On closer inspection, she discovered that she had before her two bones, the two middle joints of a small digit of a small hand, tied together with dirty fraying cotton thread. They took her back to anatomy lessons of yesteryear. A hundred years ago, she had studied bones and muscles, articulations and connections. She had learned the names of the small bones and of the large. This knowledge was not much use to her these days. But from a hundred years ago dry words whispered to her. The radius and the ulna, the carpal, metacarpal and phalangeal bones.

She regarded the missive without alarm but with respect. She touched it gingerly. She gazed at the rest of the package. There were envelopes within envelopes. Wads of paper, notebooks, newspaper clippings. A complex presentation. It had come from abroad, and the stamps were unfamiliar. Was it, she wondered, a gift of leprosy? Was a fatal illness lying there before her? The bones looked like an amulet, a charm against evil. Did it bring her good or ill? Which was intended? And by whom?

Liz, as a healer of hurt minds, was professionally familiar with distressing post. She knew the handwriting and the notepaper of derangement. She had received objects before now: once a used condom, once a dried purple rose. But never before had she received a human bone.

The ensemble exuded craziness, from string, from dirty peeling adhesive tape, from large crudely printed address, DR E. HEADLEAND, 33 DRESDEN ROAD, LONDON NW8, it requested. It was quite substantial. Manuscript size. Was it perhaps an unpublished and unpublishable novel, from a leper in the Congo? From a burnt-out case, shedding his unwanted thoughts and fingers on Elizabeth Headleand in St John’s Wood? She wondered, half seriously, if it would be safe to touch it. She recalled the public library books of her childhood which had carried health warnings about contagious diseases. This looked a dangerous package. If any package could kill you without explosives, this would be it.

Liz thought of rubber gloves, but dismissed the notion as absurd. She picked up the bones, wrapped them up again in their wisp of creased paper, laid them to one side of her large leather-topped desk, and applied herself to the package.

First she extracted an airmail envelope of unfamiliar design, with her name upon it in an unfamiliar hand, written, like the address, in wandering capitals. She opened it. A piece of lined bluish-grey paper mysteriously informed her I ASK SEND YOU THIS GREAT CRISIS GOOD BYE! BYE! BYE! No date, no signature.

She moved on. Was she bored, was she intrigued? She could not have said. Everyday craziness is dull, but grand craziness compels attention. Could this be craziness on a grand scale? She eased the string from a brown envelope full of paper, and found the handwriting of her old friend Stephen Cox.