It was during the first summer of the pandemic when one of my mother’s friends said that I should probably speak to Steve. I had spent the previous four months interviewing lawyers, politicians, investigators, and criminals for a book that wasn’t meant to be just about the assassination of my mother, Daphne. It was meant to be about her life as Malta’s most famous journalist.
The personal part is what I found hardest to cover. The details of her death, and its alleged link to a corrupt public contract worth more than a billion dollars, were heard in open court, across three sets of criminal proceedings, two of which are still ongoing, in a public inquiry, and in countless civil cases. But her life before the car bombing that killed her six years ago had been elided. I thought I’d just sit at my desk, summon my memories of her, and write them down: how she’d take me and my two older brothers to the beach after school, how she was with my father, and how she’d play Bob Marley, loudly and on repeat.
But how little I knew. I didn’t even know why, in 1990, she had become Malta’s first female columnist and its first columnist to write under their own name. I read all of her pieces on Malta’s political corruption, but I didn’t see where it all began, how her love of reading as a young girl gave way to wanting to write the corruption out of a country, a mission she refused to give up. I didn’t know what her life was like before journalism, marriage, and three children.
So, Steve. I took down his number and, thinking it wiser, messaged rather than called him. The last time he had seen my mother was in 1980, when they were 16 years old. Steve’s expulsion from a Maltese boarding school had ended their relationship as each other’s first loves. Three days after I wrote to him, he replied: “I was surprised to hear from you.”
I didn’t even know why, in 1990, [my mother] had become Malta’s first female columnist and its first columnist to write under their own name.
He explained that he now lived in the Caribbean, was married with adult children, and that my message brought back a flood of memories. We spoke over the phone about their swimming at empty beaches, how they’d ended up working on the case of a Maltese drug trafficker—he, as a customs official in the U.K.; she, as a young reporter for The Sunday Times of Malta writing her first big story—and how they used to listen to Bob Marley all the time.
When we hung up, I closed my notebook. I drank a pint of beer, left my house in South London, and, because pandemic restrictions meant I couldn’t sit on a bench in the little park nearby, walked around and around the park. Why was I moved by the call? Of all things, why that call?
I’m still not sure. I think it was a sense of relief that there was more color, more joy to my mother’s life than I knew. I was so moved by the call that I gave my interview with Steve more space than it needed in the first draft of my book.
I was so anxious about that draft that I shared it only with my father, Peter, who was married to my mother from 1985 until her death, and my brothers, Matthew and Andrew. Matthew wouldn’t read a draft for another two years. Andrew sent me an e-mail with a number of suggested scenes, each one featuring him. And my father said, “It’s good, Paul. But do we really need so much on the first boyfriend?”
Paul Caruana Galizia’s A Death in Malta will be available beginning November 7 from Riverhead