Once when Benet was about fourteen they had been in a train together, alone in the carriage, and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It was some time now since Benet had seen her mad mother, and when Mopsa arrived at Heathrow, looking drab and colorless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tried not to hate her. A death in the family precipitates a series of intertwined events--kidnap, murder, deception, and an overwhelming sense of guilt and yearning. A sense that is strongly identified with a bizarre collage in a hospital ward...The Tree of Hands.