The Cycle of Victimhood and Evil

The Cycle of Victimhood and Evil is the moral pattern captured by Auden’s claim that those harmed by evil may do evil in return. In the novel, the idea is neither accepted as an iron law nor dismissed as irrelevant: Dan Padgett’s violence has roots in deprivation and humiliation, but Kate Miskin insists that suffering does not make murder inevitable. The tension between understanding a perpetrator and holding him responsible gives the cycle its ethical and emotional weight.

The maxim and its challenge

The idea enters a conversation after the danger to Millie Tranter has passed. Adam Dalgliesh explains that he appealed to the strongest feelings he believed Dan Padgett possessed: hatred of his father and the desire to matter. He reminded Dan that Millie was innocent and had done nothing to him, while presenting a different route to revenge: by exposing what his father had done, Dan could make the man’s name remembered through his own actions. Dalgliesh used the promise of recognition to redirect Dan from pushing Millie to her death.

Kate calls the approach clever and cynical, and Dalgliesh agrees that it worked. The exchange matters because it treats the cycle not as an abstract law but as a force that can be interrupted, at least in a particular moment, by changing the form revenge might take. The intervention does not erase Dan’s violence or turn his grievance into justice. It exploits his fixation on his father to prevent another killing, making the practical success of the appeal inseparable from its moral compromise.

Later, Dalgliesh recalls Auden’s formulation that those to whom evil is done do evil in return. Kate answers that the idea is a cop-out: many children are illegitimate, mistreated, resented, or unwanted, and do not grow up to be killers. Her objection refuses a simple causal equation between injury and violence. A history of harm can help explain a person’s circumstances, but it cannot account for every choice or absolve the person who makes it.

Dan Padgett’s history and responsibility

Kate tries to imagine the life that shaped Dan. In her reconstruction, his mother may have been powerless and absorbed in a love that was no more than a joyless seduction, or perhaps a rape. She pictures a single violation leaving her pregnant, penniless, and homeless, at the mercy of a petty sadist. The language remains conjectural: Kate is trying to picture what may have happened, not reporting a complete, independently established biography.

The imagined surroundings are ordinary and bleak rather than spectacular: a suburban house with a dark hall, a front parlour kept immaculate for visitors who never arrived, and a back room where family life carried the smell of cooking and failure. Kate imagines that school, too, may have marked Dan as a charity child, dependent on a philanthropist’s annual payment and placed in a school that did not suit him. A succession of failed jobs follows in her account. The details accumulate into a history of exclusion, but they do not establish that violence was the only possible outcome.

Dan’s deprivation also meets a particular island grievance. He had been unwanted from birth and, in Kate’s formulation, unwanted throughout his life except on Combe Island; even there, he felt under-regarded and unqualified. That contrast is essential to the cycle’s shape. A place that offered a measure of belonging did not remove his sense of injury, and the injury alone cannot explain the killings. Kate asks how he could have done better while refusing to confuse that question with a claim that he could not have acted otherwise.

Kate Miskin and the inheritance of harm

Kate’s attempt to understand Dan brings her own past into view. She remembers overhearing her grandmother tell a neighbour that it was bad enough having Kate’s bastard foisted on her, and that Kate’s mother should at least have stayed alive to look after the child herself. The words were not spoken directly to Kate, but she knew from childhood that she was regarded as a burden. Only near the end did she recognize that her grandmother’s care had contained a kind of love.

Her childhood memory is attached to Ellison Fairweather Buildings: poverty, hopelessness, vandalized lifts, and the fear of climbing through a building where violence might be waiting on any floor. Kate escaped through hard work, ambition, and some ruthlessness. Yet escape did not mean that the past had vanished. She could not recall her mother’s name, and no one knew who her father was. The absence left her feeling unmoored, as if she had entered the world without a secure connection to anyone.

This parallel makes Kate’s rejection of fatalism more exacting, not less compassionate. She recognizes the force of being unwanted because she has known a form of it herself; she also knows that a damaging beginning need not dictate a life of violence. Her own survival does not prove that everyone can overcome deprivation by will alone, but it prevents Dan’s past from serving as a complete explanation. The narrative holds understanding and contempt together: Kate attempts to imagine the injuries that shaped him, yet cannot turn that imaginative effort into pity without reservation.

A cycle, not a verdict

Auden’s verse gives the pattern memorable symmetry, but the conversation exposes the danger of mistaking symmetry for inevitability. Dan’s crimes include killing his father and Adrian Boyde; the threat to Millie shows how the same logic could have extended to another innocent person. Calling this a return of evil identifies a chain of injury and retaliation, not a moral balance in which the original harm licenses the later one.

The distinction is reinforced by the different uses of the idea. Dalgliesh invokes Dan’s hatred as a means of stopping an immediate threat, redirecting revenge toward public exposure rather than another killing. Kate considers the maxim as a possible explanation and challenges it as an excuse. Neither response restores what has been taken from the victims, and the successful intervention does not undo Dan’s earlier acts. Instead, the novel leaves the reader with a narrower and more difficult proposition: inherited or suffered harm can shape what a person feels and wants, while responsibility persists and another act of violence may still be refused.

The cycle therefore functions as a question about the limits of explanation. The history of rejection makes Dan’s grievance intelligible; Kate’s counterexample and her own remembered life resist turning that grievance into destiny. Auden’s line remains powerful precisely because it is not allowed the last word. The novel presents repetition as a danger sustained by real suffering, but not as a law that cancels choice, accountability, or the possibility of intervention.