Park Jongseo talked for two hours and forty minutes.
He was, as I had predicted, willing. More than willing: he had the quality of a man who had been waiting for this conversation for a very long time, who had perhaps rehearsed parts of it in his head during the years on Jeju, who had not slept well since the scope expansion had become public record and whose son had told him with gentle precision that the investigators were thorough and that things would be better said than found.
He was eighty-one. He sat in a room that smelled of the sea and old wood, with his son beside him and Attorney Hwang — not Shin's Hwang, but his own legal counsel, a woman from Jeju who had a calm and careful manner — and he told us what he knew.
