Her eyes met his for the duration of the hello but now she was standing close, peering at Lydia Jarmyn, touching a hand to her forehead. ‘How old did you say?’

‘Eleven, apparently.’

‘Huh.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Let me take her from you,’ Pillai said, reaching with both hands, but the child squirmed, dug her head in under Hirsch’s chin and burrowed against him.

‘Okay, she’s latched onto you,’ Pillai said. ‘Come with me.’

To a room along the corridor, where Pillai and a nurse named Ella poked, prodded, peered, stood Lydia on scales, took a blood sample. The little girl whimpered; Hirsch felt useless.

Then Pillai said, ‘We need to bathe her now.’

The implication was: to see what might lie under the grime. ‘I’ll be out in the waiting room,’ Hirsch said.

But a minute later Pillai was back. ‘Sorry, Paul, I think she’d be calmer if you were with her.’

She led him to a spacious tiled shower room with a hoist and pulley arrangement for non-ambulant patients. He stood in a gap in the curtain and smiled at Lydia as Ella and another nurse stripped off the nappy, socks and jumper, Doctor Pillai watching. The stench rose and Ella said, ‘Oh, you poor little thing,’ and Hirsch didn’t look but he could visualise: caked wastes, sores.

‘That nappy’s been there for a while,’ Pillai said, confirming the image.

A showerhead on a chrome flexi hose in one hand, a washcloth in the other, Ella began to dab at the bony limbs and torso, Lydia succumbing but her eyes fixed hard on Hirsch. He tried a smile or two; her expression didn’t alter. She was trusting him, and he didn’t know if he could live up to that. The suds turned brown; pink skin emerged.

Then a shampoo and rinse, three times, Ella finally saying, ‘Clean now, but she’s got headlice.’

Pillai nodded. ‘Treat that later. Right now I want to finish examining her, then get her into some warm clothes and something to eat. You hungry, sweetheart?’

Lydia, lost in a giant towel, shrank away.

The hospital boasted a small comfort room: a sofa and armchairs, TV set, a poster of kittens on one pastel wall. Magazines on a coffee table, children’s books, and a box of plastic tip trucks, soft toys and Lego. Hirsch and Pillai stood behind the sofa watching Lydia, in roomy blue pyjamas and a pink dressing gown, building a Lego tower. Her eyes flicked ceaselessly from the next Lego brick to Hirsch’s face. Now and then she’d reach out to a plate of crustless sandwiches, nibble, and return the sandwich until next time, as if luxuriating in the meal, making it last.