The Professor of Truth (18 page)

“I fear for her,” he said. “She’s never been able to mourn properly. None of us have, you included, but sometimes you forget that this isn’t just about you. We have all been in pain. We still are. We thought some kind of healing might begin when the trial was over, and maybe it could have, but then you started this”—he broke off, and I could almost see him searching, reaching for the right words—“this incessant gnawing, like a dog at a bone. But there is nothing left on the bone, Alan. And now this latest madness.”

“What madness, Alfred?”

“Going to see that bastard.” I had never heard Alfred curse before. It gave him an uncharacteristic vehemence. “What could have possessed you to do that?”

“I wasn’t getting answers to my questions elsewhere. I thought, why not ask the man who’s supposed to know?”

“And you expected what? Anything but a pack of lies?” The tremble in his voice was quite gone now.

“That’s all I’ve been getting anywhere else.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Total nonsense. You just don’t like what you’ve been told, what was clearly established at the trial, and so you keep on with your madcap theories about what
might
have happened instead. Well, none of us liked what we were told, but we had to get used to it. And so ought you.”

“We’ve been through all this,” I said. “You know we don’t agree.”

He either didn’t hear me or chose not to. “Rachel wants you to stop,” he said. “We all want you to stop.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but Khalil Khazar should not be in prison.”

“He’s lucky he is,” Alfred said. “If he hadn’t have been somebody would have hunted him down and killed him by now. He’s lucky to be alive.”

“He did not bomb that aircraft,” I said. “He did not kill Emily and Alice and all those other people.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“I asked him.”

“You looked into his eyes. That’s what that newspaper article said.”

“I did,” I said. “I looked at him for I don’t know how long. And yes, that’s what he told me.”

“You looked into his eyes and he said he didn’t do it and so you believed him. Am I right?”

“It’s the closest I’ve got to the truth so far. Yes, I believe him.”

“What kind of an idiot are you, Alan?” Alfred said. “I can’t even bring myself to say his name, he disgusts me so much. And if you want to know, you disgust me too. I’m sorry to say that, but the fact that you went to commiserate with that animal, that bastard, after what he did to us—to you too, for God’s sake—it’s beyond comprehension.”

“You’re not listening to me,” I said. “He didn’t do it.”

“No, I am not listening to you. He did it.”

“He did not.”

Maybe we would have gone on saying that back and forth like two kids disputing some sporting infringement, but suddenly it seemed Alfred had had enough. “Well, I don’t give a damn whether he did or didn’t!” he shouted. “I’m just asking you to stop what you are doing and give us some peace. Do you think you could have the decency to do that?”

“You are asking me to switch myself off,” I said. “To stop thinking.”

“And let Rachel be a little easier in her mind,” he said. As quickly as it had risen, his voice had gone flat again. He said, so quietly that I almost didn’t catch it, “It is too cruel.” He was, I calculated, seventy-nine or maybe even eighty, stuck between Rachel and me, trying to mediate, and that was an impossible place to be. I imagined him replacing the
receiver after we’d finished, and going back to her, and telling her that it would be all right, that I had agreed not to go on any more, or telling her that I had not agreed, that I was going to carry on. He would either have to lie or he would be hurting her. I felt sorry for him, but not so much that I myself could lie to him.

“Alfred,” I said, “this goes beyond you and me and Rachel. I have to do this for Emily and Alice.”

There followed one of the prolonged silences that marked these exchanges. I almost thought he had quietly put the receiver down and walked away. But then he spoke one last time.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “It is not for them. It is for you.” And he hung up.

That was three years ago. I have not spoken to either of them since. I do not know if they are alive or dead. It is almost possible for me to say that I do not care.

I stand by what I said that night. This goes beyond all of us. It even goes beyond Emily and Alice and the other people on that flight. Beyond us all there is something else worth reaching for, greater than any of us.

I had had the same from my own family: shared grief, sympathy, fatigue, and eventually accusation. My mother got there long before Alfred did. The last time she and my father came to stay with me, they were appalled at the state of the house generally, and the state of the dining room in particular. “You could at least have cleared the table,” my
mother said. “What is all this?” And as I explained, or tried to explain, I saw horror filling their faces. “I thought it was your university work,” my father said. “I had no idea …” My mother said briskly, “Well, we can’t eat in here.” “No, we eat in the kitchen,” I said, “or we can go out if you don’t want to do that.” “We’ll go out,” she said.

This set the tone for a stressful, unhappy few days. When they got home she phoned me. “It upsets me to say it, Alan, but you were never difficult like this. You were always so accommodating. You’ve become selfish.”

“I never used to be a bereaved husband and father,” I said.

“We’re all bereaved,” she said.

“I’m sorry if you think I’m being selfish.”

“You have to let it go,” she said. “Move on.”

“I can’t let it go,” I said. “I can’t let
them
go. Can you?”

“You have to,” she said. “You
have
to.” And she started to sob, and then apologised, and we said we’d speak again soon, and we did, but something had changed between us. And my father, quiet and stoical and sad, was there in the background. I felt I had never really known them.

Not long after that came the prison visit to Khazar, and the attendant publicity, and the gulf widened. My sister, Karen, called and said she was coming to see me. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years. She was forty-seven then, had been married for twenty-five years to her childhood sweetheart, Geoff, and had two grown-up sons, Ben and Daniel. She still worked for the same supermarket chain but as a customer services manager. In most respects she didn’t appear to me to have changed much over the decades.

I met her off the train a week later, and we went back to the house in a taxi. She’d brought a bottle of gin, her favourite tipple, and we opened it and talked.

“I take it you’ve been sent as an envoy,” I said.

“A what?”

“Mum and Dad asked you to come and talk some sanity into me. Am I right?”

“Actually, no. It was my own idea. They agree with me, though.”

“About what? That I’m insane?”

“Don’t be silly. We love you, Alan.” As if love and madness couldn’t go together.

“I know you do.”

“You can’t spend the rest of your life like this. That’s what we agree about. Or one day you’re going to wake up and it’ll be over.”

“Karen, this
is
the rest of my life. I didn’t will it to be like this, but it is. And you’re right, one day it will be over.”

“I don’t just mean over, I mean used up, finished, gone, but you’ll still be breathing. You’ll be a crumbling old man and you still won’t have Emily and Alice. You won’t have had them all those years and years and some day soon you’ll be dead. What good will that be? What good will it have done you? Or them?”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘that’? What good will I have done staying alive? Trying to find out who killed them? I don’t know, Karen. Are you offering me something better?”

“You owe it to them to live differently.”

“You have no idea what I owe them. I am tired of having
these conversations with everyone. You, Mum and Dad, Emily’s family. Why do I have to justify myself to you all?”

“Alan, you know your trouble? You think too much. You always have. If you stopped thinking you had to justify yourself and just
were
yourself, you’d be a lot happier.”

“Like you, you mean.”

“Yes, like me. I know I don’t have your brains and nothing that’s ever happened to me is remotely as terrible as what happened to you and I’ve got Geoff and Ben and Daniel and so I’m lucky, but if I woke up one morning and my luck had changed, I know I’d get up and get on with it. I’d have to. And I’m not saying you should ever forget Emily and Alice and I’m not saying I’ve forgotten them or that I don’t think about losing Geoff or the boys and how awful that would be. I’m not saying that.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying it was eighteen years ago.”

I was silent.

“Hasn’t there been anybody else, not even a possibility, in eighteen years?”

“No.”

I had not, would not, mention Carol to Karen or my parents. I still never have. She is none of their business. They would load such expectations on the relationship it would destroy it. It may be as much as I can manage, but it certainly would not be enough for them.

Karen was with me for only a weekend, and we survived it. She gave up her probing and lecturing after the third gin and we talked of other, safer things, mostly Ben, Daniel
and Geoff. On the Saturday we went to Edinburgh and were tourists for a day. On the Sunday we took a long walk in the country. On the Monday she went home, back to her family four hundred miles away. Not only did I not mention Carol, I kept to a minimum any possibility of Karen meeting her.

Different things woke me in the middle of the night, or would not let me go to sleep in the first place. Dreams of Alice; sudden memories jabbing like knives; complex puzzles from different filing cabinets of the Case, endlessly rearranging themselves. But worst of all was the gripping, sweat-inducing fear which hissed that I had made a terrible mistake, that for all the years in which I had argued and campaigned against the verdict of the court I had been in error. This insidious whisper said that Khalil Khazar was indeed guilty of the crime. He it was who had placed the bomb in the suitcase, who had gone in Parroulet’s taxi to the airport, who had somehow managed to get the suitcase through security, on to the connecting flight to Germany and on to London. Then he had flown out on another flight, back to his own country, with a smile under his blank face, knowing he had done his job in the service of whatever his cause was. And I had refused to accept his guilt. I had looked into his eyes and he had coolly and earnestly looked back into mine and taken me for a fool. I had lost my wife and daughter to this man and then I had lost years of my life convincing myself that he was as innocent as they. I had argued with the families of other victims about it, I had clawed
at the wounds of Emily’s family till I had lost them as well, and I had all but lost my own relatives. This fear was with me always, and when it loomed large in the hours of darkness it tortured me, left me broken by the awfulness of what I might have done. It was as if, had I been a driver, I had run over a child not because of a momentary lapse of concentration or because the child had suddenly stepped out in front of me but through some arrogant, wilful conviction that I was in control and incapable of making a mistake. No matter how rationally I argued against the fear, reminding myself of all the piles of evidence in the Case that spoke against it, still it persisted. It condemned me again to my ancient prison, to scraping at the mouldy walls, but this time there was no hope of release and it was my own fault that I was incarcerated. What had I done wrong? I had created my own false religion, without which I could not function, could not wake and work every day, could not
be
. I had locked myself in a cell of delusion, of total, blinkered faith in Khalil Khazar’s innocence.

LED NILSEN INTO THE HALLWAY AND POINTED TO THE
downstairs toilet. He moved slowly across the space, as if still treading through snow, and closed the door firmly behind him. It was the first time that he’d been out of my sight since his arrival.

I didn’t want to stand sentry until he reappeared but on the other hand I didn’t want him roaming the house unattended. Next to the toilet was the dining room, its door ajar. Least of all did I want him in there. I went in myself and waited, surrounded by the Case. I could hear nothing through the wall. What was he doing? Getting rid of the coffee, I assumed, but everything was quiet. Was he staring in the mirror and if so what did he see? A weakened, dying man? Or a man still in control, ticking off items on his to-do list? Maybe both. Then the toilet flushed, and I heard a tap running.

I was about to step back into the hallway but changed my mind. If Nilsen came into the dining room what might he see that I didn’t want him to? It was inconceivable that he would not have worked out that my house must contain the Case, or something approaching it in scale. He would already have a feel for the weight of its paper, the way it made the very walls
of the room bulge. The Case—his version of it, my version—was, after all, why he had come. “Nilsen,” I called out. “In here.” And I pulled the door wide.