Fry knew how easy it was to reach that stage. She knew you could find yourself in a situation where a greeting from a stranger was a torture, and the words ‘good morning’ from the postman were as welcome as the plague. When somebody rang the door bell, you not only refused to answer it, you wanted to hide in another room, in case they saw you through the window and knew you were there.

Once you allowed yourself to become a recluse, then the world began to seem a long way off, beyond your reach. It became a place where you would be an alien, if you ever found yourself there. And you knew the people from that world would see you as an alien, too. You were not like them. You were different. Disfigured.

Fry supported herself against the side of her car and shuddered. Memory was such a physical thing. It was more physical than her own skin, than the clothes she wore, or the ground she stood on. A terrible, physical thing. And some memories never seemed to lose their power to hurt. They never weakened with age, nor dimmed as the years went by. They simply slipped behind a cloud of everyday concerns and trivial preoccupations, waiting until the right moment to emerge, more powerful than ever. And memories still hit hardest when they were most unexpected.

There was no doubt Maggie Crew was a damaged woman. Fry had begun to dread going to see her. While she was there, in Maggie’s house, she felt somehow at home. Yet afterwards, within a few minutes of leaving, when she was sitting in the car with her hand on the ignition key, she would suddenly begin to shake. She realized now that she was sweating, her hands were trembling, and her legs felt weak, as if she hadn’t eaten for days. She had to wind down the window and let in the cold air to shock herself back into alertness.

She wasn’t used to feeling so drained of energy as she was now. She was usually able to direct energy into her body at a moment’s notice. She had trained for years to feel it flow and channel it where it was needed. But an hour with Maggie Crew had sapped that vitality. So what was going wrong?

There were things for her to do back at HQ, but nothing urgent – she had been given a free hand to spend as long as she needed to with Maggie. That meant she had time to call at her own flat in Edendale on the way. She decided a shower would help wash away the cold stickiness that was clinging to her skin.

Yet Fry drove round town for a while, turning through the steep streets aimlessly, unwilling to arrive home until her energy had returned and her mood had dissipated.