The Truth Commissioner (3 page)

And more than anything they are children, bright-eyed with idealism and the belief that the report they will present in a
month's time will illuminate the way forward, that they will have played an important part in constructing the way out of
the morass, in building a new bridge to healing and forgiveness. So how would they feel if he were to tell them now that it's
all been for the optics, that what will happen and how it will happen has already been agreed, mapped out, and the fixity
of the main boundaries established like every continent after every war? A few small disputed areas still exist that might
be left as neutral or placed under joint administration but by and large it's a done deal. So perhaps it was not such a bad
thing that they have had their compensatory fun, their day in the sun, even the obligatory ritual of a visit to Robben Island
where they were given a tour guided by an ex-prisoner. Afterwards they had a group photograph taken in the entrance to the
prison, under the sign which reads: ‘We serve with pride.'

A snow cloud of petrels flakes thickly around the boat, hovering as if frozen on the layered air before free-falling. He watches
and envies the effortless grace of their flight, their balletic eloquence, and then his eye catches something further off.
Too big to be anything else. He doesn't want to admit it at first and then he starts to laugh. He looks around for someone
to share the joke with but there's no one close enough to hear his voice, so when he speaks, the words are for himself:

‘ “God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look'st thou so?” – With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.'

It can't be anything else. Nothing has that wingspan. The joke is delicious and he feels a rich syrupy laughter lace and warm his throat like the sweet burn of whiskey. It's an albatross – unbelievably it's an albatross! He suddenly shivers. Who is he? The Ancient Mariner? A bleached-boned and weary Poseidon? Samson with his locks shorn? He savours the self-mockery and each one fixes the bitterness of his smile deeper in the frozen mask of his face. An albatross! He holds his face up to the white-mottled wrap of sky as a ragged laugh breaks free and he shouts the word ‘Wicked!' to the falling flakes of petrels that spangle the salted air.

If he is honest with himself, and there are occasions when he admits the painful benefits of such moments, then he has to admit that it was the job's title that first prompted his acceptance. ‘Truth Commissioner' has a nice ring to it and its accompanying salary is almost as generous in its scope. Also in momentary truth, his career in recent years has stalled a little, diverted into the dull-as-dishwater and hopelessly technical sidings of railway-disaster inquiries, or arcane and never-ending reviews of contentious anti-terror legislation. Having moved from what he found to be an increasingly moribund and emotionally stultifying stint at the Bar, to do some work at the International Court and experience the pleasures of a cultured European city, he has continued to live comfortably off his two books on human rights and the law. A couple of years' lecturing proved rather intoxicating – all those beautiful young women diving for the showered pearls of his words – but rather like an alcoholic working in a liquor store, he knew it was not the most prudent of places to see out his days and so when the opportunity came to be involved in investigations into human-rights abuses in various parts of the world's cesspits, he grabbed it with both hands. The Balkan business secured his international reputation and no doubt placed him on the short list for similar job offers. However, he was genuinely surprised to be invited personally by the Prime Minister to this present post, one of six on offer, and despite his best cynicism found himself unexpectedly susceptible to that chummy telephone flattery. An Irish Catholic mother and an English Protestant father allow him to straddle both tribes and, despite spending the first twelve years of his life in a leafy suburb of Belfast, he has no personal or political baggage to be unpacked by either side. Not even any meaningful or sharp memories to prick him towards anything as strong as a prejudice.

The job title has a magisterial ring to it but also a rather totalitarian, industrial edge and he enjoys this juxtaposition of ideas. But what he enjoys most is thinking of the book that will surely come out of it and already he's batting ideas around for the title –
The Whole Truth
…
Nothing but the Truth
… perhaps even
The Freedom of Truth.
He dismisses them all as too hackneyed and obvious, like Perry Mason potboilers. As yet he is undecided on the book's genre and it's possible that he might include autobiographical material, give accounts of some of the phases of his career including the most dramatic parts of his human-rights work. He toys with the idea of eschewing a dry academic work and writing for a more populist market, imagines readings at literary festivals in sleepy English towns in marquees garlanded by delicate braids of sunlight.

There is another reason, of course, that prompted his acceptance but there's a limit to how far truth can be allowed to journey so he's not quite prepared to admit, even to himself, that having a daughter living in the North might also have been a significant factor. A daughter called Emma whom he hasn't seen for five years. A curious coincidence, he tells himself instead, the type of coincidence that life inevitably throws up. That's all.

The one thing, however, he knows is that whatever rewards accrue as a result of his acceptance, he will have earned them, not least the fact that he will spend the next two years living in a city that he considers much the same way as he might think of a piece of dirt that he hoped he had shaken off his shoe. It's true that they've given him a rather luxurious apartment overlooking the river and sought to accommodate every possible requirement, and it's also true that he's only an hour's flight away from his London home and Hampstead Heath, but the thought of the actual job precludes any wild surge of pleasure. Still, there is the young team that has been assembled to service the process and of course, and not least, the lovely brown-eyed Laura whose faltering interview required a rather large helping hand before the post was hers. Still, in comparison to the demands of some of his fellow commissioners, it was a small price for them to pay. He thinks with disdain of the Finnish commissioner, the squat little barrel of a woman with truncated legs whose two preposterous poodles have been allowed to sidestep the laws of quarantine; of the obligatory South African judge who seems to have ensconced a veritable tribe of relations in a most desirable residence in the very heart of Hillsborough.

He wishes it were Laura who stood beside him now and not Beckett who stands his customary ten feet away, the nothing-to-say, red-haired Beckett who has been appointed by the PSNI as his protection officer and driver. Beckett in his grey Marks and Spencer's suit and shiny shoes, who is silent as a Trappist monk. The early-morning air is cold and edged by a razor wind that cuts at the cheekbones and pinches the eyes into narrow slits. It's always good to show willing but he wonders why his presence was deemed necessary – something no doubt to do with the constantly reiterated and linchpin word ‘transparency'. It's impossible to speak to those in authority without hearing it drip from their tongues like honey, usually coupled with some vacuous statement about the ‘integrity of the process'. Transparency and integrity – words no doubt that help the user feel ennobled and elevated to a higher plane than his listeners.

So what he is now watching is supposed to be the practical implementation of these concepts and as the first security vans and police vehicles begin to wind their way through the harbour estate he pulls up the collar of his overcoat. Elliot, Simon and Matteo stand at the door of the shipyard's old and long-defunct drawing office ready to receive the first delivery, the identification badges in their lapels and the metal clips on their boards blinking weakly with reflected winter light. Behind them stands a phalanx of clerical assistants and members of the private security firm who have won the public tender for the work. He has already been given an inspection tour of the building's restoration and refurbishment, observed the high-tech security system – clearly not the one used by the Northern Bank – with the infra-red scans and bar codes, the palm-print identification, the heating and humidity controls, the computer terminals and the internal and external security cameras. He has seen the certificate from the pest-control company stating that the final rodent has been irrevocably exterminated from the environs. So here, where in a former age under the vaulted ceiling the plans of great White Star ocean liners were drawn, stretch rows of metal tables, partitioned and numbered, and above and around them purrs the steady hum of electricity and an expectant readiness.

On his own he has already toured the area and found it freakishly attractive, a bit like visiting some windswept tundra of history where each year leeches off another little bit of what must have been, leaving only the silted dry docks and the swathes of cracked concrete from which sprouts every type of wild flower. Leaving, above all, the infinite desolate sense of space emptied of whatever begat it. A few of the flowers he looked at bore no resemblance to any that he had ever seen, as if they were phantom mutations of raw metal, sparked into life by some long-dead welder's fiery fantail, their filaments as if iron: their stamens the shred of steel. When he arrived there had been no sunlight and the waters of Belfast Lough and the sky had met in a seamless meld of grey. Now the river has weakened and the sky lifts itself a little higher and tries to imprint the water's surface with a new pattern but it resists and seems to hug its own coldness. The lurid yellow of the enormous cranes strikes an attempt at defiance but they look like nothing so much as giant hurdles waiting for a Finn McCool to jump them.

And already they are talking of restoring this place in the city's favourite passion of self-consoling mythology. It will, no doubt, be a giant theme park where they will build a facsimile of the great ship, construct hotels and exhibitions, hope to bring in the tourists from Japan, from America, from everywhere, for an exclusively virtual experience. It saddens Stanfield to think of the vulgarity that will be unleashed, the way he imagines this place will become the equivalent of some casino town in the Nevada desert. There is one memory from his childhood that he suddenly recalls and it's being in his father's car on the other side of the river and following an open grain lorry, pigeons swooping on it. The sour sweet smell of the grain. Swinging around across the bridge and more birds. Great shifting parabolas of starlings shading the sky in charcoal. It must have been at the end of the afternoon for suddenly the bridge itself is black with the released shipyard workers, lunch boxes in their hands, heels clacking, voices calling like the boys selling newspapers on street corners.

The curse of memory. Scabs on the soul. Even with most of his life behind him he thinks only of the future, of what can still be savoured. Of what experiences still await. He looks across the water and smiles. Nothing amuses him quite so much as the city's gauche attempts to reinvent itself as a cosmopolis, nothing makes him smile more genuinely than to see its newest makeover. So on the other side of the river, in front of the wasteland of book depositories, tyre depots and warehouses, and on the water's edge, sit some of the city's more recent buildings, styled with features that echo Venetian palazzos but look as if they have been constructed out of a child's building set. Behind him Beckett coughs and he remembers his driver doesn't have the benefit of a coat as he turns to look at him. Beckett's face has reddened in the wind as if worn raw and his hair is a sudden flash of colour as if a match has been struck in the greyness of the morning.

‘It's cold,' Stanfield says, ‘we'll drive back round and watch the arrivals.' Beckett doesn't answer but simply nods and holds the door open for him to get into the back of the car. Stanfield notices the broad wedding ring on his finger but in the car he can't be bothered to attempt further conversation.

The arrivals are in full flow now with the files and papers being carried into the building where they will be catalogued and stamped with their delivery date. Some come in file boxes but most are in manila or green folders tied with string. A few have clearly been rehoused inside new covers but most wear the marks of their age and use and are badged with grubbiness – the circles of cups, the scribble of ballpoint, the greased or sweated fingerprints of those who perused them. Some of them bulge at the seams and corners of papers loll like tongues out of mouths. Some are carried inside plastic bags – the type used to remove evidence from crime scenes. He feels a desultory randomness about it all, a sense of fragmentation that bodes badly for those charged with putting it all together, for those whose job is supposed to be to shape it into meaning.

One of the policemen stumbles and a file is spilt to the ground. There is a communal gasp as if they are watching an urn spill its ashes and, as the first pages flutter into the air, rushing hands grasp for the escaping paper. One evades the frantic clutches and mischievously scampers momentarily above head height before wallowing slowly to earth and grateful capture. ‘Gentlemen, careful please!' Matteo's authoritative voice rings out as he steps forward with his arms outstretched, shepherding the deliveries to the door. Stanfield silently congratulates him – it's always good to see someone exercise authority and he believes that it's what marks the led from the leader. There are always those who despite their abilities don't have what it takes when the testing moment comes, who, in the mysterious vocabulary of the young, don't have ‘bottle'. He commends himself for the leadership he has already shown in demanding, upon the entirely genuine threat of resignation, that all files and case notes be removed from their diverse locations and centrally stored under the Commission's independent protection. After a third file mysteriously, and no doubt conveniently for those charged with its protection, went missing, it was obvious that immediate action had to be taken. Faced with the full welter of reluctance and obstruction from the local apparatchiks, he led the entire team of commissioners to the Prime Minister's door and, with the prospect of an international embarrassment, the demand was finally granted.