Which is what happened.
But you’re on a different trail now, so it couldn’t have been like that. You go through it once more, voicing your hypotheses, scribbling down timings, working it out all over again. You’ve missed something, perhaps something obvious. If Khazar planted the bomb, he could not have introduced it at Heathrow. But if it came in on another flight it would have blown up before it even got to Heathrow, if it was triggered by a barometric timer. So—of course—it had to be another kind of timer. The bomb had to be triggered not by barometric pressure change but by ticking time. You set the timer running, you get the suitcase into the system, and when the time runs out the bomb goes off.
It’s so simple when you say it. But how does the bomber know how long to set the timer for? He puts the suitcase on one flight, it’s to be transferred at another airport to a second flight, then in London transferred on to the target flight, and then it’s to blow up over the Atlantic. One unaccompanied suitcase going through all those airports, all those security systems, with all the possibility of detection, baggage mix-ups, delayed departures and arrivals—how long does the bomber give it? Maybe it doesn’t matter where or when or on which plane it blows up. Maybe if he’s an inefficient bomber it can blow up on the ground with no one on board for all he cares. But he isn’t inefficient. He has a job to do, and he cares a great deal about getting it right. There is money in it, and vengeance, even a cruel, barren kind of justice. The trouble with your simple explanation is that it isn’t simple at all. It’s ludicrously complex and has a huge likelihood of failure. If the bomber wants to bring down a particular plane he’s going to put the bomb on to that plane, not any other, and he’s going to use a device that detonates only when that plane is well into its flight.
Then that bomber must be the wrong bomber.
The right bomber used a different kind of timer.
You talk to your forensics experts again—your future lab technician and chiropractor—and they go back to the fragments of clothing from the primary suitcase and have another look. And they find something, a tiny fragment of circuit board embedded in a shirt collar. So tiny it might almost have been missed. In fact it was missed first time round; well, not missed but overlooked, there’s some confusion over when and where it was found and how it was catalogued or not catalogued, which would explain why nobody thought there was anything special about it back then, but now they do. Now it is very special. It is the key to everything. It comes from a timer, the right kind of timer, the kind of timer that will fit with the narrative that has a bomb in a radio cassette player in a suitcase going on its merry undetected way from one airport to another even though a warning was circulated to look out for bombs in radio cassette players because you and the Germans and God knows who else knew there was at least one of the damn things out there. But that was before, that was the old narrative, and now you have turned the page, and there you find that a batch of these other, non-barometric timers was once supplied by the manufacturer to the hostile regime and that Khalil Khazar, travelling the world under his own name or another, could have had a role in acquiring them.
And then Ali gives you another name. He understands, as you do, or because you do, that the bombing wasn’t an act of individual insanity but one of shared ideology. If Khazar was involved, he can’t have acted alone. So Ali gives you Waleed Mahmed, also employed by the national airline, its station manager at the island’s airport. As with Khazar, the suggestion is that there is more to him than appears on the surface, that his work for the regime goes far beyond what is given in his job description. Whenever Khazar is on the island he spends time with Waleed Mahmed. Waleed Mahmed is a well-known face around the airport, especially at the check-in and information desks. This is not to say that he is free to wander wherever he likes, but he does have detailed knowledge of the airport and its security procedures—which, as it happens, are very thorough and very thoroughly adhered to. Anybody wishing to circumvent those procedures would find such knowledge useful. Khalil Khazar and Waleed Mahmed together make an interesting team.
But Waleed Mahmed’s whereabouts on the day in question are not known. It cannot be established if he was at the airport, or even on the island. Nobody can be found to verify where he was. If he had been at the airport, where his face was so familiar, somebody, surely, would have remembered. This does not rule him out as a suspect, but it makes it all the more important to concentrate on Khazar, who, carrying a false passport, went through the airport that day.
Ali the car mechanic has done well for you, done well for himself, earned himself and his family a new start in America, but his paid-for testimony won’t stand up under legal scrutiny in a courtroom. Which is where, sometime, somewhere, this is all heading. You need to press and bend one more piece into place in the jigsaw, so that you can pin this crime on Khazar and Mahmed, one or the other or both, and, through them, on your hostile, strategically unimportant, wickedly motivated rogue state.
One more piece. You need an eyewitness.
I was staring at the window. A constantly shifting curtain of white flickered outside. The snow was now so thick that it made the daylight sickly and feeble, and it was not even three o’clock. I wondered how I was going to get Nilsen out of the house if the weather did not improve.
“We are almost there, Dr Tealing,” he said. “We are almost at the end.”
I said again, “You are too late.”
He shook his head.
I said, “Do you really think I will join in this ridiculous game of yours, after all these years?”
“A witness,” he said. “Someone who saw Khalil Khazar handle the suitcase on the island. He was at the airport, on the day of the bombing, in order to fly home. What else was he there for? It’s too much of a coincidence, and you know what we think of coincidences. Surely we can find someone who saw him. Join in, Dr Tealing? Yes, of course you will. You already have. You can’t help yourself. As I was saying. We need a witness.”
He was right. I could not help myself.
“Parroulet,” I said.
7
FTER THE BOMBING, ONCE THE SHOCK DIMINISHED and I began to accept that what had happened really had happened, I found myself having dreams about Alice, myself and Alice, night after night. Had I gone for counselling, no doubt I would have learned that this was normal, part of a process. But I chose to be my own counsellor, standing outside and apart from myself sometimes as I grieved, and I worked it out unaided. She was my daughter, but she could not be with me in the new reality I inhabited; reasonable, then, that she should walk and run and laugh instead through my shallow sleep. She was always happy in these dreams, never fearful or hurt or anxious. Sometimes we were at home, watching television together, or out in the garden. Often we were on a beach, kicking at the frothy ends of waves. I would pick her up and carry her deeper, threatening to launch her into the sea. She’d be screaming and laughing, knowing—absolutely trusting—that I would never ever let her go no matter how very nearly she might seem about to leave my grasp. And someone—I wanted it to be Emily but I never got to see who it was—was taking pictures of us. Alan and Alice posed for the camera: hunter with seal under arm, ogre with captive princess, man with daughter clinging to neck. But it wasn’t Alan, it was me, and the dreams were more wonderful, more intense and pure, than the experiences on which they were loosely based. I wished I could have stayed in them forever, those happy-ever-after dreams, but of course I couldn’t. I would wake from them with tears pouring from my eyes, and lie in the darkness a few steps from the empty bedroom where she had once slept. After a while I would get up, and go downstairs to try to read. This was years before I got involved with the Case. No wonder I cannot remember all the literature I have read: great chunks of it passed before my eyes in those dead nights. I took it in but where it went after that I do not know.
And then a time came when she no longer came to me in dreams. And a while after that I found, to my horror, that she had faded a little
in my mind, and I would catch up a photograph of her and Emily, terrified that I would not recognise them. And yes, there they were behind the glass, but I saw also that they had gone, or perhaps that I had gone. I was looking at a photograph in which they were still six and twenty-eight, while I was racing towards middle age, and on beyond that to decrepitude.
Had I gone for counselling, I might have asked the counsellor, how is it that I hardly ever dream of Emily? I asked it of myself, but I didn’t come up with any answers.
Once, when I was coming home from work on the bus, earlier than usual, a man and a little girl got on, two or three stops after I had, and sat across the aisle from me. She was six, seven at most—Alice’s age—and in school uniform. The man was probably ten years younger than I, tall and thin, with untidy curly hair, and there was a boyish, gently ribbing tone to his voice when he spoke to the girl, his daughter. He’d just picked her up from school. I had a vague sense of having seen him before. Maybe he taught at the University. As soon as they were seated the girl made him open the free newspaper he’d picked up on entering the bus, a copy of which I’d been idly, blindly leafing through, and they began what was evidently a regular game. He took the left-hand page and she the right-hand one of each spread, and as they turned them they counted the pictures of different items on each side. The winner was the one with the highest number by the time they got to the end of the paper. The first time through it was houses, then it was animals. She won both times. “You’re much too good at this,” he said, as she called out a dog and two horses to his solitary fish. “Oh, that’s so unfair!” he groaned, a minute later. “Look at all those cows! That’s, uh, 98–3 to you.” She giggled at his plucked-from-the-air number but kept concentrating. She didn’t miss a trick, with her heart-shaped, pixie face and shining blue eyes and the same out-of-control curly hair as her dad’s. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. It wasn’t clear who was more snuggled into whom. I knew how she would smell to him: not what she would smell like, but how, to him, her father. “Let’s play again,” she said. “But I always lose,” he said. She insisted. This time they were car-spotters. For a few pages it was close, and he kept up a running commentary—“One to me, two to you, oh, another to me, we’re both winning, oh, now I’m ahead, I’ll beat you this time, I’m winning 3–2.” Her legs kicked up with pleasure. I forced myself to sit back. I could see what page they were on, and began turning my own paper in time with theirs. Together we turned, and again, and then there came a story about floods in Italy, and a photograph of a car park full of floating cars, dozens of them, on the right-hand page. “I give up,” the father said. “Why are they swimming?” the daughter asked. My eyes stung, my tongue was suddenly choking me. Her wonderful, innocent question ached in my ears. I stood up and pressed the bell, and lurched from the bus a mile short of my usual stop. I thought I was going to be sick with jealousy.
I walked the rest of the way home in tears, remembering Alice’s first day at school. Emily hadn’t wanted to upset her by crying when she had to let her go, and so we’d agreed that I would take her. It was a ten-minute walk to the school. Alice chatted all the way, telling me the exact contents of her school bag, which we’d packed together the night before and repacked in the morning; and then, as the school building loomed and she saw all the other children in their new blue shirts, and the other fathers and mothers, converging on the gate, she fell silent and clutched my hand more tightly, and I felt my own pulse quicken and my throat tighten. But she was brave, we were both brave. She said, “Will it be all right?” I said, “It’ll be fantastic, just you see.” And she said, “Are you coming with me?” “No,” I said, “but I’ll get you to the door, and make sure somebody is there to show you where to go, and then you’ll be fine.” “But where will I go?” she asked. “You’ll see when you get inside,” I told her. And she accepted that, because it came from me, and said, “Okay,” quite casually, as a girl ten years older might have said it.
So we came to the door and I said, “Now give me a kiss and a hug,” and she did, and her teacher was there, who recognised her from the visit we’d made at the end of the previous term. “Hello, Alice,” she said. “Do you remember me?” “I think so,” Alice said, and she took the teacher’s hand and in she went. I let go of her, and she of me, so easily that I hardly realised we had done it. She didn’t look back, and it was over, not such an ordeal for either of us, but at the end of that first day, and all the too few schooldays that followed, either Emily or I would be there to greet her and take her home, and that was the thing, that was the joy and the pain of the man and his little girl on the bus, the thing that could never happen for me and Alice again. And I hoped that Emily had been able to keep holding her hand all the way, and that if there was a door maybe they had gone through it together.
Emily had wanted Alice to experience Thanksgiving. Rachel wasn’t keeping well again so she and Alfred couldn’t—wouldn’t—come to Scotland. “But it would mean taking Alice out of school,” Emily said.
“So, take her out of school,” I said.
“The school disapproves. I disapprove. I don’t want to get into that habit.”
“Once won’t matter. She’s only six.”
“If we go, will you come? It would be lovely if we could all go.”
“I can’t,” I said. “The University …”
“… would disapprove.”
“To put it mildly. I’d be breaking my contract. Sorry.”
“I kind of figured that. Would you mind very much if we went without you?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’ll get by. It’ll be good for Alice. She should see your folks more often. And they’ll love you both being there for Thanksgiving.”
“We’ll only be gone a week,” Emily said. “And we’ll be together here at Christmas, just the three of us.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, and I meant it, not a trace of irony in there.
Before the sweeter, kinder dreams came the one from which, for a long time, I thought I would never escape, the dream that toppled my world, that stifled the born-again Alan and left the dead me in his place. It was my dream, but it was about Alan.
He was in his office at the University, with a stack of essays waiting to be read. A long evening lay ahead. The weather was grey and drizzly. He drank black coffee from a flask, marked a couple of essays. Outside it grew dark. He drank more coffee, looked at his watch. Six o’clock. They’d flown to London from Edinburgh that afternoon. He thought of them queuing at the gate, boarding the plane, waiting for take-off. He marked a few more essays. Some rain splatted on the window. He looked at his watch again. Just after seven. They would be airborne. He thought of them up there above the rain. Then what, in this dream? A jolt, a strange rearrangement of the air, some paranormal flicker? He poured the last of the coffee, turned to the next essay. Very bad handwriting (I can see it still): good student, bad writing. He began to decipher it. The phone rang. He reached across the desk and picked it up.
“Alan? It’s Jim.” Jim Collins, his Welsh realist colleague, analyst of male anger and angst in post-war working-class fiction, Barstow, Sillitoe, Storey, Hines, all that. Jim was Alan’s senior by a few years, not that they noticed the difference. He had a daughter, Lisa, the same age as Alice; they were at the same school. He had two sons as well, older, and an ex-wife on the other side of town, and they all seemed to get on fine between the two households. Jim had a cool, commanding way of speaking. He said, “Alan, didn’t you tell me the other day that Emily and Alice were going to be flying to the States?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’ve gone already.”
“They’ve gone? Good. Thank God for that.”
“Actually, they should be in the air right now. They were flying this evening from Heathrow.”
In the dream the words “they should be in the air right now” repeated several times, the emphasis shifting along the line like a crow hopping along a wall. The crow bounced up and down on “right now.�
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“Heathrow?” Jim’s voice had suddenly lost its authority. “Shit.”
“What?” Alan said. In the dream he wasn’t perturbed. Why would he have been? “Shit” was such a small, unimportant word. “Shit happens,” and similar phrases. He said, “What’s up?”
“There’s been a report on the radio. A plane crash in the Borders. They’re saying it’s a transatlantic flight from Heathrow. I don’t know if that’s right, but that’s what they’re saying.”
“On the radio?” Alan said. “Where are you?”
“I’m at home. I’m going to put the TV on. I’ll phone you back.”
In the dream Jim Collins hung up. In the dream Alan Tealing paused, wondering what to do. Even then he wasn’t really worried. A plane crash in the Borders had nothing to do with him. Emily and Alice had left Scotland, to go to America. There was no radio or TV in his office. He was half an hour from home if he walked, ten minutes by bus if there was a bus. He wasn’t thinking of taxis, not yet. He looked at the essay again, deciphered a few more lines of the dreadful scrawl in which were hidden some good ideas about Wuthering Heights.
The phone rang. In the dream he heard it ring and the air seemed to crumble between his hand and the phone. The hand picked up the receiver.
Jim said, “The plane was flying from Heathrow to New York. It was scheduled to take off at six o’clock.”
Something lurched in Alan’s heart, like a mad dog throwing itself against a door when the bell is rung.
“I’ve written down the flight number,” Jim said, and he read it out.
Alan heard himself say, “That’s their flight.”
The next thing was someone calling from a distance, as if through a dense fog or in the blackest of starless nights. “Alan!” the voice called. “Alan!” He tried to make the voice wake him. He tried to make it sound feminine, Emily’s voice, and he tried to hear Alice’s voice alongside it, or beyond it, “Daddy!” but they wouldn’t come. “Alan!” the voice called. “Are you there?” and he was, the receiver still pressed to his ear, and Jim was saying, “You’d better go home, Alan. You need to go home. I’ll meet you there.”
The Professor of Truth Page 8