The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

  In an hour the vestiges of mist will have faded and light will shock everywhere into new definition. Now any searching eye might see colour if it has the patience to look – the purple moor grass, the mauve tips of heather, the black bog rush, the white beak-sedge and under the trees where the light pushes through the tangle of branches the simmer of faded foxgloves. But this is not somewhere that humans ever come. Sometimes, too, there are sounds in this place where not even sheep or cattle graze – the lisp and sudden inexplicable suck of water where no foot has trod, the liquid burble of some invisible tongue.

  Then as the light slowly levers open the sky there is a new sound as dawn begins its daily skirmish with the water to conjure reedy, windblown reflections and stir the drift of bog myrtle. It’s a long way off at first but as a hovering kestrel’s wings thrum the air the sound grows steadily louder. And then in the first true light of morning a yellow digger trundles along the pitted track and when it reaches the edge of the bog it stops its engine and waits. Soon others will arrive with their transit vans and equipment, their thermal-imaging cameras and their marking poles. But for the moment the driver sits alone waiting in his cab and as the rising wind snakes around him he shivers against the coldness of the morning and, pressing his hands together as if he’s praying, lifts them to his mouth and tries to fill them with the warmth of his breath.

  A Note on the Author

  David Park has written six books, most recently the hugely acclaimed Swallowing the Sun. He was the winner of the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature and a twice winner of the University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland with his wife and two children.

  By the Same Author

  Oranges from Spain

  The Healing

  The Rye Man

  Stone Kingdoms

  The Big Snow

  Swallowing the Sun

  First published in Great Britain 2008

  Copyright © David Park

  This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The right of David Park to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 2099 5

  www.bloomsbury.com/davidpark

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