So I was, once more, single-handed, albeit, this time, on the other side.

I was then taken from the hospital back to the custody suite at police headquarters, and if I thought everything would have been sorted out by then, I was much mistaken.

‘Cell seven,’ said the custody sergeant to my escort as we arrived.

‘When do I get to be interviewed?’ I asked.

‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘We are authorised to keep you here until nine o’clock tomorrow evening.’

‘But I want to speak to a senior officer now.’

‘All in good time,’ the sergeant said, again unhelpfully. ‘Cell seven.’

And so I ended up staring at the same sickly cream cell walls, wondering what pack of lies Harry Asquith was spinning to his chum the chief constable, and fearing that I might never get out of here, and certainly not in time to pick up Marina and Saskia from Heathrow at five to six on Friday afternoon.

I was finally interviewed at eleven o’clock on Thursday morning after a long, difficult, sleepless night in cell seven.

As the local anaesthetic had gradually worn off, my right hand had started throbbing mercilessly and my left hand had continued to itch because the hospital had been unable to provide my usual cocktail of all six immunosuppressant medications.

To take my mind off the pain, I had spent most of the hours thinking about what Dr Grossi had said.

How could I expect Marina to accept my new hand as a fully integrated part of me if, deep down, I didn’t accept it myself?

In the glow from the ever-on light in the cell ceiling, I had found myself looking closely at this incomer, studying it and, eventually, I started talking to it.

‘So, do you want to be part of me?’ I asked it. ‘Or would you rather be rotting underground in a box, along with the rest of your former owner?’

Unsurprisingly, the hand didn’t answer me directly, and I felt rather foolish. But the die had been cast.

My left hand and I communicated back and forth together for the rest of the night, me asking it question after question and it, point-blank, refusing to answer any of them out loud. But, in fact, it did answer them all in its own way.

It never shied away from my inquisition, never once hid from reality.

I studied the surface of my new manus in fine detail, noting every blemish, every crease, every wrinkle. I flexed the fingers straight and then curled them into a fist, and I rotated the thumb, marvelling at how the skin so readily stretched and relaxed. I also noticed a tiny white scar at the base of the wrist and wondered how it had come about.