The Truth Commissioner (43 page)

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 fire 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.

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

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