“The fate of The House is in the Glass,” she’d said, and put both my hands on it, then joined them together. And Flo had watched with obvious wonder.

Maybe, in that cryptic and oblique way she tackled everything, she was telling me that I had her official permission to use the Glass, that I was her chosen heir to its mysteries.

I got up, switched off the lights and sat down again at the table with my face the same distance from that faintly clouded sphere, just enough light coming in from outside to see. And I stared, fixed the focus of my vision on the inside of the crystal, and kept it there.

“The fate of The House is in the Glass.” Well, if it was, I didn’t have the wherewithal to see how, because after half an hour of gazing, gazing, gazing, I saw nothing that wasn’t already in the room. No visions, no faces, no anything.

I covered it and started to get ready for work.

This evening, as already said, I ate with Toby. We’d finished and I was putting stuff back in the fridge while he washed the few dishes, when the door bell rang. Toby dried his hands on the tea towel and went to answer it. Since Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s death, only Toby, Klaus or Jim took door duty. Without her to watch over it, The House was suddenly vulnerable.

He seemed to be gone a long time, so long in fact that I began to worry. Then I heard footsteps coming, his and another’s, the low murmur of two male voices.

“Dr. Forsythe wants to see you, Harriet,” Toby said, coming in first with scowling face. Oh, I wish he didn’t dislike Duncan!

Who walked in with the aloof expression doctors can assume like an extra garment. I got a nod, a slight smile, but no blaze of feeling from his eyes.

I invited him to sit down, with a glare for Toby, who ignored it and remained standing by the door.

“No, I can’t stay, thank you. As you probably know,” he went on in his best clinical manner, “there is some gossip circulating through Queens about us.” When my mouth opened, he waved it shut. “Because of it, one of the registrars in the Psych Pavilion came to see me today to ask me about my Harriet Purcell. He’d seen the name on a police report and a Child Welfare report, and he wanted to know if the Harriet Purcell of the gossip could possibly be the same Harriet Purcell. I asked him why he chose to approach me instead of you, and he said he thought it unwise until he had verification from”—a tiny, wry smile—”a sensible man.”

“Flo,” I said as he paused. “It’s Flo.”

“She’s in the Psych Pavilion, Harriet, admitted there two days ago from a Child Welfare centre.”

My knees stopped working, I sat down in a hurry and stared up at him. “What’s the matter with her, Duncan?”

“He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. His name is Prendergast, John Prendergast, and he said to tell you that he’d be in Psych all day tomorrow. He’s very anxious to interview you.”

Tears started pouring down my face, the first I’d shed since they took my angel away. Maybe if Duncan hadn’t been hampered by Toby’s presence, or Toby by Duncan’s presence, they might have attempted to comfort me. As it was, when I covered my face with my hands and wept harder, they left me to it.

Just before the door closed, I heard Toby say to Duncan, “Isn’t it a pisser that she doesn’t love either of us a tenth as much as she does that child?”

Angel, angel, you’re on your way home! Now that I’ve found you, nothing will keep us apart. Child Welfare have put you on my turf, which is a lot closer to home than Yasmar.

Tuesday,

February 21st, 1961

It’s pretty new for general hospitals to have psychiatric wards. Only the big teaching hospitals do, and the inmates are not the poor sad chronic epileptics, tertiary syphilitics, senile and other dementias of places like Callan Park and Gladesville. They’re all patients whose symptoms are not so firmly based in organic brain damage—schizophrenics and manic depressives in the main, though I’m not very up on psychiatry. When I was doing routine chests I’d get an occasional girl with anorexia nervosa, but that was about it.

So the Psych Pavilion is a new building, the only one not clad in glass with aluminium framing. It’s very solid red brick with few windows, and what windows there are have bars. There’s a huge steel double door around the back for servicing, but apart from it, the place has just one door, another steel affair with an inch-thick glass panel in it, reinforced with steel webbing. When I got to it just after four o’clock, I saw that it had two separate locks with the insides on the outside. So I had no trouble getting in, all I had to do was turn both knobs simultaneously, but the moment the door closed after me, I saw that in order to get out, I’d need two different keys. A bit like a jail, I suppose.

It’s air-conditioned and very nicely decorated. How on earth had they prevailed upon Matron to let them run riot with brilliant colours and fabrics? That’s easy to answer. The whole world, even Matron, retreats before Mania. All our defences cannot cope with those who suffer disorders of reason because you can’t reason with them. It’s a very frightening thought. The four floors are neatly split. Labs and offices on the ground, male patients on one, female patients on two, and child patients up the top on three. The receptionist buzzed Dr. John Prendergast and told me to take the lift all the way up to the third floor, where he’d meet me.

A big teddy bear of a man, curly brown hair, grey eyes, the build of a Rugby player. He ushered me into his office, seated me and went behind his desk, which always disadvantages the visitor. Even as we went through the pleasantries, I realised that he’s a cunning bastard. Deceptively mild and dopey. Well, you don’t fool me, I thought. I’m not only sane, I’m smart. You’ll get no ammo from me that might explode in my face.

“So to Florence—Flo, you call her?” he asked.

“Flo is what her mother called her. As far as I know, Flo is her proper name. Florence is a Child Welfare presumption.”

“You don’t like Child Welfare,” he said, not a question.

“I have no reason to like Child Welfare, sir.”

“The reports say the child was neglected. Was she abused too?”

“Flo was neither neglected nor abused!” I snapped. “She was her mother’s angel and the recipient of enormous love. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz may not have been an orthodox mother, but she was a very caring one. Flo isn’t your average child, either.”

After that outburst I forced myself to be calm, self-possessed, alert. I told Prendergast what kind of life Flo had led, about the lack of interest in material comforts, about her mother’s brain tumour and odd physical appearance, about Flo’s arrival on the dunny floor during a tummy ache, about the doctor who had prescribed the hormone which had resulted in Flo.

“Why has Flo been admitted to Queens?” I asked.

“Suspicion of derangement.”

“You surely don’t believe that!” I gasped.

“I’m not making any judgements of any kind, Miss Purcell. I think it’s going to be weeks before we have the slightest idea what Flo’s problems are—how much of her present state is due to what she witnessed, how much of it has always been there. Does she talk?”

“Never, sir, in anyone’s hearing, though her mother insisted that she does talk. I’ve discovered that the reading centres in her brain are either badly impaired or simply not there.”

“What kind of child is she?” he asked curiously.

“Hypersensitive to emotion in others, extremely intelligent, very sweet and gentle. She was so afraid of her mother’s murderer that she’d bolt under the couch even before he appeared, though no one else except me considered him dangerous.”

And so it went, on and on and on, a bit like a fencing match. He knew I wasn’t telling him everything, I knew he was trying to trap me. Impasse.