The Professor of Truth

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

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.

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.