‘Look, if you could just check my throat is—y’know—check it’s basically okay and then I’ll go.’

‘Let’s have look,’ said Paula softly.

This woman was clearly ready to bolt out the door at any moment, so Paula knew better than to bombard her with questions.

The moment Rochelle removed her scarf, Paula took a sharp intake of breath. Doctors weren’t supposed to react audibly like that, but the lurid strangulation bruises, the handprints around her throat, were so vicious that Paula’s immediate response was the instinctive human one.

Many abuse victims who showed up in a GP’s surgery had been cowed into secrecy and were reluctant to reveal anything. The doctor would need to coax them gently in order to elicit information.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Paula asked. ‘Who did this?’

Rochelle answered with surprising bluntness. ‘My husband. But it’s the first time in a while.’ This woman was a veteran.

Taking her cue from Rochelle, Paula jumped straight to the direct questions. ‘Did you black out when he strangled you? Did you lose consciousness?’

‘Not this time. He said he didn’t want to actually kill me this time.’

‘But he wanted to demonstrate that he could kill you if he chose to?’

‘Bingo,’ Rochelle answered, with a small mordant smile. ‘You’ve met my husband, have you?’

Paula examined the woman’s injured neck as tenderly as she could, not wanting to add to her physical pain. She could feel the tension in Rochelle’s entire body, every muscle and sinew braced tightly.

‘Do you have any difficulty swallowing?’

‘No. Well, it hurts when I swallow, but no trouble getting food down.’

Paula examined Rochelle’s eyes and saw some petechiae—tiny red haemorrhage marks. The throttling attack had been brutal. It was amazing she hadn’t lost consciousness, hadn’t died.

Paula recalled seeing Rochelle with her husband outside the practice once. Ian Ferguson was much older—she in her early thirties, he in his early sixties—and he was physically much bigger than her too. Paula had observed them for a few moments as Ferguson steered Rochelle into the car, his fingers digging into the flesh of her upper arm.

‘Can you take off your jacket?’ Paula asked.

‘Look, if you reckon my throat’s okay, I’d rather just go home and get my sick little boy into bed.’

‘Be good if I could take a proper look at your neck.’

Rochelle hesitated, then unzipped the blue jacket and slid it off. Paula noticed a small bony lump along her clavicle, where a previous fracture had healed.

‘How did you break your collarbone? Was it your husband?’

‘That was ages ago.’

Rochelle’s hand went up to touch the slender line of her collarbone. That’s when Paula saw the puckered red skin on the pale underside of her forearm—the healed scar from a large rectangular burn.