“You are unhappy with the outcome,” he said. “But what is it you are looking for? Justice? The truth?”
“Either of those would be a start,” I said. “Both would be good.”
“It is naive of you to think—” Braithwaite began, then broke off. “Maybe I should finish that sentence right there. No, I apologise, I’m being facetious.” He stopped again. “The thing people always do—people who are not lawyers—is confuse the law with justice, evidence with truth. What goes on in a courtroom is not a search for truth. It really isn’t, although the mythology suggests otherwise. A courtroom is a venue for a fight between two sides, each trying to persuade a jury, or in this case the Bench, that an accused person did or did not do something. That’s all it is, a fight. As in a boxing match, points are scored by delivering punches on target. It may even be that a knockout punch is landed. And when it is all over, one side wins. But the outcome of any trial is not that justice has been done, or that the truth has come out, any more than the outcome of a boxing match is that the better, nobler, finer man has triumphed. Justice may have been done. The truth may have come out. But neither of these things is necessary in the application of the law. They are actually irrelevant. Yes, I’d go as far as to say that. Irrelevant. We might wish it were not so, but that is the nature of the law. And why is that? It’s because truth and justice are only ever principles at best, and more often mere aspirations. They are what we aim for, what we hope for in ideal circumstances. But we never get ideal circumstances because none of us—solicitors, advocates, judges, jury, witnesses, the accused—none of us, in the end, I am not sorry to say, is perfect. We are all only human.”
“That word ‘irrelevant,’ ” I said. “Lately I’ve been wanting to strip out everything to do with this whole affair that is irrelevant, all the speculation and confusion and emotion. Concentrate on the hard facts. I feel then, despite what you say, that what would be left would be the truth.”
“You might feel it but you’d be wrong.” He stood up, lifted the decanter and refilled our glasses. “You’re missing the point. What are the hard facts? What you say is irrelevant in this affair is not irrelevant in life. What is irrelevant is what makes life. If you strip out the irrelevant, the truth won’t be standing there like a gleaming sword. There won’t just be no truth, there’ll be nothing.”
“You mean, there is no truth?”
“I mean it is not pure and separate. It is dirty and decayed and has frayed edges, and holes and tears in it. The last thing the truth does is gleam.”
“You suggested that image, not me. But I’m glad I’m not a lawyer, if this is how you end up thinking.”
“Without idealism? It’s the only way to think, if you want to stay sane. The lives that come before lawyers in the course of their work, the lives that are paraded in front of magistrates every day of the week, all over the world, are scruffy and soiled and stupid, and a million miles from idealism. And I’m not just talking about criminal law, I mean civil law too, buying and selling houses, legacies and divorces, commercial law, the whole kitbag. Do you think anybody involved in those processes could go home and eat his dinner, or go to the theatre, or enjoy a game of golf or a drink or a joke with friends, or even the quiet of a room like this with its books and pictures, if he took the—well, you might call it the nobler view, but I call it the naive view? It just wouldn’t be possible.”
It was early spring. The evening light had dulled, and the room was murky. Braithwaite’s face had become indistinct, and I was not even sure if his eyes were still open. Then he spoke again.
“I did once know someone in the law, a sheriff, who tried going down the road you’re on, the noble road. He too decided that justice and the law must be one and the same, despite all the evidence”—he cleared his throat—“to the contrary, or what was the point? And what happened to him? I’ll tell you. First he took to drink, then he went mad, and finally he threw himself off a bridge.”
I had no recollection of such an event. “Really?” I asked.
“Really,” Braithwaite said. “Many years ago. We had our disagreements, but I was very fond of him.”
Something, I wasn’t sure what, had been revealed in the half-dark. We both drank. Braithwaite cleared his throat again, reached for a table-lamp and switched it on, then walked round the room switching on other lamps strategically placed to illuminate but not glare. He refilled the glasses.
“In a way,” he said, “he thought he was above the law, or immune to it. But of course he was not immune.”
“Nobody should be above the law,” I said.
“We’re all above it, or think we are from time to time,” he said, “whether for noble reasons or base ones. Every one of us. Some of us fiddle our expenses, or don’t declare all our earnings. Drivers break the speed limit, just a little, or a lot.” He tut-tutted, like a man going at 75 mph being overtaken by another going at 90. “We all think we’re above the law, and most of the time it doesn’t matter. Then there are times when it might. The Catholic Church thinks it’s above the law with its sanctity of the confessional. Journalists protecting their sources say that if they named them, even under oath, it would destroy the freedom of the press. And then there are the times when it definitely does matter: when an institution like the Church protects its priests just because they’re priests, for example. Or when an organisation—the police, say, or a powerful company—becomes corrupt in order to get business done. Or when a man takes the law into his own hands. For example.” He leaned forward. “If I had a daughter who was abused, or raped, or killed, and I knew who’d done it, I’d kill the bastard if I could, not wait for the law to catch him and lock him up. We’re all above the law, but mostly it doesn’t show.”
The sudden ferocity that had surged in his voice was alarming. I felt almost as if I were being accused of something.
“You’re sure that’s what you would do?” I said.
“No,” he said, and smiled, apparently calm again. “But I’m sure that’s what I would feel.”
“I could never kill anybody,” I said.
“You’ve never been in a room with whoever murdered your wife and daughter,” Braithwaite said. “Or you tell me you haven’t. So how can you be sure?”
“Even when I thought Khazar was guilty,” I said, “when the trial began, when I was in that courtroom and he was sitting there behind the bulletproof glass, even then I didn’t want to kill him.”
“What did you want?”
I had thought about this. The answer was quite simple, really. I said, “I wanted it to be over, and not to have to think about it anymore.”
He nodded.
“I wanted to be able to go to sleep,” I said, “and not dream, and not wake up till morning.”
He said, “I’m afraid even justice and truth can’t give you that.”
“Are you saying I’m wasting my time looking for them?”
He shook his head. “No, not at all. If I were you that’s what I’d do. All I’m saying is, be prepared to be disappointed if you ever find them.”
Jim Collins stopped me outside the department office a few days later. “George said you’d been to see him,” he said. “Was he helpful?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so. I’m still digesting what he said.”
“What did you make of him?”
“Cool, as you said. I can’t say I exactly liked him. Quite cynical. Although he got very impassioned at one point.”
“George is all right,” Jim said. “The cynicism’s a front. He got pretty bruised when he was a solicitor. He told me he saw a lot of lawyers who couldn’t cope, whose lives fell apart under the pressure.”
“He mentioned a friend who jumped off a bridge,” I said. “I wondered …”
“That was his brother. It was one of the things that prompted him to change direction.”
“His brother? I thought maybe a partner, a companion.”
“You think George is gay? Well, I s
uppose anything’s possible. But he was married back then. As we all were. George was one of the ones who fell apart. He’s very self-contained these days. Doesn’t reveal anything he doesn’t want to.”
“That,” I said, “makes a lot of sense.”
“Do you know how I found out that Parroulet was paid for his evidence?” I said. “Did you ever work that out?”
“You dug a lot of holes in a lot of different places.” Again, Nilsen was neither denying nor acknowledging anything.
“A policeman told me. Do you know why he told me? Because he thought the whole investigation had been wrecked, undermined by what you call the ‘rethink.’ He said it was a classic example of making evidence fit the crime rather than the crime fit the evidence. He said he was very worried by the way outside agencies were interfering with the investigation. He wasn’t the only one, he told me.”
“I don’t recall anyone in the police being too worried,” Nilsen said. “I don’t recall anyone raising objections.”
“He was overruled. They all wanted a result, just as you described. When Khazar and Mahmed became suspects, the police made it absolutely clear to your people that Ali’s evidence wouldn’t stand up in court because it was known he’d been in your pay. If Parroulet was to have any credibility it was essential that the same charge couldn’t be levelled at him. Your people said the money was on the table and the police said it had to be off the table or under it. No money could change hands till a trial had taken place. So when Parroulet asked about payment the police kept it low-key and off the record, but he knew if he said the right things there’d eventually be a pay-off, he’d just have to wait for it.”
“An offer of a reward for information leading to a conviction is nothing new,” Nilsen said. “What did your policeman find so offensive about that?”
“The amount. Your people were talking about two million dollars. You can buy a lot of narrative for that kind of money.”
“There was no guarantee he’d get anything. The police were clear with him about that. Every time he raised the subject of a reward they shut him down.”
“He knew the money was there for him if it ever came to a trial and he gave the right evidence. Whatever the police said or didn’t say, he knew the offer was there. But nobody else did. The judges didn’t know. Khazar’s defence team were never told. If they had been they’d have gone to town on Parroulet. And without Parroulet, there was no case against Khazar.”
“But you have no proof.”
“As you said, I dug a lot of holes. I’m still digging. I’ve seen enough and heard enough to know what happened.”
“To change anything, you still need proof.”
I said, “That’s why you’re here, though, isn’t it? To set the record straight.”
“There is no record,” he said. “Not that you or anyone else will ever see.”
“But still, that is why you’re here,” I said.
He nodded beyond me, towards the window.
“Look at that snow,” he said. “Where does it all come from?”
10
S IT FAIR TO SUGGEST THAT CAROL INVITED HERSELF into my life? No. Fairer to say that she invited me into her life, quietly but repeatedly, and that at last, without much grace, I went. I have never been sure why I did, nor have I ever had the will, or the grace, to leave again.
She was in my life, of course, before the bombing, but only as an academic colleague, my senior by a couple of years. I liked her well enough then, but always felt a little sorry for her, and a little guilty in her presence. Sorry, because she was (as I thought) competent but dull, besides being married to Harold Pritchley. Guilty, because I was so much luckier in my marriage than she was.
She had married Professor Pritchley when still one of his undergraduate students, had done a PhD—on women’s poetry of the 1930s—under somebody else’s supervision, and then been appointed as a lecturer. When I first arrived Harold and Carol (the cheery rhyme of their union seemed self-mocking) had been together for six or seven years, but by that stage everybody knew it was a marriage of unremitting misery. Harold was, as the Dean of Faculty and everybody else acknowledged, brilliant. He was also cruel and—by the time I knew him—a drunkard. When Carol married him he was not yet in thrall to the bottle, the brilliance must have had a certain charm, and the cruelty, which she could hardly have missed, she was deluded enough (so she later told me) to think would never be directed at her. Presumably they had both had their reasons for marrying, but all I could see in his eyes when he looked at her was how much he despised her. His malice was not discreet: all of us within the department saw it. He would humiliate her in front of us by first seeking her opinion and then exposing her ignorance of this or that subject. In private (again, I learned later) his favourite sport was to taunt her failure to get pregnant—a failure caused as much by his drinking as by any biological problem of hers. His emotional abuse was extreme, but he was, she said, too much of a coward ever to hit her. Most of the rest of us were also cowards, adherents to the middle-class religion of Nonconfrontism, and we watched, cringing, as he ground her down. On one occasion I, who was at least fifteen years younger than Harold, could not bear his rudeness, and tried to defend Carol’s argument if not Carol herself. He turned on me and I was demolished too. When this happened a second time, a few weeks later, I told him he should be ashamed of himself. He said shame was the prerogative of third-raters and children, and suggested that I was only in the job I was because he had thought—wrongly, but he was not ashamed to admit his mistake—that I showed promise and would, given time, grow up. I reminded him that there had been an interview panel of five. He said that that only underlined the failings of management by committee. I never spoke to him again. Two months later he left us for a prestigious Fellowship at Cambridge. Nobody, as far as I know, warned Cambridge what they were really getting.
Years later Carol told me that though it must have looked as if he had left her too—the final humiliation—in fact she had refused to go with him. That decision, she said, marked the beginning of her independence, a state for which she would always be grateful. She said this with a vehemence that I thought suspect, but I did not challenge it. I had no wish to do so.
She certainly bloomed after Harold’s departure—took more care of her appearance, became more animated and engaging and shed the skin of dullness she had previously worn. Perhaps even then—between her liberation from Harold and the bombing—she wanted something from me. An affair? If she flirted with me, I was oblivious. I was more than content with Emily, and by then we had Alice. The idea of a relationship on the side never so much as occurred to me.
Afterwards she was solicitous and kind, as everybody was, but somehow her sympathy did not irritate me as that of others did. Perhaps this was because I soon recognised that there was self-interest in it. Philosophy tells us that there is self-interest in all sympathy, but hers had the virtue of being neither blatant nor much disguised. She was practical too, covering for me at work on bad days, encouraging me on good ones. I knew what she wanted, but could not reciprocate. She was very patient. She probably thought I wasn’t “ready,” whereas I was certain I never would be.
Several times in those first years, after an evening function of one kind or another, she offered me a lift home. She lived on the other side of town in a district that had, until the early twentieth century, been a village in its own right—the birthplace in fact of David Dibald (not that there was a plaque or street name anywhere to commemorate him)—and usually drove to work. “It’s taking you miles out of your way,” I protested, the first time. “I’ll just get a bus.” “It’ll only be fifteen minutes at this time of day,” she said. “And it’s raining.” So I accepted.
After a while I had to give directions—she didn’t know my part of town, she said. But as we turned into my street a recognition stirred in her: she and Harold had looked at a house here.
“Harold thought it was too middle class,” she said.
/> “What did he expect? It’s a middle-class area,” I said.
“He was an idiot,” she said, puncturing the generally accepted view of Professor Pritchley’s intellect. She slowed the car. “That one there. It looks all right, doesn’t it? But Harold wanted to live in a mansion, although he professed to despise all social ambition. What a snob he was.”
We arrived at my house and she switched off the engine. “It’s so quiet,” she said, and we sat listening to the quietness until I felt oppressed by it.
“Thanks for the lift,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Alan,” she said, and quickly asked my opinion of a student she was finding difficult, and that led on to something else, and it was all fine and unthreatening but at the same time I was thinking, she wants to come in, and I didn’t want her to come in.
“Well,” I said, opening the passenger door, “thanks again,” and again she said, “You’re welcome,” like a polite waitress. I got out of the car.
“See you tomorrow,” she said, and I smiled at her and closed the car door, and she drove off, and I entered my silent, empty, familiar house.
Over time these lifts and conversations became, almost, a habit we shared. We’d get to my house, sit in the car and chat about the function we’d just attended, about department politics, about books and writers. I still didn’t invite her in, but gradually she became bolder, till at last she was asking questions that I wouldn’t have tolerated from anyone else. She had hardly known Emily, having met her only two or three times, and had spoken to Alice just once when we bumped into her at a garden centre, and so she didn’t have a claim on them, a proprietary interest, in the way that I felt my family, Emily’s family, did. She did not think they belonged to her, and for this I was grateful.
She asked on one occasion if I’d been alone when the news came through, or if anyone had come to be with me. I told her of Jim Collins’s role, how he had fielded calls and fed me drink and sat with me through most of the night. Eventually he’d had to go, back to his own family, still alive even if not together under one roof. My neighbours Brian and Pam Hewat were on a winter break in Madeira or Tenerife or some such place and weren’t due back for a few days. The next morning I went to the railway station and headed south, and when I came home days later—was it seven, was it eight?—my sister, Karen, and my parents had installed themselves, having been given a key by Brian and Pam. They stayed for a week until I asked them to leave, because there was nothing they could do. “We’d stopped hugging and started arguing, actually. It wasn’t good.”
The Professor of Truth Page 11