‘What deception?’ asked Saul, who had appeared at the terrace gate, photons raining on the sea behind him and the Calder turning very slowly into a new configuration. ‘Is it okay if I come in?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to interrupt but there are a couple of developments on the Capo Santo deal that I’d like to run past you before I fly out. We can talk them through on the phone tomorrow, if you prefer.’

‘Come on in,’ said Hunter.

‘Hi, Saul,’ said Lucy. ‘The “deception” was the placebo effect, and I was asking, where’s the deception? If a patient thinks she’s going to get better and then does get better, why not call it persuasion, or self-healing? The deception is built into the experimental method, it’s not inherent to the effect.’

‘Right,’ said Saul, ‘the deception is in making sugar pills look identical to the pharmaceutical pills they are being tested against; the psychogenic effect is real.’

‘It’s hard to see how to harness it, though,’ said Hunter. ‘It’s been treated for so long as a sign of human frailty that it should be relegated to the Daniel Kahneman penal colony for cognitive bias, rotten intuition, groundless prejudice and misleading heuristics. I guess the real test is what happens to the effect if people know they are being given a sugar pill.’

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ said Saul, ‘it still works. Ted Kaptchuk is the top placebo guy. He’s at Harvard Med and he’s shown that what he calls “open label placebo” has a powerful effect. People know they are taking a sugar pill and sixty per cent of them still report significant relief of symptoms.’

‘How would you market that?’ said Hunter.

‘Call it Open Placebo,’ said Saul, ‘and get an endorsement from Harvard Med. The margins would be incredible: close to zero cost for manufacturing the product and at the same time a moral responsibility to augment the patient’s sense of receiving something valuable by pricing it up.’

‘Could they not be sugar pills?’ said Lucy. ‘It clashes with my diet, and with everyone’s dental health.’

‘No problem,’ said Saul, ‘but it mustn’t be something that anyone else is claiming is beneficial, otherwise it’ll get lost in the supplement zone.’

‘I’m enjoying the supplement zone,’ said Lucy. ‘Just because something is actually beneficial, like this fabulous juice, doesn’t mean that my conviction that it’s beneficial can’t give it a placebo turbo.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Saul. ‘Ted Kaptchuk’s work is all about expanding the definition of placebo beyond a trick pill used in a pharmaceutical trial. He wants to include and quantify the whole therapeutic drama surrounding prescriptions and procedures: the attentive listening, the rituals and the costumes, the diplomas on the wall, the authority of the healer.’