Twelve years on, released with a new name and identity, Danny appeals to the psychologist to help him remember, and hence understand, his crime. Lambs to the slaughter. Seymour recalls an incident from his own childhood, when the bullying of a toddler beside a pond could have led to disaster but for the chance intervention of a passing adult. The snag in his present life ran back into the past and unravelled it. Because they were splitting up, it was easy to believe they'd never been happy.
Barker depicts a range of attitudes towards rehabilitation, redemption and the notion of evil.
The system is based on the rehabilitation of offenders, but this novel suggests both the inadequacy of those efforts and how hard people find it to believe in change. Images of snared rabbits and rapacious foxes recur, though Barker steers away from allowing Danny to style himself as a victim. No, not difficult, impossible. An insistence on the enigma at the heart of the crime, its unknowability, can seem like cheating, yet the withholding of answers creates its own haunting resonance. Like an Escher drawing, Danny's image changes before our eyes as he reflects the reader's fears and projections.