Our country has entered a delicate stage. People warn each other not to rush to conclusions. And yet they criticise each other for prevaricating over drawing the correct observations from the facts. There are many unknowns about why and who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia, though we are being told a lot about the how.

Although even the term ‘political killing’ is a matter of dispute, no one denies the massive political implications of every new page that is turned on this story. Malta’s history is being written and nothing will ever be the same again.

The government has for weeks been promoting ‘business as usual’. This was not a sufficiently dramatic event to disturb the Prime Minister’s travel plans lined up for him by Henley and Partners. European parliamentarians and protesting women were received in Castille politely and kicked out curtly. Requests for debates in Parliament were reluctantly entertained, but not before the all-important Budget was debated and approved.

But the go-proed assault on the deflatingly-named potato shed in Marsa was as normal as a volcanic eruption.

The government is keener than it admits to recover somewhat from the reputational damage it has suffered and continues to suffer beyond our shores. Its reliance on drama to confer what is ultimately a correct message does tend to spoil things a little bit. But if the police can prove the three people they arraigned executed this atrocity, we would all feel a little bit less crushed by what has been going on.

If the exceptional resources focused on this crime lead to the solution of others before it, that too is a good thing. Though it has to be said: if the same level of enforcement had been implemented when the bombings first started, we could with justified bitterness have remembered and reminded that Daphne would still be alive.

It looked like the government was looking at the car bombings as turf wars in the crime world that it would rather not intervene in, letting the crooks incinerate each other instead. But that is bound to spill over at some point. And it has.

Joseph Muscat is keen to reverse that. He could probably survive any criticism. But he’d struggle to defend himself from the one real criticism that counts: that he runs a country that can no longer call itself normal. Normal stands for safe, democratic, rational, tolerant, peaceful, inclusive, fair and kind. We have chipped all of those values when we decided to let criminals blow themselves up. And we paid a huge price when they turned to eliminate our journalists.

Muscat has successfully addressed the challenge from the rest of the world on whether he would allow proper investigations into the crime.

But there are many challenges he has yet to address.

In his endearingly halting English, Antonio Tajani told him he wants to know “who the mother and the father” of the crime are. Antonio di Pietro stuck to Italian but told him “we cannot be happy knowing who executed the crime. We must know who ordered it”.

The diligent work of the inspectors who will be presenting evidence in open court starting this week must only be the beginning. The work done by the inquiring magistrate so far must continue until we get to the very bottom of this.

The State has tools at its disposal but we cannot overestimate the willingness of contract killers to exchange the revelation of their principals with the renunciation of the protection prison bars give them from retribution. We cannot be naïve and assume that someone who has engaged a contract killer once would have a problem engaging another.

It’s a tough road ahead.

These are the people who can save this country. They can prove to the world we have not gone beyond the point of no return

If it is confirmed, however, that the executors of the crime are all Malta-based, the job of finding the principals might prove less overwhelming than at first feared.

The Prime Minister too will have been having the same water-cooler conversations that the rest of the country has had since the identities and the histories of the arraigned became clearer. He will have been told in greater detail than any of the rest of us who are the friends of these hoods, what gangs they have been working for, who their lawyers are or were, and what connections they have.

Inasmuch as solving the manner of this bombing created the opportunity to investigate similar cold cases, understanding the planning of this bombing reveals layers and wounds that not only the perpetrators will prefer uncovered.

There is not only the fear of prison for those who commissioned the crime. There is a fear of a downfall by association for their friends and their connections.

Many will have an interest right now to keep this snowball motionless until the sun comes out. But many have the means not to allow that to happen.

There are fearless, hardworking, smart police inspectors. There are independent, conscientious magistrates. There are honest, politically indifferent prosecutors. They will have everything thrown at them. They will be cajoled, coerced, threatened and derided. But some may very well screw their courage in its sticking place and not let go until this job is done.

These are the people who can save this country. They can prove to the world we have not gone beyond the point of no return. They can show all of us that their choice of poorly-paid, unappreciated public service is borne out of a sense of mission. They can bring out the anger and indignation they felt as schoolgirls and as schoolboys at all that is wrong with the world.

Now indeed is their chance to make a difference.

We are reminded of the example of people like di Pietro, in similar predicaments, with death and destruction around them, and with political power seeking to crush them.

But we are also reminded of the example of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Antonio Tajani, Antonio di Pietro and many other Italians who followed this story passionately, spoke of Caruana Galizia as following in a line from Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. We cannot underestimate the scale of this admiration, gratitude and respect.

The death of the judges killed in Sicily in the early 1990s was the catalyst for the transformation of a society and a country that refused to face the realities of its sins. Inspired by their sacrifice, hundreds and thousands of citizens and public servants stepped up to continue their work. No Prime Minister could stop that wave of change.

The work cannot stop here.