‘Don’t worry about asking your patients – clients, whatever – about the November and December dates,’ Sellers told her. If Lane Baillie was anything other than the kind, gentle person she appeared to be, he would walk through Spilling town centre naked. Though that particular gesture would mean less coming from him than it would from someone who hadn’t already once done that while very drunk, in the early hours of a particularly disappointing-on-the-picking-up-girls-front morning in 1999. Sellers shuddered. What a state he’d been in that night: his absolute low point, and, let’s face it, there was stiff competition.

‘Are you all right?’ Lane Baillie was leaning forward to inspect him, with a concerned expression on her face.

‘Fine, thanks.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry! All right, so we’ve dealt with the dates. Moving on …’ He produced the printout of the ‘Two Sisters’ story and passed it to Lane. ‘Is this familiar to you?’

‘Yes!’ It was as if Sellers had reintroduced her to an old friend. ‘This is a wonderful story. I give it to most of my clients. I have a few others like it – stories that contain unusual and, I hope, enlightening insights about life. I like to share them with as many people as I can.’

‘Let’s talk numbers: how many clients have you had in the last year, say, and what percentage of that number have you shared the stories with?’

‘I have no more than ten private clients at any given time. That’s my upper limit, if I want to give each of them the very best of myself, which I do. I also have the people I see at the hospital. There are about sixteen in that group.’

Cancer patients, thought Sellers. Marion Hopwood had been murdered on a cancer ward.

‘I think the percentage must be a hundred,’ said Lane. ‘There’s a wonderful website, Boundlessconsciousness.com. It has many stories on it. Sometimes I print a particular one for a particular client, but I try to make sure I tell all the people I work with about the site, so that they can discover the wonderful stories for themselves. And I’ve put some of them on my website – with permission, of course. Have you read this one, “The Two Sisters”?’

Sellers nodded. ‘We all have. It’s funny, actually – when I first read it, I thought, this is daft. It’s trying to make out that people who fight for good causes are doing more harm than selfish, greedy people.’ And then I met Sondra Halliday.

Lane laughed. ‘It does seem upside-down at first glance, doesn’t it? But in fact, if you read it closely, the story says nothing critical about those who work hard for good causes. The world urgently needs those people – you’re one of them! Saving us from harm, keeping us safe.’

Sellers felt positively heroic.