AS HAL OLIVER-MORTIMER let them in, Rafferty again noted the confident way he walked. This was not a man bowed by age or sin, was Rafferty’s firm opinion. All his years and his sins looked lightly borne. Guilt for all the fatherless children that Mary Soames mentioned he had left in his wake had left few tracks on his forehead. In fact, unlike the rest of his face, his forehead was strangely unmarked by the passage of time or sin: those marks, those sins, had been borne by others.
Blithely must he have passed through his life and the lives of others, Rafferty thought, not even noticing the damage he left behind. The man might be a wraith—a spirit who touched the lives of many, but who was himself untouched.
Rafferty wasn’t sure whether to feel sad at the shallow emptiness of Harry Mortim
