IN TWO MINDS

A young woman is kidnapped in Liverpool and taken to the home of David Fenhurst, the proprietor of Hollymere estate in the north-west of the Lake District. She is drugged and imprisoned in a stone coffin, far below the Fenhurst mansion, in a large cavern discovered and enlarged in the distant past by Rodney Fenhurst, David’s murdered father. Rodney had imprisoned his wife, Marrah, in the same cavern decades earlier, because she had recognized and then verbally abused a war criminal mingling with a group of Knights Templar meeting in the Fenhurst mansion. Marrah would never again see the light of day. David, a young boy when Marrah is imprisoned, is permitted to visit her in the early weeks and months. The young boy loves his mother but, when that maternal love is discovered by his despotic father, he is barred from visiting her below the house and eventually packed off to boarding school with the threat that, should he speak of Marrah and her location, his beloved mother will perish. A second child, Edward, is conceived during Rodney’s repeated raping of Marrah. At five years of age, the younger son suffers his first epileptic fit. He is sent to Austria and undergoes a cerebral commissurotomy. On his return, he is unwanted and once again, is dispatched to be raised by one of Rodney’s business associates in Austria without ever meeting his mother. The resulting effects of the experimental operation will not be felt for years but will return to haunt the brothers, with deadly consequences. Greg Trevane’s conscience is killing him. His marriage has broken down and, after saying she still loves him, his wife walks out of their Lake District’s home and, seemingly, disappears into thin air.