Babel (14 page)

The meeting room they were shown to was simply furnished, with a view out across the river to the Dome. The most surprising thing about it was the man sitting at the head of the conference table, the University President, Professor Young.

‘They alerted me to your visit,’ Young said, and Kathy imagined frantic phone calls and alarms. ‘And I thought I’d take the opportunity to keep in touch. Professor Haygill’s secretary misinformed you, as it happens. He landed a short time ago. He’s on his way here to meet you now.’

Kathy was even more impressed. Had they got a message to Haygill on the plane, or hit him on his mobile while he was queuing for immigration? Young gave no indication of panic, unless it was in the overly languid way he strolled forward and shook their hands. Kathy noticed a small pile of glossy brochures on the table.

‘So in the meantime, if there’s anything about CAB-Tech’s role in the university that I can help you with, be my guest.’ He turned to Dr Darr and murmured, ‘I think we might leave any technical matters until Richard arrives, Tahir. So we won’t detain you.’

Darr nodded and withdrew. From another door a woman looked in.

‘What can we offer you?’ Young said. ‘Tea, coffee?’

Brock shook his head. Turning his back on them, he walked over to the window, staring out at the view. He clasped and flexed his hands behind his back and Kathy realised that he was angry.

The woman left, closing the door silently behind her.

‘All right, then.’ Brock turned. ‘Tell us about CAB-Tech.’

‘It’s one of our research centres,’ Young said, casually easing back in his chair and crossing his legs. ‘A particularly successful one. As its name suggests, it works in the field of biotechnology, which of course is a particularly dynamic area of scientific research at present.’

‘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 ß-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.’