‘Fishing accident,’ I said. I tried to smile as he probed further and ended up grimacing instead.

‘I see. Deep breaths now. That’s good …’ He trailed off – uninterested in my bullshit, distracted by the hunt for the little bullet still inside me.

He’d been patching me up for more than half of his eighty years. My father, a military doctor, resolutely refused ever to treat me himself, though whether out of uncertainty at his own ability or in awe of Doc’s, I never knew. Either way, every sprained ankle, broken bone or bloodied nose was treated by Doctor Jacob Levy.

I’d never called him anything but ‘Doc’.

His hands were neither as strong nor as steady as they’d once been, and the unruly mane of black hair that he’d once swept aside to wink at the officers’ wives had receded to a brilliant white fuzz cresting what was otherwise now a brown, bald pate. But his green eyes still flashed wickedly in the lamplight, and when he smiled you still could see why he’d left half a century of broken hearts behind him.

And one inside him.

He’d carried a torch for my mother until the day she died. The flame still burned, too, and all the more brightly now that time had erased the certainty of who she really was and blunted the truth of what he’d become. When she waded into the lake behind our house with stones in her pockets, he’d dived into the depths of the whiskey bottle. It was too much for his wife. After she left him, he’d retired from Wicklow to a Victorian pile teetering on the shores of Lough Conn. No phone, no electricity – but plenty of eau de vie. I’d been lucky to find him sober after sunset.

I hadn’t seen him for three years. It had never been safe to visit and it wasn’t safe to be there, then – for either of us. But I could no more check myself into St Joseph’s Hospital in Ballina than I could leave the wounds I’d sustained in the cottage untreated. Just as he always had done, he helped me unconditionally. I supposed that keeping me alive kept the memory of my mother alive, too.

‘Nearly there, now. Tricky little beggar this one. Tiny, isn’t it?’ Doc probed deeper. I breathed out, hard.

He knew I was putting us both at risk. All those years and my mother still ruled his heart. One day it would be at the cost of his head. I couldn’t decide if that was admirable or absurd – but the weakness it created worked to my own advantage: if anyone came looking for me, Doc would deny knowing me on pain of death.