The Professor of Truth (6 page)

I keep the grey plastic clip on my desk, in a little wooden bowl; the kind of container that one might fill with rubber bands or drawing pins, but nothing else sits in that bowl except the clip. Sometimes days pass without me noticing it, but then I do. A memory occurs, or perhaps there is something on the news, and it is there for me to pick up and hold. To recollect. It never wears out, it never changes. It has a kind of permanently renewable energy. It warms quickly to my touch and that is all it does. I like its banality, its uselessness, the way its utility was removed for ever by the destruction of the aircraft. It became something different then, something useful only to me. This is why it landed at my feet, or rather why I landed beside it. In that moment it became mine, and my only regret about removing it from the scene is that I didn’t find a second one to go with it.

Emily and Alice had been sitting in row 25, from which they could look out over the port wing. The main fuel tank was directly beneath them. It transpired that my imagining of them falling like parachutists without chutes was false. You could not call it wishful thinking—I never, of course, wished it on them—yet there was a kind of angelic possibility in such a descent, some birdlike moment when they,
in my mind’s eye, swooped up and glided away, and did not touch earth. Behind this image, which for a while was often with me, lay a reason: their total disappearance. The reality was that they must have been together in their seats until the main section of the plane crashed into the ground. The fuel went up in a fireball at such a temperature that flesh and bone were instantly incinerated. Identification of most of the people in the central rows of the aircraft was down to tiny surviving scraps. For a few, it proved impossible. No trace of Emily or Alice Tealing was ever found.

Later, much of the clothing contained in their luggage was returned to me, but of them or what they were wearing that night there was nothing. They fell to earth not in two minutes but in barely one, travelling, at the moment of impact, at more than 120 mph. They were almost certainly not conscious. I like to believe this, and also that, conscious or not, they were holding each other. Holding hands, at least. Sometimes, even now, I wake in the night and I am leaning over the backs of their seats, checking that simple act of union like a solicitous steward, and someone else, whom I ignore, is screaming at me to sit back down.

For a while, although it went against all my principles, I liked to think something else: that just as the bomb made a sudden and permanent separation between my own two lives—life before, life after—so had it done for Emily and Alice; that, since they vanished so completely, they had indeed swooped out of this life into another. I knew this to be nonsense, and not even comforting or purposeful nonsense,
as I could not picture any paradise into which they might have flown, where they might still be holding hands and alive. Yet for a while, until I began to question the whole mechanism of the thing that had happened and brought me to my lonely knees, I really wanted to believe it.

HAT WAS YOUR PURPOSE?” I ASKED FOR THE THIRD
time. “What brought so many of you there so quickly? You say you got there on day three but you weren’t the first. Nobody knew for sure it was a bomb at that point. It was what we feared, it was what we
felt
, but nobody knew.”

For a second—no longer or shorter than any other second—Nilsen’s face changed. It happened and was over. I couldn’t even say what the change was, but I saw it, and I realised we had entered a new zone.

“
We
knew,” Nilsen said. “That’s why we came. We knew because of the flight time. Air traffic control lost the signal thirty-eight minutes in. As soon as we had that information we knew, in all probability, it was a bomb.”

He put his hand to his mouth, as if he’d let something slip out by accident. But by now I was pretty sure that nothing he did was by accident. He was signalling to me. Just the two of us in that kitchen in the middle of a snowstorm, and the intelligence part of him still found some things impossible to say out loud.

He said, “What is your view on coincidences, Dr Tealing?”

I said, “I don’t give them much thought.”

“I do. I don’t believe in them, but I think about them a lot. Chance is a big brush. When you get down to fine detail,
it’s too clumsy. In my experience coincidences are ways of avoiding explanations.”

“But you believe in miracles?”

“They’re not down to chance. What I’m saying, thirty-eight minutes was too precise to be a coincidence. It had to be a part of the explanation. We recognised that.”

What this implied was only what I had worked out for myself over the years. Nevertheless, to hear it from this spectral, fading man chilled me despite the heat of the room.

“That’s always been denied,” I said. “You’re telling me the direct opposite of what’s been the official line for years.”

“You asked about purpose,” Nilsen said. “
That
was our purpose. To establish a line. First to ascertain what had happened, then to gather evidence.”

“That way round,” I said.

“There’s an overlap. The order isn’t fixed.”

“You’re admitting this? Now?”

“That is my purpose
here
, Dr Tealing. To set the record straight. With you.”

I had my elbows on the table. I felt very tired suddenly. I leaned my head into my palms, closed my eyes. At last, I thought. Some abusive language rose to my lips but went no further. Insults would neither help me nor hurt Nilsen.

A hundred thousand pinpricks of light were flashing behind my eyelids. I would have preferred it if he had patronised me by calling me Alan. Maybe then I could have shouted at him. I felt repulsed, relieved.
Ted
Nilsen. I wanted him out of the house. I wanted him to say more.

“The irony is,” I heard Nilsen say, “if the flight path had been different—if the plane had headed west a little sooner—we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If it had gone down over the Atlantic.”

“Don’t talk to me about irony,” I said.

“What I’m saying, we wouldn’t have had a trail. But that’s academic. We dealt with what we did have. Complex evidence gathering. The police did pretty well in the circumstances. They combed all that farmland, all those moors and forests, and they got almost everything. Fragments of engine, spoons, razor blades, headphones. It’s astonishing what they got. The sheer impossibility of gathering it all together and rebuilding it. You hear what I’m saying? The
impossibility
. But it was done. It had to be done, so we could work out the narrative. You know what I mean by the narrative?”

I opened my eyes. First irony, now this. “I teach literature,” I said. “I should know.”

He did that concessionary thing again with his hand. He was going to explain anyway.

“The log of the journey. You start an investigation and you’re starting a journey. Sometimes you set off and you draw the map as you go. You’re looking for some end point but you don’t know what or where it is. And other times you do know, and it’s just a question of how you get there. The narrative is how you get to the right destination.”

For twenty-one years only one narrative, and a broken one at that, mattered to me. The fracture occurred when Emily
and Alice were murdered. Everything in my life before that moment stopped, and everything after it began, right then. I too was a victim of their murders. This, of course, is why I have been in regular receipt of the awed sympathy of my colleagues.

I don’t mean to be cynical. But one can absorb only so much.

Nilsen professed faith in an afterlife. I don’t know how that kind of faith works—whether Nilsen had it before and lost it, or picked it up off the street one day, or whether it was always a vague thing inside him that came into focus only when he discovered he was terminally ill—but I have no interest in it. I have an interest in truth—the hoped-for destination at the end of
my
narrative—and truth and faith are related only occasionally, but then merely by chance. Did Nilsen consider himself “born again”? Do I care? No. I do, however, know that such a thing as rebirth can happen—that a man can be transformed, joyfully reconfigured. I know this because it happened to me.

Once, in another life, in another world, a quiet, polite boy was growing up in a quiet, polite street in a small town on the south coast of England. Alan Jonathan Tealing. I was bright, what they call “academically inclined.” At school I excelled at English. I wrote near-perfect essays that greatly satisfied my teachers—partly, I see in retrospect, because my balanced paragraphs, good syntax and well-regulated imagination gave back to them, ripe and unbruised, the fruits of their own fundamentally conventional wisdoms. I could sit exams without fear or panic and I did so, passing
them with ease. There was talk of Oxford or Cambridge but I came from a family uncomfortable with any ambition that might seem immodest, and so the talk came to nothing. Instead, without quite understanding how or why, I found I had applied to, and been accepted to read English Literature at, a young university in an old northern English town sufficiently distant from home to make it seem, when I got on the train, as if I were embarking on a great adventure.

I arrived: the local accents and beers were different, but not much else. I settled in and continued in my unassuming ways, an assiduous taker of notes at lectures, a well-read contributor to tutorials. The university library was a vast brutalist block of six storeys, which I inhabited daily and for a while thought the only necessary place on earth. My tutors, like my schoolteachers, praised my written work. I passed—again without trouble—all my exams. Yet, deep down, I felt fraudulent. This was for two reasons. First, for all that I absorbed the literature I was studying, for all that I could discourse on it with great seriousness, in speech and on paper, I could not clear from my head a small but irreducible conviction that it was
not
necessary, that it was neither important nor useful. Second, I knew I was not as clever as my tutors seemed to think. My mind was not agile and athletic: it merely strolled. It absorbed everything, retained what was needed, could reshape and regurgitate on demand, but where was the spark of original thought, the sharp points to my questions, the precipice of an idea that I might fearfully or excitedly look over before jumping? They were nowhere. “Have you thought of a career in the Foreign
Office?” one lecturer asked. “You’d make a fine diplomat.” She meant it as a compliment but I was dismayed. Diplomacy implied constant compromise: was that what I was best at? I worried that I might saunter through the rest of life and never know what it was to feel anger, or pain, or triumph, or despair, or love.

I went to classical concerts and the film club in winter, and in summer rowed clumsily on the river or took long walks through the soft, buzzing countryside. I had friends—and they had me—just conventionally unconventional enough to perpetuate the belief that our existence might actually be exciting. We smoked some pot. We drank fine ales in old country pubs. Sometimes—we were students, after all, with the obligations of students—we drank too much and behaved badly. I had a girlfriend in first year, but we parted at the end of it; I had another, and we parted at the end of second year. Both times I was sorry but not hurt. After a while I wasn’t even sorry, and neither, I am sure, were they.

I sat my final exams, passed them, and graduated summa cum laude. Ah, now, my lecturers said, spreading their hands, the limitless possibilities! Research, a PhD, an academic career—the path of my future was laid out before me. I could become one of them! They used the word “limitless” without irony. I listened and understood. The ease with which they spoke made me uneasy. Despite my success I still felt, only now not so far below the surface, a fraud. I was twenty-one, but feared I might wake any morning and find myself fifty. This did not stop me applying, successfully, to return in the autumn as a postgraduate. I did wonder if this
was really what I wanted to do with my life, but, unable to think of an alternative, I did not hesitate for long. The man who agreed to be my supervisor made helpful suggestions as to what areas of research I might find interesting. “Don’t narrow your options too soon,” he said. “You can specialise later.” It seems that I have, consciously or not, followed that advice ever since.

I went home for the summer. My parents were proud of my achievements. My sister, Karen, three years younger, had steadily and carelessly underachieved at school, left at sixteen and got a job as a checkout girl in a supermarket. Sometimes I felt I was achieving for two. This did not make me dislike Karen, or even feel superior to her. Despite having only our parents in common, she and I got on pretty well. Neither of us, I think, felt threatened by the other.

Our parents didn’t seem disappointed in Karen: she went out at weekends, she had a boyfriend, she was happy, and they were happy that she was happy. Dad worked in pensions and life assurance; Mum in the county council’s finance department. They left the house together at eight o’clock, she came back at five, and he came back at six. They had been doing this for years. I didn’t know, really, what they did in their jobs. In the evenings and at weekends they cooked, cleaned, gardened, did the shopping, went for walks, read the papers and watched television. Life was one routine task or leisure activity after another. As a family we did our best, in the best tradition of middle-class England, not to upset one another, and for the most part we succeeded.