He had not created a murderer.
He had found a jealous woman and handed her a slow weapon and a permission structure, and let her jealousy do the rest, ratcheting up by degrees over five years from a little sick to what my lab work actually showed.
That is the thing I understood in the rain: that real evil rarely announces itself as evil.
Sometimes it starts as a lonely woman who just wants to feel needed, and finds the wrong person willing to tell her how.
And then, far off down the mountain, sirens.
At the sound of them Elspeth twisted loose and ran, splashing through the mud, straight into my arms, and I had her, I had her, I folded her into my coat and felt her whole body shaking.