The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

  He tells himself that if he were to stay any longer in this midden of a country there would be only a slow death as he dwindled and withered away, starved of all the things he needs to sustain himself. So there’s a new resolution in his step as he enters the apartment, as always switching on the secondary lighting that softens the sense of emptiness, and invites human voices to speak to him by playing his music. It’s a favourite – Tippett’s ‘Rose Lake’ – and he pours himself a glass of red wine and goes to the seat overlooking the river as the music begins to swell into life. And everything seems better because he knows that there won’t be many more nights spent here and that to gather up his possessions and be ready to leave could be done in less than an hour. He won’t be leaving empty-handed because as well as the handsome salary he’s already accrued he’s gathered enough experience to write his book if he so chooses. And in the ledger’s credit column is also the fact that he’s seen Emma and if he hasn’t absolved himself of her blame for what happened to Martine, he did get to see her and a channel of communication, however fragile and faltering, was established.

  He sits by the window and watches the amber lamps on the other side of the road shed their yellow light on the dullness of the evening. On the edge of Europe, sometimes he thinks this place gets the dregs of light, the left-over luminosity from brighter worlds. Blue skies are what he needs now, some warmth on the skin. He sips the wine and lets the music wash over him so when the phone rings it’s an irritation that he thinks of ignoring but then reluctantly he gets up and answers it, the glass still in his hand. But he doesn’t recognise the voice and then he understands it’s Alan the son-in-law he’s never spoken to who’s talking about Emma and he grips the glass more tightly in the fear that this call is going to spill some terrible news about his daughter. He’s not listening to what he’s about to be told and asking the question, ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine. She’s fine and the baby is fine.’

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘She had it this morning at eleven o’clock. A boy. He came a bit earlier than expected but he’s fine. Everything went well.’

  ‘And how’s Emma?’

  ‘Tired but fine.’

  There’s a pause and they don’t know what to say to each other so he tells the son-in-law he’s never met that it’s great news and he’s delighted and then there’s another awkward silence and to break it he asks what hospital she’s in. He knows now they’re both thinking the same thing so he takes a deep breath and asks.

  ‘I think that would be all right,’ he’s told.

  ‘Thanks,’ and then for the first time he uses his name and says, ‘Alan, I really appreciate that.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  Then the call’s over and he sets the glass of wine down beside the phone and thinks for a moment, trying to work out if the caller was just too embarrassed to say no or if she might really want him there, and he doesn’t know any of the answers but it’s one last risk he’s willing to take. He calls Beckett and apologises profusely for the inconvenience then hears his own voice laden with pride tell him, tell Beckett with whom he’s never had more than a second’s emotional engagement, that he’s just heard his daughter’s had her baby and would there be any chance …? Beckett congratulates him in a typically non-committal way and says he’ll pick him up in twenty minutes. In the background he can hear children’s voices and he apologises again.

  After he puts the phone down and although he knows he can’t be after a single glass of wine, he feels a little giddy as a confusion of thoughts loosens and swirls round his head. He’s a grandfather but he immediately jettisons the word with its connotations of grey-haired, rocking-chair senility and instead thinks of the child and suddenly he realises he doesn’t know his name or what his birth weight was. But they’re both all right and that’s all that matters so he hurries to the bathroom and freshens his appearance, changes into new clothes. In less than twenty minutes Beckett has arrived as he rushes to the door then realises that the music’s still playing but he leaves it on and as he’s going out he remembers the title. Flowers! He needs flowers but can’t think where they might be got at this time and after thanking Beckett he tells him what he wants so they stop at a large garage on the way to the hospital. His heart sinks when he sees the garish choice available, where everything’s some artificial, lurid colour and every tone separates them from the slightest affinity to what flowers should be. He looks at Beckett and shrugs his shoulders then in desperation picks ten bunches and with his driver’s help carries them inside and disregarding the queue forming behind him points out the couple of flowers he wants from each and gets the assistant to make a new bouquet of these, discarding all the rest. It’s less than he would have wanted but it’s the best he can do under the circumstances and as they drive off he tries to improve the arrangement.

  The hospital doesn’t please him either. If only it had been possible he would gladly have arranged somewhere private that doesn’t look as if it’s in need of redecorating and that presents a more aesthetically pleasing environment in which to bring a child into the world. He walks along the cream-coloured corridors with their scuffed floors and plastic swing doors and rubs his coat where the stems have dripped water. But despite it all there’s a feeling of pride in his steps that helps control his growing nervousness. But what if her husband’s apparent affability is to be replaced at worst by his daughter’s refusal to see him or even at best her studied indifference? He has little time to ponder the different possibilities because he quickly reaches the wing where he knows his daughter is and he looks with concern at the flowers again as he starts to tell himself that they look tawdry. But Emma never liked ostentation or what she considered the show of wealth so ironically perhaps he has made the right choice. He asks a nurse where he can find his daughter and she smiles at him as she tells him and then compliments the flowers, saying she’ll bring a vase in a little while. He walks past the first two wards where visitors lounge round beds and thinks that for some reason he had assumed she would have a room to herself then sighs as he realises it’s to be the same homespun style as their last meeting. There’s a smell that reminds him of cabbage or custard and he loosens his collar a little by inserting a finger between it and his neck. His confidence has started to drain away and then it crumbles totally as he thinks that it should be Martine coming to visit, that it’s her mother she wants now not him. He hesitates, considers turning and walking away and dumping the flowers in the nearest bin, but then there’s a young man standing in front of him and immediately they both know who they are.

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘Yes. Emma’s father?’

  ‘Henry Stanfield. Very pleased to meet you.’ He offers his hand and it’s taken without hesitation. He’s slightly younger than he imagined, perhaps a few years younger than Emma, and he’s quietly handsome in a boyish way. To Stanfield’s relief there’s little evidence of his preconceived prejudices about what a secondary-school geography teacher might look like. ‘It was good of you to call me – I appreciate it very much.’ He gracefully shrugs off the thanks with a smile and slight shake of the head. ‘And how are they both?’

  ‘They’re both fine, both doing well,’ he says, gesturing an invitation with his extended arm.

  He wants to tell him it’s not quite so simple but instead he hesitates again and as a distraction he lowers his eyes to the flowers that he suddenly realises have no scent, and whose dreamy, vacuous faces leer up at him.

  ‘Nice flowers. I’ll go and get a vase.’

  ‘The best I could do at this time of night. No need – the nurse is bringing one.’ He feels a pulse of panic and he knows he wants the presence of this son-in-law he’s never met but who as far as he can ascertain seems to bear no obvious resentment towards him.

  ‘Well go ahead, Emma’s in the first bed just round the corner.’

  Then he hears himself say something incredibly clumsy and pompous – ‘Do you think she’s ready t
o receive me?’ He sounds like some suitor in a Jane Austen novel about to plight his troth to one of Mrs Bennet’s daughters. But he needs to know of this young man whether he should actually take those next few steps – no one will know more surely than him.

  ‘I think she’s ready,’ he says and then as if encouraging a child to take its first independent step he nods his head.

  ‘Thanks, Alan. You’re coming, too?’

  ‘In a moment. I just want to see the sister about something. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You go on.’

  So there’s no avoiding it any longer and he straightens his back and, holding the flowers in front of him like a shield, steps into the ward where he sees his daughter sitting up in the bed cradling her son. She’s so preoccupied with the baby that she doesn’t see him and he can’t bring himself to speak because he thinks that if he’s to speak the moment will fragment and be lost to him for ever. So instead he stands and watches as her loosened hair curtains the side of her face and she lightly strokes the corner of the baby’s mouth with the tip of her finger. Part of him tells himself that he should go now, just step quietly out of her line of vision and be gone, because a thousand times better to walk away and hold this moment forever in his memory than intrude and risk it being tainted with his presence. He takes a single step backwards but she looks up and sees him and he isn’t sure but it’s possible she understands and he stands frozen to the spot until she smiles at him. It’s the slightest, quickest of smiles but it’s just enough to invite him forward and he sets the flowers on the bed without comment and goes closer so he can see the child she’s holding.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ he says and his voice is whispery and uncertain.

  ‘Yes,’ she says as if what he’s said is a simple statement of fact and not a compliment and she keeps her eyes fixed on the baby’s face as if searching it for something undiscovered on which to focus her admiration.

  ‘And you’re all right, Emma?’

  ‘I’m fine, just a bit sore and tired.’

  In that moment he would give everything he owns in the world just to be able to stretch out his hand and touch her cheek or bend over her and kiss her lightly on the top of her head. He looks at her hand and wants to feel it inside his but he holds himself still and tries to steady the beat of his heart with controlled talk.

  ‘And have you decided on a name yet?’ he asks as he looks at her in her simple nightdress and thinks she seems to him like the child she once was, his child lodged in his memory just as her child will lodge in hers.

  ‘We’re not sure – we were expecting a girl for some reason. But we’re thinking of something simple like Tom.’

  ‘Thomas?’

  ‘No, just Tom.’

  ‘Very good,’ he says but in that second he knows that it’s unlikely that she’ll allow him to give the child material things so there’ll be no school fees or allowances accepted, no extravagant presents at Christmas. Whether she will permit him to give him something else remains uncertain and he has no right to expect, ‘I met Alan – he’s very nice.’

  ‘So you approve?’

  ‘I approve of anything you want for yourself.’

  She turns her eyes back to the baby as he wonders if he’s said too much.

  ‘Thanks for the flowers.’

  ‘They’re not the best. Wasn’t much choice, I’m afraid.’

  ‘They’re fine. The nurse will put them in water later.’ Then lifting her gaze from the child she asks, ‘How did today go?’

  ‘I think it went well – if that’s the right word. It looks as if Maria and her family will get Connor back. Very soon, very soon.’ What can he say? And how can he tell her that he has a letter for her in his pocket?

  ‘That’s good, that’s really good. Thanks for your help.’

  He simply smiles slightly and tries not to think of how he did his best to do nothing, as always to do what was clearly in his best interests. And now he’s to be rewarded for the service he didn’t give as she lifts her face towards him and asks, ‘Would you like to hold him?’

  ‘Very much.’

  As she slowly passes him the child their hands briefly skim against each other. She was the last and only child he’s ever held in his arms and now he holds the small lightness of her son. He cradles the bundle against the blackness of his coat. It feels more delicately beautiful but more alive than anything he’s ever held and he’s compelled to sit down on the edge of the bed by the sudden power of it. And then he turns his head away so that she won’t see.

  Afterwards in the car he sits in silence but the moment still resonates inside him as real as if the child’s still in his arms. Beckett as always says nothing, driving with the same steady caution and looking constantly in his mirrors. They’re almost home when his mobile phone calls and he answers it to find he’s talking to a breathless Matteo on a line that’s breaking up so the fragmenting words come in snatches only long enough to understand he’s to come immediately to the harbour estate.

  The black column of smoke is visible from a distance and as soon as they cross the river they can see the sky turning purple like a slowly spreading bruise and there’s the clanging scream of sirens as they pull aside to let fire engines and marked police cars blur past. The gates to the harbour estate are flung open and the security men are frantically waving on all emergency services but stopping press vehicles. They try to turn them away, too, but Beckett shows his authorisation and they’re given permission to enter. Even before he gets out of the car Stanfield can see the whole building is almost gone as parts of the roof collapse and angry new eruptions of stuttering flames break through in climbing, skittering, trembling tongues of yellow and blue. Above one breached section is a gaping mouth of red from which loudly explode showering cascades of sparks and a black snow of ash. He stands beside Beckett and recognises the primitive sense of awe that comes in the presence of uncontrolled fire and on his face he can feel the print of its heat.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ Matteo shouts as he runs up to them, his face a bleeding transfer of colour. ‘I couldn’t get hold of you. Your phone was switched off.’

  ‘I switched it off in the hospital,’ Stanfield says, turning his eyes back to the fire, and for a second his own sense of shock is replaced by Matteo’s words which are uttered as if he thinks he might have brought with him some miraculous capacity to extinguish infernos.

  ‘They can’t save it, they say. They won’t send men in – say there’s too much risk of the building collapsing. You need to speak to them,’ and he pulls Stanfield by the cuff of his coat like a child pulling a parent.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, gently removing his arm from the young man’s grasp, ‘it’s too late, it’s gone and we can’t put men’s lives at risk. It’s gone.’ As if on cue there’s a sudden snarl and a throaty rush of fire bursting out from above the front entrance. ‘It’s too late.’ After a moment he asks, ‘How did it start?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Matteo says. ‘We don’t know. How could it have happened?’

  Stanfield steps a little closer to the fire and, feeling a sudden compassion for his young colleague, momentarily thinks of putting his arm around him. For all his knowledge, how very little he really knows about the world, how little he understands that sometimes the angel troubling the water might only darken the swirling pool of the past. There’ll be an inquiry of course and for the rest of their bitter, corrosive history each side will blame the other and each year a new and blossoming conspiracy theory will apportion blame. The securocrats? Walters and his crew? One of the myriad groups of increasingly exposed paramilitaries? A loner somehow on the inside? Who can say for sure? When all is said and done, an act of God? Perhaps even the collective fusion of so much smouldering pain in some kind of spontaneous combustion. Who is to know? Who will ever know the truth?

  As Matteo slumps against the front of the car with one hand shading his eyes from the heat Stanfield walks away in a different direction. Out on the Lough the f
ire dances and shimmers, teasing and painting the black canvas of the water. Away now from the others he pauses and recites the words:

  ‘About, about, in reel and rout

  The death-fires danced at night;

  The water, like a witch’s oils,

  Burnt green, and blue and white.’

  He walks towards the bright tracery of water that is given a momentary, vivid filigree of colour. The fire makes no difference in one sense – all the files have been scanned and their contents now sleep in the hard drives of computers, out there in cyberspace beyond the reach of destruction. They weren’t to know. A dark, wind-twisted cloak of mottled smoke shakes loose its inky pleats and folds over the city as he feels in his pocket for the two envelopes and takes them out. He has a daughter in this place and now he has a grandchild, a child he has been allowed to hold in his arms. A black rain of ash falls silently out on the water in this berthing place where journeys started. Then he tightly crumples both envelopes and walks back to the car, a little ash settling on his collar as he goes.

  Endings

  The sky stretches grey-rimmed and closed, still resistant to the first soft-edged smears of light smudging slowly in from the east. A vague, half-hearted mist lingers and drapes itself over the shapeless lattice of heather, moss and deergrass. Clumped pockets of scrawny, bone-fingered trees pleach into each other like the clasp of arthritic hands and everything is silent, trapped in the settled dreams of darkness that press against the remote stretch of bogland. The brackish water gives off no reflections but sleeps on motionless and unstirred by the low frieze of sky. Then slowly a rising breeze begins to stir the bog cotton and tussock grass. A birch tree gives a thin shiver and a complaint from its creaking joints as gradually the first sharpening spears of light begin to pierce the morning.