The Professor of Truth (12 page)

Emily’s parents, Alfred and Rachel, were both academics. Alfred was an economist and Rachel a sociologist. They were steady, competent, conservative people who worked in different parts of the vast further education network of the state of Pennsylvania. It seemed that they spent far more time on administration than they did teaching. If their jobs excited them intellectually, they never revealed it to me. They were learned but not imaginative. Maybe this was why their daughter wasn’t interested in research or teaching herself. Alfred and Rachel had provided a safe, conventional upbringing for Emily and her two older brothers, and by the time she was in her twenties she had had enough of it.

Then why, I sometimes asked myself, did she choose to be with me? However much her love had changed me, made me bolder, warmer, wittier, I was still the same polite English boy underneath. The question—and the further question it provoked—disturbed me deeply, and disturbs me still now, long after she is gone. Was I—am I?—merely Alfred in disguise?

OU SAY HIS NAME WITH SOMETHING LIKE DISGUST,”
Nilsen said. “And yet all Parroulet did was identify the suspect.”

“Wrongly identify him,” I said.

“He was asked questions by the police and he gave answers. That’s what he did. It was a year after the bombing, the rethink had happened, the island was now the likely point of ingestion, so the police investigation went there. Khazar had stayed in the Central Hotel the night before the bombing and he’d gone to the airport that morning, so what do the police do? They speak to taxi drivers. Are they going to
not
speak to taxi drivers? So they speak to Parroulet, and he remembers the passenger he drove to the airport that day. It’s how investigations happen, Dr Tealing.”

“He was wrong,” I said.

“He picked out Khazar’s face from a bunch of photographs, and later he picked him out in person in an identity parade. The prosecution had a case against Khazar and Parroulet made it better. That’s all he did. He didn’t find Khazar guilty. He didn’t send him to prison. But the main thing he didn’t do, he didn’t put a bomb on an airplane and blow it out of the sky. He didn’t kill anybody.”

“No, he just delivered his lines,” I said. “First the police coached him, then your people. Or maybe your people first. That’s what you said, isn’t it? ‘The order isn’t fixed.’ Maybe it was you who coached him. Is that where you fit in all this?”

Nilsen shook his head. I didn’t read it as a denial, and pushed again.

“At what point did he know that there was money on the table?” I was playing the game now, just as Nilsen had said I would. “That if he said what you wanted him to say, in court, he’d never have to work again? New life, new identity, because of something that happened thousands of miles away and had nothing to do with him. When did that piece of providential bounty become clear to him? He was never going to get it in writing. Not like your car mechanic, your Ali. You couldn’t put Ali in the witness box because there was a paper trail of payments there and the defence lawyers would destroy him as a witness. So how did Parroulet know he was going to be thanked? Was it like this, now—all nods and silent signals? Was it?”

Nilsen said nothing, did nothing.

“You got what you needed from him anyway,” I said.

“He gave evidence that the court decided was credible. Sometimes, the way you’ve attacked his testimony, you and others, sometimes it’s like you thought he was the terrorist, he was the one who should be rotting in jail.”

“I just wanted the truth,” I said. “He didn’t give me it. None of you did.”

“I’m saying a little perspective is required. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I went to that trial thinking that Khalil Khazar was the murderer of my family. I went there to hear the evidence that would convict him. I went to get justice. And what I got was Parroulet and a whole new barrow-load of injustice. How much perspective would you like me to have?”

“Parroulet said what he said in court. It was thirteen years after the event. Nobody can remember everything clearly after all that time. But he’d given statements to the police before that, he’d picked Khazar out before that, and when he was asked if he’d changed his mind on anything he said no. And the court decided that what he remembered was good enough. You can’t blame Parroulet for what the court decided.”

“He was supposed to tell the truth. He didn’t. And incidentally, I remember plenty with absolute clarity. There are some things you don’t forget. They’re etched into your mind.”

“Some things,” Nilsen said. “You’re very sure of yourself. But have you never been mistaken? Never smudged the edges of a fact? Never been economical with the truth? You said you spent seven or eight days down at the crash site. So was it seven or eight? And what happened on day seven, if it was day seven? You saw stuff, things happened, but on which day? Day three? Day five? And what did you really see? Is what you remember what you saw? How accurate does a memory need to be before it’s deemed to be genuine?”

“That is different,” I said, “and you know it.”

“I don’t know as much as I used to,” Nilsen said.

•  •  •

Perspective. Evidence. Testimony. I had heard these words, and others like them, so often that they had become almost meaningless. The game of words—of building, destroying and reconstructing scenarios—that I played inside the snowstorm with Nilsen was a version of the game that had been played all down the years from the moment of the bomb’s explosion: by the police and the intelligence services of several countries, by scientists, security experts, explosives experts, terrorism experts, Middle East experts—experts in everything, some of whom had been summoned eight years before to appear in court as expert witnesses; and by the massed ranks of politicians, lawyers, journalists and judges. You could have filled a sports stadium with the players of the game.

There had been key moments: when, for example, the police liaison people told relatives on both sides of the Atlantic that they had identified the type of timer and who had supplied it and to whom; when the indictments against Khalil Khazar and Waleed Mahmed were issued; when, after years of stand-off followed by years of negotiation, the regime agreed to let them stand trial, and they agreed to go; when, at last, thirteen years after the event, the trial began (a special trial in a special court convened in a foreign city, a neutral place, a court without a jury but with international observers and officials to monitor the process and judge the judges); when Mahmed was acquitted for lack of evidence, but Khazar pronounced guilty; when Khazar’s appeal failed; when he began his life sentence in jail; when he was pronounced to be dying of cancer; when he was pronounced
dead. Key moments, yet none of them, the last least of all, really was a key, not the one that I had for so long hoped to find.

This is what we were told had happened. This is the story, or the bones of the story, that the court heard and that the judges apparently believed. There was more, of course, much more. Weeks and weeks of evidence, some of which looked firm and some of which looked unstable. But what it came down to, when you boiled and scraped all that mass of written and verbal fat away, what it came down to was what Martin Parroulet said he had seen.

Parroulet was, to look at, a man of no great distinction. Of average height and build, a little plump, he had a slumped, round-shouldered carriage that spoke of far too many days behind the wheel of a car. He was balding but he tried to disguise it (ineffectually, of course) with a comb-over. His teeth were yellow from smoking, and his eyes narrow, suggesting shortsightedness although I never saw him wear glasses other than sunglasses. He looked like a man who had always been middle-aged. It was hard to imagine him as a boy, although his lower lip sometimes protruded, especially when he was being closely questioned, as if it might not take too much to make him cry.

At eight o’clock on the morning in question—the morning of the day of the bomb—Parroulet was, as usual, waiting at the taxi rank on the street opposite the Central Hotel. His car was at the head of the rank. There were five or six taxis behind his, and he and the other drivers were standing on the pavement, smoking and talking, as was their
custom. The doorman from the hotel whistled, again as was usual practice, and signalled that a taxi was required. Parroulet drove to the end of the street, U-turned and arrived at the hotel entrance. The guest was already on the pavement. “Going to the airport,” the doorman told Parroulet, who, having first released the lid of the boot, got out to open the door for his passenger and help with his luggage. This, according to Parroulet, consisted of a medium-sized hard grey suitcase and a small black attaché case. The passenger resisted Parroulet’s attempts to load both items into the boot of the car. He insisted on putting the suitcase in himself, laying it flat in the otherwise empty boot, and kept the attaché case with him when he got into the back of the car.

Parroulet was shown a suitcase, previously identified to the court as being of the same make and model as the primary suitcase, the one that had contained the bomb. He was asked if he recognised it. Yes, he did. Had he ever seen a similar suitcase? Yes, he had. Where had he seen it? In the boot of his car. It had been placed there by the passenger he took to the airport that morning. And it was similar to the one now presented to the court? It was identical. Was he absolutely positive about that? He was.

The drive to the airport took twenty-five minutes. In that time Parroulet tried to engage his passenger in conversation. He asked him when his flight was, and was told that they had plenty of time, two hours or so. He asked where he was flying to, and was told, “I am going home.” Parroulet asked where home was but received no answer. The man in the back seat opened his attaché case and appeared
to busy himself with papers inside it, although Parroulet could not see what these were. It appeared to Parroulet that his passenger did not wish to engage in conversation. In the rear-view mirror he had a reasonably clear sight of the man. He described him as dark-complexioned, Arabic-looking, of average weight, a little under six feet tall, with thick black hair. It was a sunny morning and he was wearing sunglasses, which he pushed up on to his forehead when reading the papers, but lowered again when he stopped. He spoke in French, which Parroulet spoke, but said so little that Parroulet was unable to identify which country he might be from.

The prosecution asked Parroulet if he had ever been asked by the police investigating the bombing to identify the man he had driven to the airport that morning. Yes, he had. When was this? About a year later. About a year after the bombing? Yes. The police had visited him on several occasions and shown him photographs of various men, and asked him if any of them looked like his passenger. And had any of them? Yes. On the first police visit, he had thought that two or three of the photographs looked a little bit like the man, but he could not be positive. The police had returned two days later with more photographs. How many? Eight or ten. And had he thought any of these looked like the man? Yes, this time he’d thought that one of them was probably a picture of him, although it wasn’t a very clear image. And did he now see, in the courtroom, anyone resembling the man from that picture? Yes, he did. Would he point to that person? Parroulet pointed at Khalil Khazar. Did the
police show him more photographs after that? Yes. And did he positively identify his passenger from any of these? Yes, several times. And did he see that man in the courtroom? Yes (pointing at Khalil Khazar again). More recently, did the police arrange an identity parade to see if he could pick out the man whom he had driven to the airport that day? Yes, they did. When was that? Last year. And did he pick anybody from that parade? Yes, the same man. Could he point him out? Parroulet pointed at Khalil Khazar. “That is the man.”

At the airport Parroulet had pulled into the drop-off lane and stopped. The passenger had got out of the car immediately and was waiting, with his attaché case, beside the boot by the time Parroulet had released the catch and got there himself. The passenger retrieved the suitcase himself. He had money ready for the fare, and did not wait for any change. Parroulet was surprised because he had not appeared very friendly and yet left quite a substantial tip. Parroulet said goodbye and the man muttered a reply, then turned and walked through the doors into the departures hall. It was about 8:30 a.m.

Parroulet drove away from the drop-off lane, intending to return to the taxi rank opposite the Central Hotel. However, as he sat waiting for traffic lights to change at the airport exit he glanced behind him and saw a silver pen lying on the back seat. He leaned back and retrieved it. It looked expensive to him. He was sure that it had not been there at the start of the day, and as he had only had the one fare he assumed that the pen must belong to the man he had just dropped off. As the lights changed to green, he was able to
turn left and rejoin the road back to the terminal building. He said that if the lights had not changed at that moment, and if he had not been thinking of the large tip left by his passenger, he might not have taken that decision.