“I’ll walk with you to the front door,” she said. “If you’d like, I’ve time to let you have a look at Professor Artimore. We’ll be passing near his cell on our way out. You remember I mentioned him — the most notorious by far of those criminal academics? People have actually offered to pay just to see him in the flesh. His research caused an uproar when it became public at the trial. He’s one of the strangest types we’ve ever had to deal with at Eildon House.”
Of course I was happy to go with her.
SHE TOOK ME ALONG a side corridor that led to a room with a door that differed from any of the other doors we’d passed. It was reinforced with metal struts and had a small, barred rectangle for viewing the occupant.
Sarah Mackay glanced through it then waved me over. “Take a look,” she said.
I peered into a small, sparsely furnished room with a caged bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Under it an elderly man sat strapped by the arms and legs to an upright wooden chair bolted to the floor. His grey hair was straggly and long. His face was grey, too, except for some angular bluish marks right in the middle of his forehead — they looked like letters of the alphabet, but from where I stood I couldn’t quite make them out. His cheeks were lined with anxiety or pain. His eyes were half closed with a faraway expression, as if concentrating on some problem.
After I’d had a good look, Sarah and I continued on our way. She was obviously keen on hearing my impression.
“Well?” she said. “He looks relatively ordinary, don’t you think?”
I actually thought he seemed more than a little stressed.
She smiled at that.
“You’re quite right, of course,” she said. “And he certainly has good reason to be. Let me tell you about his case.
“Artimore was a renowned professor of linguistics at Edinburgh University. His main interest was in finding out how language first began to develop amongst human beings. I’m told that’s still one of the great mysteries for scholars.
“In the course of his historical research, the professor came across a rather sadistic, unethical linguistic experiment that had been tried without success as far back as the Egyptian pharaohs. Indeed, over the centuries it had been repeated over and over again — there was even a Scottish connection: in the late fifteenth century, King James IV of Scotland, who fancied himself quite a student of linguistics, had tried the same experiment, in vain.
“Linguistic scholars, including Artimore himself, had always denounced the entire effort as barbaric. But at the back of his mind, he believed his colleagues would feel quite differently if the experiment were to lead to a breakthrough in linguistic studies. So he made up his mind to try it.”
I’d no idea yet what exactly this Professor Artimore had done, but his rationale did sound similar to Dupont’s — that the end will justify the means. I readied myself to be appalled.
“The professor got in touch with some kind of underground market in human flesh,” said Sarah Mackay. “Through it, he acquired two newborn infant girls.”
I didn’t really need to hear any more than that. But human curiosity, like a dog’s nose, can’t control itself. I waited for more.
“He was a bachelor and lived alone in a Georgian villa in the New Town, one of the most exclusive parts of Edinburgh,” said Sarah. “He’d already had a room specially prepared in the basement, so he put the two infants down there with a serving girl to look after all their needs. The serving girl was a deafmute — that was vital for the experiment. She would be the only human being the children came into contact with, so they’d never hear language being used.
“From the day of their arrival in his house, and for the next five years, Artimore spent hours each day behind a one-way glass, observing the infants develop. Every grunt or gesture or attempt to communicate with either the maid, or with each other, he made meticulous notes on.
“But disaster struck.
“One afternoon, he had to attend the university for a meeting.
During his absence from home, a massive thunderstorm engulfed Edinburgh. A bolt of lightning struck his villa and set it aflame. Because of fallen trees and flooding all over the city, it took the fire brigade a long time to arrive. They managed to pull the deafmute servant out of the basement alive. They understood enough from her frantic noises and pointing to hack their way down again into the basement. There they found both children already dead from smoke inhalation. The rest of the house was in ruins and the professor’s study and all his notebooks were incinerated.”
PROFESSOR ARTIMORE, Sarah told me, had subsequently been charged with numerous crimes, including human trafficking, kidnapping, unlawful confinement, and manslaughter. The deafmute girl testified against him by sign language and in writing.
The professor would say nothing, but through his counsel, pleaded guilty to all charges.
At the sentencing, this same counsel argued, in mitigation of his client, that his was by no means the first attempt at such an experiment. He cited the well-known historical precedents— even that king of Scotland. He also maintained that similar experiments were still being conducted by a variety of linguists in less enlightened parts of the world, where the concept of human rights for children wasn’t taken seriously.
He went further. Even in our own hemisphere today, members of various professions were permitted to subject children daily to horrific behaviour-modifying procedures. These were often druginduced and unproven, yet the practitioners garnered not the slightest disapproval from the authorities. His client, Professor Artimore, may have been misguided, but he was essentially a humane man. He’d taken every measure to ensure the children were well treated — aside from confining them in a basement and depriving them of language. In reality, it was a violent act of nature that killed them, not the professor’s research.
The judge wasn’t impressed. Artimore was sentenced to life in a maximum security prison. He was later transferred to Eildon House as a more suitable place of correction for a scholarcriminal to serve out his time.
At first, several of his former colleagues used to visit him. Before the fire, he’d apparently hinted to them that he’d made the most astonishing, groundbreaking observations on the origins of language. These colleagues now told him he still had a scholar’s obligation to publish his research and make his discoveries known for the benefit of linguistic science. Yes, his behaviour had been atrocious in the eyes of humanity, but what was done was done— publishing his findings would be a clear way to make amends.
The professor maintained his silence in the presence of these former colleagues, and soon all visits ceased.
“He’s been here now for ten years,” said Sarah Mackay. “He hasn’t said a word to anyone since he arrived.”
I’d been curious all along about those marks that looked like letters of the alphabet on the professor’s forehead. It was as though someone had rubber-stamped them there.
“You’re almost right,” she said. “When he was in the penitentiary they caught him in the middle of the night carving them into his forehead with a piece of broken glass. They’re the capital letters THGIR. It’s been speculated that he’d been trying to write ‘THE GIRLS’—you know, as in an inscription on a gravestone. But he didn’t have a mirror, so it could have been ‘RIGHT.’ Anyway, whatever it was he didn’t get it finished.”
Hearing about Artimore’s research had recalled Dupont’s work and his attempt to give an ethical justification for what outsiders might consider his criminal behaviour. That in turn reminded me of Sarah’s comment that my own line of work would have disappointed Miriam, in view of the “idealistic streak” she’d seen in me. So I smiled and tried to make some facetious remark on the irony of “right” the wrong way round.