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.