathy got the impression that he was using an explanation that he’d trotted out many times before, ‘… editors of the most important book of all, the book of life.’

  ‘The book?’ Brock asked softly, so innocently that Kathy glanced at him to try to make out what had alerted him.

  ‘The human genome,’ Haygill replied, then added quickly. ‘You’ve heard of it, of course. It’s had so much publicity lately.’

  ‘Yes, although, I have to admit, I haven’t been following it all very carefully. I think I got lost somewhere after the double helix and DNA. I don’t remember it being called a book, though.’

  ‘It’s a useful metaphor. Almost every cell in your body carries a copy of the “instruction book”, if you like, of how to make you and maintain you. If you think of it like that it’s easier to understand the way the scientific terms fit together. Shall I stop there, or do you want me to go on?’

  ‘Please. I’m very ignorant. Kathy here probably knows all this stuff. I’m interested in the idea of the book.’

  ‘OK.’ Haygill got stiffly to his feet and went over to a whiteboard on the wall and took up a black marker pen. ‘The genome has a structure like any ordinary book. It’s broken down into twenty-three chapters, called chromosomes.’ He wrote the word.

  ‘Each chapter contains several thousand paragraphs, or genes. And each paragraph is made up of sentences, exons, separated by spaces, introns, strung in a sequence along a DNA strand. Some paragraphs are long, like the dystrophin gene, and others are short, like the ?-globin. The sentences are made up of words, or codons,
which are composed of just four letters, or bases, which we know as A, C, G and T. OK?’

  Brock looked impressed if not enlightened. Haygill put down the marker and returned to his mug of coffee.

  ‘It must be a very long book to hold all the necessary instructions?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Oh yes. It has about a billion words, so it’s the equivalent of eight hundred bibles long, and it’s so compact that it can be carried inside the nucleus of each of your cells. You’ll have read about the human genome project, of course. It’s the most important scientific frontier at the present time. Teams of people all over the world are studying and deciphering its parts.’

  ‘So you could be described, all of you, as “people of the book”, yes?’

  Haygill shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And how does CAB-Tech fit into this?’

  ‘Our interest is in gene therapy.’ He saw the blank look on Brock’s face and got to his feet again. On the whiteboard he circled the word gene. ‘Sixty per cent of these paragraphs in the book are fixed and the same for all humans, but forty per cent are polymorphic, differing slightly from person to person. These variations in the polymorphic genes are what make us unique as individuals, hence genetic fingerprinting, which you people are familiar with, of course.

  ‘Now the book is extraordinarily clever. It’s able not only to read itself, but also to copy itself, so that new cells will be able to acquire its information. But in the process of copying a billion words, some, just a few each time, get miscopied with each edition of the book. This is an important natural process, because it allows species to change and evolve, but it also means that harmful errors can happen, which will be damaging to the parent body and cause genetic diseases. Up until now, medicine has hardly been able to deal with these. Until now almost all of the advances in medicine have been concerned with combating diseases and other factors originating outside the body. But now, for the first time, we are able to look inside the book and correct the errors that accumulate in there in the form of genetic diseases. That’s what gene therapy is all about, editing the book of life.’

  ‘That’s like genetic engineering, then, is it?’ Brock asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Therapy sounds gentler I suppose, less intrusive.’

  Haygill shot him a questioning glance, and Brock smiled back benignly. ‘A massive project, though?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We’re looking at just one group of genetic disorders, and even then we have to focus on a small part of the problem at a time. But that’s how we move forward.’

  ‘You mean you’re looking at one group like, what, cancer?’

  ‘Not exactly. I suppose, from what you’ve told me, that the most interesting aspect of our work to you would be that it relates to a specific cultural region of the world. Predominantly, to the Islamic regions of the Middle East and South Asia.’

  Brock looked puzzled. ‘A cultural region? Do you mean, a racial group?’

  ‘The more I learn of human diversity, Chief Inspector, the more convinced I am that the term “racial” has no meaning except as a cultural category.’

  ‘But surely genetic disorders aren’t cultural?’

  ‘The ones we study are.’ He reached across the table to the glossy brochures and flicked through one of them until he found what he was looking for. He handed it to Brock, pointing to a map of the world on which certain regions, principally in North Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia, were shaded pink. The title read, ‘Global distribution of areas where consanguineous marriages exceed 10% of total. Source: World Health Organisation’.

  Haygill said, ‘The custom of cousins marrying has been entrenched in some societies for thousands of years. There are sound practical reasons for it, strengthening family structures, stabilising relationships within clans, and so on. Unfortunately it also leads to a much greater frequency of errors in the copying of the human book. The risks of stillbirth and serious congenital malformation are approximately doubled for the offspring of couples who are first cousins. This wasn’t especially noticeable when external factors such as malnutrition and disease resulted in high infant mortality, but when living and medical conditions improve, as they have throughout these regions, congenital malformations and chronic disabling diseases in children become more and more apparent. That is our project, Chief Inspector, to find gene therapies to offset the effects of consanguineous marriages.’

  It was said, Kathy thought, with an enormous dignity and exhaustion, as if the task and the responsibility were both so noble and so vast that any individual would risk being crushed by it.

  ‘How could Max Springer object to that?’ Brock asked.

  ‘How indeed. How indeed.’

  ‘And naturally, the countries that suffer from these diseases would want to fund the work.’

  ‘Yes, through various agencies, the Arab World Bank, the Islamic Health Foundation, and so on. They’re listed in the books there. They support a number of teams, some in the Middle East and Pakistan and some in the States, one in France, and us in the UK. We each have particular paragraphs of the book to study, and are developing our own techniques for interventions.’

  ‘And you’ve made a point of recruiting staff from those regions also, have you?’

  ‘As far as possible, yes.’

  ‘They form a close-knit team, I imagine? Strong sense of loyalty to you and to the project?’

  ‘Yes.’ Haygill frowned at him. ‘You have a point?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just the story we heard about the Christmas e-mail problem, Professor. It made me think that your Muslim team members must feel rather isolated here, somewhat embattled, perhaps, to react in that way?’

  ‘It might seem a trivial matter, but they had some justification for feeling that they had to make a point. This wasn’t the first incident. But I’m sure we’ll resolve it all in due course.’ He passed a hand wearily across his eyes.

  ‘I thought it was resolved.’

  ‘Not yet. An arbitration committee has been appointed, but it hasn’t heard all the evidence yet. But Springer had nothing to do with this.’

  ‘And the earlier incidents?’

  ‘Oh, some of our laboratory technicians had a somewhat unfortunate sense of humour. They dubbed our project…’ he winced and lowered his voice, ‘… the “super-wog project”. They even had a scurrilous newsletter that they produced. You can imagine the kind of offence that caused when it got out. There was a disciplinary committee, and the university wanted to dismiss them outright, but the union fought that as an excessive penalty. In the end they were kept on, but moved to another part of the campus. It left a great deal of bitterness all round. Hence the sensitivity to the Christmas e-mail.’

  ‘I see. And again, Springer had no involvement in any of this?’

  ‘Absolutely not. As I say, I’d be very surprised if any of my team, beyond Tahir Darr perhaps, has ever heard of Max Springer. And if you have the slightest reason to doubt it I’d be very much obliged if you’d interview my people as soon as possible and clear this up, because these rumours of some kind of Islamic fatwa against Springer are potentially enormously damaging to us. Do you see that? The reports were causing untold consternation in the Gulf when I left. They’re wondering what the hell is going on at UCLE, and I want to distance ourselves absolutely from whatever has happened.’

  ‘I appreciate your cooperation, Professor Haygill. As a start I’d like a complete list of CAB-Tech staff, preferably with some information on their background.’

  ‘That’s easy. We keep profiles of our research team updated on file for our funding submissions. I’ll get a copy run off for you.’

  A giant blood-red sun hung low on the western horizon as they left the CAB-Tech ziggurat, its light glinting on the dark surface of the Thames, shimmering off the prisms of the university buildings.

  Kathy turned her collar up against the cold. ‘This place is weird, isn’t it? What’s it trying to be, Disneyland?
And the people! The editor of the book of life; a girl wasting five years of her life writing about a theory of action that no one will ever read; a mad old man shot dead on the lecture theatre steps… Only the students seem normal.’ She watched a group of them hurrying towards the doors of the cafeteria, a couple kissing in the shadow of an overhanging balcony, a youth whistling past on a bike.

  ‘Got time for a drink?’ Brock said. ‘Somewhere normal.’

  10

  T he warm fug, the smell of stale beer, the dimly lit browns and creams of the saloon bar of The Three Crowns were all reassuringly normal. Around the walls were old photographs of it in its heyday as a watering hole for the dockers, shipwrights and sailors who had once populated Shadwell Road. From her seat by the window Kathy could see out between the red velvet curtains to the evening crowds of turbaned and saried shoppers who had taken their place, but with rather less patronage for the pub.

  Brock sipped his pint thoughtfully as he worked his way through the sheaf of staff biographies Haygill had supplied, each helpfully provided with a photograph in the top corner. He set aside six, which Kathy considered. There were two Pakistanis including Dr Darr, one Egyptian, two Iraqis and a Lebanese. All had impressive academic pedigrees from a mixture of Middle East, UK and US universities, and all had doctorates in the biological sciences with the exception of the Lebanese, who was the team’s systems analyst and chief computer programmer.

  ‘You see, what I’m thinking, Kathy… well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘That one or more of these might have put the gun in your wild young tearaway Ahmed’s eager little fist.’

  Brock nodded. ‘Not a conspiracy, necessarily, but something like that. We have a tightly knit, somewhat paranoid group, devoted to their great cause and to Haygill, who is being unjustly harassed by some mad old coot who just won’t shut up. And maybe, at the end of another long, hard day, Haygill says, in that weary way of his, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” or words to that effect. Not seriously, just out of exasperation.’