This is a story that has not been told in the turbulent weeks after Daphne Caruana Galizia's horrific murder, except in parts.

It is the story of one of Daphne's victims, the people she targeted in her blogs.

Just to be clear right from the beginning: the following in no way intends to minimize the horror of Daphne's murder. And even the victim, at least this victim, feels so. Other victims are more ambivalent, focusing on their own hurt.

The whole point is there is no way closure can be declared. The issues raised by Daphne remain open and unsolved. Whether she was right or wrong about this person and others like this person can never be established.

She has taken with her to her grave the background of the information she shared with her readers, information that is still accessible. This is one aspect of the whole tragedy that has gone mostly unremarked upon; the impossibility of retraction. The story, once told, remains there for eternity.

This is, if you want, an indictment of our courts with their delays and postponements. At some point, with the death of one of the parties, the process grinds to a halt. Who was right? Who was wrong? The question still hangs in the air.

Let us assume that Daphne was right in most of the claims she made. That means she was wrong in others. But now there is no way the victims who claim that she was wrong about them can get the justice due to them.

The issue, the story, remains unresolved; one can read it again and again. The injury is repeated with every additional reading and sharing.

People who do not personally know the victim, and even persons who do know the victim, continue to believe what the story says about the victim.

The people Daphne wrote about were people in the public eye, mostly politicians, but she also wrote about people who cannot be described as having a public role, such as relatives of people in the public eye, and so on.

Now I readily grant that such chatter is the rule whenever people meet, at parties, at work, anywhere. But there is a huge difference between gossip among friends, bitchy though it may be, and that conversation appearing in black and white on a blog. Gossip among friends has a (sort of) well-defined boundary, whereas chatter written down has no such boundary. Nor does it have any date of expiry. Scripta manent (what is written down remains forever).

So was Daphne right in what she wrote about the victim? At times, the victim denies everything. At other times, the victim sort of admits but then says everyone was doing it; it was done in PN times but no one wrote about it, and one senses a rather weak, generic, regret.

We have honoured Daphne as a person of immense courage, and it was this courage that got her killed. We did the right thing. But in fairness, we must also hear what the people she wrote about have to say rather than simply shaming them as people in the wrong simply because that was what Daphne said about them.

There are people, and then there are issues. Mostly, issues are made up by people. The history of the past year has had the country realizing, or being told, that truth is never one sided. There are people with good intentions on this side, as well as on the other side. And there are people with evil intentions both on this side and on the other side. Those who believe otherwise, and I think Daphne was one of them at least until the very last phase of her life, are manifestly wrong and our common experience of life amply confirms this.

Having said all this, there must be somehow a middle way between idolizing Daphne and damning her. She paid the ultimate price for her writings, so she must be honoured for that. But her victims, many times left without real justice, must be heard as well.

There is more to it. Daphne died, as her last words testify, in defence of the rule of law, honesty, uprightness in the management of the State. That places her right up there with the icons of our society, inspiring those who will continue to fight on behalf of the rule of law.

But then, that is also the Daphne paradox - her death has deprived many of those she wrote about of having justice and redress paid also to them.

If this is going to be left without closure, we risk leaving our successors with open sores. We cannot say 'Let bygones be bygones now' for that means that the body politic will remain with sores that will never heal.

This is why we should all insist that the wheels of justice continue to turn. One may accept that these wheels turn more slowly than we or some of us would wish, but we cannot accept that manifest infractions continue unpunished. If those who rule Malta cannot see this, hopefully this week's debate in the European Parliament and subsequent actions will make us see reason. Hopefully too, there must be objectivity on this issue because what is not good for Malta is not good for the other European partners either.

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