The Distant Hours
[citation needed] The book begins with arrival of a letter, sent during the Second World War, to a small house on Central London in 1992.
Edith Burchill (Edie), a young woman working as an editor in a small family-run publishing firm, is visiting her mother Meredith when the letter arrives.
She discovers that Milderhurst Castle was the home of the author of her favourite childhood book, "The True History of the Mud Man", and that his youngest daughter was driven mad by being abandoned by her fiancé.
Percy takes Edie on a tour of the castle, showing her the library where the twins' mother Muriel was killed in a fire.
The story then cuts to 1941, where the twins (who are then in their thirties) are preparing for Juniper and a mysterious guest to arrive for dinner.
Juniper and Thomas are extremely late, and the twins are beginning to worry that they won't arrive, when there is a knock at the door.
When her mother refuses to speak about it Edie calls on her Aunt Rita, who finds a box of letters written by Meredith to her family while she was at Milderhurst.
In the end Juniper, who is known for acting irrationally and on her own agenda, picks Meredith out of the group of children who are left.
Saffy is at home with their father, who refuses to leave his tower and is suffering from paranoid delusions of the Mud Man coming to kill him.
He has come to Kent to check on his students, of which his favourite is Meredith, and to make sure they are happy in their surrogate homes.
Meredith didn't realise that Juniper had written to her after she had to leave Milderhurst, and had believed that her friend had forgotten about her.
She is very keen to make Edie see that while Percy feels responsible for Juniper's madness and is painfully overprotective of her sisters and the castle, she is truly a good person.
When she arrives at the castle the following day, Percy is waiting to take her to the tower where Raymond spent his final years.
Raymond confronted them one night in the library, and attacked Oliver, causing the fire which led to Muriel's death.
Saffy lets in Juniper, who is soaking wet, and can't remember how she got from the bus to the house.
Percy attempts to find and conceal the evidence of whatever Juniper has done along the road outside, while Saffy waits in the parlour.
Percy arrives back at the house to find him dead in the moat, and buries him in the pet cemetery on the grounds.
Juniper watches Percy burying the body, and begins her descent into madness believing that she killed her fiancé.
In the epilogue it transpires that Juniper helped deliver a baby at the roadside that night, and so was covered in blood and traumatised when she arrived.
Percy never told Saffy of her role in Thomas' death, and when her secrets had been released she drugged her sisters and set fire to the library.
