Barbara Havers is the novel’s co-protagonist and a foil for Lynley. Her character exemplifies the themes of How Patriarchy Enables Predatory Behavior Among Men and The Dangers of Class Bias in Great Britain. In the middle-class, male-dominated police force, Havers is acutely aware of her social class and gender. In this environment, she is never allowed to forget that she is a working-class woman who is trying to build a career in field that favors upwardly mobile men. Her superior officers, for example, are members of the aspiring middle class, while Lynley is famously descended from an aristocratic bloodline. 

Havers resents the way in which others view her as the embodiment of her gender or class. She cannot make a mistake, because it will be attributed to her social status or gender, in a way that it would not if she were a man. Her defense mechanism is her aggressive, suspicious attitude. She has internalized the idea that she is unattractive and deliberately cultivates her unattractiveness rather than feel that she is bowing to expectations of feminine beauty. Rather than conform, Havers fights back, but this alienates her from most of her colleagues.

She comes to appreciate Lynley because he allows her to fail on her own terms, rather than turn everything into a referendum on her identity. This trust in Lynley allows Havers to open up about her own regrets, as she blames herself for her parents’ retreat into a false reality after her brother’s death. Like Lynley, she blames herself for other people’s unhappiness, showing that they share a sense of moral responsibility though they express it in different ways.

Superintendent Nies is the police officer in Kendale originally in charge of investigating William Teys’s murder. Nies and the novel’s antagonist not because he is involved in the murder but because he does everything in his power to obstruct Lynley and Havers’s investigation. Nies has a history of animosity with Lynley; he arrested him five years earlier on a false murder charge. Nies fell out with his partner, Kerridge, over another botched investigation, and he resents the Metropolitan Police force taking a lead role in the Teys case. Nies is a flat character who epitomizes bad police work. He is motivated by spite due to his bruised ego and doesn’t take responsibility for his failures. His investigative file on Teys is thin, he lets Roberta be unlawfully admitted to the psychiatric hospital without looking into it, and he withholds evidence and test results to the point that Lynley and Havers have to employ their own forensic examiner, Simon St. James, to get reliable results. Nies is another example of a community member who let William Teys get away with his abuse, finding out only when it was too late.

William Teys is the story’s murder victim, who dies before the narrative begins. The investigation into his murder drives the plot forward, and it reveals a history of abuse that reframes his murder as his daughter’s attempt to prevent him from abusing another young girl. This speaks to the dual role William plays in the narrative. In the present tense, he is dead, a plot catalyst and a starting point for the unfolding mystery. In the past, he is the antagonist, a monstrous pedophile who caused decades of pain for his wife, Tessa, and his daughters, Gillian and Roberta.

William’s relationship with the local priest, Father Hart, sheds light on the mystery of the baby that was found dead at the abbey three years earlier. A seemingly upstanding member of the community, William used religion to assuage his guilt and to manipulate his victims. His character demonstrates the extent to which violence and trauma can be hidden in plain sight. And the strong desire of some communities to deny difficult truths, even when it means letting innocent victims suffer.

Roberta Teys, 19, is William Teys’s daughter and his murderer. She is a round, secondary character who occupies a nontraditional role as the murderer in a murder mystery narrative. Instead of serving as the novel’s antagonist, Roberta is a victim of the man she killed. She is found at the crime scene, confesses, and is hospitalized before Lynley and Havers begin their investigation. She is placed in a psychiatric hospital instead of being arrested because no one in the community, including the police, believes she could have committed the murder. Therefore, it’s not the crime as much as the events predating the crime that Lynley and Havers must uncover to make the current situation make sense. Roberta is in shock after she is found and refuses to speak. This plot device means that the investigators can’t rely on her further testimony—especially since they’re not convinced her confession was reliable in the first place.

Roberta exemplifies the theme of How Patriarchy Enables Predatory Behavior Among Men. Her dominating and sexually abusive father victimized her mother, Tessa, and her older sister, Gillian, both of whom escaped, leaving Roberta as the only target. None of the women could ask for help: William was a powerful and well-respected man in the community. A devout Catholic, he was considered above reproach. Women were supposed to fulfill their domestic roles without complaint, and Tessa and Gillian’s decisions to leave led others to judge them instead of suspect William. Roberta continued to act as William’s devoted daughter in public but developed an eating disorder as a result of the abuse. Only reuniting with Gillian toward the end of the novel gets Roberta to break her silence and reveal her motive for killing her father: protecting his next victim, a young girl named Birdie Odell.