THE BULLET TRICK - Louise Welsh
Tales of wrongful convictions- the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Maguire Seven.
National Missing Persons Helpline.
"They were random faces, more young than old... looking out from their photographs or hiding behind the faces of their younger selves in pictures taken decades ago. Long hippy hair, seventies mullets, eighties flat-tops, photographs so dated they'd make you smile, if they'd not been turned tragic by circumstance. The same skewed aspect clung to all of the images. The lost mothers and brothers, sisters aunts, daughters, sons and uncles generally had a carefree air, caught at a family celebration or a party or maybe just the last photograph in the spool." (252)
A screen of lost faces.
"I wondered how many of the disappeared were dead, how many had been coerced into leaving. I wondered if the even knew that they were missing, that there were people who loved them, desperate to forgive whatever they had done. But then who was I to jump to conclusions? Maybe some of them had committed acts too awful to be absolved."
"I clicked to the next page and a warning that the following images might disturb me; I clicked again and the screen threw forth photographs of some of the found. There were only three of them. A woman washed up in the Thames, a youth discovered dead in Petersham Woods and an elderly man who had lain in the bushes in Richmond Park for a very long time before his skeletal remains were uncovered. All of them had lost their features to decay and the images on this page showed reconstructions of how they might have looked in life. The technicians who rebuilt their faces were more magician than I'd ever be, They crafted an illusion of flesh onto bare bone, dragging back the lost features of the dead. The technicians' skill were painstaking and exact but the images were ghastly. The smiles of the missing people that had shone carelessly from the previous page were all gone. There was no glimmer of expression here, the skin was too smooth, the eyes too blank, the lips too set, no living face ever held such deathness. The missing may yet be alive, but one look at the remoulded faces of these three showed what their fate might be. ' (pp.252-253)
The Raskolnikov Effect
National Missing Persons Helpline.
"They were random faces, more young than old... looking out from their photographs or hiding behind the faces of their younger selves in pictures taken decades ago. Long hippy hair, seventies mullets, eighties flat-tops, photographs so dated they'd make you smile, if they'd not been turned tragic by circumstance. The same skewed aspect clung to all of the images. The lost mothers and brothers, sisters aunts, daughters, sons and uncles generally had a carefree air, caught at a family celebration or a party or maybe just the last photograph in the spool." (252)
A screen of lost faces.
"I wondered how many of the disappeared were dead, how many had been coerced into leaving. I wondered if the even knew that they were missing, that there were people who loved them, desperate to forgive whatever they had done. But then who was I to jump to conclusions? Maybe some of them had committed acts too awful to be absolved."
"I clicked to the next page and a warning that the following images might disturb me; I clicked again and the screen threw forth photographs of some of the found. There were only three of them. A woman washed up in the Thames, a youth discovered dead in Petersham Woods and an elderly man who had lain in the bushes in Richmond Park for a very long time before his skeletal remains were uncovered. All of them had lost their features to decay and the images on this page showed reconstructions of how they might have looked in life. The technicians who rebuilt their faces were more magician than I'd ever be, They crafted an illusion of flesh onto bare bone, dragging back the lost features of the dead. The technicians' skill were painstaking and exact but the images were ghastly. The smiles of the missing people that had shone carelessly from the previous page were all gone. There was no glimmer of expression here, the skin was too smooth, the eyes too blank, the lips too set, no living face ever held such deathness. The missing may yet be alive, but one look at the remoulded faces of these three showed what their fate might be. ' (pp.252-253)
The Raskolnikov Effect