The Professor of Truth (19 page)

He seemed to have aged by some years. He came in and there it was for him. He looked at the shelves, the table, the chairs, the floor, all covered with the live workings and the exhausted seams of my research. His gaze lingered on the filing cabinets, then came back to me.

“What?” he said.

“There’s nothing you can give me that I don’t already have, somewhere,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“But I can,” he said.

He had something, I realised, clutched in his left hand, and now he stretched out his arm and opened his fingers. A tightly folded square of paper fell on the table among the other papers. He continued to look at me, as if he were a conjurer expecting me to gasp or cheer. I reached for the paper, unfolded it. An address was printed on it in typed block capitals: a house number, a road, a town, a country. The town was called Sheildston. The country was Australia.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s where he is.”

“Who?”

“Parroulet.”

I looked again at the paper. Who had typed the address? Nilsen? He appeared not to want to leave a trace of himself, not so much as a specimen of handwriting.

“This is what you came here for?”

“I came to talk to you. Yes, and to give you that.”

“This scrap of paper?”

“It’s all I have. What do you want, a phone number?” He spoke as if I’d asked him a favour. “He isn’t going to talk to you across twelve thousand miles. You have to go visit him.”

“I don’t want to visit Parroulet. I want to know who killed my wife and daughter.
He
doesn’t know.”

“That’s not why you’d go.”

“Why don’t you give me the address of the bomber? The real bomber. That would be a visit worth making.”

“I can’t do that. I don’t know where that is. Or who that is.”

“If you did, would you tell me?”

“If I did, we’d have paid a visit ourselves.”

“Maybe you already have. Maybe you’ve erased them, but you still can’t afford to admit it wasn’t Khalil Khazar. The perpetrator is dead, and so is Khazar, but only Khazar stays guilty.”

“Not if you get Parroulet to talk.”

“If he’s not going to talk to me on the phone, why would he talk to me face-to-face? There’s nothing in it for him. Unless he’s dying with a guilty conscience too.”

“You won’t know till you get there.”

I dropped the paper back on the table. “All I want is the truth and you offer me this? The address of a bought witness? Am I supposed to feel grateful?”

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to feel. I have nothing else to offer. But if you can get Parroulet to talk, you could force them to reopen the whole case.”

I felt faint at the thought of starting again, had a brief vision of one hole in one wall leading to another, and another, a new succession of holes in walls.

I said, “Why not you? You’re on a mission. You go to him.”

“I don’t have time. Anyway, we talked to him already. That conversation is over. This is between him and you.”

I picked up the paper again, turned it over. The reverse was blank. I hadn’t really expected anything else.

“I wish I’d never let you in the door,” I said.

“No you don’t.”

I tried again. “How do you know this is where he is? If you’ve been retired as long as you say you have.”

“You never retire. They don’t let you. Or you don’t let yourself. I still have contacts.”

“And they would give you this information for what reason?”

“Officially, no reason,” Nilsen said. “Unofficially, let’s say a favour, from one man to another. A guy who knows what’s happening to me. Who understands the time imperative.”

Again I felt a surge of anger, at the implication that time had only started ticking when
he
learned he was dying.

“And you told him what? ‘God says I have to tell Tealing where Parroulet is so he can go and have a chat with him, and then all our consciences will be clear and I can die happy.’ Is that what you said?”

“No, but if that’s what does it for you, so be it. What you think of me or my faith is of no consequence. You can mock all you like. I’m just giving you an option. But it isn’t really an option, is it? You won’t be able to not go. You’re still in the game.”

“This place might not even exist,” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“The first thing you’ll do after I leave,” Nilsen replied, “is look it up.”

“I want you to leave now,” I told him.

“I’m on my way.”

I ushered him from the room. Deliberately, I left the piece of paper on the table, as if I didn’t care about it, but he was right, of course, about what I would do when he was gone.

Back in the kitchen he began the laborious process of putting on his coat and fastening its buttons. Outside, the last of the light was leaking from the day. I wanted rid of him but still I found I had questions for him.

“Why should I believe you, this getting-ready-to-meet-your-maker nonsense? And even if I do believe you, why did you come to me like this, like a thief in the night? Why not just go public on everything you’ve told me?”

His fingers stopped their fumbling. “Why should
you
believe me?” He gave that short, croaking laugh. “Who else is going to? I go to the media with this, I’m just another conspiracy crank. I can’t prove who I am. I might get a few minutes of someone’s attention, sure, because it sounds like a story, but then they check me out at the office. ‘What about this guy?’ they ask. ‘He says he worked for you.’ And they say, ‘Well, a lot of guys say that. We never heard of him. He’s just another fantasist.’ I know how they operate. They’d deny everything. And in a few weeks or months I’ll be dead. But you won’t be.”

“And what makes you think I’ll act on this?”

“It’s like I said, I admire you.” He waved a hand in the direction of the dining room. “You’ve stuck at it so far. You’ll see this through too.”

I shook my head.

“Yes you will. We’re alike,” he said. “In other circumstances, we could have worked together.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“In another life, sure we could have. You’re the one I needed to reach. The other relatives got a version they believed because they wanted to. You wanted to believe it too, but you couldn’t. You’re the one we lied to. You’re the one that can get to Parroulet. You’re the one that can change everything. You’re a good citizen.”

“You’re full of crap,” I said.

“I don’t expect you to like me,” he said. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is there’s a bottom line, a calculation at the end of everything. Do we do good or do we do evil? All these details, these things we grapple with, they’re part of the calculation. We get some of them wrong, I’ve been trying to tell you that. But the bottom line: what is it we work towards? Good or evil?”

I had no answer. He pulled his hat slowly down over his ears. It looked as if it hurt to do so. He said, “There’s nothing more I can do here.”

“So who’s next?” I asked. “You said you had other debts to settle.”

“I guess I’m clear now,” he said.

“You’d better be sure,” I said. “If you turn up and find one thing on the sheet that hasn’t been ticked off, one detail, wouldn’t that make all this a waste of time?”

The doglike smile flickered. “Time’s up. And I’ve been pretty thorough.”

“But if you’ve made a mistake,” I insisted, “if you’ve missed something, just one thing, and your contract is null and void, what then? The angels will be thorough too. Won’t they put you on the fiery escalator down to hell?”

He did not like my flippancy.

“You don’t understand, do you? The thing I have with God. I’m not some salesman with merchandise. Do you think I could sneak in somehow if he didn’t want me?”

“Maybe there’s a back entrance with a broken padlock. Do you believe in hell, by the way?”

His look said it was a stupid question. “Yes, I do.”

“So do I,” I said, “but my hell is John Milton’s: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ I don’t suppose you’ve read Milton, have you?”

“Not lately.”

His face gave nothing away, but his mouth held the vaguest hint of amusement, or tolerance. Maybe he’d never heard of Milton.

“He believed in everything you do, but with a depth and intellect you can’t even imagine. You know why?”

The faint smile was gone again. “Tell me.”

“Because he lived four hundred years ago, when that kind of belief was still possible.”

Nilsen shook his head. He started towards the back door, and I got ahead of him and opened it.

In a moment, I thought, that paper with the Australian address on it will be the only sign that he’s ever been here.

No, not quite. It was snowing again, hard. Nilsen stepped out and his boots left their marks in the snow. He’d leave a trail round the house and down the street, for a while at least. But eventually only the paper would remain.

Nilsen said, “Goodbye, Dr Tealing. Good luck.”

Already, with the flakes settling on him, he looked like a man in a film about to perform some heroic act. Did he expect me to wish him luck back? I said nothing. He turned and began his walk along the already filled-in path. He went round the corner of the house. I looked at my boots. Coatless and hatless, not knowing why I went, I hurried after him.

Nilsen had moved with more speed than I’d thought him capable of. He was clear of the house, of the driveway. The street lights had come on, so that near them the snow fell as a pale-yellow substance, stains on the general blanket of white. I stood out in the middle of the road and glimpsed the retreating figure, slumped yet marching somehow, going into the snowstorm between the two lines of sickly torches. I felt an urge to call out, but what would I say? Goodbye? Come back? There was nothing to say. I said nothing.

And then Ted Nilsen was gone, on his way to paradise.

I went back to the house. The snow was coming down in heavy clumps, a great latticework of flakes. I kicked my boots against the wall, stepped inside, removed them. I
certainly wasn’t going anywhere and I didn’t think Nilsen would have much luck getting out of town. I took the coffee mugs and cafetière and washed them. I thought, is there a wife? Are there children? Grandchildren? Maybe Nilsen is divorced, maybe he has a girlfriend much younger than himself, maybe he doesn’t. For some reason I couldn’t imagine him having a boyfriend. I thought, does anybody care about him? I thought, why do I even ask?

I went into the study and to the computer there. Who was David Dibald now? He was no one. I closed the documents I’d been working on, retrieved the Australian address, and started searching the internet for information on Sheildston. There wasn’t much. It was up in the hills, almost but not quite joined to a coastal town called Turner’s Strand, which lay a couple of hundred miles south of Sydney. Once Sheildston had been quite isolated—at first not much more than a logging camp, then a village with a school and a church, the place named after John Sheild, the logger whose wealth built it—but an improved road had brought it closer to Turner’s Strand. It was, though, according to one website, still “discreet and secluded.” Another applied the words “desirable” and “wealthy.” The area on the coast seemed busy, crowded with housing and tourist developments. “Popular with retirees and family holidaymakers from Canberra and the south Sydney suburbs,” the second website reported of Turner’s Strand. I searched in vain for images of Sheildston or an indication of the size of its population: it seemed to be a backwater of somewhere that itself was pretty unremarkable.

What were the chances that a man on a witness protection scheme, or just a man with a lot of money wanting to retire from the world, would end up in a place like that?

And what were the chances that I would go all that way to see if he had?

WORKED LATE, REVISITING THOSE PARTS OF THE CASE
centring on Parroulet’s evidence. At some point I dragged myself upstairs and went to bed. I slept fitfully, then overslept, and woke to the sound of scraping and banging outside. I pulled back the curtain and was dazzled by the sun shining from a clear blue sky on to a world of whiteness. Brian Hewat was hard at work with his snow shovel. He looked up and waved at me. I dressed and went down.

“Some storm, eh?” Brian said cheerily. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen so much snow. Did you hear the news?”

I hadn’t, obviously. He was eager to tell me.

“They’ve found a body,” he said with glee. “Just over on Woodside Road. A snowplough driver spotted him first thing this morning. It was on the radio.”

“Him?” I said.

“Middle-aged man, no details as yet,” Brian said. “I took a walk over there, just to check if the main roads are driveable—which they are, by the way, not that you’ll care.” It was typical of him that he would want to inspect the scene of the incident, that he would need an excuse to do so, and that he would take the opportunity to refer to my weird inability to drive. He is a good neighbour, Brian, but a man of small and constant calculation.

“And?” I said.

“Nothing much to see. Ambulance had been and gone. A couple of policemen were still there. The plough nearly hit him, apparently, but he was dead already, so they said. No ID on him. I asked if they’d be making door-to-door inquiries, to find out who it is.” I pictured Brian hurrying home in order to be in when they came. “They didn’t say. Well, they might have to.”