The Truth Commissioner Read Online Free Page A

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.