Kershaw said, “I’m going to tell you something that I have never told another human being and never shall. I do that because I believe that with you it will be safe. And perhaps there comes a time at the end of life when a secret becomes a burden which one longs to place on another’s shoulders, as if the mere fact that someone else knows it and will share in its keeping somehow lessens the weight. I suppose that’s why religious people go to confession. What an extraordinary ritual cleansing that must be. However, that’s not open to me and I don’t propose to change a lifetime’s non-belief for what to me would be a spurious comfort at the end. So I shall tell you. It will impose no burden on you and no distress, and I am speaking to Adam Dalgliesh the poet, not Adam Dalgliesh the detective.”

Dalgliesh said, “At the moment there can be no difference between them.”

“Not in your mind, Commander, but there can be in mine. And there’s another reason for speaking—not admirable, but, then, which of them is? I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to talk to a civilised man about something other than the state of my health. The first thing the staff or any visitor asks, and the last, is how I am feeling. That’s how I’m defined now, by sickness and mortality. No doubt you find it difficult to be polite when people insist on talking about your poetry.”

“I try to be gracious since they mean to be kind, but I hate it and it isn’t easy.”

“So I’ll keep off the poetry if you will keep off the state of my liver.”

He laughed, a high but harsh expelling of breath cut short. It sounded more like a cry of pain. Dalgliesh waited without speaking. Kershaw seemed to be gathering his strength, to be settling his skeletal form back more comfortably in his chair.