She kept to one side and peered through the glass window into the corridor beyond. There were a group of people not far from her, but she wouldn’t have to worry about being seen. They were far too focused on the man being held between them.

Thea had seen evangelical healings on television, the way the afflicted would shake and judder under the priest’s touch while the priest shouted something like: ‘Satan! Be gone!’ It always ended with the person cured and floppy, sagging gratefully into the arms of their family.

The man in the corridor flailed and jerked as if demon-possessed but no one near him was going to bother laying hands on his head. They were too busy trying to secure his arms and feet as he kicked and twisted and strained, all the while screaming in that terrible way. There were no words in what he yelled over and over again, or rather, if there had been they’d become so badly mangled together they could no longer be understood.

They shuffled with him as a group – a many-legged monster making its halting way along the corridor – and Thea shrank back as they passed her door, glancing at Rosie.

Another face swam into her memory: a pale blob in an arched window.

Had they found the person in the monastery?

She carefully opened the door and tiptoed into the corridor. All she had to do was follow the screaming – so she did. It brought her to a door not too far away from Rosie’s, with a similar square pane of a window.

They had got the man closer to the bed but that was as far as he was going to let them. Thea managed to get a proper look at his face and realized with a jolt that it was Richard from her sleep therapy group, tortoise-Richard with his bald head, sad voice and sheepish smile. There was no smile now. Richard’s voice was beginning to sound hoarse and ragged, but he continued to wrestle the others holding him, jerking his body so hard Thea feared one of his joints would pop.

Then his rolling, wide eyes caught hers. Thea froze. But she needn’t have feared – his eyes may have been looking at her but what they were seeing was something else, something that made him cringe suddenly, his gaze never leaving her, the screaming turning wetly to a wild keening. He stilled.

He stood, chest heaving, limbs slack, all fight gone.

One of the men holding him must have been lulled into a false sense of security and loosened his grip as he tried to edge him towards the bed. It was all the chance Richard needed. With a roar that made the tendons in his neck bulge Richard wrenched one arm free with a strength that belied his skinny frame, grabbing the nearest thing to hand.

A chair.