‘Not really,’ said Tom in a voice that carried comfort although it was not at all soothing. ‘For most of us the balance between the satisfying of our own needs and those of other people is more nearly held. The trouble comes when a man’s own needs seem to him so much more important than other people’s that even their deaths count for nothing in the scales.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Willow. ‘Has he confessed yet?’ Worth nodded his dark head.
‘Yes. I was afraid for some time that the sonnet he sent to poor Miss Titchmell would be as near a confession as he was prepared to get. I’ve got a copy here.’ He pulled out of his pocket a small, old edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, bound in rubbed green morocco and gave it to her. ‘I’ve marked it.’
Willow opened the musty-smelling book and read:
‘How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I see, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
“Thus far the miles are measur’d from thy friend!”
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov’d not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.’
When she reached the last couplet, Willow looked up.
‘Melodramatic bastard!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s enjoying it all, isn’t he?’
‘I think he is,’ said Tom. ‘He’s the kingpin at the moment. How could he resist playing his part to the hilt? It must have been bitterly frustrating for him when he could be the only one allowed to know what he was doing. Perhaps that’s why he finally gave in and told us all about it, unable to bear the thought that no one would ever know for certain that it was he who had made the kills.’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Willow, thinking of the broken woman who had just been taken away from the ward, of her mother and all the other secondary victims of the murders. ‘I wish I’d never … How do you cope with it, Tom? Do you just ignore it?’ She put one of her hands on his arm and felt the rough wool of his sleeve.
‘You can’t pretend not to have been through any experience, Will,’ Tom answered gently. ‘You have to absorb it and do the best you can with it. With luck, it’ll be useful to you one day.’
At that echo of Marcus Aurelius, Willow smiled and took away her hand. She wished that she did not look and feel so ridiculous with her legs strung up before her in their heavy plaster casings. There ought to be a grand gesture, she thought, to finish the case, but she was in no position to make one and grand gestures were not much in Tom’s line.
‘You’re a bit of an old Stoic yourself, aren’t you, Tom?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed and allowed himself a hint of teasing in his smile. ‘It’s lucky, isn’t it, given the way things are with us?’
Knowing that he was not talking about the policing of society any longer, Willow felt like frowning at his mockery. But something had happened to her during the Case and her long weeks in hospital. At last the appropriate action occurred to her and she made her grand gesture.
As Willow stuck her tongue out at Tom Worth, a smile of rare pleasure swept aross his craggy face.
Copyright
First published in 1990 by Simon & Schuster
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Natasha Cooper, 1990
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