“Did Jimmy visit you where you’ve been staying?” Strike asked.

Billy chewed his lip.

“Yeah,” he said at last, “and he said I had to stay there or I’d cock everything up for him again. I thought the door had explosives round it,” he said, with a nervy laugh. “Thought if I tried to go out the door I’d explode. Probably not right, is it?” he said, appearing to search Strike’s expression for a clue. “I get ideas about stuff sometimes, when I’m bad.”

“Can you remember how you got away from the place you were being kept?”

“I thought they switched off the explosives,” said Billy. “The guy told me to run for it and I did.”

“What guy was this?”

“The one who was in charge of keeping me there.”

“Can you remember anything you did while you were being kept captive?” Strike asked. “How you spent your time?”

The other shook his head.

“Can you remember,” said Strike, “carving anything, into wood?”

Billy’s gaze was full of fear and wonder. Then he laughed.

“You know it all,” he said, and held up his bandaged left hand. “Knife slipped. Went right in me.”

The male psychiatrist added helpfully:

“Billy had tetanus when he came in. There was a very nasty infected gash on that hand.”

“What did you carve into the door, Billy?”

“I really did that, then, did I? Carved the white horse on the door? Because afterwards I didn’t know if I really did that or not.”

“Yeah, you did it,” said Strike. “I’ve seen the door. It was a good carving.”

“Yeah,” said Billy, “well, I used to—do some of that. Carving. For my dad.”

“What did you carve the horse onto?”

“Pendants,” said Billy, surprisingly. “On little circles of wood with leather through ’em. For tourists. Sold them in a shop over in Wantage.”

“Billy,” said Strike, “can you remember how you ended up in that bathroom? Did you go there to see someone, or did somebody take you there?”

Billy’s eyes roamed around the pink walls again, a deep furrow between his eyes as he thought.

“I was looking for a man called Winner… no…”

“Winn? Geraint Winn?”

“Yeah,” said Billy, again surveying Strike with astonishment. “You know everything. How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Strike. “What made you want to find Winn?”

“Heard Jimmy talking about him,” said Billy, gnawing at his nail again. “Jimmy said Winn was going to help find out all about the kid who was killed.”

“Winn was going to help find out about the child who was strangled?”

“Yeah,” said Billy, nervously. “See, I thought you were one of the people trying to catch me and lock me up, after I saw you. Thought you were trying to trap me and—I get like that, when I’m bad,” he said hopelessly. “So I went to Winner—Winn—instead. Jimmy had a phone number and address for him written down, so I went to find Winn and then I got caught.”

“Caught?”

“By the—brown-skinned bloke,” mumbled Billy, with a half-glance back at the female psychiatrist. “I was scared of him, I thought he was a terrorist and he was going to kill me, but then he told me he was working for the government, so I thought the government wanted me kept there in his house and the doors and windows were wired with explosives… but I don’t think they were, really. That was just me. He probably didn’t want me in his bathroom. Probably wanted to get rid of me all along,” said Billy, with a sad smile. “And I wouldn’t go, because I thought I’d get blown up.”

His right hand crept absently back to his nose and chest.

“I think I tried to call you again, but you didn’t answer.”

“You did call. You left a message on my answering machine.”

“Did I? Yeah… I thought you’d help me get out of there… sorry,” said Billy, rubbing his eyes. “When I’m like that, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“But you’re sure you saw a child strangled, Billy?” asked Strike quietly.

“Oh yeah,” said Billy bleakly, raising his face. “Yeah, that never goes away. I know I saw it.”

“Did you ever try and dig where you thought—?”

“Christ, no,” said Billy. “Go digging right by my dad’s house? No. I was scared,” he said weakly. “I didn’t want to see it again. After they buried her, they let it grow over, nettles and weeds. I used to have dreams like you wouldn’t believe. That she climbed up out of the dell in the dark, all rotting, and tried to climb in my bedroom window.”

The psychiatrists’ pens moved scratchily across their papers.

Strike moved down to the category of “Things” that he had written on his notebook. There were only two questions left.

“Did you ever put a cross in the ground where you saw the body buried, Billy?”

“No,” said Billy, scared at the very idea. “I never went near the dell if I could avoid it, I never wanted to.”

“Last question,” Strike said. “Billy, did your father do anything unusual for the Chiswells? I know he was a handyman, but can you think of anything else he—?”

“What d’you mean?” said Billy.

He seemed suddenly more frightened than he had seemed all interview.

“I don’t know,” said Strike carefully, watching his reaction. “I just wondered—”

“Jimmy warned me about this! He told me you were snooping around Dad. You can’t blame us for that, we had nothing to do with it, we were kids!”

“I’m not blaming you for anything,” said Strike, but there was a clatter of chairs: Billy and the two psychiatrists had got to their feet, the female’s hand hovering over a discreet button beside the door that Strike knew must be an alarm.

“Has this all been to get me to talk? You trying to get me and Jimmy in trouble?”

“No,” said Strike, hoisting himself to his feet, too. “I’m here because I believe you saw a child strangled, Billy.”

Agitated, mistrustful, Billy’s unbandaged hand touched his nose and chest twice in quick succession.

“So why’re you asking what Dad did?” he whispered. “That’s not how she died, it was nothing to do with that! Jimmy’ll fucking tan me,” he said in a broken voice. “He told me you were after him for what Dad did.”

“Nobody’s going to tan anyone,” said the male psychiatrist firmly. “Time’s up, I think,” he said briskly to Strike, pushing open the door. “Go on, Billy, out you go.”

But Billy didn’t move. The skin and bone might have aged, but his face betrayed the fear and hopelessness of a small, motherless child whose sanity had been broken by the men who were supposed to protect him. Strike, who had met countless rootless and neglected children during his rackety, unstable childhood, recognized in Billy’s imploring expression a last plea to the adult world, to do what grown-ups were meant to do, and impose order on chaos, substitute sanity for brutality. Face to face, he felt a strange kinship with the emaciated, shaven-headed psychiatric patient, because he recognized the same craving for order in himself. In his case, it had led him to the official side of the desk, but perhaps the only difference between the two of them was that Strike’s mother had lived long enough, and loved him well enough, to stop him breaking when life threw terrible things at him.