They had called him in from the prison garden as soon as I arrived. Now he sat facing me across the stained wooden table in that drab visitors' room with its faded cushion covers and its out-of-date magazines. He looked almost as I remembered him, which surprised me, after everything that had happened. He wore a long navy-blue gardener's apron, just like the one he had worn as gardener at the Grange.
His hands, resting lightly clasped on the table, were as powerful as ever. They made me shiver as I remembered what I had seen them do. Once they had picked up five small kittens. I had watched hirn put them in a sack, then calmly drop the sack into a tank of water. Those hands had held the sack under water until the bubbles stopped. He had smiled his strange smile and said, 'Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.' But he looked as if he had enjoyed it.