Death of an Expert Witness (42 page)

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. about the author P. D. James is the author of nearly twenty books, most of which have been filmed for television. Before her retirement in 1979, she served in the forensics and criminal justice departments of Great Britain's Home Office, and she has been a magistrate and a governor of the bbc.

The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. In 2000 she celebrated her eightieth birthday and published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest.