How do you know? How can you know this about me, for certain?

He wants a nail to hang his self-esteem upon, some external proof that he is worth saving. But Dr Salmon disappoints.

Since the process, it feels like – I sense the good in pretty much everyone.

He points at the paper she was trying not to read: someone with narrow-set eyes recently elected to the European Parliament and promoting the violent removal of France’s Roma population. Him? You sense goodness in him?

Not from the photograph. But I suppose if I was put in his company.

Logan thinks of some of the people he has been asked to assess. The bullies and domestic abusers. The premeditated murderers. And those rare but disturbing individuals who simply exude evil. To be in the same room with one of those people is to feel your blood cells rush faster through your veins, away, away, as though they drag their victims’ ghosts around with them and those ghosts are screaming, unheard, in your ears. Just sharing the same air with one like that draws your thoughts into disused warehouses where meat hooks swing and terrible things are done, or moorland at night, the chuck of a spade, and you know you cannot be long with them, the air is visibly darkening, you are being sucked into whichever circle of Hell they inhabit, and your wife and children are already at risk.

I don’t suppose, he says, you have, since completing the process, met a psychopath.

Not to my knowledge, she says.

Someone truly evil.

I don’t know if I believe in evil, she says. I believe more in – the absence of good.

And he thinks again about the absence of good, so absent it is a vacuum, sucking you into its horror. He takes refuge in his armchair, the sturdy comfort of a Chesterfield.

So it’s not that I’m an especially good man, he says, but just that you now think everyone good.

Don’t take it as an insult, she laughs, digging into her bag for her car keys.

It has nothing to do with my daughter, anyway.

I don’t know, she says, clasping the keys and placing the bag on the floor, maybe it does. It was what I felt moved to say to you. I felt it strongly after she – can I call it a visit? – visited me.

Strictly speaking, one would call it a visitation, surely.

Only if you wanted to call her a ghost. She rotates the key ring – a plump brass heart. And I don’t think— I mean, maybe that’s what ghosts are, but I think the idea of a ghost is misunderstood.

Ghosts are classically misunderstood, surely, that’s why they come back, right?

Logan believes nothing of the kind, but hopes to lighten her seriousness.

But I don’t think they’re ever gone, she says. We have this idea of separation. But it’s wrong.