The Third Murderer

I sat across from him at the table under the vines. He was tall, solidly built, tanned, handsome, bulky with prison muscles - looking fresh and at ease in his faded khaki shirt and pants.

A few years at the prison farm had got the smell and look of real prison out of him - that stale, smoky smell of cheap rolling tobacco, depression, aggression and budget disinfectant.

One of the kings of the place, he was - lifers have a high status, both because of the time they have to establish themselves and their networks, and because of the perverse glamour of their crime - usually. "They could let us go tomorrow" they say, with a lot of truth, generally, "and we would never re-offend. We aren't real criminals." It is hard to find a real criminal in prison.

A king, too, this one, because of physical attractiveness, strength, charm and because he, like a duo of others, had murdered as minors - almost at the same time - sixteen or seventeen - and been tried as adults and moved to adult prison at 18. All three were particularly attractive men - children of the place really, success stories - well-behaved, somehow growing up in the twisted culture and surviving - perhaps these will do OK when they get out, we can feel it is not all hopeless, I can feel the prison people who care thinking.

I knew the other two, too - one well, because I was his assigned Parole Officer - and the other quite well, because a friend of mine was his.

I understood them - I knew what had formed them - knew the family of my other guy well, too - had worked with his dad.

This man? Hmmmmmm. He was a mystery. "Lovely family". Father a military man - mother loving and sane. Brothers and sisters had managed to grow up without a murmur of problems with the law. So....why are you here? Who are you...?

So frank and charming, Gazing at me with clear, level eyes. My other member of this trio never says anything about you - he is friends with number three - they come over laughing and chatting. He chats easily about other guys. What is not said is important. Sometimes things are not said very loudly. We sit there talking - probing each other - much is not being said - but in a seemingly friendly way.

You want to go for Parole? Hmmmm. Not the best idea, I say. If you get knocked back, it is another five years before you can apply formally again. Of course, you get reviewed every year -the Parole Board MIGHT release you without formal application.

But I have done eight years, he says! He knows his statistics - this is the average for a lifer at this time. But, I say, people who have committed notorious or especially vicious murders are doing longer.

The eyes darken. Also, I say, you have been disciplined for a couple of things recently - bullying sorts of things. I think of a certain silence. That will not look good right before you apply - you might want to think of keeping your nose clean for a while. Stiffness -the realities of power are there before us on the table. My power, the power of the state, his power in this place, this little world - power he is used to - I am challenging it, he ischallenging mine, me - as a male to a female, as a person on one side of the great divide to one on the other - where do I stand? Can he "trust" me? Trust me to think he is safe - trust me to say where I stand - can I be charmed, subtly intimidated? There is something dark on the table - I think it belongs to us both, to this odd relationship with its ambivalences and its shifting boundaries of reality and deception - different with everyone I see - and its rippling aurora of overt and covert power fluctuations. I can see some of them - he can see others - some are visible to only one of us, some to both - some to neither.

Silent assessment and struggle play in the space between us - like the invisible beams of power and vulnerability that are emitted by chess pieces, as they hunker down, or move about the board.

The darkness grows - I become more certain most of it is his - then he says it - I have been explaining as calmly and evenly as I can why his offence will be viewed especially gravely by the Parole Board - I can feel, as I seldom do in such a powerful way, the victim between us. I am used to seeing both the crime and the person behind the crime when I am with violent offenders - this is different. It is the silence again - this murdered person is not present in our discussion, even in the perfunctorily remorseful way of the career criminal who knows which side their bread is buttered on, certainly not in the real way that other victims have been present in other conversations. The silence amplifies the voice of the person who is no longer alive because of this man...well, boy, he was, at the time.

"Everyone's entitled to one little mistake." he says.