The Professor of Truth Read online

  ALSO BY JAMES ROBERTSON

  NOVELS

  The Fanatic

  Joseph Knight

  The Testament of Gideon Mack

  And the Land Lay Still

  SHORT STORIES

  Republics of the Mind: New and Selected Short Stories

  Copyright © James Robertson, 2013

  First published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books in 2013.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text Designer: Chris Welch

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Robertson, James, 1958-

  The professor of truth / by James Robertson.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-633-1 1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. International relations

  and terrorism—Fiction. 3. Aircraft accidents—Fiction. 4. Grief—

  Fiction. 5. College teachers—Fiction. 6. Conspiracy theories—Fiction.

  7. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6068.O183P76 2013

  823’.914—dc23

  2013004166

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For Marianne, again, with love

  The distance that the dead have gone

  Does not at first appear;

  Their coming back seems possible

  For many an ardent year.

  And then, that we have followed them

  We more than half suspect,

  So intimate have we become

  With their dear retrospect.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Ice

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two: Fire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  HEN I THINK OF NILSEN NOW, HOW HE CAME AND VANISHED again in the one day, I don’t feel any warmer towards him in the remembering than I did when he was here. I don’t even feel grateful for what he gave me, because he and his kind kept it from me for so long. But I do think of the difficult journey he made, and why he made it. What set him off, he told me, was seeing me being interviewed on television, after Khalil Khazar’s death. He said he’d watched the interview over and over. He’d wanted to feel what I felt. But you cannot feel what another person feels. You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try. This I know.

  When Khalil Khazar died, the news went round the world in minutes—in text messages, in emails, through social networks, on radio and television, via websites and by telephone. I got the call at home from Patrick Bridger, a BBC journalist I knew and trusted. We’d talked, a week or so before the end, about what we would do and where we would film, knowing that it could not be long. “Alan, I’m on my way with a cameraman and a soundman,” Patrick said. “We’ll pick you up and head straight to the location.” I didn’t take any more calls. I was giving Patrick an exclusive. It was a way of controlling things.

  While I waited for their car I thought about how the news would be received in different parts of the globe. There would be tears, I knew, but also there would be laughter. There would be grief and jubilation, clasped hands and clenched fists, loud dismay and quiet satisfaction. There would be one family mourning, other families celebrating. Some people would feel a sense of resolution, of justice having been done. Others would feel, as I did, a sense of things unresolved, of justice having not been done. A guilty man or an innocent man had gone to his grave: it depended on your perspective. Soon enough, politicians would be making statements; mere citizens such as myself would be making statements. Others, politicians and mere citizens alike, would be keeping their mouths closed. There would be headlines in the papers, archive footage on the news channels. Opinions would be voiced, opinions withheld. And through all the noise and all the silence, one thing and one thing only would be certain: Khalil Khazar was dead.

  I knew what I was going to say in front of the camera. I had a good idea of the kind of questions Patrick would be asking. What happens next? With Khazar’s passing, will new information come to light? Do you think there is any previously unseen evidence that might prove his innocence? Or do we already know everything there is to be known about these events? Would his guilt still stand, in other words, and was there nothing more to do but watch as more hatred was heaped on his departed soul?

  Last night I replayed the clip of that interview and tried to see it from Nilsen’s point of view. I found myself wondering about his life—where he had come from to reach me. I had no knowledge of him except what I’d gathered from those few hours we spent together. I watched myself speaking against a backdrop of old grey stone and grass so green with life it must have hurt him to look at it. The camera pulled back to reveal the castle, panned to show the town spreading down the hill, the farmland and hills in the distance. It looked like a good old country, Nilsen had told me, and it did. Scotland, at the end of a Scottish summer. I looked tired, he’d also said, and he was right about that too.

  “I do not believe his death changes anything,” I said to the camera. “I do not believe anything will happen as a result. I am sorry that he is dead, because he was a human being, like me. He had nothing to do with the bombing. He has died because of his illness, but still suffering a terrible injury, an injury that our justice system inflicted on him. I wish I could say that his death makes things different, or better, or that it closes a chapter, but none of that is true. Everything is still as it was, and we are no closer to finding out the truth about who really killed all those people twenty-one years ago, who killed my wife and daughter. There is nothing to celebrate today. I am sorry that Khalil Khazar is dead.”

  Then Patrick asked his questions, and I answered them. While the clip was still playing, my phone rang. I paused the film and picked up the phone on the third ring. It was Carol.

  “How are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “And you?”

  “Fine. I’ve just finished writing that paper on Muriel Stuart.”

  “Well done. Can I read it?”

  “I was hoping you would.
How have you got on today?”

  “Not too badly,” I said. “A bit of writing, a bit of thinking. I’ll tell you when you come over.”

  “Is that all right? If I come?”

  “Yes. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge.”

  “I’ll be with you soon, then.”

  “Good. Remember to bring your paper.”

  She hung up, and I went back to my face, freeze-framed on the screen, older-looking than its years. I searched for my father in that face, but I did not see him. It was more like seeing a stranger, some grey visitant from the future peering in through a window. But it was myself, looking out from the past. I closed the thing down.

  I thought of Nilsen deciding to make the journey, and me at the other end of it. He came with a purpose because, he’d said, it turned out that I was right in that interview. Khalil Khazar had died, and the world had waited—or it had not—for something to happen, and nothing had. One death—three hundred deaths—did not stop the world from turning.

  Many things, of course, had happened. A tornado had left a trail of destruction. A civil war had raged. A famine had grown. A government had fallen. A sportsman had failed a drugs test. A film star had been exposed in some scandal. Weeks had become a month, two, three months. Snow had fallen. But Khalil Khazar had not spoken from the far side of his death.

  So Nilsen decided to come and find me, and to make something happen before he ran out of time. He came because he could. He had knowledge, and it was in his power to give it to me.

  1

  NEEDED A BREAK. I HAD BEEN WORKING FOR HOURS—or so I could just about persuade myself, since I’d been sitting at the computer all morning. Through the window I could see the sky still heavy with cloud, but the snow had stopped falling for the time being. I felt half-asleep: some fresh air might not be a bad thing.

  I put on a jacket, gloves and thick socks. I was just lacing up my boots when the telephone rang. It was set to ring eight times before the answer-machine kicked in. I reached it on the fourth ring. I said, simply, “Hello?” because I had learned that it was sometimes better to retain the option of not being myself, and a male voice said, “Dr Tealing?” “Who is this?” I asked, and the line went dead. I dialled 1471 and the familiar automated, polite, female voice intoned, A caller who withheld their number rang, today, at 1227 hours. Thank you for calling. Please hang up.

  It was not so unusual. I didn’t think much about it. I finished tying my boots, went outside, fetched the snow shovel from the garden shed, and started to dig a path from there to the back door of the house.

  There had been quite a fall, three or four inches. Each shovelful lengthened the path I was making by less than a foot. The snow was dense and weighty. After a few minutes, despite the cold, I was sweating. Muscles in my back and shoulders began to protest, but I liked the feel of the effort. I worked like a machine, with regular, repetitive movements, and with the mindlessness of a machine. This, too, I liked. When I reached the back door I paused, stretched, then bent to the task again, this time going round the house to the street.

  It is an ordinary suburban street, one of a number of drives, crescents and avenues that form a little residential district where once was rough pasture. The houses, most of them built in the 1960s, are modest in size and of no great character. When new, they were doubtless called contemporary. Now, surrounded by mature trees and hedges and having borne the effects of half a century of Scottish weather, they are all a little tired and dated. Some are doing better than others. Mine has not had the care and attention it might have received from someone else, or from myself in different circumstances.

  I was—I am—a lecturer in English Literature. The University where I work is an institution of no great age located in a part of Scotland that positively groans under the accumulation of history. I am fifty-five as I write this, not much older than the University, yet I too feel the burden of past events upon me.

  I am the PhD kind of doctor. Some of my colleagues are disdainful of other academics who do not have these letters after their names. I, obviously, do not attract such disdain. Instead I receive sympathy, or a kind of hushed reverence which has nothing to do with the power of my intellect and which I do not find flattering. There are occasions when I would much prefer their disdain. I am, after all, like most of them, only a lecturer. But I am special, because unlike any of them I lost my wife and daughter when the aeroplane in which they were travelling was blown out of the sky by a bomb.

  I never wanted to be special, not for this or any other reason. Nevertheless, I am.

  I could once have been a professor—the Professor—of English Literature. Important people in the University invited me to apply for the then vacant Chair, and I was advised that it was as good as mine if I wanted it. Yes, I could have been a real professor, and who knows, somewhere in a storeroom there might even be a real chair, commissioned in the 1960s. That was eighteen years ago, when the code of governance concerning appointments was less rigorous, and to be told such a thing, and told it not all that discreetly, was not uncommon. Perhaps the people who suggested it (the Principal of the University and the Dean of Faculty) thought that being a professor would take my mind off the bombing, which had happened three years earlier. Perhaps it was a suggestion born, at least partially, of kindness: they felt it would be good for me as well as for the University. And perhaps it would have been, but nobody can now say, because I declined the invitation and did not apply.

  I am a professor, but only an imagined one. No one knows this but myself and my colleague Dr Carol Pritchley. It is our secret—our secret joke really. It is what this is all about and why I am writing it down.

  I have plenty of space in this house that was built, and bought, for a family to live in. I have two rooms for work, and two computers. One room—the study—is for university work. It was where I had been that morning. The other—the old dining room—is where my special work goes on. The Case, I call it. The two rooms and what they contain are as separate and different as day from night.

  It was late January. The days were short, meagre of light. A sense of confinement had pressed on me all winter. I’d seen no one for weeks, not even Carol. She was not just my colleague but also my friend. My occasional sexual partner, to be specific. Our relationship was an on-off one, and it was off at that time. We’d had a couple of ill-tempered days together at New Year, nothing serious, just enough irritation to make it seem like a good idea to give each other some space, and this was my space, closed-in and solitary. The snow added to the oppressiveness, yet there was also comfort in the way it deadened everything. To be half-asleep, or feel only half-alive, is sometimes a relief.

  Carol and I would meet soon, say little, possibly nothing, about our fractious New Year, and resume our relations. That was how we conducted ourselves. It seemed to suit both of us pretty well, although a greater degree of emotional commitment might have suited Carol better. But, to be frank, the way we were was about as much as I could cope with.

  When the new path was complete I fetched the grey bin from beside the shed and wheeled it out to the pavement. There was a grey bin for general rubbish and a green bin for compostable matter, and they were emptied on alternate Fridays. That week it was the turn of the grey bin. But maybe the bin men wouldn’t come. In a country of unpredictable winters you never know whether snow will bring everything to a standstill or people will soldier on stoically, even when it is futile to do so. So it was from force of habit rather than in faith that I brought the grey bin to the kerbside, ready for emptying in the morning. Others, I noticed, had done the same.

  Actually I didn’t give a damn about grey bins and green bins, not when I thought about it. That was the point: not to think about it. Just to do things, to get through the waking hours and the hours that were supposed to be for sleep, was all, at that juncture of my life, that concerned me.

  That “juncture” of my life had been going on for twenty-one years.

  There hadn’t
been a snowplough along the street all day. Presumably the priority was to clear the main roads. The street was churned and criss-crossed by tyre marks where some residents had managed to get their cars out. The parked cars were covered in smooth, thick, white mattresses.

  My driveway was empty. No car had sat in it for twenty years, except when my parents came to stay, which had not happened in a long while and was unlikely to happen again. (I don’t drive, never have.) If anyone had been going to attempt a journey that day it would have been Emily, but she wouldn’t have wanted to drive anywhere. She’d have gone sledging with Alice.

  For a moment they flashed before me, Emily and Alice, packed together on a sledge, whooping with delight, rushing down a white slope in bobble hats and with stripy scarves flying. They were the ages they always were. Then they were gone.

  I gave Emily’s car to my sister, or she took it away, I don’t remember which. I just wanted it out of my sight. And indeed my sister obliged and I never saw it again.

  I was alone in the street. I pulled back a glove to look at my watch: one o’clock. It occurred to me that the schools might have closed because of the weather. I had no memory of having heard children passing the house earlier. But if there was no school, why weren’t there children outside now, building snowmen, throwing snowballs, taking sledges to the park? Didn’t children enjoy snow anymore? Did they spend all their free time in their bedrooms, insulated from the real world, watching TV or playing computer games? All of them?

  I thought these thoughts, then chided myself for having them. It served no purpose to resent children for being what and who they were, for not being Alice. But again, that was the point: there was no purpose to my resentment. It was simply there.

  My neighbour Brian Hewat had not only put out his grey bin and made a path to his front door, but had also cleared the snow from the stretch of pavement in front of his house. Seeing this, I felt an obligation to do the same, and set to work again. The red plastic shovel scraped less easily and more raucously over the surface of the pavement than it had over the smooth stone slabs around the house. I was slightly ashamed of the noise. It was as if I were boasting about my sense of civic responsibility, even if only to the deserted, smothered street.