A Certain Justice

But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis.

She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire.

How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being.

"Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous."

He had learned to be as wary of intuition as he was of superficial judgements, but it was hardly possible to be a long-serving detective officer and not know when a witness was lying. It wasn't always suspicious or even significant. Nearly everyone had something to hide. And it was optimistic to expect the whole truth at a first interview. A wise suspect answered questions and kept his counsel; only the naïve confused a police officer with a social worker.

Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect.

How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos.

A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition.

They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?

Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?