‘What do you mean? Swallowed it, of course. A glass of water in my hotel . . .’

‘From the faucet - the tap?’

‘Yes,’ I said, hollowly. ‘From the tap.’

Silence, as his pen scratched the paper. My muscles ached; my innards gurgled; my head throbbed. Was it neon they were using for the light in here?

‘Have you had any other contact with unfiltered water since you arrived? Have you been in any areas containing swamps, for example?’

Only waded through one. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so I just nodded. He scribbled it down.

‘Have you been in contact with any rodents since you arrived in Nigeria?’ he asked, not looking up.

I stared at him and nodded. Of course. The rat in the sink. The same sink from which I had poured the water to wash down Manning’s useless bloody malaria tablet.

‘What do you think it is?’

‘We’re not sure,’ he said. ‘We’ve tested you for everything we could think of: malaria, typhoid fever, trichinosis . . . None of them fitted. Another candidate is yellow fever, but you don’t look jaundiced and if you arrived Monday the incubation is still a little too fast. It could be a new disease: there was one discovered a couple of hundred miles north of here in January, in a village called Lassa. An American nurse in a missionary hospital fell sick very quickly. Then one of the nurses treating her caught it. Nobody’s sure how it’s transmitted yet, but one possibility is via rodent faeces. From monitoring you and talking to others, you seem to have had some of the same symptoms as the nurses: muscle and back pain, fever, nausea . . . Have you had any retro-orbital pain?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Behind the eyes.’

I nodded.

‘That’s another.’ He looked down at his pad. ‘Also intermittent loss of hearing, respiratory problems, hallucinations . . .’

His outfit was starting to take on a significance I didn’t like. ‘What happened to the nurses?’ I asked.

‘They died,’ he said evenly. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. That disease has only just been discovered, and we’re by no means certain you’ve contracted it. It’s just an idea. We’ve been giving you hydroxychloroquine and tetracycline, and now I am starting you on chloramphenicol. We’re doing everything we can. In the meantime, I’d be very grateful if you could make a list of all the people you have come into contact with since arriving in Nigeria. We may need to start tracing them.’

I asked him how I had arrived at the clinic, and there was a conspicuous pause before he answered. ‘Some Biafran soldiers brought you in. They said they had been at a meeting with Doctor Wise when you had collapsed.’

‘Doctor who?’