The elation of being a winner stayed with him while he got off the tram at the railway station and bought a ticket to Knudsen. He stopped at a flower stall, thinking that he should buy something for Angie. You always took flowers to people in hospital, even if the Rankin House place wasn’t really a proper one. But the stall flowers were unspectacular bunches in identical wrappings, as though they’d all been processed in some factory. The only thing out of the ordinary was a sheath of pale stems dotted with small silvery moons. Each disc felt like silk stretched delicately over framework.

‘That stuff’s called honesty,’ the assistant said. ‘Present for someone, is it, love? People buy it to put in dried-flower arrangements, but it looks nice on its own, too. It’s expensive, though, we don’t often have it in stock.’

On the way to Knudsen station, he thought dubiously that, expensive or not, he might have made a mistake about the choice of flowers. They didn’t look very exciting, nestled in their tissue wrapping, just a handful of brittle little circles the colour of milk coffee. But there was no time to worry about that now, he had to find a red-brick building on the left-hand side as described by Thelma. It was easily visible from the train, but when he got off, he became lost in a maze of narrow, illogical streets while trying to find the entrance. Angie and her hospitals, he thought irritably. Why can’t she ever pick one in a place that’s easy to get to!

After trudging around a complete block, he found the entrance at last, with a large sign above the gate saying ‘Rankin House’. The sign didn’t carry the extra information that had been in the phone book, and he was glad of that, grateful that Angie’s trouble wasn’t advertised to all the passing traffic in the street. Now, he thought, all I have to do is walk into the reception hall, that should be easy enough for Clive Trelawney’s nephew. It’s visiting hours, they said so on the phone. All I have to do is ask for her…nothing to it…