On the second day of the tribunal, Caldris stood.
She did it without being asked. The chair had called the respondents’ statements, and Caldris’s name was first on the list, and she stood up from the table’s far end with her slate in her hand and did not look at it.
“I admit responsibility,” she said.
The hall was quiet. The windows were open; the people outside were quiet too.
“For enforcing the secrecy of the retirement plan,” Caldris said. “For four years, under my office. For every order I signed that kept the plan’s figures from the councils it affected.” She paused. “And for the closures I did not investigate. Each one.”
She gave them in order.
One by one. Every lamp that had been retired or cut or reduced under her office without her checking the figure that retired it. The date. The lamp. The figure. And the fact: not investigated.
She did not give an estimate for any of them. She did not say perhaps a thousand or many families or I believed at the time. She said the lamp and the date and the figure and not investigated, and then the next one.
