I wondered who had warned him. The Chaplain? Devine? Ms. Buckfast? Or maybe even Eric, still trying to curry favor with a management that has long since ceased to think of him as management material?

“I had no idea I was so predictable,” I said. “Or indeed, so prescient.”

He smiled again. “Oh, Roy,” he said. “You can’t imagine how sorry I am. But at this stage, to hold any kind of memorial for Harry Clarke, or even to mention that business in connection with the School, would mean the worst kind of publicity. All schools have their scandals, of course, but the nature of the Clarke affair makes it all the more urgent for us to keep the story away from the press. It’s not a personal grievance, you know. It’s for the good of St. Oswald’s.”

For the good of St. Oswald’s. I suppose he thought that would move me. After all, St. Oswald’s has been my life. I am as firmly attached to the place as the gargoyles on the Chapel roof, and, like the gargoyles, I am trained to divert the foul water of scandal away from our saints and effigies.

“There was no proof,” I told him. “The boy was obviously disturbed.”

Harrington looked at me closely and with unsettling sympathy. “Roy, I’m getting the sense that somehow you hold yourself to blame.”

“I don’t blame myself,” I said, rather more sharply than I’d intended. The invisible finger prodded and sought the soft spot under my breastbone. “I don’t blame anyone but—”

You. I almost said it aloud. You. You’re the one I’ve always blamed. You, with your little attaché case, and your pair of sycophants. As if God cares who a man loves, just as long as he can love—

Harrington was still looking at me. “It was a very difficult time,” he said, with that look of compassion. “What happened that year marked us all. Did you ever have any counseling? I did, and it helped me. I know you’re not a man of faith, but Survivors helped me enormously.”

I said: “I don’t need counseling.”

“But you are concerned about closure.”

Closure. What a loathsome word, with its transatlantic affectation of sympathy and psychobabble. No, I am not concerned about closure, you hypocrite, but about justice. What happened to Harry was unjust: and as we grow old, and our memories blur and shift and recede with time, injustice is the one that stays most poignant, most persistent. Injustice outlives a broken limb; the death of a parent; a heart attack. Injustice is the tiny shard of something broken in the soul that can never be mended.

“Well, if it helps,” said Harrington, “the Chaplain gave me this for you.”