JFM secretary's report on Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

[What follows is the report by Justice for Megrahi’s secretary, Robert Forrester, on the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee’s consideration of JFM’s petition on 4 June:]

Most of you will already be aware of Tuesday's result, however, for those who do not, I enclose here various links to the event to put you in the picture. In brief, again, the Justice Committee is to be thanked for maintaining the status of our petition, PE 1370, as open. Moreover, they are also to be thanked for agreeing to write to both the Justice Directorate and the Crown Office on our behalf in order to establish a variety of factual information relating to the allegations we have lodged with Police Scotland. I will not go into the details of this here since it is all contained in our submissions to the Justice Committee and is self evident in the Committee's official report.

Clearly this is a positive result, however, and if not too late, the JFM Committee would like to enquire of the Justice Committee whether or not the letter to the Justice Directorate could be made a little more specific. Our feeling is that the form of the question is somewhat open in that it does not specify the laws that we have quoted as being the ones which provide the government with the power to farm out our allegations to an independent investigator: this being of particular relevance here where Mr MacAskill has, by offering us no alternative but to lodge our allegations with Police Scotland, created extraordinary and highly dubious circumstances in which the Crown Office and Police Scotland have become investigator, judge, jury and accused all rolled into one. Whilst there is a directness and simplicity to the from of words chosen by the Justice Committee in the letter, Mr MacAskill has a record of saying 'I 'beg to differ with JFM' in the interpretation of law. This occurred when we gave evidence on the Punishment and Review Act (shortly before the publication of the Statement of Reasons for Mr Megrahi's second appeal in The Herald). The fact is that his interpretation of the law was wrong then because the Scotland Act superseded the Data Protection Act, and Westminster had not seen fit to include the Data Protection Act in the Scotland Act as a reserved issue, therefore, the issue of its being raised at all with Westminster was indeed a red herring, as we said at the time. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that The Herald's actions rendered the whole business redundant, he got away with it on the day. We will be writing to the Justice Committee to see if it is possible to modify this current letter to the Justice Directorate, and I will inform you of the result as soon as I know it.

In the meantime, see here below the relevant links covering the Justice Committee's consideration of PE 1370. I have also included a link to an interview given by James Robertson immediately after the hearing. James's most recent novel, The Professor of Truth was launched in Edinburgh on Thursday to a packed house, and has been receiving enthusiastic and very well-deserved reviews. James has been extremely courageous with this work: a book which, whilst it stands firmly on its own two feet without the references to actual events, quite obviously poses a significant challenge for the author simply because it does have these associations. I strongly recommend it to you all.

The committee wishes to thank both Tessa Ransford and James for joining us at the hearing on Tuesday, and to all of you for your constant support. 

Parliament PE 1370 general references page:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/44107.aspx

Parliament TV broadcast of 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/newsandmediacentre/41408.aspx

JC official report:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28862.aspx?r=8193

Letter from JC to JD:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Cab_sec.pdf

Letter from JC to COPFS

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Crown_Agent.pdf

James Robertson BBC interview immediately subsequent to 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0210pmg/The_Culture_Studio_with_Janice_Forsyth_04_06_2013/

New Dumfries police chief talks about her Lockerbie experience

[What follows is an excerpt from an article published today in the Scottish edition of The Sun:]

One of Scotland’s top cops told last night how she plunged into despair as she struggled to cope with the horror of the Lockerbie bombing.

Chief Superintendent Kate Thomson had just finished her FIRST shift as a rookie when Pan Am flight 103 smashed into the town.

The officer, then aged 21, was one of the first emergency workers to witness the hellish scene of devastation on December 21, 1988.

She was quickly tasked with converting the town hall into a makeshift mortuary — and identifying all 270 victims of the outrage.

It was a living nightmare that would take its toll years later as the traumatised young PC was engulfed by grief.

And, in a remarkably candid new interview, Ch Supt Thomson revealed: “I found it hard to get my head around how someone could do something like that.

“As soon as we arrived at Lockerbie we could see the flames.

“I had never experienced anything like that grief, that horror.”

In 1991, the nightmare finally caught up with her and she realised she needed counselling.

Ch Supt Thomson, now the area’s Divisional Commander for the new Police Scotland, said: “I struggled. I cried buckets. It was so heartbreaking to think of the loss of human life.

“But I was professional in seeking help. You are not a machine — you are a human being.

“I went for six counselling sessions and it helped. You have to hear yourself saying there was nothing you could have done.”

The young PC Thomson completed her first day on the beat at Dumfriesshire’s nearby Langholm police station just hours before the terror attack.

She was at home when two ashen-faced colleagues hammered on her door.

They raced to a car where the voice of a senior officer crackled over the radio.

She recalled: “He told us, ‘We have found the cockpit and it says Pan Am Maid of the Seas’.

“We knew then that it was a passenger flight and there would be fatalities on a large scale.”

As emergency crews descended on Lockerbie, she was handed the heartbreaking job of identifying the victims.

Many were American — with shocked relatives thousands of miles away across the Atlantic.

She said: “We were just running backwards and forwards getting information so we could let families know we had their loved ones. They had to know we were looking after them.”

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi — the only person convicted over the bombing — was freed in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died at home in Libya last May, aged 60.

Ch Supt Thomson said: “I have my own personal view of the people who did this dreadful thing.

“But, for me, it was the loss of life that was so hard to get my head around.”

After confronting her own pain, she rose through the ranks at Dumfries and Galloway Police.

[It might have been worth mentioning that allegations of criminal misconduct in the course of the Lockerbie investigation have been made by Justice for Megrahi and are currently under investigation by the former Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway Police, Pat Shearer.]

Minutes and Official Report of Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

The minutes of the meeting of the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee held on 4 June contain the following (agenda item 5):  

“The Committee considered (...) current petitions and agreed in relation to Petition PE 1370 by Justice for Megrahi calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, to keep the petition open and to write to the Scottish Government and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service seeking further information on issues raised by the petition”. 

The Official Report (Hansard) of the committee’s discussion of the petition can be read here (columns 2961 to 2964).  I would wish to draw particular attention to the contributions of John Finnie MSP.

Lockerbie is an existential nightmare

[My attention has just been drawn to a review by Mike Wade in The Times (behind the paywall) of James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth.  It reads in part:]

On December 21, 1988, a bomb aboard a flight from London to New York exploded 31,000ft above southern Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, and when the wreckage of Pan Am 103 hit the ground, 11 others perished in the village of Lockerbie. More died that evening than in any other terrorist attack in Britain.

For the bereaved, a long, dark journey had begun. They had to wait years for the lineaments of an inquiry to take shape and for suspects to be identified. When, in 2000, two Libyans came to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, one walked free. The other, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was identified by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

With al-Megrahi’s conviction, many of the bereaved found closure. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora had been killed, did not. Already well known as a spokesman for the relatives of the dead, he believed the convicted man had been framed, and embarked on a mission to exonerate him, and reveal, he hoped, the truth behind Flora’s murder. This much is fact, but in James Robertson’s latest fiction,The Professor of Truth, only some of the details and none of the names are precise. Lockerbie is never identified. Megrahi is renamed Khalil Khazar; Gauci becomes Martin Parroulet, a taxi driver; and Swire, a Worcestershire GP, is transformed into Alan Tealing, the academic referred to in the title of the book.

In his disclaimer, Robertson insists that these characters are “products of the imagination”, though of course Swire would be most unlikely to sue even if they weren’t. The novel sets out to undermine the verdict of the real trial and is profoundly humane in its examination of Tealing’s remorseless obsession with “the case”. By the end, it is pity we feel for him, not admiration.

Robertson is a great storyteller. His earlier works won comparisons with Walter Scott and James Hogg; And The Land Lay Still, a sprawling Scottish nationalist epic, paradoxically evoked the work of J B Priestley. This time around there are shades of Graham Greene in the eerie sense of menace that surrounds his central character. It is a tense and gripping read.

Set in the present, the narrative takes place over little more than a week. It opens in winter, when, out of nowhere, Nilsen, a CIA agent, appears at Tealing’s home. The American is terminally ill, but before he dies he hopes to provide a piece of information to help the Englishman find peace. Tealing at first resents his visitor, but when circumstances force him to act on this new lead, he sets off in pursuit of Parroulet, the crucial witness.

Tealing’s back story is revealed in contemplation and reminiscence. He recalls the week spent around the village in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, imagining the fate of his wife and daughter, plummeting through the night. “They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.”

When at last he manages to break a police cordon around the disaster area, he rescues a plastic peg from the heather, the kind of rotating clip that secures a passenger’s table. It stays on his desk at home for the rest of his life, a memento of his family’s last moments.

These details are beautifully imagined. Others are all too real: Parroulet’s inconsistent evidence, the pressure brought to bear on him by the police and, finally, the reward he takes for helping to jail a terrorist, are all traced from Gauci’s life. In the real world of the bombing, it was confirmed in 2007 that a reward of $2 million (£1.3 million) had been promised to the shopkeeper for his testimony at Camp Zeist. The revelation was one of the six grounds cited by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for granting al-Megrahi leave to appeal.

The case was never heard. Within a year the Libyan had cancer diagnosed. His lawyers claim that he agreed to drop his appeal in return for his release on compassionate grounds; he later died in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Gauci, like Parroulet in the novel, has gone to ground with his money, in Australia. Swire maintains a website, www.lockerbietruth.com, to keep the case in the public eye.

Robertson’s fiction shows that, in fact, Lockerbie is an existential nightmare for the people it left behind. The horror is summed up by the cynical CIA agent, who has the measure of Tealing’s restless 25-year quest, asking: “Were you even alive before the bomb went off?”

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson; Hamish Hamilton, 257pp, £16.99; e-book £10.

Dissatisfaction and disquiet

[The Waterstones Scottish book of the month is James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth. Here is what he writes about the novel on the Waterstones website:]

After my last novel, And the Land Lay Still – which fills nearly 700 pages, has a huge cast of characters and covers 60 years of social and political change – I was keen to write something more concise and closely focused. At the same time, I had become increasingly interested in, and disturbed by, the story of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie 25 years ago this year, and its long and complicated aftermath. Gradually I came to realise that these two strands of thinking were not in competition but were drawing together. The Professor of Truth is the outcome of that process.

Like many other people, I can remember exactly what I was doing on the evening of 21st December 1988 as news of that terrible event broke. I was working as a bookseller in what was, at the time, the only Edinburgh branch of Waterstones, on George Street. The shop was crowded with customers buying Christmas presents. A colleague who mistakenly thought I was from the Lockerbie area phoned in to tell me there’d been a plane crash there. When I got home later, that was the only story on the news. The scale of the devastation, the fact that it had happened in Scotland, and the announcement a few days later that it had been caused not by bad weather or mechanical failure but by a bomb, made a deep and lasting impression.

The ramifications of the Lockerbie bombing have spread far beyond Scotland, of course. There has been much dissatisfaction and disquiet over the conduct of the investigation into the bombing, the process and outcome of the trial of the two men accused of carrying it out, the conviction of one of those men, and his subsequent release from prison, on compassionate grounds, eight years later. A year ago that man, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, died of cancer even as his country Libya was emerging from a bloody revolution. Yet despite his death and the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, blamed by the USA and UK for the bombing, serious questions about Lockerbie persist, and the affair continues to cast a long shadow over the Scottish justice system.

Julian Barnes has said that fiction is “telling the truth by telling lies”. One of the functions of a novel is to explore what it is to be human, and to do this more subtly than is possible through, for example, the hard facts or loaded opinions of journalism. I could have attempted a work of non-fiction about Lockerbie, but there is no shortage of such material on the subject, both in print and on-line. What I wanted to do instead was move away from the real event, and imagine the emotional and philosophical journey that might be taken by a man after losing his loved ones in a similar set of circumstances. In the novel, that journey also becomes a physical one: Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, receives a visit from an American former intelligence officer, and this prompts him to travel from snowbound Scotland to Australia, in one last attempt to unravel the truth about who killed his wife and daughter.

So The Professor of Truth is a novel which grew out of, rather than is about, the Lockerbie affair. I hope it is read, and is readable, as a novel, but if it can also help to expose some of the still hidden aspects of the real events that inspired it, that in my view would be no bad thing.

James Robertson, for Waterstones.com/blog

The Professor of Truth, by James Robertson, is available at your local Waterstones bookshop (http://bit.ly/Yu5LpV) or online at Waterstones.com (http://bit.ly/15x6PuV)

Scottish Parliament Justice Committee keeps Megrahi petition open

[On my return to Edinburgh after a forty-five hour journey from a snowy Roggeveld, the only report that I can find on yesterday’s consideration by the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee of Justice for Megrahi’s petition (PE 1370) is the following item in today’s edition of The Herald:]

Holyrood’s Justice Committee has asked ministers to report back on their powers to appoint an independent investigator to look into the Megrahi conviction for the Lockerbie bombing.

The move, which stops short of the full demand for a public inquiry sought in a petition by the Justice for Megrahi campaign, keeps the issue going.

The committee also asked what resources were being committed to investigating the allegations of the Justice for Megrahi Campaign, whether there was a full on-going investigation and whether the Crown Office had actually instructed the police to carry out inquiries.

Each of these demands were seen as a way of keeping the pressure up for the issue to be investigated. 

[Among the supporters of Justice for Megrahi who attended the Justice Committee meeting was James Robertson.  Immediately thereafter he rushed across the road to the BBC Radio Scotland studios where he was interviewed for about twenty minutes on Janice Forsyth’s The Culture Studio.  This can be heard here (starting at about 28 minutes in).]

James Robertson and Jim Swire interviewed

[The following is adapted from an item on the Lockerbie Truth website:]

During the 2013 Hay Festival, Philippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London,

Philippe Sands

 

James Robertson

interviewed Jim Swire and James Robertson at an event to mark the launch of James Robertson's new novel The Professor of Truth.

Jim Swire explains and recounts his twenty five year search for the truth about who brutally murdered his daughter Flora, its effects upon him and on his family.

In a detailed and hard-hitting presentation he challenges the Scottish and Westminster authorities to re-examine their position on a matter of historic 

international significance.

A podcast of the interview can be heard here.

Truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope

[What follows is a review by Hannah McGill of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth in yesterday’s edition of Scotland on Sunday:]

Should novelists and other makers of fictions be discouraged from drawing their inspiration from life? Some argue that novels and films drawn from real events muddy the ­factual waters, pollute collective memory with inaccuracies or even just display poor taste.

Clearly, to bar the practice would be impossible: most writers are drawing from something real most of the time, whether they’re up front about it or not. But objections can be more vociferous when the aspect of real life chosen is a controversial one. Say, one of the biggest crimes the UK has ever seen. Or one of the most significant miscarriages of justice.

James Robertson’s new novel doesn’t name as its subject the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, or the ensuing legal case against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, but the parallels are not so much clear as glaring. Robertson, indeed, is hardly ducking them: while his publishers are urging comparison with the thrillers of Graham Greene and John le Carré, he’s sharing promotional events with activists for a reopening of the Lockerbie case.

That’s not necessarily a contradiction. On one level, this is a fictional study of how ordinary people cope with embroilment in crimes and cover-ups perpetrated by states; on another, it’s a piece of campaigning literature, intended to publicise the overt problems with a case which the cross-party bulk of the British political establishment would dearly love to see closed for good. These functions aren’t mutually exclusive. But since some potential readers of a new novel by the author of The Testament of Gideon Mack and And the Land Lay Still may be put off by the prospect of being campaigned at, let’s deal with the first one first.

The Professor Of Truth is not a treatise in novel’s clothing, but a novel, and a very good one at that: at once powered by action and mystery, and profoundly invested in the emotional lives of its characters. The titular professor, an English literature academic named Alan Tealing, is a lovingly drawn and wholly believable creation: widely read, but secretly fearful of intellectual adequacy; private, but forced into a public role by the unsought drama of having lost his wife and daughter in the most high-profile manner imaginable. A slightly dull man who has been briefly transformed by his experience of love and fatherhood, Tealing is now an amateur sleuth, preoccupied day and night by “The Case” even two decades after its main event. His project is not just to bypass official obfuscation and find those really responsible for his loss: it is to replace the energy of his marriage, to keep alive a passion for something, to secure for himself a point to it all.

This is all wonderfully and sensitively evoked, as are Tealing’s encounters along the way with truth-seekers, secret-keepers and minor players alike. Robertson offers up some powerful philosophical asides on truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope, and the nature of romantic love; he also shows his mettle as an ­effortless evoker of atmospheres, particularly when Tealing’s quest takes him to Australia, and drunkenness, food poisoning, broiling heat and cultural alienation all mingle potently with his jet lag.

The plot can shift on in a slightly jerky manner, but that’s not too unusual within the political thriller genre, and Robertson’s way with character eases the transitions.

What, then, about the book’s relationship to the Lockerbie disaster itself? Well, it made me want to know more. I would guess that conversations took place between Robertson and his publishers about whether to include any material on the real case; and that the decision not to do so was down to a quite reasonable desire to give Robertson’s work a life as fiction.

However, I’d posit that since the proximity of “The Case” to its real-life counterpart is too extreme to be missed or disregarded – and since the author seems to wish for quite the ­reverse effect – it would have been useful to the reader to have included some information, even if it was just direction to authoritative factual sources.

Such an addition would both service the curiosity inevitably stimulated by Robertson’s ­story, and help to emphasise where his book diverges from the real events, in either their official or unofficial versions. For the record, I read a useful précis by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books (available online) of the issues raised by campaigners against Al-Megrahi’s conviction, and plentiful further information at Dr Jim Swire’s lockerbie­truth.com and Robert Black QC’s lockerbiecase.blogspot.com. (As for a credible defence of the official version – well, good luck sourcing one; many of the bereaved don’t feel that they have yet. This isn’t so much a case of unstable conspiracy theories, as one in which the theories stand strong while the official ­version falls apart if you breathe on it.) 

So should novelists keep their inky hands off real-life tragedies? One answer is that the word “should” has no business intruding on art. Another is that on this evidence, absolutely not: the mingling can produce work that’s both beautiful and important.

The importance of caution in labeling a terrorist attack

[The following is an item published yesterday on the Press Pass section of the NBC News website:]

It was reported this week that President Obama plans to name a new FBI director, former Bush administration official James Comey, who will take over at a busy time for the agency, in the midst of counterterrorism investigations including that of the Boston bombings. In 1989, another new FBI director appeared on Meet the Press to face tough questions about a terror attack. William S Sessions was only about a year into his term as Director of the FBI at the time of the  explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. American and British officials would later conclude that the explosion was caused by a bomb, the deadliest terrorist attack on American civilians until September 11, 2001. But when Sessions appeared on Meet the Press shortly after the attack, on New Year’s Day of 1989, very little was known about the details or motivations behind the Pan Am disaster. Sessions had said during the week before his appearance that it was still unclear whether the attack was the work of a terrorist group or an individual, and the journalists on the Meet the Press panel were intent on finding out new information. But Sessions frustrated their efforts for almost all of his appearance, and refused to label the bombing a terrorist attack. Early on in the interview, NBC News’ John Dancy jokingly exclaimed, “Well, you’re not very helpful this morning!” – to which Sessions replied, “I’m trying to be, but you ask tough questions.” You can watch the full exchange in the video below, including FBI Director Sessions’ discussion of the importance of caution in labeling a terrorist attack.

[It comes as a relief that the tenure of Robert S Mueller III as FBI Director is finally over.]

A big stain on Scottish justice

[The Scotsman today features a long profile by David Robinson of James Robertson on the occasion of the publication of his novel The Professor of Truth.  The following are excerpts:]

James Robertson has a problem. No matter how often he tells people that his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, isn’t a retelling of the Lockerbie disaster, he realises that people won’t believe him.

Look, he’ll point out, the name of the Scottish town where the blown-apart airliner crashed isn’t even mentioned. Nor are the names of any of the most prominent figures in both the atrocity itself and the subsequent trial. The country thought to be responsible for the plot isn’t named: there are no dates, no real names, only the sketchiest bit of geography. So it’s not Lockerbie.

On the other hand, it is about a bereaved man trying to find out who really was responsible for blowing up an airliner above the Scottish Borders a couple of decades ago. And how many other times has that ever happened apart from the tragedy that befell Pan Am Flight 103?

“It’s not a roman à clef,” Robertson insists. “It’s not thinly disguised history. But it is my attempt through fiction to investigate and explore some of the issues that come out of an event like that.”

“Inevitably, people are going to read it as being about Lockerbie. I don’t blame them for that and I don’t expect anything else.” (...)

I meet Robertson in his Edinburgh flat. Beyond the kitchen window, the clouds are grey and heavy, pushing slowly south over Arthur’s Seat. To me, and I suspect to millions of others, the Lockerbie affair was like those heavy clouds: it passed over us in endless headlines and stories while we remained unquestioning below. We read about the plots, the official one and the rival one. We became used to seeing the footage, the wreckage of Pan Am 103 incongruously gouged into a Dumfriesshire hillside. For years and years, the story rumbled on, and those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected felt a fading sadness for those who were. After decades, though, that sadness turned to boredom, that initial newsflash shock to apathy. Weren’t there 15,000 witness statements? Weren’t there experts to sift through them and put the truth together? Couldn’t we trust them, the way we trust meteorologists to tell us in what direction the clouds are going?

What I really wanted to know from Robertson is why his reaction was so different to mine, why he cared so much about the Lockerbie affair. At what moment did he begin to think justice wasn’t being done? What was it that seeded it in his mind as a subject for a novel?

I suspect I half know the answer to the first question. Allan Massie has noted that there is a “sort of Orwellian decency” about Robertson’s writing, and that’s true about the man too. It isn’t just Dr Alan Tealing – his fictional hero in the novel and the man who gives it its title – who is searching for truth and justice. So is Robertson. Because if Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi was innocent, the people who really planted the Lockerbie bomb are still out there.

And if that’s the case, Robertson believes, the Scottish judicial system is seriously flawed. As this newspaper pointed out six months ago, in an article looking ahead to the books that would be published this year, the subject matter of Robertson’s new novel – “the most eagerly anticipated one of the year from a Scottish author” – could hardly be more ambitious or demanding. (...)

Robertson started writing The Professor of Truth in 2011, a year after finishing his novel And the Land Lay Still, a hugely ambitious (and at 688 pages also just huge) portrait of the changes in Scottish life since the Second World War. He had always followed the Lockerbie case and by this time had long doubted the official version of events. “I can’t tell you the precise moment,” he says, “but I remember reading reports of the Camp Zeist trial and thinking there was something not quite right even though I couldn’t pin down what it was”.

He had also started writing a story about someone who had lost family in a Lockerbie-like atrocity. “I wanted to put myself in that person’s shoes and think how it would have affected them – not just the terrible loss of losing your family in such a horrible way, but the fact that the ramifications from that event go on and on for a quarter of a century. I wondered how all of that would affect the individual’s life.”

As this had actually happened to Jim Swire. Did Robertson have him in mind while writing the novel? “I did my best not to. I was actually quite clear in my head that I shouldn’t compromise myself by worrying about that side of things. If I worried about whether anyone was going to be upset, I wouldn’t write the book I wanted to. I showed the book to him after I had finished it as a courtesy because inevitably people were going to make assumptions and draw parallels. His response was very encouraging, which was a great relief.”

Two years ago, Robertson began to realise that his growing belief that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Lockerbie trial and his planned story about someone who had lost loved ones in a similar disaster weren’t separate issues. Instead, he could bring them together in a novel.

Already, he knew the case backwards. He’d trawled everything he could find about the lengthy legal proceedings. “People don’t do that unless they are absolutely obsessed by the case, but I have. I don’t expect other people to get into the case at that level. But a novel is a way in which people can have their interest triggered and maybe even though this is fiction, within it readers might find something that explains why so many people are convinced that there has been a miscarriage of justice.”

At this point, let’s get back to the novel. The main thing to say about The Professor of Truth is that it does indeed do what Robertson intended – to strip away that dismissive, bored “Oh, not bloody Lockerbie again!” reaction by using fiction to tell a similar story. (...)

A disillusioned lawyer counsels Tealing against ever expecting to hear the real truth from a court case. A woman he meets in Australia who has also suffered appalling loss urges Tealing to stoically accept the randomness of fate instead of obsessively searching for the truth.

These are voices you wouldn’t hear were Robertson a lesser novelist, stacking the deck in favour of making a propagandistic point on behalf of a cause he supports. But he doesn’t: he’s too good for that.

He questions everything – even his own craft as a novelist. Sometimes, he admits, he shares the doubts that Tealing, a lecturer in English literature, has about its importance. “Most writers who think about this seriously,” says Robertson, “do wonder whether their craft is superficial. But it’s good to doubt. Doubt is one of the great virtues. That’s what allows progress to happen and societies to be more civilised and settled and open-minded.”

And though he was talking about his craft, he could be talking about the reason he wrote The Professor of Truth too. Because this is a novel written out of doubt about the Scottish justice system. “There seems to me to be a big stain on it because of Lockerbie. If in some small way the publication of this book helps, if it gets sufficient attention, to push the door open a bit so we can get this thing sorted out, that’d be fine.”

• The Professor of Truth by James Robertson is published by Hamish Hamilton, price £16.99. He will be talking about the book at 7pm on Thursday (6 June) at Summerhall, Edinburgh. Tickets £5 from Waterstones, 128 Princes Street Edinburgh.