Free The Professor of Truth by James Robertson Page A

conspiracy …”
    “I’ve never used that word,” I said. “I’ve always been careful to avoid it.”
    “Nevertheless …” Nilsen answered, baring his teeth in the unlovely smile. He was echoing me from some distance back in the conversation, and we both caught the echo but only he smiled. “That’s what your theory of events amounts to, a conspiracy. In the absence of proof, that is.”
    “The absence of proof isn’t my responsibility,” I said.
    “Well, let’s not go there. Let’s, as you requested, get to the point. You think a whole lot of things happened. I’ll tell you what
I
think. Let me go through it, and you listen. You don’t have to agree with me. Just listen till I’m done.”
    “If you imagine I’m going to sit here nodding like a poodle—” I began, but Nilsen stopped me with a completely different word and a different tone.
    “Please,” he said. And then again, more quietly, “Please.”
    I’m not sure I knew how I’d been going to finish my sentence, but I didn’t finish it.
    “I’m going to level with you,” Nilsen said. “That’s why I’m here, to take a load off of my conscience. I told you outside, you can help me and I can help you. So please, listen to what I have to say.”
    “What is it I’m about to hear?” I said. “What you
think
happened, or what you
know
happened, or what happened? Because I really don’t need any more theories.”
    “Just listen,” he said.
    I thought of the work I’d been doing before I went out to clear snow, the work I should be doing now, the pointless, impractical work on David Dibald that was the reason for my being on sabbatical and that I wasn’t really getting done and that was of no importance. Literature makes nothing happen, I thought. Auden said that, or something very like it. In my other life, when Emily was with me, I would have contested it. She certainly would have. She’d crushed that niggling insecurity in the old, young Alan Tealing so that I’d hardly felt it, and then she had died and it had come back, stronger than ever. So now there wasn’t anything I would rather be occupied with than listening to Nilsen. I didn’t doubt that I would have heard before whatever he had to say, but what was to be lost by hearing it again? There wasn’t anyone in my life as it was that I’d rather have seen sitting where Nilsen was. Not Carol, not Jim Collins, nobody. So I emptied the last of the coffeefrom the cafetière into our cups, and put the kettle on to make more, and I let him talk.
    “In the days immediately after the event,” Nilsen said, “various claims of responsibility were made, some of them plausible, some not. Within a week we knew for sure what we’d believed from the start, that it was a bomb. The wreckage confirmed it. Very soon we had some pretty strong theories as to who had done it. British intelligence were thinking along the same lines. The police were doing their thing too, progressing the investigation.” He weighted that last phrase with something that might have been contempt. “We were all sharing information, and we were coming to the same conclusions. After about three months we knew a lot, and after six we knew so much you could say we were certain. One theory was so far in front of all the others it stopped being a theory. It became what we knew.
    “The police had identified the suitcase that contained the device. We knew where it had been located in the aircraft hold. We had fragments of clothing, recovered at the crash site, which had been in that suitcase. The clothing had most likely been packed round the bomb. We knew the item the bomb had been loaded into, a radio cassette player, we knew the make and model. We knew that the bomb had detonated thirty-eight minutes after take-off and that pointed to a particular type of timer, and when we put that together with the cassette player we got scared because werecognised the combination. There was a Palestinian group based in