The Professor of Truth

by James Robertson

  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?

  15

  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.”

  I just managed to stop myself asking what the victim had been wearing, what he looked like. It was perfectly possible that Brian had extracted this information from the police, but I wanted to keep my distance.

  “I expect they’ll track him down. Dental records or something. Or someone will report a missing person.”

  “You’re probably right,” Brian said. “But that’s assuming he’s local. Poor beggar. Must have just got caught out.”

  I changed the subject. “I should get my shovel and give you a hand,” I said. “All that work we put in yesterday was a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it?”

  “We weren’t to know that,” Brian said. “Appreciate your effort, by the way.” He pointed at my grey bin, which had a perfect cube of snow on its lid. “Don’t think we’ll be seeing those idlers today. Don’t you bother yourself. I’ll clear your bit of pavement too. I’m enjoying the exercise.” He made a little show of expanding his chest. “Good for the heart. Isn’t that your phone?”

  I excused myself and went back in. I made it on the seventh ring.

  It was Carol. We hadn’t spoken for weeks, but she didn’t mess about with preliminaries. She wanted to know if I was all right.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I just heard a report on the local radio. It said they found a body in the snow over your way.”

  “So I gather,” I said.

  “They said a middle-aged man. I thought I’d check it wasn’t you.”

  “Why would it be me?”

  “I don’t know, Alan, but it might have been.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.”

  “I was worried, that’s all.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me, Carol.”

  “Well, I do. I’d like to see you. Can I come over?”

  “Not going to work?”

  “Campus is closed,” she said. “But the roads aren’t too bad around here, so I can get the car out. What are they like with you?”

  I was about to put her off, but changed my mind. I needed to tell someone I trusted about Nilsen. I trusted Carol.

  “Driveable, according to Brian next door,” I said. “But don’t try coming into the street or you might not get back out.”

  “I’ll be over in a while,” she said. “Do you want me to pick anything up for you?”

  “No, thanks. It’ll be nice to see you.”

  While I waited for her I wondered what I should do. Should I contact the police, go to the hospital, identify Nilsen’s body? (Of course, it might not be his, but I had little doubt that it was.) But how could I identify him? All I had was a name, which was probably not his real name, and a nationality based on his accent. And how would I even begin to explain our relationship? I could see myself being dragged into a long and tedious process, in which I would have to divulge information I had no wish to divulge to anybody, least of all to the police. Nothing was to be gained from it.

  There was an odd irony about the situation. I had never been able to identify Emily and Alice because nothing of them was left to be identified. Nilsen had left his physical shell, but I—the last person, presumably, to see him alive—could not and would not identify him. I wondered if he’d meant to die in the snow, if it was by accident or by choice that he’d been overwhelmed. He came, he delivered what he had to deliver, he left, he died anonymously. Perhaps it was all part of his journey plan.

  I chided myself. A man is dead. Where is your sense of humanity, whoever he was and whatever he did?

  But I did not feel very charitable towards Ted Nilsen.

  Sooner or later, they would discover who he was. And once they had, they would inform the American Consulate in Edinburgh, and wheels would start to turn. They would know or work out who Nilsen really was, and then they would know or work out why he had been where he was and that he must have been on his way to or from me, the troublesome Dr Tealing. Why would he have wanted to see me? Might he have given me sensitive information such as the whereabouts of a protected witness? Whoever had given Nilsen Parroulet’s address would realise that he might have passed it on. They would try to stop me reaching Parroulet, or warn him or the Australian authorities that I was on my way. At this moment, though—if I could believe Nilsen—nobody knew that I had the address. Nobody would know so long as the body remained unidentified. I had this window, perhaps several days, perhaps even a week or two. If I was going to go I had to go now.

  By the time Carol arrived I had made up my mind. I told her everything. I told her about Nilsen and what he had given me and what I intended to do. I thought she would try to dissuade me, tell me I was embarking on yet another voyage to disappointment. But she didn’t. “You have to go,” she said. “He’s handed you this thing, whatever it is, and you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s like he’s pointed at a stone and told you to lift it. Of course you must lift it.”

  “Even if there’s nothing underneath?”

  “Even if. You can afford to go, can’t you?”

  I think if I had said no she woul
d have offered to help. “I can’t afford not to,” I said.

  We switched on the computer. Finding and booking a flight took twenty minutes. Applying for an electronic visa took another twenty. There was some disruption at the Scottish airports because of the weather but delays were expected to be only temporary. London was clear. Carol said she would drive me to Edinburgh. I could be in Australia in two days’ time.

  “I’ll keep an eye on the house while you’re away,” Carol said.

  I had visions of men turning up to look for me, getting into the house, finding Carol here alone. “No, stay away. And let’s go back to yours tonight.”

  I packed the small pilot’s case I used for short trips. I didn’t take much in the way of clothes. What I didn’t have I could buy when I arrived.

  I closed down the computer, took a last look round the Case. “There’s stuff here I might need,” I said.

  “You don’t need any of it,” Carol replied. “All you need is to find him.”

  I picked up the external hard drive, asked if she would keep it for me. “Of course.” I locked the house, set the alarm. We set off for her car, parked on a road that had been cleared, a few hundred yards away. As we trudged I thanked her. I said thank you to her so many times in the course of the next few hours that she told me to stop. I said she might be questioned by the police, by the Americans. They would want to know where I had gone. “I won’t tell them anything,” she said. “It might hold things up for a day or two. What are they going to do, torture me?”

  “I don’t think it will come to that,” I said.

  In the end, it wasn’t about chance. It wasn’t even about choice. I went because if I didn’t … But I had no idea what would or wouldn’t happen if I didn’t. The same fear or hope that drove me always to pick up the phone when I was at home would make me get on the plane to Australia. I knew it would. Nilsen knew it would. That was why he had come to me.

  As the years after the bombing had passed without a trial, and then after the trial more years had passed without Khalil Khazar’s conviction being overturned, I had begun to think the unthinkable: that I might die before the truth was known about who had killed Emily and Alice. I hadn’t ever doubted that the truth would come out eventually, but if it came out when I was dead what use would it be to me? Or if it came out long after all of us—all the fathers and mothers and sisters and lovers of the dead—were gone? By then, it wouldn’t really be the truth at all. It would be information, of historical interest only, provided to people untouched by the event. It would be like news of some atrocity in a foreign, distant land, unreal and therefore, in a way, untrue. They would want to feel it, those people, but they wouldn’t be able to, or the feeling would not be sustainable. Human sympathy can only travel so far.

  Powerful forces—of governments and other organisations and some individuals—were ranged against the truth being revealed. They would not want the accepted narrative found to be in tatters. This much I did know. But it might still be possible to prove that Khazar had not planted the bomb. And if that could be proved—only if that could be proved—then Nilsen’s precious narrative would be destroyed and they would have to build another to put in its place. Would that be the true narrative? I could not know, but it could not be more unacceptable to me than the present one.

  But Nilsen had said it was good enough, believable enough, for others. It satisfied, insofar as anything could, their need to believe. If I destroyed the present narrative, what would that do to those people? My mother’s words came back to me: “You’ve become selfish.” Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Karen was right: I thought too much. Perhaps I had made more of it than I should have. Perhaps none of it mattered. I was certain—as certain as I could be—that there was no God. Perhaps George Braithwaite was right and there was also no unblemished truth, no untainted justice. And if these things did not exist, pure and whole, then neither could there be an end to my search for them. And if there could be no end, then let there be an end to it. Let me live the rest of my life without this ceaseless search for something unattainable. Let me not waste what was left to me.

  That was what my mother, my sister, Emily’s parents, argued. Yet it could not be done. I could not do it. I had to go looking for Martin Parroulet. It was beyond who I was not to do this. Nilsen had given me a key and I had to see if there was a lock it would turn.

  At the airport check-in desk, after Carol and I had embraced and said our goodbyes, a woman in a blue uniform took my passport and scanned it, took the ticket printout and tapped the details into her computer. She said, “Is it just hand luggage?” “Yes,” I said, and she remarked that I was travelling light for such a long journey. “Yes,” I said again. “Did you pack the bag yourself?” she asked. “Yes.” “Could anyone have interfered with it at any time?” “No.” “Does it contain any sharp objects, any liquids? You won’t be able to take them through security.” “Yes, I know. Nothing like that.” On the wall behind her was a poster displaying representations of guns, knives, gas canisters and other dangerous objects. I said, “Does anyone ever admit to having any of that stuff in their luggage?” The woman swivelled in her chair, swivelled back, looked at me more intently, as if suspicious of the purpose of my question. “You’d be surprised,” she said. She handed me my boarding pass. “Have a nice trip.” I thanked her and made my way to the barrier where it said PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, and joined the queue of people waiting to take off their coats, empty their pockets of coins and keys, remove their belts and subject themselves to the inspection of men and women who were trained to believe that everyone was a possible terrorist, and that none of us was safe.

  1

  HE HOTEL ROOM WOULD HAVE BEEN UNBEARABLE without air conditioning. It was small and comfortless, the en-suite shower needed to be ripped out and replaced, the tiles were cracked and the paintwork scuffed. The air-conditioning unit rattled and roared but the cool air it pumped round the room was merciful. I lay in the centre of the double bed in my underwear, head propped on two inadequate foam pillows, and flicked through the TV channels. I had the volume up loud to contend with the air conditioning and with the bass notes of some live band playing a street or two away. It was ten in the evening. Any minute I expected someone to bang on the door and complain, but no one did. I was on the far side of the world, my body was jumping with exhaustion, but I hoped that if I could force myself to stay awake just a little longer I might sleep right through till morning, oblivious to all noise.

  The journey had passed without incident. The flight from London to Singapore and on to Sydney had been tedious but uneventful, and no difficulties had arisen at immigration or passport control—which meant, I presumed, either that Nilsen’s body hadn’t yet been identified or that it wasn’t Nilsen’s or that Parroulet wasn’t here or that nobody cared that I had touched down. Once or twice I’d looked over my shoulder. I had not seen anyone remotely suspicious, but that of course meant nothing.

  I’d spent a night in Sydney and the next day had boarded a coach south out of the city, through mile after mile of suburbs, past shopping malls, technology parks, fast-food restaurants and, occasionally, surprisingly old-looking industrial buildings. I’d always thought of Australia as being a new, clean country, not one with a past of factories, grime and toil. White beaches and blue sea appeared for a few minutes on my left, then the highway turned inland again, and a haze of green hills rose beyond the houses on my right. The coach was only half-full. No one was sitting next to me. What were another four hours of travel, of staring, thinking, stretching my cramped muscles, on top of two days I’d already spent travelling? In the last hour or so the settlements became smaller, the stretches of farmland or scrub between them greater. I had a sense, simultaneously, of arrival and anti-climax. I could hardly persuade myself that Parroulet would be at the end of the journey. And yet I had to believe that he was, or what was my purpose in making it?

  At last the coach pulled in to Turner’s Strand. I had rea
ched, perhaps, the punchline of Nilsen’s final earthly joke. Had he sent me on the longest, most pointless excursion of all, to an unremarkable little town in search of a man who wasn’t there? Well, I was there. I would see it through—I heard Nilsen’s voice, saw his doglike smile again—to the end.

  I’d not reckoned on the numbers of holidaymakers in the town. When I stepped off the bus it was late afternoon and there was a throng of people in shorts and swimwear on the main shopping street that led to the seafront. The schools were still on holiday, of course. There were families and young couples, bronzed gods and goddesses and leathery old turtles all apparently in their natural habitat. In my long trousers, shirt and jacket, I was not dressed for these crowds, nor for the heat.

  I sought out the town’s tourist information office and inquired about accommodation. The assistant said it would be difficult to find me a single room, especially as I didn’t know exactly how long I’d be staying. She suggested I go for a coffee or a drink for half an hour while she phoned around. “Come back before six, though,” she warned. “That’s when we close.” All I wanted was to go to sleep, but I did as I was told, bought a coffee and a slice of cake in a cheerful little diner and wondered if an Australian Mrs Hastie might turn up out of nowhere and take me home. But no Mrs Hastie was forthcoming.

  Somebody had left a copy of the local paper at my table. The front-page story was about the prolonged spell of dry weather—two months without rain—and the perilous condition of the bush. Fires were breaking out inland, and a few remote properties had had to be evacuated. The coastal zone was unaffected so far, but the authorities were asking all communities and individual citizens to exercise due vigilance. So far, the story concluded, it seemed that all the fires had started naturally, but human carelessness could not be ruled out and nor could the possibility of arson.