Rachaela sat down facing him. ‘Stephan, what Ruth did was terrible. Can’t you see that she’s psychotic? To lock her up in your attic will solve nothing.’ Stephan watched the phantom of the fire. ‘She needs attention. She needs a hospital.’

‘Anna,’ Stephan said.

‘Anna can’t be helped. Let me help Ruth.’

‘We have our own ways.’

‘Ruth isn’t yours. She’s mine.’

‘Ruth is ours.’

The bodies lay in their bedrooms, Peter and Dorian together on one bed. Soon, when the tide turned, they would be taken to the beach. Burned. So much Stephan had told her.

‘You must listen to me, Stephan.’

‘Oh, Anna,’ he said.

Rachaela got up and went to her room.

She sat listening to the sea, trying to hear the moment when it changed.

It had happened.

Ruth would hate Adamus now. And he was finished with Ruth. So much passion between them. More than there had been between Adamus and herself.

But she must get Ruth away. Now it was possible. Only the locked attic door to prevent it.

Why? Why must she rescue Ruth?

Ruth was the demon Rachaela had always envisaged.

Better to wash her hands of Ruth and all that blood.

But something would not let her.

After all there was some bond between them. Like the umbilical cord, unsevered. No love, never that. But... something.

She could not leave Ruth to the Scarabae.

The tide, surely the tide had turned now.

She listened, no longer for the tide, but for the minute noises of the Scarabae as they went down to the cremation of their dead. Like beetles in the woodwork, creeping. She heard them go, or did she imagine it.

Finally she went out, and from the landing she saw them, filing into the lower rooms, in their summer clothes, as if to a midnight garden-party.

What a bonfire there would be on the beach.

Had Adamus gone with them?

Rachaela turned and went into the left-hand corridor.

When she reached the foot of the stairs she expected one of them after all left on guard, but no one was there.

She climbed to the attic door. It was firmly closed. The lock must be more hardy than that to the room of gowns or they would not have trusted it.

She tried the door. It shook and did not give.

Rachaela stood there at a loss.

What should she say, to an eleven-year-old murderess who had killed four times over?

‘Ruth—Ruth? It’s me. Ruth, answer me.’

A bell of silence formed, in which Rachaela seemed to hear dim bat-like squeaks, the rush of sparks in a great fire miles away.

‘Ruth.’

A voice answered from beyond the door.

‘Hallo, Mummy.’

It was calm and still, the voice, muffled by the swollen lips, and very young. It was a child’s voice.

‘Ruth. Are you afraid?’

‘No,’ said the voice. And then, solemnly, ‘Yes.’

‘Did they leave you a light?’

‘Oh yes. They left me candles.’

‘Be very careful with them,’ said Rachaela.