‘Hmph. And where would I go, eh? My parents left me that pub and I’ve invested too much time and effort in it to just walk away.’

‘You could sell up,’ he suggested.

‘No one wants a place all the way out here,’ she replied. Her brown eyes regarded him steadily as he finished stitching. ‘Bert and I get along fine,’ she said. ‘He has his funny ways, and I have mine. When things get me down, I take myself off for a bit of a breather. He’s not all bad, y’know.’

Bert didn’t have a redeeming bone in his scrawny body, but Hugh said nothing as he placed a square of lint over the wound, fixed it with a sticking plaster and pushed back the stool.

Sal rose rather unsteadily to her feet and fiddled with her hair until it hung over her battered eye. Fixing it firmly in place with her broad-brimmed hat, she caught him watching her and gave him a wan smile. ‘It hides my face so the busybodies don’t bother me with questions,’ she said flatly.

‘It rather suits you,’ he murmured.

She ignored his flattery and placed the exact number of coins needed to pay for the treatment on the table. ‘Catch you later, Hugh – and try to get some flaming sleep, mate. I might look crook, but you look like death warmed up.’

Hugh was still smiling as she swept out of his surgery, her scarlet skirt swinging round her knees as her bracelets jangled and her hair bounced down her back. She looked like a Gypsy, and perhaps many generations back she’d come from Romany stock – for she would often disappear for days in her battered old utility.

In a small place such as Morgan’s Reach, everyone knew everyone else’s business, but despite the rumours and gossip no one had yet discovered where Sal actually went – or what she got up to during her mysterious disappearances.

‘Good on you, Sal,’ he muttered as she drove away from the hospital in a cloud of dust. ‘Wherever you go, I hope you find the peace you so obviously deserve.’

He finished clearing everything away and took one of his pills before closing the window and locking the door. Rebecca was looking after the patients on the ward, and Jane would take over from her during the night, so his duties were finally done for today – as long as there wasn’t another emergency. He yawned as he shoved the keys in his pocket and made his way to the hospital kitchen to make sure everything there was going smoothly.

The hospital at Morgan’s Reach was blessed by additional help from two local spinster sisters, Louise and Enid Harper. They been nurses there until retirement, but had soon found they didn’t really like being idle and had become permanent fixtures to be relied upon in any emergency.