We called the surgery down the road and asked to borrow their emergency doctor. This wouldn’t take a minute, we promised. It was the usual procedure but still. The doctor was in a huff when he arrived, obviously inconvenienced. He mumbled, ‘Couldn’t have picked a worse time,’ then apologized, complaining of merciless cuts to public services. We tried our best to explain to the doctor that the old man had died while unsupervised, but he didn’t seem keen to listen. ‘Well, he definitely is,’ he said. It was obvious he was in a hurry. His face was expressionless. He scrawled on his pad, ‘cardiac arrest’, ‘ischemic hypoxia’ – spasms not uncommon as an attack reaches its climax – and went back to his twenty-three five-minute appointments. Mr Hancock must’ve struggled as his heart stopped and it’s not unlikely he had a fair bit of strength left in him. In his youth he had had a passion for bodybuilding. That’s how his arm ended up in such an odd position. It looked worse than it was because of the blood, Mona and I concurred, because of the strange angle. And really it was only a bit of blood. Just a shame Timmy was the one to find him, because of his phobia. Time of death: approximately 10:30 a.m.

Over two hours before Timmy came up with the tray. But after I’d been to his room on my round.

I kneeled on the floor to clean it all up, picked up the chicken breast, the coleslaw, the bread roll and shoved them back into each individual section of the tray. Then I went over to the bin, stamped on the pedal and emptied it inside, tapping its back against the metal edge until all the food fell out. This is how we made a start on fixing the room. We called his daughter immediately, of course, but she was tied up. We didn’t really get to speak to her. She’d put her phone through to her PA. Legally, we aren’t allowed to share medical information on the phone with anyone who isn’t a close relative, but we made an exception given the urgency of the matter. We were told by the assistant that Miss Hancock had been in a meeting in Noho for three hours. It didn’t look anywhere close to finishing. Even if we’d caught it in real time, she would still have missed her father’s passing. Nothing to be done. This made the circumstances of his death seem less unfortunate. Mona and I agreed on this point.