The Book of Guilt

To prepare the boys for the outside world, the Ministry arranges Socialisation Days with girls from the Edith Saunders Home. Three girls visit: bespectacled Diane,¹² wax-pale Jane,¹¹ and heavyset Karen.¹³ Awkward waltzing to Richard Clayderman gives way to a game of Sardines, and while hiding behind a fuchsia bush, Jane¹¹ presses her mouth to Vincent¹'s ear and reveals the thing that upends his world: the medicine does not make them better, it makes them sick.

She hints there is something the boys have never figured out about what they are. Vincent,¹ half in love and wholly rattled, cannot stop turning her words over. Every Home, the girls note, has its own Mother Morning,⁵ Afternoon⁶ and Night,⁷ a fact that leaves the brothers strangely unmoored.

Testing Jane¹¹'s claim, Vincent¹ hides his canary-yellow pills instead of swallowing them, and within a week feels transformed: strong, rested, able to shrug off both brothers in a wrestling match. William² soon copies him.

Then Mother Morning⁵ discovers the hoarded pills in a drawer and, wounded and steely, force-feeds Vincent¹ five at once. He collapses into days of hallucination. During his delirium the young Mother Night⁷ slips to his bedside and whispers a desperate warning: Margate is not Margate, he must never go there, he must get a family to take him and never put a foot wrong.

She presses something papery into his hand. When Vincent¹ recovers, his brothers insist he dreamed it all, calling him bonkers, and the warning dissolves into uncertainty.

Sent alone to the village bakery, Vincent¹ is thanked effusively by kind Mr Webb,¹⁴ whose dying grandson recovered thanks to an experimental drug. Webb¹⁴ blurts that Vincent¹ and all the Sycamore children are heroes of the drug trials, then realizes he has said too much.

When Vincent¹ returns days later to press him, a stranger claims no Mr Webb¹⁴ ever worked there. Meanwhile the brothers notice something impossible at bedtime: Mother Night⁷ looks older, subtly wrong, though she wears the same clothes and scent.

They privately name her Mother Not, sensing she has been replaced. Piecing Webb¹⁴'s slip together with the encyclopedia's entry on drug testing, Vincent¹ concludes there is no Bug at all. They are laboratory subjects, and the boys who died were killed by the medicine.

During a picnic Socialisation Day, the group wanders into the woods and splits up. Karen,¹³ who has been flirting clumsily with William,² screams; the others cannot find her. Vincent¹ discovers her at the foot of a beech tree, clothing torn and pulled down, terrified of anyone with William²'s face.

Understanding instantly what his brother² has done, Vincent¹ chooses protection over truth: he begs Karen¹³ to stay silent, warning that something very bad will happen to William,² and to her, if she tells. Later, eavesdropping down the laundry chute, he hears Mother Morning⁵ report that Edith Saunders has accused William² of copulation, the very word torn out of the boys' encyclopedia. Dr Roach,⁸ they agree, will quietly look after everything.

The Minister⁹ tells the boys their father survived the heart attack they were told killed him, and arranges a coach trip to meet him in Manchester. The castle-like building is Strangeways prison; the man behind the glass¹⁵ has their exact eyes, jaw, cowlick and long fingers, aged fifty years.

He says he untangles Post Office string, warns them that families are cruel and that they must always protect young ladies, and grows agitated as a guard counts down the minutes to something happening the next morning.

On the drive home the boys confront the Minister;⁹ she admits the drug trials are real, that the dead boys were heroes, and that no more medicine awaits them once rehomed. Vincent¹ has already glimpsed his own face on a torn newspaper scrap.

To attract adoptive families, the Ministry films the triplets in the garden with the Minister,⁹ who opens her arms maternally while William² sneers and deliberately fumbles the staged apple-picking. The clip airs to a public largely uninterested in taking a Sycamore child. Then, at last, brochures for Margate appear on the boys' pillows, and they pack ecstatically, certain their turn has finally come.

But the Van that arrives is turned away at the gates. A childless couple in Exeter, the Fletchers,¹⁰ have telephoned wanting to meet the triplets with a view to adopting one. Margate is cancelled. The boys, crushed and confused, are told they will travel to Exeter instead, and that only one of them can be taken.

The Minister⁹ drives the triplets to the Fletchers¹⁰ 'spotless Exeter bungalow, where Mr Fletcher¹⁰'s astonishing hand-built model village enchants them: working trains, a cuckoo clock, a colour television, a white cat that curls into Lawrence³'s lap. But cracks show.

At lunch Vincent¹ glimpses pure loathing flash across Mrs Fletcher¹⁰'s face when he trims gristle from his pork. A staged train crash the boys orchestrate ends in William² throttling Lawrence³ on the carpet.

When Vincent¹ returns alone to retrieve Lawrence³'s lost Margate brochure, he sees Mrs Fletcher¹⁰ frantically scrubbing every trace of the boys from the sofa. As he leaves, a net curtain stirs and a pale girl with long black hair,⁴ the girl from his dreams, appears at the glass, terrified, and mouths a single word: run.

Haunted by the Minister⁹ mentioning babies her parents could not keep, Nancy⁴ climbs into the forbidden loft and finds two suitcases. One holds photograph albums of a girl identical to her, in decades-old black-and-white, posed in places Nancy⁴ has never been, dated as far back as 1950.

The other holds newspaper cuttings about Arthur Powell,¹⁵ the Butcher of Birmingham, hanged for murdering eleven schoolgirls, including twelve-year-old Nancy Liddell, whose body was never found.

The murdered girl's photograph wears Nancy⁴'s own clothes and pose. Nancy⁴ realizes she is a copy of her parents¹⁰ 'murdered daughter, grown from baby teeth, dressed and renamed to replace her, and that the celebratory party her parents threw fell exactly on the morning Powell¹⁵ was executed.

The Fletchers¹⁰ choose William,² precisely because his violence at the visit marked him as the disturbed child they secretly want. Vincent,¹ who has never forgotten the girl mouthing run and the scrubbed sofa, faces an unbearable calculation.

Rather than let William,² the brother he has always loved best despite his cruelties, walk into danger, Vincent¹ stays silent about his fears until the choice is made, then proposes the switch. Lawrence,³ gentlest of the three and eager to meet the dream-girl⁴ he imagines as lovely, agrees to dress in William²'s clothes and go in his place.

They debate it, absurdly, in Ethical Hour. So the tenderest brother³ is quietly substituted for the one the Fletchers¹⁰ chose, and Vincent¹ buries the dread that something terrible awaits.

On delivery day, packing his rucksack, Vincent¹ finds a hidden page slipped into the jigsaw box by the real Mother Night:⁷ encyclopedia page 504, the torn-out entry titled not Copulation but Copy.

It explains that Dr Roach⁸ grew human copies for medical trials, first from stillbirths, later from prisoners, and established the Sycamore Homes to house them cheaply. The brothers confront a drunken, collapsing Mother Morning,⁵ who confirms it all: they are clones of a criminal, monitored through the Books of Dreams and Guilt to predict inherited evil.

Worst of all, Margate is a lie. Children reported as dangerous were weaned onto placebos, told they had recovered, then gassed in the Van they boarded joyfully, their ashes tipped into rivers to reach the sea.

Delivered to the Fletchers,¹⁰ Lawrence³ (disguised as William²) is drugged with sedative-laced breakfast. Nancy,⁴ learning her parents¹⁰ mean to torture the boy the way Powell¹⁵ tortured her original, tries and fails to warn him, then flees the house and hitchhikes across the country to Captain Scott.

She finds Vincent¹ in the garden and warns him William² is in danger; Vincent¹ knows it is truly Lawrence.³ He phones the former Minister⁹ using her private card. She races to confirm the Fletchers¹⁰ are the vanished Liddell parents and calls the police.

Officers raid the plastic-sheeted room in time to save Lawrence³'s life, but not before the Fletchers¹⁰ have severed his tongue, leaving him mutilated and mute. He returns home refusing to look at Vincent,¹ who knows exactly what he did.

Years pass. Mother Morning⁵ vanishes; a religious carer, Miss Ream, takes over as surviving children from closed Homes gather. Lawrence,³ mute and estranged, runs away at fourteen and disappears forever, likely lost to the streets.

In 2019, Vincent,¹ now a librarian married to Nancy,⁴ and William,² who visits only to be cruel, learn the full history through a museum exhibition in Margate itself. Cabinets display the Books of Dreams and Guilt; placards confirm the gas-van cullings and credit the disgraced ex-Minister Sylvia Dalton⁹ with winning copies the right to vote, work and marry.

There Vincent¹ finds Jane¹¹'s final Book of Guilt entry, sent to her death for a crime he first reported, and reunites with the real Mother Night,⁷ aged and imprisoned for ten years for trying to tell the truth.