‘Delia Povey had Harris’ bedroom window bricked up.’ Chest compressions. Clear more mud from Elspeth’s mouth. Breathe hard into her lips. ‘Someone painted real windows over them, as if they could still see out. Who do you think did that?’ Sit up. Try to catch her own breath before she passed out.

Fergus thought about it. ‘Someone sad. Someone who didn’t want to go back to the hospital. He probably didn’t want the electric shock treatment any more.’

Connie put two more breaths into Elspeth’s lungs and could taste the blood on the woman’s teeth. Blood and dirt. If that wasn’t death’s own recipe, she didn’t know what was.

‘Did the electricity make Harris feel bad?’ Connie asked.

Compressions again. Her arms felt weak, and there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t know why she was bothering. Harris Povey could kill any of them at a moment’s notice, and she had no strength left for either fight or flight.

‘They said it wouldn’t hurt. Should have been more anaesthetic. But sometimes it wore off when the electricity got turned on. I … Harris was scared, and sometimes he fought and then they gave him even more.’

Struggling to breathe, to speak, Connie looked at the child in the man’s body standing before her, and allowed her eyes to fill with tears for them all. For Meggy and the trauma from which she would never fully recover, for Elspeth who would likely not regain consciousness, for Baarda who might not be alive, for herself, survival seeming an unlikely conclusion. Even for Harris Povey, who had suffered depression, needed help, and instead got a negligent anaesthetist and treatment that had left him no less depressed but changed in other much worse ways, forever.

‘Poor Harris,’ she said. ‘None of it’s his fault.’ She gave up chest compressions and prepared to give mouth to mouth again. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Are you crying for me?’ he asked, his voice childlike and high. ‘Tears for me? Do you really care?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, one breath down, one to go. ‘You’re owed some tears, Harris. These tears and thousands more. And hugs and love and tenderness. Whatever you did, you never felt you had a choice. I know that.’

‘Tears for me,’ he whispered. ‘That’s it. That’s what I was waiting for. All these years. Tears for Harris. Now I can pass. It was you I was meant to be with, not them. You’re all I ever needed. You really love me.’

He took a step towards her.

‘Harris,’ she said. ‘You have to let me finish helping Elspeth. She’ll die if I stop.’