“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also”

“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also” is a line in James Carew’s suicide note that John Rebus later recalls. Its movement between Carew’s carefully fashioned statement and Rebus’s exhausted thoughts makes it a compact refrain for the novel’s entanglement of culpability and suffering.

The Line in Carew’s Note

John Rebus reads the sentence in James Carew’s bedroom after Anthony McCall hands him the note. The document is written in elegant handwriting with a proper nib pen on thick, watermarked paper. Yet its refinement is unsettled by visible signs of fear: some letters tremble, and words have been crossed out and attempted again. Against these traces of agitation, the line sounds composed and formal.

Rebus wonders whether the sentence is a quotation. It strikes him as unusually prolix for a suicide note, but he imagines James Carew revising draft after draft until the wording was exact, something that could stand as a monument. The note also includes a sentence addressed, Rebus feels, directly to him, as if James Carew were saying something only he could fully understand. Anthony McCall calls it a funny sort of note; Rebus agrees, without resolving what the line’s source or full meaning might be.

Recalled Amid the Investigation

Later, as dawn approaches, John Rebus drives back to Marchmont after stopping at an all-night bakery for warm rolls and refrigerated milk. He thinks again of James Carew’s words, but now the sentence is set among a succession of images from the case: Tommy McCall and Anthony McCall together, James Carew dead in his bed, Nell Stapleton’s bruised face, Ronnie McGrath’s battered body, Matthew Vanderhyde’s unseeing eyes, Calum McCallum’s frightened expression, and Tracy.

The recollection changes the line’s emphasis. In Carew’s note, suffering accompanies the claim to sin; in Rebus’s thoughts, the words return amid a crowded record of other people’s pain and the investigation’s unresolved connections. Rebus remembers that James Carew had taken the line from somewhere, but decides that tracing its source would be only another thread in an already tangled case. The refrain offers no solution; its recurrence marks how the case’s moral and human costs remain with him as he tries to get home and sleep.

Function and Significance

The sentence binds two distinct moments without making their meanings identical. James Carew gives it a deliberate, almost monumental place in a note whose polished form bears signs of fear, while John Rebus recalls it in the midst of fatigue and accumulated images of suffering. The gap between composed inscription and involuntary return gives the expression its force: it can be read as Carew’s self-presentation, yet it also persists beyond him as one more unresolved clue in Rebus’s mind.