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charges were considered, and the authorities accepted my proposal and remanded her to my care.’
    ‘Hold on a minute,’ interceded a frowning Kate, ‘I’m a bit confused.  If she wasn’t able to make a statement, why was she suspected of anything?’
    ‘The circumstances were pretty conclusive, if I remember correctly.  I told you her mother died in a fire at their home in Foxrock, just over a year ago.  The police found Grainne wandering aimlessly about in the garden, wildly agitated and completely incoherent, wearing only a dressing gown soaked with petrol.  She also had a box of matches in her pocket, though as she’s a smoker that doesn’t mean much.  Anyway, the house was totally destroyed and investigators quickly established that it was arson, so suspicion obviously fell on her.  Apart from the fact that she was cataclysmically stoned she already had a history of drug abuse and aberrant behavior.  To be honest I think the fire was probably a suicide attempt that went wrong, or even an accident, rather than deliberate murder.’
    ‘Were there no witnesses to the fire?’
    He shook his head, ‘The two of them were alone in the house.  It was a neighbor who phoned the fire brigade.  She’s an only child and Riordan himself only got home after the blaze was pretty well out.  Apparently he was at his club.’
    He said this with a touch of disdain, which Kate ignored, knowing that he believed parents should entirely subsume their lives into those of their children until they reached adulthood.  Instead she asked, ‘So what’s happened since she arrived here?’
    ‘I told you; after she physically recovered, and started showing some early signs of mental recovery, I conducted several interviews with her myself before passing her on to Sarah.  We learned a lot more from Sarah’s sessions than mine, but even so we’d hardly scratched the surface when Sarah left.  It’s immensely difficult to talk to Grainne, to snap her out of whatever make-believe existence she’s hiding in from day to day, but whenever she came into the real world long enough to discuss such matters she expressed terrible remorse for the death of her mother.  Thinking about this would then drive her back into fantasy, or into wild, paranoid rages.  She seems to have detached herself totally from reality and moved into a fantasy world of her own making, presumably to protect herself from the shock and guilt of her mother’s death.  I have to say I’ve never seen such extreme disassociation before; most of the time she has no links at all with the real world.  For quite some time she regressed in her own mind to the age of four or five, and refused to discuss anything that happened to her after that age.’
    Kate pursed her lips, already fascinated and feeling a strong desire to meet the girl who might become her first patient in so long.  In to o long, perhaps.  But would she be able to help someone as damaged as Grainne sounded? ‘What treatment was she given?’
    ‘We haven’t tried any chemical therapy yet, just sedation.  She’s been here over a year and Sarah tried every test in the book on her , both mental and physical, without finding any trace of clinical illness.  M.M.P.I., GAF, DSM; everything.  The only useful tests were the Rorschach and the T.A.T., which revealed extreme stress and fear of personal danger from unknown, malevolent figures.  And her dreams are unbelievable; full of sex and violence and death.  In all these dreams she’s the target of rapacious predators.  Such powerful, repetitive dreams can obviously be very revealing, but without more data they could have too many different meanings to be of any practical use to us right now.  Sarah became convinced that Grainne had no clinical illness, that she detached herself from reality as the result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by her mother’s death.  So she reduced her sedation to the bare minimum necessary to keep her calm