Summary

First Time in Paperback

Declan Scott stood inside the room looking at Jury as if he were one more disappointment in a long list of them. Police, private investigators—all had failed to find the child Flora.

Brian Macalvie of the Devon and Cornwall police takes this failure especiall hard, since he had headed up the investigation three years ago when Flora disappeared one day from the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

Scott's step-daughter has vanished. His wife Mary has died.

"He really doesn't need a body in his garden," says Macalvie, as he looks down at an unidentified woman murdered in the gardens of the Scott estate, Angel Gate.

And on a shabby London street, another child lies dead. When Richard Jury bends over the body of the little girl, he knows this will be one of the saddest investigations of his life.

Saddest, and most serpentine, for Flora and this child appear to be connected, and in the worse possible way—by an iniquitous house in North London.

"It's these little kids. It's what happens to them... Why should they have to pay for what we do?... What I do, what I try to do, is put myself in that place, in their place, you know? Feel what they must feel. Terror. Like that."

"Maybe you shouldn't go there, Macalvie."

Macalvie looked down at the dregs of this drink. "Neither should they."

Joined by the intrepid Melrose Plant, now a gardener at Angel Gate, Jury and Macalvie rake over the present and the past in a pub near Launceston called the Winds of Change. In a case where the victim is as hard to identify as the murderer and where no one is exactly who he seems, how can Jury be sure that he himself hasn't been duped in some game of illusion?