The Truth Commissioner by David Park

Author:David Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

STANFIELD PRESIDES WEARILY OVER the chamber and glances regularly but surreptitiously at the clock and feels as if he’s slowly drowning in words. Day after day, it’s as if the dam is breached and out pours a torrent of rising levels of hurt that have been stored over long winters of grief. They come to the chamber to let it finally burst its banks and their breathless flood threatens to engulf him. He lifts his head and tries to draw breath because it always feels as if there’s not enough air in the room so he’s grateful, at least, for the seemingly straightforward brevity of the case in progress. There’s been an admission of responsibility, an apology and even a seemingly sincere little appeal for forgiveness. All that remains is for him to ask Mrs Latimer, or her representative, if she would like to sum up her feelings about her husband who on a summer evening twenty years earlier opened his front door to his killer. He’s glad they’re reaching the conclusion because it feels as if they’re sinking in the hollow of the afternoon where the movement of time has wilted and collapsed into a lethargic slumber.

He glances down at the elderly woman who’s not spoken a single word so far. She looks frail, withered, like a desiccated leaf that might blow from the tree in the next wind, but there’s also something about her that unsettles him. Is it the fixity of her gaze? Her refusal to look at the man who killed her husband? The way her thin and knobbed hands clutch the Bible that she holds in her lap so tightly?

‘Mrs Latimer, would you or your representative like to make your final address?’ he asks gently, hoping that it will be mercifully short, then nodding encouragingly as she slowly stands and makes her way to the microphone. She walks, more quickly but it’s not to the microphone and then as Stanfield blinks his disbelief and time seems suspended, or unfolding in some unpredictable sequence as if in a dream, she has a knife in her hand – Stanfield can’t be sure but thinks it’s come from inside her Bible – and is lunging towards the killer of her husband. It’s the physical change confuses him and takes away what little breath he has. What once seemed withered has hardened into an angular rigidity, her limbs stiff as rods, like a scarecrow suddenly come to life. People are screaming, chair are toppling over as her intended victim tries to raise an arm to shield himself, but the knife skewers over its top and embeds itself in his shoulder blade. Stanfield stands up but for a second freezes before he shakes himself into action, presses the panic button on his desk and almost immediately police arrive.

She stands perfectly still, the knife dropped to the floor, with the appearance of the catatonic, unseeing, unhearing, unresisting as she’s led away. There are medics in green uniforms kneeling over the victim and then the blare and static of radios set in motion.

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