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made a sy mpathetic face, ‘It went too deep for public consumption, I think.  Too much scholarship and not enough sentiment and glib, chat-show solutions.  The public want to be entertained, not educated.’
    She grimaced ruefully, ‘ Wow!  That’s pretty much exactly what my publisher said.  You always could get straight to the heart of problems, Trev, I’ll give you that.’
    His good-humo red expression faded as he lifted a file from his desktop and said, ‘Not this problem.  I really need help here, Kate.’
    Sh e felt a tingle like a mild electric shock course through her body and drew in a deep, nervous breath before taking the plunge.  ‘Tell me about her.’
    He opened the file and began flicking through it.  ‘The patient is one Grainne Riordan, a very troubled eighteen-year-old girl. I had a female psychiatrist called Sarah McGrath treating her but the bloody woman went and got herself a job in America.  Selfish, I call it; imagine wanting to work in a country where they don’t take almost all your salary in tax.  Anyway, the point is that now I’m stuffed, unless you agree to help.’
    Kate frowned in puzzlement, ‘You’re no shrinking violet, you know just how good you a re.  Why not treat her yourself?’
    He pursed his lips and said carefully, ‘Unless heavily medicated, Grainne Riordan becomes wildly agitated and even violent in the presence of men.  Any man, except for her father, and sometimes even him.  And her violent outbursts apparently include murder and at least one suicide attempt.’
    Kate only raised her eyebrows and, a fter a pause to gather his thoughts, Trev continued, ‘Grainne Riordan was the original wild child, a party girl spending Daddy’s money on clothes by day and on drink and drugs at night.  To say nothing of sleeping with a long succession of men.’
    He shrugged his narrow shoulders, ‘She was regularly taking coke, hash and prescription drugs, all washed down with bottles of vodka.  You name it, she was on it, including the odd syringe full of heroin.  On the night in question she took a speedball of coke, heroin and amphetamines and had some sort of psychotic episode.  She set fire to her own house, killing her mother -who was asleep inside- in the process.  Actually, asleep is a bit of a euphemism; the mother had passed out after drinking the best part of a bottle of vodka of her own.’  He shrugged again, ruefully, ‘She was known to be an alcoholic, which might explain Grainne’s own weakness for drink and drugs.’
    Kate shook her head sadly, though she had seen and heard far worse, and Trevor continued, ‘She was taken to the emergency room of Loughlinstown hospital at first, where she promptly tried to kill herself.  Believe it or not, she smashed a window and cut her own throat with a shard of broken glass.  She didn’t finish the job because she went into a drug-induced coma, but even so she came pretty close to dying.  She came out of her drugs coma a couple of days later but remained in a strange, semi-catatonic state that persisted for months.  She still lapses into it quite often even now.  She didn’t stay in Loughlinstown that long, of course, since they don’t have a psychiatric unit.  Right from the beginning it was clear that her problems were mental rather than physical, and as the police obviously couldn’t charge her while she was in that state, and as she was a minor at the time, she was made a ward of court.  The first thing the court did was order her to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, but as she hadn’t actually been charged with anything they let Riordan send her here rather than to a state institution.  When she started exhibiting signs of removing from her catatonia and engaging with the world around her again I started trying to talk to her, with a view to counseling her myself.  It didn’t work out well and, as I say, I replaced myself with a female psychiatrist.’
    Kate frowned