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it home.
    I’d made happy plans to hang the portrait in the drawing room: to stage a surprise unveiling for Father and my sisters. But my scheme was thwarted. Father had caught me smuggling the bulky painting into the house, taken it away from me, and removed it to his study.
    Next morning I had found it hanging in my laboratory.
    Why?
I wondered. Did Father find it too painful to look upon his blighted family?
    There was no doubt that he had loved—and still loved—Harriet, but it sometimes seemed that my sisters and I were no more to him than ever-present reminders of what he had lost. To Father we were, Daffy had once said, a three-headed Hydra, each one of our faces a misty mirror of his past.
    Daffy’s a romantic, but I knew what she meant: We were fleeting images of Harriet.
    Perhaps that was why Father spent his days and nights among his postage stamps: surrounded by thousands of companionable, comforting, unquestioning countenances, not one of which, like those of his daughters, mocked him from morning till night.
    I had thought about these things until my brains were turning blue, but I still didn’t know why my sisters hated me so much.
    Was Buckshaw some grim training academy into which I had been dumped by Fate to learn the laws of survival? Or was my life a game, whose rules I was supposed to guess?
    Was I required to deduce the secret ways in which they loved me?
    I could think of no other reason for my sisters’ cruelty.
    What had I ever done to them?
    Well, I had poisoned them, of course, but only in minor ways—and only in retaliation. I had never, or at least hardly ever, begun a row. I had always been the innocent—
    “No! Watch it! Watch it!”
    A scream went up outside the window—harsh at first, and agonized, then quickly cut off. I flew to the window and looked out to see what was happening.
    Workers were flocking round a figure that was pinned against the side of a lorry by an upended packing case.
    I knew by the red handkerchief at his neck that it was Patrick McNulty.
    Down the stairs I ran, through the empty kitchen and out onto the terrace, not even bothering to throw on a coat.
    Help was needed. No one among the ciné crew would know where to turn for assistance.
    “Keep back!” one of the drivers said, seizing me by the shoulders. “There’s been an accident.”
    I twisted away from him and pressed in for a closer look.
    McNulty was in a bad way. His face was the color of wet dough. His eyes, brimming with water, met mine, and his lips moved.
    “Help me,” I think he whispered.
    I put my first and fourth fingers into the corners of my mouth and blew a piercing whistle: a trick I had learned by watching Feely.
    “Dogger!” I shouted, followed by another whistle. I put my heart and soul into it, praying that Dogger was within earshot.
    Without taking his eyes from mine, McNulty let out a sickening gasp.
    Two of the men were heaving at the crate.
    “No!” I said, louder than I had intended. “Leave it.”
    I had heard on the wireless—or had I read it somewhere?—about an accident victim who had bled to death when a railway crane had been moved away too soon from his legs.
    To my surprise, the larger of the men nodded his head.
    “Hold on,” he said. “She’s right.”
    And then Dogger was there, pushing through the gathering crowd.
    The men fell back instinctively.
    There was an aura about Dogger that brooked no nonsense. It was not always in evidence—in fact, most of the time, it was not.
    But at this particular moment, I don’t think I had ever felt this power of his—whatever it was—so strongly.
    “Take my hand,” Dogger told McNulty, reaching between the lorry and the packing case, which was now teetering precariously.
    It seemed to me an odd—almost biblical—thing to do. Perhaps it was the calmness of his voice.
    McNulty’s bloodied fingers moved, and then entwined themselves with Dogger’s.
    “Not too hard,” Dogger told him. “You’ll crush my