I didn't welcome it, because it wasn't conceived or written as a topical book about a particular crime. I would be quite devastated if there were another Bulger killer story when the book comes out. Danny Miller, the boy at the centre of her psychological thriller, was convicted of murdering an old lady when he was 10 years old. In agreeing to help the young man to understand his crime and exorcise his demons, Seymour crosses the borders of professional detachment and lays himself open to real danger, physical and psychological. A cruel joke got out of hand.
Barker is fascinated, as always, by the randomness both of violence and salvation.
She based this chilling episode on a passage she read in Kathleen Jones's biography of Catherine Cookson. As a small child, Cookson was apparently seen by a man on a passing tram in the act of drowning a little boy. What makes the difference is the adult taking responsibility for the child. At many points in James Bulger's long, last journey to the railway line, adults might have stopped and questioned his young tormentors, but they did not. Here, as in the prize-winning Regeneration war trilogy that made her name, and in her subsequent novel, Another World, the past extends its shadow over the present, shaping, warping, distorting.