‘Let’s say the reactions to it vary considerably. There are many people who refuse to believe that it’s actually a real hand. Even when we explain the whole thing to them, they still don’t believe us. They go away thinking it’s a plastic reproduction, which it isn’t.’

Of course, the White Hart at Caldmore Green had a ghost or two of its own. There had allegedly been a death in the attic where the ‘hand’ was found, the suicide of a servant girl. A previous landlord had reported hearing sobs coming from the attic room, and an investigation found nothing but the mysterious handprint of a child in the dust.

Whether the White Hart hand of glory had ever belonged to the servant girl was doubtful, though. Fry had seen it just as she was beginning her training to join the police and had already started her course at UCE in Perry Barr. Even if she hadn’t already picked up a smattering of medical knowledge, it would have been obvious to her that the object in the museum was actually the severed arm of a small child, torn off right up to the scapula, then pickled in formalin.

Despite the story that had become attached to it, she was pretty sure that Walsall Museum’s hand of glory was more likely to be a medical specimen from the mid-nineteenth century. If that was supposed to be a magical item used to aid burglaries, there must have been some malefactors being badly misled by their hand-of-glory supplier. How or why a medical specimen had come to be concealed in the chimney of a pub, no one was saying. Everyone preferred the stories of ghosts and magic, obviously.

‘By the mysteries of the deep, by the flames of Baal, by the power of the East and the silence of the night, by the Holy Rites of Hecate, I conjure and exorcise thee.’

‘Sorry?’

He pointed at a printed card inside the case. ‘It’s the spell you’re supposed to use with the hand of glory. If you do it right, it not only protects you, but provides light that only you can see. Naturally, it was used mostly for nefarious purposes. Anything useful always is, don’t you find?’

The phenomenon of general credulity on the subject baffled Fry. Fair enough, if there was something genuinely mysterious and unexplained, you might be forgiven for letting loose the imagination and coming up with your own interpretation. But when the scientific facts were staring them in the face, how could people ignore them and believe instead in something that flew in the face of the evidence? Some would believe that the world was flat, or that the Earth circled the Moon, just because they wanted to believe it. Others had faith in the magical powers of a pickled hand or a severed head.