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museums (Bascom), or whether to go swimming as the main activity on a Saturday (Sorrel) or to the library (Bascom), or whether to fill the house with cute, furry pets (Sorrel) or have no pets at all, not even a goldfish (Bascom). When Lisette, Allisande and Perrine visited their friends’ houses, they noticed at once that there was not always a “No, this / No, that” debate going on. Many of their friends’ parents hardly spoke at all.
    Lisette, Allisande and Perrine had been brought up very differently from their friends. Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey couldn’t agree about anything, as I have explained above, and this included how to bring up a child. Bascom firmly believed that children need fixed routines and strict rules if they are going to grow up to become civilized people. If you let a child do what it wants, he thought, it will never learn virtues like hard work, obedience and self-discipline. Also, if you let children eat what they want, and sleep when they want, they will end up exhausted all the time with greasy spotty faces. Grown-ups, he believed, must impose their will on children.
    Sorrel (you will not be surprised to discover) strongly disagreed. She thought that parents who insisted on routines and tried to control what their children did were neurotic loons whose offspring would probably end up hating them while struggling to shake off anxiety disorders. Sorrel thought that as long as you loved your children, fed them (whatever they want to eat, especially crisps!) and provided a happy and secure home for them (even a really messy one), everything would work out okay. But when she tried to say this to Bascom, he always contradicted her and said, “That’s all very well if you want to bring up a troop of gamblers and jazz musicians. I’m afraid I don’t.” Sorrel laughed at him when he said things like that.
    Do you remember I mentioned that Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey were brilliant at compromising? Well, this is how they solved the dilemma of how to bring up their children. “Let’s have two,” Sorrel suggested. “We’ll bring up the first one your way. I will help, even though I think your way is crazy. And then we’ll bring up the second one my way, and you will participate enthusiastically even though you disapprove.”
    Bascom agreed, but he made another suggestion too. “What would be really fascinating,” he said, “is if we then had a third child, and brought it up using a blend of our two approaches—exactly half and half.” Sorrel liked this idea. “It would be so useful to be a family of five instead of a family of four,” she said. “Just in case the your-way child always agreed with you about everything, and the my-way child always agreed with me, the both-ways child could have the casting vote.” “Only when it’s eighteen and old enough to vote,” Bascom pointed out. “Oh, don’t be so stuffy!” Sorrel teased him. “As soon as he’s old enough to voice his wants, he can have a vote.”
    But the third Ingrey child, as we know, was not a “he.” She was Perrine the murderer.
    Lisette and Allisande came first, of course. Lisette had a strict timetable, set by Bascom, which she followed from the day she was born. Sleeping, eating, music lessons, reading, homework, physical exercise, helping with housework—Bascom had made a special chart with boxes for all the time slots in the day, and he wrote in each one which activity Lisette was supposed to do between these times. Allisande had no such routine. From the minute she was born, she was allowed to mill around doing whatever she wanted. She could watch TV all day long if she fancied it, and no one ever told her to do her maths homework, practice the piano or finish her green vegetables when all she wanted was a chocolate Mini Roll. Allisande could have crammed a whole packet of Mini Rolls into her mouth while lolling around in her pajamas at six o’clock in the evening if she’d wanted to—neither of her parents