Mr and Mrs Tanner must have known about Sebastian’s background, if indeed he was adopted. It seemed to have involved considerable physical abuse, similar to the torment that Karen had described to Olivia when she first told her about Keith. If the Tanners were adoptive parents, they must have been naively or morbidly or courageously drawn to such an extreme situation, but whatever their level of motivation and awareness, they had not been competent to deal with the highly traumatised child they adopted. Martin felt that in some way, by being so difficult, Sebastian might have become an unconscious punishment for the sterility of one or both of the parents. Perhaps they had adopted a traumatised child because of the trauma of spending years trying unsuccessfully to have a child of their own. Instead of making up for their failure, Sebastian summarised it. They were not necessarily bad people, in fact they must have been ambitiously good people, to have adopted a child of nearly two from such a troubled background, and then celebrated his martyrdom by renaming him. If he was Karen’s son and if she had been telling Olivia the truth when she said she had put him up for adoption at eighteen months, Sebastian must also have been kept in a holding pen of social services for nearly six months.

What was he doing? This was all speculation, and yet he found himself so disturbed by the possibility that he had been unknowingly treating his daughter’s brother that he was tempted to break his own rules and ring the halfway house, or the adoption agency, or one of the psychiatric hospitals Sebastian had been admitted to, and see if he could find out the facts of the case. He gazed at the phone on his desk for a while and then drew back. He couldn’t abandon Sebastian, whatever family he had been born into, and he had a professional obligation not to disclose his suspicions to Olivia, so there was no immediate conflict, but he would certainly have to think about the ethical ramifications when he had time, and disentangle whatever counter-transference might have been triggered by the subject of adoption. For now, though, he had to clear his mind and prepare for his next patient.

14

‘Lord have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us,’ muttered Father Guido, his small eyes tightly shut and his knuckles white from the tension of gripping the armrests. The Cardinal had insisted that he fly directly from Rome to Nice, despite Father Guido’s admission that he had never flown before and had a mortal dread of travelling by plane.

‘Think of it as a just punishment for your incompetence, and a test of your faith,’ said Cardinal Lagerfeld. ‘This is the most flagrant case of mystical espionage that has ever come to my attention.’