‘Does your soul inhabit your new hand yet?’

I looked at her. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.’

‘Do you think of it as being you? Or is it still somebody else, only attached to you?’

I thought back to what Chico had said just eleven days ago when I’d collected him from Banbury station: You’re walking around with some dead geezer’s hand sewn onto your arm. I’d told him at the time that the hand had become totally a part of me and that I didn’t even think about it as being different, but that wasn’t actually true.

Even when I had been fingerprinted, only an hour previously, I had looked at it as an alien being and wouldn’t have been much surprised to see it wander off on its own, like Thing from the Addams Family movies.

‘That’s a very good question,’ I said. ‘And I’m still working on the answer.’

‘I have been doing some research,’ the doctor said. ‘Asking transplant patients how they view their new organ, and the psychology of accepting that it is now fully part of them. Of course, it’s much easier to accept for those who can’t see what has been transplanted, like those receiving a new kidney, or even a replacement heart. And the problems are most profound for those few people who’ve been given a new face. Do they become the person they now see each morning in the bathroom mirror, or do they remain the person behind the mask?’

‘And what’s the answer?’

Now she laughed. ‘There is no simple answer. Everyone is different, but I do know that those who accept a transplant as being part of them entirely do much better in the long run, at least psychologically.’

I could have easily chatted to Dr Grossi for very much longer, but she turned towards the door to go.

‘I will arrange for you to go to hospital to have that wound repaired.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Could you also arrange for me to be given some immunosuppressant drugs? I have none of my usual ones with me, and I can already feel my transplant beginning to itch.’

She smiled at me. ‘It’s not your transplant, Mr Halley, it’s your hand.’

It took two hours for a plastic surgeon at the Friarage Hospital to repair the damage to my right hand, all of it done under local anaesthetic, with a surgically masked policeman watching every move from the far corner of the operating theatre—probably there to ensure that I didn’t conceal a scalpel about my person.

When it was all over, I ended up with my repaired right hand being strapped to my upper left chest.

‘It needs to stay like that for at least the next week,’ said the surgeon. ‘Keeping it elevated should prevent any excessive swelling of the tissues.’