“No. I never forgot it. And before you ask, I’m interested in neither money nor notoriety. In fact, I would prefer it if you kept my name out of the papers.”

“Anonymity is guaranteed in cases like this,” said Banks.

“Even if I had to . . . you know . . . testify in court?”

“Even then. There are special protocols in place to deal with this matter in the courts and so on. And you can’t be cross-examined by your alleged attacker.”

“Thank you.” She paused a moment. “May I ask you if any others have come forward?”

“It’s early days yet,” Banks said, “but yes, there are others. Believe me, you’re not alone.”

A blackbird sang in the garden next door and bees hummed and crawled inside the foxgloves and fuchsias, legs fat with pollen. The sound of the river was a constant background, threaded with the Beethoven Pastoral.

“It’s something I never thought about back then, when it happened,” Linda said. “That there would be others, that he would have done the same thing to someone else.”

“You were fourteen,” Banks said. “Hard to be anything other than the center of the universe at that age.”

Linda managed a sad smile. “I did report it to the police at the time, you know.”

“Do you remember who you spoke to?”

“I can’t remember his name,” said Linda. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone, not even my mum. I was frightened, and I was ashamed. But I’d been unable to sleep, I was off my food, just not myself at all, not functioning well, and mother was desperate with worry. She even took me to the doctor’s. She kept on pushing me, and finally I told her what happened.”

“But not your father?”

She hesitated. “No. He . . . he wouldn’t have handled it well. I know it would have come out eventually if . . . well . . . but at the time, no.”

“Did the doctor examine you?”

“No. He just said I was run-down and needed a tonic.”

“How was the policeman? I mean, how did he treat you?”

“Sympathetic, nice enough, but I’m not sure he believed me.”

“Oh?”

“Just his tone. It was difficult, him being a man, like it would have been for my father. Hard to talk about what happened. He seemed more embarrassed than anything else. And that office. It was like the headmaster’s study where you went for the cane.”

Banks smiled. He could imagine it had been difficult. These days, if something like that had just happened to her, she would have been talking to a sympathetic woman in a special room with Muzak and subdued lighting. Candles, probably. Maybe even the Pastoral Symphony. “I doubt you were down for the cane all that often.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised.”