Death of an Expert Witness (41 page)
Read Death of an Expert Witness Online
Authors: P. D. James
They walked on in silence towards the car. Then Kerrison began speaking again: “I still don’t understand it. She’s so beautiful. And it isn’t only her beauty. She could have had any man she wanted. It was amazing that, for some extraordinary reason, she wanted me. When we were together, lying by candlelight in all the quietness of the chapel after we’d made love, all the anxieties, all the tensions, all the responsibilities were forgotten. It was easy for us, because of the dark evenings. She could park her car by the barn in safety. No one walks on Guy’s Marsh Road at night, and there are only a few cars. I knew it would be more difficult in the spring
with the long evenings. But then, I didn’t expect she would want me that long. It was a miracle that she wanted me at all. I never thought beyond the next meeting, the next date on the hymn-board. She wouldn’t let me telephone her. I never saw or spoke to her except when we were alone in the chapel. I knew that she didn’t love me, but that wasn’t important. She gave what she could, and it was enough for me.”
They were back at the car now. Massingham was holding open the door. Kerrison turned to Dalgliesh and said: “It wasn’t love, but it was in its own way a kind of loving. And it was such peace. This is peace, too, knowing that there’s nothing else I need do. There’s an end of responsibility, an end of worry. A murderer sets himself aside from the whole of humanity forever. It’s a kind of death. I’m like a dying man now, the problems are still there, but I’m moving away from them into a new dimension. I forfeited so many things when I killed Stella Mawson, even the right to feel pain.”
He got into the back of the car without another word. Dalgliesh closed the door. Then his heart lurched. The blue and yellow ball came bounding across the clunch field towards him and after it, shouting with laughter, his mother calling after him, ran the child. For one dreadful second, Dalgliesh thought that it was William, William’s dark fringe of hair, William’s red wellingtons flashing in the sun.
P. D. James is the author of twenty-one books, most of which have been filmed for television. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Great Britain’s Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 and was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. She lives in London and Oxford.