‘I need to piss.’ He yawned until his body shuddered, then pushed a hand through his hair and moved to the door. He was wearing a pair of Felix the Cat boxer shorts. ‘I may be some time,’ he said.

Alec heard him flick on the landing light. Then a pause of three, four seconds, and he was back, leaning into the room, brittle-faced. ‘Mum’, he said, and disappeared again.

Alec climbed from his bed. He felt small and powerless and utterly unprepared. He put on his glasses. There was really nowhere to hide. After a few moments he went out.

Alice was face down in the doorway of her bedroom, her nightdress caught up around her thighs, her panties in a tangle round her ankles. The backs of her legs were streaked with diarrhoea, and there were small black pools of it on the carpet. It was not hard to see what must have happened. The confusion. The floundering in the dark. A last panicky attempt not to foul herself. Had she called out to them? Was that what they had heard?

Larry was crouched beside her, his fingers feeling for the pulse at her throat. He looked up at Alec. ‘Go downstairs and call Una. Tell her what’s happened, but that it doesn’t look like she’s broken anything. And she’s not unconscious. Tell her I’m going to get her back into bed...’

‘Should she be moved?’

‘I’m not going to leave her here. Not like this.’

‘No,’ said Alec. The stink was very real. A smell of rot. A stench like the smell of the sickness itself.

‘Ask if there’s anything else we should do. Anything we should give her. And when you come up bring all the cleaning stuff you can find. OK? Go!’

Alone with her, Larry spoke in a whisper, telling her he would take care of her. He checked again for signs that she had damaged herself in the fall – he had once performed a similar procedure as Dr Barry, though on that occasion the patient had been a female lifeguard thrown from a moving limo by her jealous lover – then he stood, leaned, lifted her in the cradle of his arms, and carried her into the bedroom. Her legs were very cold. He thought: She’s going to die on me. I came too late.

He laid her on the bed, covered her feet and went into the en-suite bathroom. In the mirror he caught glimpses of himself frantically snatching towels, sponges. There was a pink plastic bowl. He put a bar of soap in it and filled it with warm water.