‘The Kaiser?’

‘That’s what she said, straight up. And why hadn’t we given women the vote yet? Even accused me of being one of the Liberal Party scum who deserved to swing at the end of a rope.’ He threw his hand up in frustration. ‘Trust me to choose the village nutter to talk to. And, to top it all, her bleedin’ dog tried to bite my ankles.’

I made an effort not to laugh, but without success.

‘You can bleedin’ shut up for a start,’ Chico said crossly at me. ‘I’m tellin’ you, that crazy woman is livin’ in the past. Even her dog was called Gladstone.’

With no one else visible walking their dog, and with me being reluctant to ask questions at the Blue Lion Inn in case word spread among the locals that two strangers had been asking for names of the village residents, we set off back south.

We had what we’d come for—Marcus’s video—now safely stored on my phone, and also on Chico’s for good measure.

Even if I hadn’t yet worked out what to do with it.

‘So tell me,’ Chico said when we were travelling south on the motorway, ‘does it feel the same as the other one?’

He was looking at my left hand on the steering wheel.

‘No, not quite. The sensations are there all right, but they are rather dulled, as if I’m wearing a rubber glove. But it’s a lot better now than when it was first done. Initially, I couldn’t feel anything even though I could move the fingers very slightly from day one.’

I remembered how the area of sensation had gradually worked its way from my wrist through my palm and finally up the fingers. There were still some bits of skin I couldn’t feel, but the doctors had said that even those should come back eventually.

‘I was told it would take some time for my brain to relearn the meaning of the signals it receives from the reattached nerves, especially as I didn’t have a hand there at all for so long.’

‘Amazin’, really,’ Chico said. ‘Makes you wonder what they’ll transplant next. Heads, maybe. If your body packs up, just get a new one.’

‘But someone would have to die to provide the body,’ I pointed out. ‘And transplanting heads does seem a bit extreme. Even my surgeon, Harry the Hands, can’t reattach a severed spinal column. Not yet, anyway.’

I had a thought about something else, but then, suddenly, a truck pulled out right in front of me to overtake another and I had to brake sharply to avoid a collision.

The fleeting thought had snapped into my head but, just as quickly, it had slipped out again as I concentrated on the road. What the hell was it?