The Professor of Truth (17 page)

We walked into town together, Carol pushing her bike. The sunshine and the light breeze seemed to lift my spirits. We stopped for a drink and a bite to eat, then wandered on, arriving at her cottage in the early evening. We sat out on her patio with a bottle of wine, and it was relaxed and easy and nothing more was said about my having let her down, if indeed I had done so. Carol’s seemingly endless patience enabled me not to worry too much about that. The worrying came later, after we’d gone to bed and she’d fallen asleep. At three o’clock I was wide awake, trying to fit everything together, scraping away at the prison walls again. I eased myself out of bed and got dressed. Carol stirred but did not wake. When she did, she would not be surprised to find me gone. It was part of how we worked. I crept down the hall and out into the street, and made my way back to the Case through the last of the night.

WENT TO SEE HIM IN PRISON,” I SAID.
“Khalil Khazar.”

“Yes,” Nilsen said. “You didn’t make a secret of it.”

“That was
my
attempt at setting the record straight,” I said. “I needed Khazar to understand I didn’t think he’d done it. And I needed to hear him tell me what he knew.”

“You could have done that and kept it to yourself, but you chose not to. You went to a Sunday paper and gave them the story.”

“I wanted the world to know I’d been face-to-face with him.”

“Then why didn’t you tell the world what he’d said?”

“Because he was putting his second appeal together. I promised him I wouldn’t say anything that might prejudice that.”

“A lot of people were very angry with you. They said you were naive.”

“That was the kindest comment. They also said I was being selective, putting out propaganda, keeping back anything that didn’t fit my interpretation of events.”

“And were you?”

“I’d given him my word.”

“So it was okay for you to withhold information, but not anybody else?”

“The difference was, my reasons were entirely honourable,” I said.

“Now there’s a word,” Nilsen said.

“Those people who criticised me for going, that was their right. It was my right to go. They didn’t have my motivation. They believed he was guilty. I believed he was innocent.”

“Some people will believe anything.”

We were going round in circles again. I thought, why is he here, still testing me, still not giving me whatever it is he says he has to give?

“I went twice,” I said. “That first time, and then again, near the end.”

“When he was dying.”

“Yes. People said he wasn’t dying. They said it was a ploy to get himself released early. They said he was faking it.”

“But he wasn’t,” Nilsen said, and he gave me a challenging look.

“No,” I said, “but he’d changed, and not just because he was so ill. It was as if part of him had already gone on somewhere, been released.” And now when I looked back at Nilsen I thought, I may not have seen your face before but I’ve seen the light in your eyes, or something like it. “He was a very religious man,” I said. “Very devout.”

“A martyr,” Nilsen said.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “He didn’t have the self-regard of a martyr, or the fanaticism. He just trusted his God.”

Nilsen’s eyes narrowed. I wondered if he thought he
shared his deity with Muslims and Jews and all the other religions of the world and they simply had the wrong description, the wrong name. Or did he think they were worshipping nothing? He couldn’t, surely, think there was more than one God out there, competing for votes. And could a man really
think
any of that stuff, or did he just
feel
it?

“He didn’t have a deal going, a contract,” I said. “There were no guarantees, just his faith. I prefer that kind of religion to yours. It makes more sense, as much as any of it does.”

I suppose I was trying to goad him again, but Nilsen was not to be goaded, or at least nothing showed in his haggard face. He said, “When he died, I saw you on TV, saying how sorry you were.”

“I was.”

“They filmed you in front of that castle,” he said. “It looked pretty good. It was summer of course. You looked tired but they didn’t keep the camera on you all the time. I remember thinking, that’s a good old country. It’ll be here long after we’re all gone.”

“Is that what you thought?” I said.

He nodded. “I saved that clip. I’ve watched it I don’t know how many times. You want to know why?”

“Tell me.”

“Because I wanted to be sorry too. I wanted to feel what you felt about him. I wanted to understand what it was like.”

“Just watching me wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it didn’t. But it started something. I waited to see what would happen now that he was dead. You know what happened: nothing. Just like you said in that clip.”

“So what did it start, watching me?”

“This,” he said.

His being there in my house. That was what he meant. The journey he’d made began when Khazar died, when he saw me saying what I said.

“And now?” I said.

“And now we’re almost done,” he said.

He made a movement, unstiffening himself. Surely this was when I would find out what it was he had for me.

But all he said was, “I need to use your bathroom before I go.”

GOT ON REASONABLY WELL WITH ALFRED AND RACHEL
when Emily first introduced me to them: they were hospitable and generous, although they were not wealthy. I think they looked on me as a kind of curiosity from the old world, amusing for a while and then to be discarded. When they realised that Emily and I were serious, that we meant to marry and that I was going to take her thousands of miles away from them, the warmth diminished. For the first three summers after the wedding we made a point of spending a month with them and Emily’s brothers and their families, and once we went for Christmas too. Then Alice was born, and we had less money and less energy to make the trip. We did go, when Alice was two, or rather Emily and Alice went for a month and I joined them for ten days, but it was a stressful experience. Alfred and Rachel made uneasy grandparents, always fretful that Alice would hurt herself or break their possessions, shifting suddenly between petting and scolding her. As for me, I had ceased to be of interest. Emily tried to persuade them to come to Scotland, but they never did—the mere thought of flying made Rachel ill—and although I was relieved I also held their refusal against them. They were everything that Emily was not—insular,
unadventurous, querulous—and it was only for her sake that I remained polite and superficially friendly on the phone.

After the bombing I took them some of Emily’s things, an album of photographs of Emily and Alice, some of their clothes, whatever I could bear to part with that I thought they might like to have. I hoped, too, that we could make some new and better alliance from our grief, but what connected us had been taken from us. We could not even share the burial of them, here or there, because the annihilation had been so complete. Alfred and Rachel arranged a memorial service in their church, and many people came. Some I had met at our wedding, but only one or two of them since then. Most were complete strangers to me. I probably did not show much grace in receiving their sympathies. To be frank, I did not care how sorry they were. Their sorrow was genuine, I’m sure, but I did not care, any more than I cared about the genuine grief of Emily’s brothers and their wives, and of Alfred and Rachel. I just wanted the day and the whole ghastly process to be over.

The obligations of bereavement are not so simply dispensed with, however. For the first few months after I returned home Rachel felt a duty to phone me every so often, and expected me to do the same, turn and turn about, even though we had nothing to give each other but painful reminders. “I’m going to hand you on to Alfred,” Rachel would say after ten minutes, and Alfred’s tired, flat voice would come down the line, asking the same questions about how I was and what was new before we concluded by saying we would speak again soon. The intervals between these calls
grew longer but they continued, and sometimes, when there were developments in the police investigation, they were more animated and prolonged, but what sustained them was not love but loss. When we spoke I pictured the ocean rolling between us, vast and grey and cold.

The years passed, and then came the charges against Khalil Khazar and Waleed Mahmed and the long process of bringing them to trial, and then the trial itself. Alfred and Rachel were both in their mid-seventies by then, and Rachel had heart problems and was not keeping well. They did not attend, but asked me to keep them informed. I did, before and during, and they listened with what I felt was a kind of numb gratitude; but afterwards, when it was over, when with a sinking dread I began to articulate to them my scepticism about Khazar’s guilt, our relationship grew strained, even hostile. They had greeted his conviction with satisfaction, tempered only by disappointment that the trial had not taken place in the United States where the death penalty might have been a serious possibility. To hear me say that I did not think Khazar had murdered their daughter and granddaughter was more than just hurtful to them; it was a betrayal. I had revealed my true colours at last, the limp, fluttering flag (I am sure they saw it thus) of European liberalism. We did not so much argue down the wires as make statements from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and each statement was answered by a longer silence, or a deeper breath, or a terser remark. “I’m sorry, I cannot accept that.” “Well, that’s not how we feel.” “That is untrue.” At the end of one such conversation I said, “Should we go on doing this?
Being in touch like this. I don’t want to keep calling you if all I do is cause you distress.” “You are the husband of our daughter,” Alfred said. “I’m putting Rachel back on.” There was a pause, the soft rasp of a hand placed over the mouthpiece. “Of course we must keep in touch,” Rachel said. “You are all we have left of her. We’ll talk again soon, Alan.” And she hung up.

But as the divide grew between what they believed or wanted to believe and what I couldn’t, and as my profile as one of the principal sceptics grew, so whatever dialogue took place between us became more stilted. Not just with them either: I had never had much contact with her brothers; now, that ceased entirely. Eventually, five years or so after Khazar’s imprisonment, everything came to a head. I had issued a long and detailed criticism of all that I felt was wrong with his conviction and this had been picked up by news agencies around the world. I had also, following my visit to him in prison, given that interview to the Sunday paper, in which I described him as a man of profound faith. This had unleashed a storm of abuse from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, who accused me of naivety, calculation, stupidity and mendacity. One autumn night, at about ten o’clock, the telephone rang and it was not a journalist making a late-night chance bid for a story, it was Alfred.

“Alan,” he said. I recognised his voice at once.

They were five hours behind us. I pictured him, now long retired, in their gloomy house on a damp Pennsylvania evening, with thick layers of orange and red leaves going to
brown in the garden at dusk, waiting to be gathered—one more thing that Alfred would be less able to cope with.

“Hello, Alfred,” I said.

“This has to stop,” he said. “You have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“You know. This endless … this endless torture. Rachel can’t take it anymore. She can’t speak to you if you keep on with it.”

“We don’t speak much now, Alfred,” I said.

“What good is it doing?” he said. There was a tremulousness in his voice, but behind that something steelier.

“It’s better than doing nothing,” I said.

“There is nothing to do,” he said, and the rising emphasis on the last two words betrayed his irritation. “It’s over. Why can’t you leave it? Why can’t you let us have some peace?”

“I wish I could,” I said, “but I can’t. Don’t you think I would leave it if it were possible?”

“Rachel is very unwell,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.