It is always said that people can remember where they were when they heard that John F Kennedy was murdered, or John Lennon, or when they first heard of the September 11 or July 7 atrocities. I suppose fewer of us will remember where we were when we heard that Monseñor Gerardi had been murdered, but I do. I happened to be having lunch with some friends from the Guatemala team at Amnesty International on 28 April 1998. It was rather a subdued affair, as they seemed still shell-shocked from the news that had rippled out from the San Sebastian parish house in the early hours of 27 April.

At the time, a little more than a year after the final peace had been signed, there was a mood of optimism that things could change for the better. People had started talking much more openly about the past, and about capital letter abstract nouns like Truth, Reconciliation and Justice.

Nowhere was this better exemplified than in the project that Monseñor Gerardi had helped create: the Recuperation of Historical Memory, (REMHI), which collected the testimonies of survivors of the civil war, aiming to understand the how, why, when, to know the truth of the past so that they might be set free. I first learned of the REMHI project on my first visit to Guatemala in August 1995, on a trip organised by the now defunct Central America Human Rights Committee. One of the many visits we made was to the Archbishopric’s Human Rights Office (ODHAG), where we met with a lady called Carmen who discussed with us the various tasks the office carried out, including its human rights work and the recently initiated REMHI project. We discussed the difficulties for staff working on this and I have in my notes “Thankfully no-one in the office has had physical threats, receive threats by ‘phone all the time. Historical position of church does give some protection”. How wrong we were to be.

The four volume REMHI report was presented by Gerardi on 24 April in the Metropolitan cathedral and blamed the armed forces for over eighty percent of the atrocities visited on their fellow citizens. On 26 April 1998, at about ten o’clock, persons unknown confronted the 75 year old Monseñor Gerardi in his garage and bludgeoned him to death with a lump of concrete. Suddenly, at our little lunch party, it seemed we were being sent right back to the time of silence and fear, when the truth may not be known and freedom may not ring.

What was to happen next would be a test of whether our fears were justified: could justice be made to work, could the real perpetrators of the murder of a high profile personage be tracked down, tried and put away. Francisco Goldman’s enthralling recent book “The Art of Political Murder” tells the story of  Guatemala’s trial of the century. Goldman is perhaps better known to us as a novelist, especially for the excellent “The Long Night of White Chickens”. The outstanding feature of that book for me was depiction of a particularly Guatemalan paranoia and distrust which afflicted the main character as he tried to find out why Flor de Mayo, his family’s former maid and his own childhood companion, had been murdered. “Chickens” was published the month before Gerardi was murdered, and almost seems to foreshadow Goldman’s writing of this story, which tries to get to the bottom of a real Guatemalan murder mystery. There is plenty of paranoia and distrust here too, and the story itself often seems so fantastical that it ought to have come from the pen of a crime novelist.

Goldman has followed the case closely since it started and tells it strictly chronologically, as he learns something, then so will you, but if he merely has a suspicion of something he may plant it in your mind and then come back to it later when his story leads back to that character, or circumstance allows the suspicion to be better addressed. This creates an interesting dramatic tension that a straightforward report of events would lack.

The story itself almost seems the work of a contrarian crime writer: often we might start off with a scenario in which there seems an obvious culprit, deduced from their potential motive and their past behaviour, only for the writer to lead us at the end to the unmasking of the real perpetrator who set up the dumb fall guy to hide their guilt. Here we are working from the opposite direction: we start out knowing who the perpetrator is likely to be and the story is about how they try to use all their weapons of subterfuge, misinformation, bribery and threats to try and pin it on someone else. Against them in the Manichean struggle is a small number of brave investigators who dare to do their job properly.

Goldman skilfully and engagingly leads you through this complex tale of good versus evil, and it gets very complicated as the false trails proliferate. Speaking as one who tried to follow the case, it became as complex as Daedalus’ labyrinth, especially when it got to court. Goldman lends the Ariadne thread that leads you through the maze of twists and turns, without the need to resort to diagrams, notes or headache remedies.

By the end we have four people convicted of the murder: three military men and Father Orantes, who had shared the parish house with Gerardi. That brings me back to the question I left hanging earlier: did Guatemalan justice work, was it done and seen to be done? I have to admit to a sense of disappointment, though this is absolutely nothing to do with the book itself which definitely maintains the high standards that Goldman set in his previous work. It’s just that, and this is going to sound preposterous, I still don’t know why they did it. All the people involved in the murder speak in half-truths and insinuation, which, like a candle in a cavern illuminates a little but leaves a lot hidden in the flickering shadow. There is always the threat of the bogey man in the dark which will leap out and devour those who dare to tell the whole truth. If knowing the unvarnished truth must precede justice and reconciliation then I must answer my own question with a no.

Reaching the point we are at now has been costly in the broken lives of those sent into permanent exile or found dead in dubious circumstances. This was not the first step in establishing an effective rule of law and the end of impunity as other high profile human rights cases show. In this version of the drama Henry II has not yet accepted a penitential flagellation for ordering the kingdom to be rid of its turbulent priest.