My real left hand, the one I’d been born with, had been severely injured in a racing fall, so much so that it had totally ceased to function. The fall itself had been easy enough—I had simply rolled off my falling mount onto the turf. It had been the horse jumping the fence behind me that had done the damage. In order to save a few pence, the trainer had fitted it with old racing plates, the lightweight aluminium horseshoes used only in races. The edge of one shoe had been worn down so much that it had become as sharp as a razor, and it had landed slap bang onto my outstretched palm, severing muscles, bones and tendons so badly that a team of plastic surgeons had been unable to rebuild it.

Indeed, they had wanted to amputate my hand there and then, but I had insisted they sew everything together as best they could, in the expectation I would regain some use of it over time. But that had been a forlorn hope, and my race-riding days were suddenly over for good.

However, the final coup de grâce for my by-then useless limb had come a couple of years later as a result of the less-than-delicate handiwork of a sadistic villain. He had been trying to compel me to tell him the whereabouts of some incriminating photographic negatives, the location of which I would rather have kept a secret. With his considerable strength, plus the use of an iron poker, he had totally destroyed the surgeons’ former repair job and, this time, the medics had had no choice but to remove my hand altogether.

For many years after that, I had been fitted with a fibreglass, steel and plastic myoelectric hand that, while very sophisticated and top of the range, was no proper substitute for real flesh. Electrical impulses in my forearm could make the prosthetic wrist rotate and the thumb and fingers move, but there had been no sensations involved, and hence I could just as easily let a wineglass slip out of my grasp as crush it into a thousand fragments.

When I’d been selected as a possible recipient of a hand transplant, I’d jumped at the opportunity and, for the most part, my new hand had been a life-changing revelation.

But was it now more life-changing than I had expected, or wanted?

Was this new hand of mine really that of an alien being, capable of causing my wife to shudder at its touch? Or was there something more, some compelling other reason? Was my hand simply the excuse?

I’d had my new hand for almost three years.