“Hell, no.” Margaret smiled at the thought. “I took three months out at my own expense. I suppose I could afford to in those days. I had a husband who was working.”

“Ah.” Li couldn’t have explained, even to himself, why he was disappointed to be reminded that she was married. His eye flickered down to the ring on her wedding finger. “You have been married a long time?”

“Foolishly,” she said with a bitterness he had neither seen nor heard in her before, “since I was twenty-four. Seven years. Must have broken a mirror.”

“I’m sorry? You broke a mirror?” Li was confused.

“It’s a silly superstition in the West. They say if you break a mirror it will bring you seven years’ bad luck. Anyway, I am no longer married, so perhaps my luck is changing.”

Li was unaccountably relieved. But still intrigued. “What did he do, your husband?”

“Oh, he lectured in genetics at the Roosevelt University in Chicago. It was his great passion. Or so I used to think.” Li heard great hurt in her voice, but she was trying to disguise it by being flippant. “He always used to say genetics could be our salvation, or our downfall. We had to make the right choices.”

“Life is always about making the right choices.”

“And some of us always seem to make the wrong ones.” And she suddenly realised she had gone too far, and her eyes flickered downwards with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, you don’t want to know about my sordid private life.” She tried to laugh it off. “I’m sure you’d much rather know how I became an expert in crispy critters.”

“In what?”

She laughed. “That’s what a pathologist I used to work for called his burn victims. Crispy critters. Sick, isn’t it?” Li thought it was. “I guess it’s a kind of self-defence mechanism, that kind of humour. We live in a pretty sick world, and that’s our pretty sick way of dealing with it.”

“So how did you become an expert in . . . ‘crispy critters’?” The distasteful sound of it seemed to bring back the smells of the autopsy room, and Li’s nose wrinkled in disgust.