Thelma insisted that he take the money and he reflected that he’d never been so rich in his life. Only now it seemed an empty thing without much joy. Angie wasn’t there. He couldn’t run across the alleyway and say casually, ‘Come on, Angie, get your earrings on, I’m taking us both out today!’ He thought bleakly of the empty flat opposite.

‘Thelma, have you ever heard of a hospital called Rankin House?’ he asked, clearing the table while she had a cup of tea, and making his voice as offhand as possible.

‘Rankin House,’ she said absently, reading the letters to the editor in the paper. It was the first page she always turned to, but it didn’t seem to give her much satisfaction. She was given to reading the letters aloud, making scathing comments about the views of each correspondent. ‘Yes, I know where that is, it’s quite close to the city. You can see it on the left when you go through Knudsen railway station. A red-brick building and it’s got a sign over the gate, private hospital, I think.’

‘Just an ordinary hospital?’

Please let it be…

‘Goodness, Seymour, I don’t know. I’ve never taken all that much notice, it’s just a place you see from the train. Why do you want to know about it?’

He tried to think of reasons. School holiday project on hospitals, he thought wildly, knowing that wouldn’t do at all, since he’d left his last school and was to start a new one. ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said evasively, for she was peering at him over the top of her reading glasses. ‘I mean, I heard someone mention it once, just the name…I thought it might be a…a school or…maybe a prison or something like that…’

‘Then why did you ask if it was a hospital?’ she said and then cried with exasperation, ‘Really, Seymour, that’s a sloppy way to stack the dishes! Rinse them under the cold tap first as I showed you.’