“And what good do you think they’re going to do?” she demanded, spinning around to face him, eyes swimming in tears, skin blotched with heated emotions. “Whatever that verminous toad has to say it isn’t going to heal her . . .”

“It could help her to understand why it happened and—”

“We know why, Dan. He was paid to do it; he’s already admitted that. He took money to harm people he doesn’t even know. He didn’t give a damn about us. All that mattered to him was his payday. So, unless he tells us who was behind it . . . Has he? Is it in his letters?”

Dan shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“So, what the hell is the point of them?”

He dropped his head for a moment, pushing his glasses up his nose as he gathered his words. “I asked him to tell Marcy—and you—about himself,” he explained. “I thought it was important for him to try and put across to you a sense of who he is and what’s made him the person he’s grown into.”

“And why the hell would we care about that?”

“It’s not so much about caring as understanding that he is a person, a victim, if you like, of his own circumstances, just as you are of yours. He hasn’t experienced any of the privileges or benefits that people like you and I take for granted. He’s struggled in more ways than even I know, or probably want to know. In spite of being exploited from a very young age he tried to get an education, to lead a normal life, but living where he does in the kind of environment that shuns traditional learning, authority, all the norms . . .”

“Spare me the sob story. He’s a cliché . . .”

“Come on, you can do better than that.”

Maybe she could, but maybe she didn’t want to. “If you’re trying to make me feel sorry for him,” she snapped, “then it’s not going to happen.”

“That’s not what I’m asking, nor am I trying to make excuses for him. What he did has caused immense harm to you and your family, no one is ever going to deny that, least of all me—or him. My aim here is to try and help you to understand that all the rage and hatred you feel toward him is more damaging to you than it is to him. In your different ways you and your mother are still suffering profoundly; most of it is locked up inside you and that’s making it worse. You only have to look at your mother and see the way she is . . .”

Claudia turned her head abruptly away.