The Professor of Truth

by James Robertson

  Were these people alive?

  Was I alive?

  Something flickered at the corner of my vision. I raised my sunglasses to see what it was. The glare of the low white wall, of the beach, of the sea, blinded me, and I had to lower the brim of my hat.

  What was I to do? I couldn’t keep returning to Sheildston every day in the vague hope of catching Parroulet at home. That would be ridiculous. But what else? I simply didn’t have a plan.

  And something else: Parroulet would surely have another name here. I couldn’t even ask around to see if anyone knew of him.

  A sudden, fantastical idea came to me, that I would break into the empty house and find some incontrovertible proof of the falseness of Parroulet’s testimony. This really was madness. Perhaps I had a touch of sunstroke.

  The flicker happened again, and this time I saw where it was coming from. Not from a distance, as I’d thought—a surfboard or dinghy in the waves. It was just a few feet away, at the foot of the white wall. A pale, almost translucent gecko, now as motionless as a model of itself.

  What were we doing here? What was I doing here?

  I thought of Nilsen again, disappearing into the snowstorm. Was he really dead? Was he in a mortuary now, in cold storage? Or had he flown back to the USA, to die or to live? How would I be, how would I act, if I had to contend with what Nilsen had said he had? A slow, terminal disease. But in a way that was what I did have.

  Maybe a fast, terminal disease would be better. Maybe anything would be better—a step in front of a bus, a dive off a cliff, a walk in the sea, a walk in the snow. I had thought of these things before. In the depths of my grief I had considered ending it. Something stronger than grief had always prevented the thought from growing into action.

  What did it take, to take your own life? When I’d told George Braithwaite I could never kill another person I’d meant—I believed that I’d meant—that my sense of a shared humanity was too strong to do such a thing, even under the most terrible provocation. But humanity might not be the real reason, and the same might be true of my aversion to suicide. The real reason, in both cases, might be that I was a coward.

  Nilsen, now, was he a coward? He had seemed to face his own death with confidence, but that wasn’t the same thing as bravery. If you were convinced that God would save you, that there was life after death, what need was there to be brave? Was it not braver to knock at a door, not knowing if anyone would answer? Braver to go through the door, fearful of what might or might not be on the other side? For what is it, to face death? What does it mean? Is it a braver thing to do than to face life? Is there even a difference? If you are not afraid, then to be brave is nothing. To be afraid and go forward, to meet life or death shaking but to go anyway, to walk terrified into the snowstorm or the wall of fire, that surely is the mark of bravery. To be a coward and yet still to act, that is the thing.

  I thought of Carol. I had never possessed a mobile phone. This had made some aspects of my research, of my quest, difficult in the past, but still I’d always resisted getting one. I’d always felt a need to be reachable through my landline, but I also wanted sometimes not to be reached. People said it was up to you, you could switch a mobile off anytime, but I knew if I had one I never would. I’d always be waiting for it to ring. So Carol and I had made no arrangements about being in touch. She did not expect to hear from me, I did not expect to call her. And yet suddenly I felt as though I would like to do that.

  But if I did, and anyone else was listening in, they would then know where I was.

  The gecko darted forward suddenly. Stopped. It was flat against the wall, head tilted towards me. It and I exchanged views.

  I thought, what advantage, for all my supposed superiority, do I have over you?

  I thought, either they know already where I am, or they don’t because they don’t care.

  The gecko had five splayed toes on each foot. From head to tail it was no more than three or four inches long. There was something fabulous and beautiful about its prehistoric ugliness.

  It ran again, stopped again.

  Around us both, everybody was laughing, talking. What was that to the gecko but meaningless, irrelevant noise?

  What was relevant to the gecko?

  I reached for my beer. The movement was slight, but it seemed to be enough to trigger the creature—if indeed it had been watching me at all—into making a dash across the floor of the café and down a crevice in one corner.

  I sat back. I was alone again amid the sound and colour of the Strand.

  Tomorrow, early, I would go back to Sheildston.

  4

  STARTED WALKING AT SEVEN AND WAS IN SHEILDSTON by eight. I’d thought of getting a taxi from the middle of town but realised it wouldn’t be necessary. The earlier start made all the difference in terms of the heat. The sky was as cloudless and the atmosphere as dry as ever. But not as still, I noticed. The breeze that was worrying the authorities was on the rise.

  Glen Road didn’t seem to have much in the way of commuter traffic: I counted only three cars going in the other direction. I reached the last house and was pleased not to have encountered the man in the khaki shorts and white socks. I pressed the buzzer, but as before there was no answer. The junk mail had gone from the mailbox. This was a hopeful sign—unless the vigilante, as I now thought of him, had removed it to reduce the impression that the house was unoccupied. But I saw something else. The day before, the leaflets had hung down, obscuring part of the front of the box just below its mouth. There were four letters stencilled on it that I had previously missed.

  P A R R

  Had I been given to whooping, I would have whooped. It was such an obvious, simple reduction, and yet it seemed to prove that Nilsen had told the truth. The fact that nobody appeared to be at home was for a moment unimportant. I felt justified in having made the journey. I pressed the buzzer again, and put my ear to the loudspeaker, but there was no response, not even a crackle to suggest that someone was listening to me listening. Still, elated, I started to walk along the fence. I would go to the road-end, come back, try the buzzer once more, then return to the town and think about what to do next. I had the name Parr to work with. That was something.

  When I reached the turning-area, someone else was already there, a woman. She was standing at the entrance to the bush path, looking westward. I did not want to alarm her, so deliberately scuffed the soles of my new deck shoes on the ground as I approached. She heard me and turned. At the same time a dog emerged from the undergrowth and came towards me, wagging its tail.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good day.” Her skin was so burned and wrinkled she could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty, but I reckoned nearer the latter. She had on a faded pink singlet, baggy multi-coloured shorts and stout walking-shoes, and was leaning on a long staff with a Y-shape at the top, a kind of primitive hayfork. She was solid, with fat upper arms and a large bosom. A bright red plastic band held her grey hair back from her forehead. She looked a mess and as if she were past caring.

  “It’s going to be another hot one,” she said.

  I bent down to greet the dog, a short-coated, black-and-white, medium-sized amalgamation. “Yes it is.”

  “Rufus!” the woman called. “Come here.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, but the dog wasn’t interested in me, and went snuffling round the edge of the open space.

  “I wish it would bloody rain,” the woman said. “Look, there’s a fire over there.”

  She pointed with the prongs of her stick. I walked over to stand beside her. Far away, almost on the horizon, a thin screen of smoke hung in the blue sky.

  “That’s started since yesterday,” she said. “I come twice a day to check. I get on the blower if I see anything, but they usually have it covered already.”

  “It seems a long way off,” I said.

  “It is, but the wind’s picking up. If they don’t put it out, that could be here in a couple of days
, maybe less. You wouldn’t believe how quickly it can move when it gets going. I wish it would bloody rain.”

  “Do you live here, in Sheildston?”

  “Yeah, back up the road.”

  “Near the church?”

  “Yeah, one of the old houses.” She laughed. “The normal-sized ones. We’re not so bad there, there’s clear ground around us, but it’s so dry the whole lot could go up.” She jerked her thumb in the direction of the Parroulet house. “I wouldn’t want that to be mine,” she said.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody’s at home,” I said. “Maybe someone should let the owners know. If there’s a risk, I mean.”

  “Oh, there’s a risk all right. And they are at home, they just keep themselves to themselves. Listen.” Back along the road there was a brief, high-pitched buzzing sound, fading rapidly into the distance. “That’s her off on her scooter.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs Parr.” She saw me start. “You’re too late if you wanted to see her. She’ll have gone to Turner’s Strand.”

  “You mean she’s been there all along?”

  “Hard to tell, isn’t it?” She seemed to enjoy my evident frustration. “Are you on holiday?”

  “Yes, in a way, but—”

  Before I could ask more about Mrs Parr, she went on, “We were talking about fires. We’ve had a few, I can tell you. The worst was long before I was around. About a hundred years ago. I’ve seen the photographs. All of this in front of us, as far as you can see, was completely wiped out, just a black desert, but you wouldn’t know that looking at it now. Blue gums love fire. They grow back very fast. When they built old Sheildston they put a break between the houses and the bush, and when that big fire came through the houses survived, including mine, although it did get a little scorched. You can still see the marks. But then people forget, or they think they know better. They don’t dream it’ll ever happen to them. But it will. All of these new houses went up in the last forty years. The bush practically grows on their doorsteps.”

  The dog came back and sat panting at the woman’s feet.

  “All right, boy,” she said, and thumped the ground with her staff, readying herself to move on but also, it seemed, in no great hurry to do so.

  “You’ve been here a long time?” I asked.

  “A long time,” she said. “Me and my husband came here in the ‘50s. He passed on last year. Raised our kids here, and it was a good place to do that, but it’s changed a lot. All this money changed it. School closed, church closed, nobody speaks to their neighbours. I don’t know who half the people are. Never see them. My son’s in Sydney, my daughter’s in Melbourne. She keeps saying I should move down and be with them, but I don’t want to. I’m not a city-dweller. But Sheildston’s not the same as it was. All right, Rufus,” she said again, as the dog whined with impatience.

  She stood looking out at the bush a few moments longer, then turned to go. I went with her. I sensed that she did not object to my company, and I needed hers. I saw that, strong though her build was, she found walking difficult and would have struggled without the stick.

  “You said Mrs Parr is actually living in this house,” I said, as we walked back along the fence.

  “That’s right.”

  “And then you said something about her going off on a scooter.”

  “Yep.”

  “What about Mr Parr?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you think he’s there too?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve been pressing that buzzer for two days but they don’t answer.”

  “No, they don’t, do they?” she said, laughing. “It was you, was it? Roger Dinning told me there’d been a dodgy customer hanging around. You don’t look like a dodgy customer.”

  “I probably did yesterday. Is he the one with the binoculars?”

  “That’s him. His wife irons him before she lets him out. Don’t worry about Roger, he’s all bark. He picks up groceries for me if he’s down at the Strand. Him and Betty, that’s his wife, are a pain in the butt but they’re the only ones that speak to me. Can’t be too choosy in those circumstances, can you?”

  “So you don’t speak to the Parrs? I once knew Mr Parr, you see, years ago. I had the address from somebody and thought I’d look him up.”

  “I don’t speak to him,” she said. “Nobody does. I would if I ever saw him. A bit of a recluse is Mr Parr. He’s French, or Moroccan or something. I see her sometimes. They’re not short of a dollar. Kim, her name is. Don’t know his—his first name, I mean. Don’t actually think Parr’s his real name either, not that that’s any of my business, but Parr’s an English name. Always makes me think of Catherine Parr, she was Henry VIII’s last wife. Kept her head and outlived him too, the old tyrant. Sorry, shut me up. Can’t stop once I get going.”

  “No, you’re fine,” I said.

  “You sound like you’re English too,” she said.

  “I am.”

  We were almost at the gate.

  “And you’re on holiday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew him from before, did you? You know him better than any of us, then.”

  “It was through business,” I said. “We weren’t friends. But, since I was in the area …”

  I wouldn’t have believed me for a second. Whether she did or not, she nodded.

  “She’s all right, Kim. I don’t see much of her. She’s Malaysian or Thai, I think. A lot younger than him. When they first came and you saw him and then her, well, you thought—or I thought—mail-order bride, you know? Derek, my late husband, he said I shouldn’t judge and he was right but I wasn’t judging, I was just thinking. Anyway, there’s plenty of money, however he got it. What kind of business was he in?”

  I hesitated, but only for a second. “IT. Computers and suchlike.”

  “Well, I guess there is a lot of money in that. Is that what you do too?”

  “No, I’m an academic. He was doing some work for the university where I teach. That’s how we met.”

  “I see.” She sounded doubtful. “Maybe you are a dodgy customer after all. I reckon he must be. It’s like he’s hiding. It’s sad. The house looks sad. What’s the point of being rich if you don’t enjoy it?”

  “Don’t you think he enjoys it?”

  “Well, he never looks happy, on the odd occasions I see him. I wouldn’t enjoy being stuck in there all the time. What’s the point? She has to get out, I reckon. You’d go mad otherwise.”

  “How long have they been here?”

  “Well, you should know. Six, seven years, something like that?”

  “Yes, that would be about right.” Khazar’s failed appeal had been eight years earlier. By that stage whoever authorised the reward payout would be confident that the conviction was going to stick, permanently. I said, “When did you last see him?”

  She shook her head. “You ask a lot of a questions, don’t you? I’ll ask you one. What’s your name?”

  “Alan.”

  She cocked her head but I didn’t give her any more.

  “Well, Alan,” she said, “as to when I last saw him, it was months ago. I’ve hardly seen her lately as a matter of fact. I hear her going past on the scooter. Rufus barks at it. If I see her I give her a wave and she waves back. She’s nice enough. She needs company, though. She must do. That’s why she goes out, I’m sure. That’s why she has her little shop.”

  “Oh, what shop’s that? In Turner’s Strand? I’ve never met her, you see.”

  “Well, it’s more of a workplace than a shop. It’s not open all the time, just when it suits her. She’s a seamstress, a very good one. She does alterations—takes in skirts, lets out trousers, buttons and zips, all that kind of thing. She did a beautiful job on a suit of Derek’s when it got too big for him towards the end. That was the one we buried him in. She’s done a few of my own things in the past. I felt a bit funny, I mean she’s a neighbour, it didn’t feel right somehow, paying h
er to mend my clothes. It was all right with Derek’s suit, though. He looked good in it, even when he was dead. I always went to the shop, never to the house. That’s how she liked it. Me too. Kept it businesslike. Anyway, I’ve not been in for a long time. Can’t be bothered with clothes now. Would you listen to me? I told you, I don’t stop once I start. All right, boy.”

  We had been standing by the Parroulet gates and Rufus was getting impatient again. She made as if to move on, but, whether out of concern or suspicion, it seemed she didn’t want to leave me alone there.

  “What are you going to do? Hang around in the heat again? You’ll be wasting your time.”

  “No,” I said, “I’ll go back into town. Maybe I’ll introduce myself to Mrs Parr, ask if there’s any chance of seeing—of seeing him. Is her shop easy to find? I’m staying at the Pelican.”

  “Oh, the Pelican? She’s just round the corner. One street further back from the shore. That’s the oldest hotel in the Strand, the Pelican. It used to be good. They had dances there every weekend. It’s not like that now, I bet.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not at all like that.”

  “That’s a shame. Derek and me used to go there a lot. Old-time dancing. Do you dance?”

  “No,” I said.

  “A lot of men don’t. Derek did. He was a wonderful dancer. Other women would be dancing with each other but I always danced with Derek. There’s nothing like it, when you’ve got a good dancing partner, nothing like it. I couldn’t dance now, more’s the pity, even if I still had Derek. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Kim’s shop, but it’s not like it’s a secret or anything. Anyway, if you’re going back to the Strand, you can walk me and Rufus home. It’s on your way. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I said.