Nurse Martin Flint/Second Fetcher Character Analysis

A tall man with unkempt hair, Nurse Flint provides medical care for the children at the children’s home that serial killer Alexander Sholt founded in his rural Australian hometown. The children’s home is located near the bunker where Alexander and fellow serial killer Derek Bell hold girls captive, abuse them, and eventually murder them. When Alexander and Derek’s final victim Isobel Catching escapes from the bunker, the allegorical tale of her abuse that she narrates to detective Michael Teller—in which two masked creatures named Fetchers, who call themselves “First” and “Second,” bring girls to be assaulted and devoured by two monsters called Feeds—indicates that Nurse Flint and his colleague Director Cavanagh were paid to bring victims to Alexander and Derek. As “Second” heals the captives before the Feeds assault them, readers can infer that medical professional Nurse Flint is Second. When Catching escapes the bunker, she brings with her the ghost of Alexander and Derek’s first victim, Sarah Blue/Crow, whom Catching has empowered to interact with the physical world. Shortly thereafter, Crow finds Nurse Flint and Director Cavanagh hiding out at the Sholt family home, murders them, and dumps their bodies near where Alexander and Derek first abducted her. When detective Michael Teller realizes Nurse Flint and Director Cavanagh’s involvement in the serial killings, he speculates that both men were morally vacuous, empty inside—a judgment that the novel represents symbolically in Catching’s story: she describes the Fetchers as having no faces, only voids, beneath their humanoid masks.