“Toby!” I gasped.

“Pappy, take Flo and Marceline into the bedroom,” Toby said, and watched until she’d obeyed orders.

Then he took my hands, sat me in an easy chair and perched on its arm just the way Duncan used to. Used to. Past tense, Harriet, past tense.

“He can’t have meant that,” I said.

I’ve never seen Toby so stern, so merciless, so cold.

“Yes, Harriet, he did. He meant that Flo is probably without kith or kin. That her mother died in what he presumes was a drunken brawl with her nutty lover, who was not Flo’s father. That he personally believes Flo is a grossly neglected child from a very bad home. That he also believes Flo is queer in the head. And that, as soon as he gets back to headquarters, he’s going to tell Child Welfare all of it, and recommend that Flo is taken into State custody as of this moment.”

“He can’t, he can’t!” I cried. “Flo couldn’t survive outside The House! If they take her away, she’ll die!”

“You’ve forgotten the most important factor, Harriet. Flo was there in that room when it all happened, and she used the blood to scribble on the wall. That’s an indictment,” Toby said harshly.

My beloved friend, to talk like this? Is there no one to take up the cudgels in her defence except me? “Toby, Flo is just five years old!” I said. “What would you or I have done at that age, in those circumstances? Be fair! There aren’t any neat statistics to govern such things! All her life she’s been allowed to scribble on her mother’s walls. Who knows why she used the blood? Maybe she thought it would bring her mother back to life. They can’t take Flo away from me, they can’t!”

“They can, and they will,” Toby said grimly, and went to the stove to put the kettle on. “Harriet, I’m playing the Devil’s advocate, that’s all. I agree with you that Flo can’t thrive away from The House, but no one in authority is going to see it in that light. Now go and get Pappy and Flo. If you won’t drink brandy, tea’s the next best thing.”

They took Flo away from me about noon, two women from Child Welfare. Decent enough women—it’s an awful job. Flo refused to co-operate in any way, even after I suggested that they call her Flo, not Florence. I’m willing to bet that Flo is what her birth certificate says—if she has one. Knowing Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, Flo mightn’t. Angel, angel. She wouldn’t let either of the women put a hand on her, nor did she waver as the pair of them coaxed, cajoled, persuaded, pleaded. All Flo did was hang onto me like grim death and press her face into my lap. In the end they decided to sedate her with chloral hydrate, but she vomited it up every time they tried, even when they pinched her nose.

Jim and Bob had come down by this, though I wished they hadn’t. The woman in charge looked them up and down as if they were scum, made another black mark in her book about The House, which only had one proper bathroom and toilet to serve four floors. And why was Flo barefooted? Didn’t she have shoes? That seemed to worry both of the invaders a lot. When, after the fourth lot of chloral hydrate, Flo left my protection and ran about the room like a bird that’s flown inside and can’t get out, crashing into the walls, the stove, the furniture, I did my block and went for Child Welfare with my fists. But Toby grabbed me, forced me and Jim to stay out of it.

Eventually they decided to give her an injection of paraldehyde, which never fails to work. Flo collapsed, they picked her up and carried her out with me trailing them, Toby hanging onto me.

“How will I find her?” I asked outside.

“Telephone Child Welfare” was the answer.

They loaded her into their car, and the last I saw of my angel was her still, wee white face as they drove away.

All of them wanted to stay and keep me company, but I didn’t want company, least of all Toby’s, the most persistent. I shrieked at him to go away! go away! until he went. Pappy crept in a little while later to tell me that Klaus, Lerner Chusovich and Joe Dwyer from the Piccadilly bottle department were upstairs in Klaus’s room, wanted to know how I was, what they could do to help. Thank you, I am all right, I don’t need anything, I said. My nose was still full of the sweet, sickly smell of paraldehyde.

About three I went into the bedroom to phone Bronte. Mum and Dad would have to be told before the story appeared in the papers, though I suppose a drunken murder and suicide at Kings Cross on New Year’s Eve wouldn’t rate more than a small paragraph ten pages in. When I lifted the receiver I discovered that the phone was dead—it had been pulled out of the jack on the skirting board. Toby when he put me to bed last night, probably. The moment I plugged it in, it started to ring.

“Harriet, where have you been?” Dad asked. “We’re frantic!”

“I’ve been here all along,” I said. “Someone disconnected my phone. Though it sounds as if you already know about it.”

“Come home now” was all he said—a command, not a request.

I told Pappy where I was going, and hailed a taxi on Victoria Street. The driver gave me a queer look, but didn’t say a word.

Mum and Dad were at the dining table, alone. Mum looked as if she’d been crying for hours, Dad suddenly looked his age—my heart twisted because I could see he’s almost eighty years old.

“I’m glad I don’t have to tell you,” I said, sitting down.

They were both staring at me as if at a stranger; it’s only now, writing this, that I realise I must have looked as if I’d broken free of a coffin. Horror does that.

“Don’t you want to know how we know?” Dad asked then.

“Yes, how do you know?” I asked dutifully.

Dad took a letter from its envelope, handed it to me. I took it and read it. Beautiful copperplate handwriting, absolutely straight across the unlined, expensive paper with professionally torn edges. The script and stationery of someone ultra-genteel.

“Sir,

“Your daughter is a whore. A common, vulgar trollop unfit to inhabit this world, but not welcome in the next.

“For the past eight months she has been carrying on a sordid sexual affair with a married man, a famous doctor at her hospital. She seduced him, I saw her do it on Victoria Street in the dark. How she led him on! How she paraded her charms! How she wormed her way into his life and affections! How she cheapened him! How she brought him down to her own level and rejoiced! But a decent man can’t satisfy her. She is a Lesbian, a valued member of that society of filthy deviants who inhabit her house. The doctor’s name is Mr. Duncan Forsythe.

“A Concerned Citizen.”

“Harold,” I said, and put the paper down as if it burned.

“I gather the allegations are true,” Dad said.

I smiled, closed my eyes. “Just for a while, Dad. I sent Duncan packing last September, actually, and I can assure you that I’m not a Lesbian, though I do have many Lesbian friends. They’re good people. A lot better than the awful little man who wrote this. When did it come?” I asked.

“In yesterday afternoon’s post.” Dad was frowning. He’s no fool, he understood that the way I looked today had nothing to do with an affair over and done with four months ago. “What is the matter, if it isn’t this?” he asked.

So I told them about today. Mum was appalled, wept afresh, but Dad—Dad was devastated. Rocked to his foundations. What had he felt for Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz in that one meeting, to grieve so for her? He kept gasping, squeezing at his heart, until Mum got up and gave him a big nip of Willie’s brandy. That put him a little at ease, but it was a long time before I could tell him what I had to tell him, that I was going for custody of Flo. Maybe his profound reaction to the news of my landlady’s death had encouraged me to hope he’d be right on my side, but he wasn’t.

“Get custody of that freak of a child?” he cried, his voice rising. “Harriet, you can’t do that! You’re well out of it, and well out of that house! The best thing you can do is come home.”