“You were in shock,” Carol said.
“Yes. Sometimes I think I still am.”
“All of you,” she said. And then: “I wish I could have helped.”
“You had your own troubles.”
“They were nothing by comparison. And anyway that was all over by then. But obviously I couldn’t have helped. What help could anyone have been?”
“People did help,” I said. “They were incredibly helpful. You were, I remember. But really, if I am truthful, none of it even scratched the surface.”
“And now?” We had been looking straight ahead, out through the windscreen, but she turned her face to me and I met her gaze, and it was so full of hope that I could not disappoint her.
“Now you scratch the surface,” I said.
She touched my wrist lightly. It was enough to be going on with.
The next time I felt I could not simply let her drive away. I asked if she wanted a coffee. She did, of course.
I knew that she wanted me too, but I didn’t understand why. I’ve never understood it. I am irritable, moody, antisocial, obsessive, irreparably damaged. I am not to be depended on. Why would she or anyone want me? It cannot just be pity. I would see that at once and not stand for it. But there she was, week after week, an open though never desperate invitation, and week after week I edged closer to not rejecting it. Not just weeks but years went by. Slowly she coaxed me out into some kind of light. Then the trial happened and I was back in darkness, and still she waited. Till one night—I don’t know what configuration of circumstances caused it other than the coffee being supplemented by a glass of wine—I brought things to a head with a sudden, bald statement of fact.
“I’ll never marry again,” I said. “I absolutely know that.”
“Nor me,” Carol said, “but for different reasons. There are negative ones and positive ones, don’t you think?”
“Yours being?”
“Negative. I could never trust a man enough to marry him, not after Harold. There’d always be the niggling fear that anyone I liked that much would turn out to be another shit after all, and I couldn’t go through that again. I don’t really trust anybody any more, that’s the thing. Your reasons, I imagine, are more positive.”
“I’ll never meet someone who can match Emily, you mean?”
“Yes. And you won’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t marry again.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “I won’t.”
We were in the living room, in two armchairs, separated by a low table. It was a summer evening, still light outside, and silhouetted against the French window Carol’s head might almost have been Emily’s, except that she was in the wrong place. Emily almost always sat, legs tucked up, on the sofa. I tried to picture her sitting where Carol was, and myself watching her from where I was. The picture didn’t come. This made the situation easier than it might have been.
“It’s not true what I said about not trusting anybody,” Carol said. “I trust you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve known you for years.”
I nodded, deferring to the fact.
“You’re not exactly a stranger, Alan. Anyway, I trust you. Why is that? Maybe it’s because you’re so loyal to Emily. You won’t let go. I respect that. I trust that.”
There was more to come, I knew. I waited.
“But you know, I think by now she would want you to let go.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Don’t start, I meant. But, having started, she couldn’t or wouldn’t stop.
“When I saw the two of you together it was obvious that you were happy and secure in each other. Even when I saw you at work, on your own. If her name was mentioned. I was jealous of what you had.”
“Don’t,” I said again.
“But I was. I was jealous of you both. And you had Alice, too. I was jealous of you for having her.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to tell her a third time.
“I was jealous of Emily.”
My surprise wasn’t total, but Carol must have caught something of it in my look. She flinched, held her ground.
“I’m being very forward, aren’t I?” she said.
I could have closed it down then. I could have agreed with her, made it clear that she had overstepped a mark, was pushing too much into private territory, but that wasn’t really what she was doing. She was confessing something about herself. What did surprise me was that I didn’t mind.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I guess what I’m saying is … Well, you know what I’m saying.”
We were too far apart for any touch that didn’t involve one of us making an irrecoverable movement. I saw that the whole thing could easily end in awkwardness, even in tears, but again Carol impressed me. She said, “If you want to come back to mine and stay the night it would be nice. No complications.”
She had given me my cue to retreat. “There are always complications,” I answered at once.
“Don’t fight when there’s nothing to fight,” she said. “I’m telling you, no complications.”
I tried to work out the consequences of going to bed with her. I tried to think of a way out if I did, a way out if I didn’t. I wondered about falling asleep, waking up.
I said, “I don’t think I could.”
She breathed out, sat back. “Okay. Sorry I asked. No I’m not.”
“I mean,” I said, “I don’t think I could stay the night. Not all night. I get restless. I’d have to come back here. But I could get a taxi. Or walk.”
“It’s four miles.”
“As I said, I get restless.”
“We can stay here, if you’d rather.”
“No,” I said firmly. “Let’s go to yours.”
11
HE CASE” IS MY NAME FOR THE WORK I DO AROUND the bombing—the gathering and sifting of information, the analysis of so-called facts and challenging of so-called evidence. I didn’t deliberately christen it, but when the doubts started, followed in due succession by the suspicions, the theories and the certainties, “the Case” became code for all of that. I had been here before, I realised, as I created files—paper ones and electronic ones—in order to keep myself on top of the accumulating mass of information. My apprenticeship had been writing my doctoral thesis. And now I was doing it again, only this time it was, as the PhD never had been, for real. Documents piled up: the fatal accident inquiry report, medical reports, cuttings from newspapers and magazines, police reports, airline reports, insurance reports, government statements, all the paperwork relating to and leading up to the trial, the trial records and the published judgment of the court. The dining room became the dumping-ground for it all. First the piles took over the table, then the floor right round the room. I acquired one, then a second, then a third filing cabinet to contain it all. Whenever I made a space by filing something away, it was quickly filled. I recorded news items, documentaries, interviews with politicians, on cassettes and videos from radio and television, and I labelled and stored them, stacking them in chronological order in a cupboard. Into the filing cabinets went copies of my own letters to the press, to the police, to the court, to governments across the world, the replies I received, the transcripts of my public statements voicing concerns about the trial, statements made in response from individuals and institutions. My redundant dining room became a reference library with only one subject.
I made paper copies of everything I could, because I was distrustful of technology, not because of the technology itself but because of the way I came to depend on it. I hated this dependency. The years of work that could be wiped out through loss of power or computer failure—I thought of that sometimes when I couldn’t sleep and it made me get up and recheck that I’d backed everything up on the external hard drive, that I had it all banked and secure. I was mindful of the fact that my emails could be intercepted and my internet use monitored. When I went to work I checked front and back doors and all the
windows. I had a burglar alarm fitted. If I went away I hid the external hard drive. I was not being paranoid. So much of what I researched was about security, protection of information. My precautions were disproportionate only in the sense that they were probably inadequate.
I was increasingly a public figure, a man who rejected the official version. I was not just a dissenter but a dissenter whose dissent had added validity, because of what had happened to my loved ones. I was invited to speak on Newsnight and World Report and Today, and I never turned down an opportunity to voice my concerns. I went to Khazar’s country, to London, New York, Washington, Brussels, Berlin. I went to the island, spoke to politicians and policemen across Europe and North Africa and the Middle East. I published articles in which I wrote not just of the failure of the law in this particular case—the Case—but of what that meant for our society. If the justice system could get things so spectacularly wrong, if it could then apparently turn a blind eye to error, negligence and suppression of evidence, if it could drag its heels and seem to want to avoid shining a light on any aspect of a case that might reflect badly on its own processes, if it could condone such attitudes in this most important of criminal proceedings—then what was justice, and whom did it serve? I asked such questions again and again, and the silence that greeted them spoke volumes, and so did the worldly shaking of heads and the muttered sympathies, which I sensed rather than heard, or heard at third-hand: “Poor Alan Tealing. Desperately sad. Quite obsessed, poor chap. There’s a word for it, isn’t there?” And yes it was obsessive, I was obsessive, but for a reason and the reason was that something was badly wrong and this needed to be said and I needed to say it and me saying it and me asking more questions and me not being satisfied with the answers had an effect and a purpose. Yes, that way round: an effect and a purpose. It was what I was for. With Emily and Alice gone, this was my purpose, to keep the Case alive, to look for answers, to seek the truth.
There was one weekend when I’d been working on the Case all Saturday, had fallen asleep at the table then crawled into bed, woken again early on the Sunday and got up, pulled on a jumper and jeans and got back into it. Piles of paper everywhere, periodic cups of coffee, a bowl of cereal munched in front of the computer halfway through the morning—it would have seemed like a kind of madness if you’d been looking in from the outside, but I wasn’t, I was inside it and it was inside me. This was when I was becoming an expert on timers. I’d done my research, read the manufacturers’ manuals, plodded through long and complex papers by experts in the field, then read up on those experts, who they were, what else they knew about, what reasons they might have for saying this thing or that thing. Then I had to go back to the transcripts of the trial, picking over the evidence of the police and the forensics people. I took their sentences apart, their hesitations and supposed certainties, their inability to explain certain procedural lapses, their incompetence if it was incompetence, their defensiveness if it was that, their prickliness under oath. I made notes, remade them, revised and revised as if I were going to sit an exam. I could have sat an exam. This was what I was engaged in over that weekend.
At some point the doorbell rang. I was going to ignore it but I’d forgotten what day it was, thought it was still Saturday morning and that it might be the postman with something too big for the letter box, and I went to the door and opened it to bright sunshine, and Carol standing in front of me. She had a cycling helmet in one hand. Beyond her, leaning against the gatepost, was a bicycle.
Since that night when we’d gone to hers, a little stone-built cottage that had once housed a weaver’s extended family, she’d never been back to mine. This was better, easier, for both of us. When we were together, we were together in her cottage. She had moved there after her divorce. Whatever its overcrowded history, it contained no ghosts for either of us.
But now she was on my doorstep.
“I hadn’t heard from you,” she said. “I thought I’d check if you were all right.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
She looked me up and down. “Sure?”
“Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?”
She stood there with her neat brown bobbed hair that she had begun to dye—to keep the grey at bay, she said, as if she were in a TV ad, or she might have been quoting from a TV ad—and I waited for her to say something else, to explain why she was there. She said, “You were going to call me.”
“I was?”
“Yes, that’s what we arranged on Friday. Lunchtime, don’t you remember?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, what exactly did we arrange?”
“We were going to meet last night, or you were going to come over for dinner. We hadn’t decided. It depended how you were feeling. How we were both feeling.”
There was no point disputing that this was what had been agreed. Clearly I had let her down.
“And I know sometimes you get wrapped up in stuff,” she said, “and I didn’t want to interrupt, I didn’t want to nag, so I left it last night, but then when you didn’t phone today either …”
“Why didn’t you phone me?”
“It’s a lovely day. I got the bike out. I wanted to see you, Alan.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It went completely out of my head.”
“Can I come in? You look like you’re on guard duty.”
I stepped back and in she came. I was conscious of not having washed, of my sweaty, musty clothes. I felt suddenly ancient, shambling, an old man not long out of my bed or not long for this world, one or the other. “Do you want something?” I said. “Tea or coffee? I’m sorry, the place is a mess.”
Carol was ahead of me. She stopped and turned. “Alan, do you know who I am? This is me, the woman you share a bed with from time to time. You’re making me feel like you’ve let me in to sell you raffle tickets or something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for the third time.
“Where do you want me to go?” she said.
“First right,” I said, on an impulse. “That’s where I’ve been all weekend.”
So this was Carol’s first time in that room, her first view of the Case. It was in full flow, spilling off the table and pooling on chairs and other low surfaces, forming slow, fat stalagmites on the floor. She put her hand to her mouth, as if to hush a cry. She said, “No wonder you didn’t call.”
I picked up a couple of mugs and a bowl. “I’ll put the kettle on,” I said. “Coffee?”
“Wait,” she said.
I put the things down again. “What?”
“I’ve disturbed you, but since I have don’t let’s leave this. I’m here now. Tell me about it.”
“What? This? You know what this is.”
“The coffee can wait,” she said. “Talk me through this.”
I suppose that was what I wanted to do, or I would never have directed her into the room. But where do you start? I couldn’t tell her everything—I couldn’t have talked anyone through all of it—but I told her a lot. I told her why I thought Khalil Khazar was innocent. I discoursed on the principles of justice and the admissibility of certain kinds of evidence, then I presented the case for and the case against and then I demolished the case for, which had been presented as the truth and was not the truth but the opposite. I remembered, as I always did, the jaundiced views of George Braithwaite, I gave due weight and consideration to them, yet I did not abandon my belief in truth and justice. It was a great performance, like one of my best lectures in front of a hundred undergraduates. Carol sat on a dining chair with a batch of papers on her knees and though she said nothing I could see she was enthralled. At the end I stood before her and gave a little bow and we both laughed.
“This is you, isn’t it?” she said. “This is what you do, what you really do. The rest of us go to work and we’re Chaucerians or Romanticists or Modernists or whatever. We have our specialities. We’re doctors of this or professors of that or readers in something else. You come home and go to work on this. It’s your area o
f expertise.”
“Not by choice,” I said.
“That’s why you’re an expert,” she said. “Because you had no choice. You have to get to the truth. That’s what you are: you’re a professor of truth.”
I liked that. In my head I capitalised it: Professor of Truth. Aloud I made a joke of it, stroked an imaginary long beard, said in a quavery voice, “Of course, my dear, there are not many still working in the field. Few think it has any great value nowadays.”
“Professor Alan Tealing, of the Department of Truth,” Carol said.
We went through to the kitchen and I made coffee. Carol asked me subtle, intelligent questions, most but not all of which I was able to answer. She was alert and engaged in a way I had not expected, and I managed to relax a little—was even quite pleased—about having let her into this domain, this secret, overgrown garden of mine. Yet simultaneously I resented her being there, because someone else was also there—Emily, my ghost wife, of whom no material trace remained. I felt her presence, saw her moving among the foliage. I was grateful that Carol had taken the trouble to come round, to make sure I was okay, but—if only she had not come, if only she would go away, I could get back to the Case, be uninterrupted for what was left of the day.
It was not to be. I owed Carol more than ejection. After the coffee I left her downstairs while I had a shower and put on some clean clothes. Perhaps she returned to the dining room and riffled through the Case like a spy or a psychologist, I don’t know, but when I came down she was in the living room, leafing through a book she had picked off a shelf there. I saved and switched everything down, set the alarm and locked the door.
The Professor of Truth Page 12