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her his baby, said he was there now, he had come home, he would never leave her. Even at that moment he was able to tell her that all would be well, he would keep her safe for ever. But she couldn't answer him, only turn to his a frozen face and eyes which, he later said, had grown to twice their size. The psychologists got to work on her. Not Julia, not then. Later on, she understood how careful and caring they had been. The police had, too. No one had pressed her. No one had shown the least impatience with her. The psychologists had given her dolls to play with and in after years she understood this had been in the hope she would act out, in her play, the events of that evening. There was a man doll and a lady doll and a little girl doll. Francine had never been a doll person. 'She doesn't like dolls,' Richard Hill told them, 'she never has.' But dolls were the recognised tool whereby children revealed themselves and their experiences to psychologists. If they had given her toy rabbits or dogs she might have acted something out with them, but they never did. Sometimes the police came and talked to her. The women officers were the kindest, gentlest people she had ever known, so kind and gentle that they made her suspicious. She understood why they questioned her. They wanted to catch the man who killed her mother. She couldn't talk to them, she couldn't write much more than her name or read more than simple words, so there was little communication. But it wasn't for years that she found out they had suspected her father. For two days they believed Richard Hill might be responsible for the murder. He was the dead woman's husband. It was family members who were usually responsible for family murders. The police questioned him and treated him warily. Then he was cleared. Two men, one of them a stranger, came forward and said they had been in the train from Waterloo with him from six o'clock until twenty-five-past. 'I think you know Mr Grainger,' the Detective Inspector said to him. 'You saw him on the train and he has come forward and said he saw you. 'I asked him how his wife was,' Richard said. 'His wife had been ill.' 'Yes, he has told us that. Unprompted, I may add. He said hallo to you and you asked after his wife. The other man is Mr David Stanark. He knows you by sight.' I don't know him.' Detective Inspector Wallis ignored this. 'He came forward of his own volition to say he was on the train and that he saw you on the train.' Years later, because she asked, Richard told Francine all this. He told Julia what David Stanark had done for him. 'He saved my life.' 'Not your life, darling,' said Julia. 'Well, my liberty then.' 'The reality is that he just saved you from a few days' serious awkwardness, isn't it?' Julia was always saving what the reality was. After Richard's life and liberty were saved there came a limbo time. It was a time of silence and stillness. Francine no longer went to school and Richard didn't go to work. They were together all the time, day and night. He moved her bed into his bedroom, he read to her, he never left her. 'What else could he do for her? He would do anything. For a while, compensating her was his whole life. He bought her a kitten, a white Persian, and for a while that helped her, cuddling the kitten and watching it play so that she was even seen to smile a little. But one day the kitten caught a bird and brought it to her as a gift, laying it at her feet. The dead bird had dark feathers and blood dripped from it, so that she shivered and stared, clenching and unclenching her hands. A good home was found for the kitten, it was the only way. No one wanted to buy the house, though it was a beautiful place, a 'gentleman's' cottage, nearly three centuries old. Potential buyers hardly seemed to notice the lattice windows or the pretty garden, the green and gold and red Virginia creeper which half veiled its gables or that the house was in the country yet only thirty miles from London. They knew