She clung to the smooth porcelain bowl, fought for breath to redeem her, and vomited. It was as if she had never seen life clearly until the last two hours and, suddenly faced with its filth, she had to get away from it, had to get it out of her system.

In that dark, stifling room the voices had come to her relentlessly. Not just the voices of the sisters who had lived the nightmare, but the voices of her own past and of the nightmare that remained. It was too much. She could no longer live with it; she could no longer bear it.

I can’t, she sobbed inwardly. Tony, I can’t any longer! God forgive me, but I can’t!

Footsteps entered the room. She struggled to pull herself together but the illness continued and she knew she would have to endure the further humiliation of being mortally ill in front of the fashionable competence of Lady Helen Clyde.

Water was turned on. More footsteps. The stall door opened and a damp cloth was pressed to the back of her neck, folded quickly, and then wiped across her burning cheeks.

“Please. No! Go away!” She was sick again and, what was even more despicable, she began to cry. “I can’t!” she wept. “I can’t! Please. Please! Leave me alone!”

A cool hand pushed her hair off her face and supported her forehead. “Life’s rotten, Barb. And the hell of it is that it doesn’t get much better,” Lynley’s voice said.

Horrified, she spun around. But it was Lynley, and in his eyes the compassion she had seen before: in his treatment of Roberta, in his conversation with Bridie, in his questioning of Tessa. And she suddenly saw what it was that Webberly had known she could learn from Lynley-the source of his strength, the centre of what she knew quite well was tremendous personal courage. It was that quiet compassion, nothing else, that finally broke her.

“How could he?” she sobbed. “If it’s your child…you’re supposed to love, not hurt. Not let him die. Never let him die! And that’s what they did!” Her voice spiralled hysterically and all the time Lynley’s dark eyes were on her face. “I hate…I can’t…They were supposed to be there for him. He was their son! They were supposed to love him and they didn’t. He was sick for four years, the last year in hospital.

They wouldn’t even go to see him! They said they couldn’t bear it, that it hurt too much. But I went. I went every day. And he asked for them. He asked why Mum and Dad wouldn’t come to see him. And I lied. I went every day and I lied. And when he died, he was all alone. I was in school. I didn’t get there in time. He was my little brother! He was only ten years old! And all of us-all of us-let him die alone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lynley said.

“I swore that I would never let them forget what they’d done. I asked his teachers for the letters. I framed the death certificate. I made the shrine. I kept them in the house. I closed the doors and the windows. And every single day I made sure they had to sit there and stare at Tony. I drove them mad! I wanted to do it! I destroyed them. I destroyed myself!”

She put her head down on the porcelain and wept. She wept for the hate that had fi lled her life, for the guilt and the jealousy that had been her companions, for the loneliness that she had brought upon herself, for the contempt and disgust that she had directed towards others.

At the last, when Lynley wordlessly took her into his arms, she wept against his chest, mourning most of all the death of the friendship that could have lived between them.

Through the transom windows in Dr. Samuels’s orderly office, they could see the rose garden. It was designed in plots and descending terraces, the plants segregated by colour of flower and type. A few bushes still had blooms on them, despite the lateness of the year, the cold nights, the rare frost in the mornings. Soon, however, the heavy blossoms would die. Gardeners would cut the bushes back for a dormant winter. But they would renew themselves in the spring, and the circle of life would continue.

They watched the little party wander on the gravel paths among the plants. They were a study in contrasts: Gillian and her sister, Lady Helen and Sergeant Havers, and far behind them the two nurses, their forms hidden beneath the long capes they wore against the wind-blown afternoon.

Lynley turned from the sight and saw Dr. Samuels watching him thoughtfully from behind his desk, his intelligent face carefully devoid of expression.

“You knew she’d had a baby,” Lynley said. “From her admission physical, I should guess.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t trust you,” Samuels replied and added, “then. Whatever fragile bond I could hope to develop with Roberta by keeping that to myself was far more important than sharing the information with you and running the risk of your blurting it out to her.” He tempered his words. “It was, after all, privileged information.”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Lynley asked.

“They’re going to survive.”

“How can you know that?”

“They’re beginning to understand that they were his victims. That’s the fi rst step.” Samuels took off his spectacles and polished them on the interior of his jacket. His lean face was tired. He had heard it all before.

“I don’t understand how they survived this long.”

“They coped.”

“How?”

The doctor gave a final glance to his spectacles and put them back on. He adjusted their position carefully. He’d worn them for years, and deep, painful indentations had been created on either side of his nose from their pressure. “For Gillian it appears to have been what we call dissociation, a way of subdividing the self so that she could pretend to have or be those things which she couldn’t really have or couldn’t really be.”

“Such as?”

“Normal feelings, for one. Normal relationships for another. She called it being a mirror, just reflecting the behaviour of those round her. It’s a defence. It protected her from feeling anything about what was happening to her.”

“How?”

“She wasn’t a ‘real person,’ so nothing her father did could really touch or hurt her.”

“Everyone in the village describes her in an entirely different way.”

“Yes. That’s the behaviour. Gillian simply mirrored them. Taking it to its furthest extreme, it becomes multiple personalities, but she seems to have prevented that from occurring. In itself, that’s remarkable, considering what she went through.”

“What about Roberta?”

The psychiatrist frowned. “She didn’t cope as well as Gillian,” he admitted.

Lynley gave a last glance out the window and returned to his seat, a worn upholstered chair: resting place, no doubt, for hundreds of tormented psyches. “Is that why she ate?”

“As a way of escaping? No, I don’t think so. I’d say it was more an act of self-destruction.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The abused child feels he or she has done something wrong and is being punished for it. Roberta may well have eaten because the abuse led her to despise herself-her ‘wicked-ness’-and destroying her body was a scourging. That’s one explanation.” The doctor hesitated.

“And the other?”

“Hard to say. It could be that she tried to stop the abuse the only way she knew how. Short of suicide, what better way than to destroy her body, to make herself as un-Gillylike as possible. That way, her father wouldn’t want her sexually.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“Unfortunately, no. He merely turned to perversions to arouse himself, making her part of it. That would feed his need for power.”

“I feel as if I’d like to tear Teys apart,” Lynley said.

“I feel that way all the time,” the doctor responded.

“How could anyone…I don’t understand it.”

“It’s a deviant behaviour, a sickness. Teys was aroused by children. His marriage to a sixteen-year-old girl-not a voluptuous, womanly sixteen-year-old, but a late-maturing sixteen-year-old-would have been a glaring sign to anyone looking for aberrant behaviour. But he was able to mask it well with his devotion to religion and his persona of the strong, loving father. That’s so typical, Inspector Lynley. I can’t tell you how typical it is.”