At last I heard a bellow from Jock, the most welcome bellow of my life. I croaked an answer. The bellow came nearer. When Jock finally loomed up before me I levelled the pistol at his belly. An hour before, I would have trusted him with my life but tonight the world was insane. All I could think of was that I was not going to be hurt any more. He stepped closer. I sniffed hungrily. There was no trace of the loathly stench of the witch.

‘You all right, Mr Charlie?’ he asked.

‘Eye aws ogen,’ I explained.

‘Eh?’

‘Aw ogen,’ I explained crossly, pointing to my chin.

‘Jaw broken. Lumme, so it is.’

‘Ailed oo ee,’ I added, pointing to my ear.

He struck a match and hissed with distress when he saw the plight I was in. The nail, it seems, had been driven in to its very head; my ear had puffed up around it and was full of blood.

‘I don’t reckon I could get a claw-hammer under it, Mr Charlie. Think I’ll have to cut it.’

I didn’t want to know what he was going to do: I just wanted him to do it, so that I could lie down and get to sleep. I made vigorous motions towards the ear and shut my eyes hard.

I couldn’t grit my teeth while he cut a channel from the head of the nail to the edge of my ear, because my teeth wouldn’t meet but I remember weeping copiously. He asked me to move my head. No good: the bit of gristle under the head of the nail held fast. There was a long pause then, to my horror, I felt the point of his knife against the corner of my eye. I wrenched away convulsively and screamed as the ear came free.

‘Sorry, Mr Charlie,’ he said as he gathered me up from the kindly mud.

The next time I woke up, Jock was dragging me out of the car into the Emergency part of the General Hospital in St Helier. He propped me up against the counter, where a kindly but stern lady was making tut-tutting noises at me. She handed Jock a form to fill in: I snatched it and scrawled ‘SEE IF JOHANNA OK’. Jock nodded, lowered me to the floor and vanished.

The time after that, I awoke under a fierce white light and a compassionate black face. The latter seemed to belong to a Pakistani doctor who was doing fine embroidery on my ear. He beamed at me.

‘Werry nasty accident,’ he assured me. ‘You may thank lucky stars you are in land of living.’

I started to open my mouth to say something witty about Peter Sellers but found that I couldn’t. Open my mouth, I mean. It was all sort of wired up and my tongue seemed to be trapped in a barbed-wire entanglement.