They ascended the wide and resplendent staircase to the floor above and walked in silence for a time along a featureless corridor until they came, finally, to a door. Beyond was an office, plain and thinly carpeted and airless, a place of bureaucratic functions and small tasks. The hospital official entered the office, sat down at a desk and leaned forward a little. He had mastered his features now. He was businesslike.

‘My name is Gregson,’ he announced, when Alasdair had followed him in and taken the seat opposite. ‘You are enquiring about a patient, I believe. A Miss Trent?’

Alasdair was. They knew this. He inclined his head. He had not removed his hat. It was not that sort of a place, not that sort of occasion.

The official, Gregson, did not continue at once. Instead, he studied his visitor through slightly narrowed eyes, stroked his beard, ran a fingernail over his front teeth, and Alasdair despised him.

But the man was talking. What was he saying? Alasdair brushed the man’s words aside. He cut him off.

‘Does she live?’ he demanded. ‘Does Miss Trent live or not?’

Gregson sat back, affronted. ‘Certainly, sir, she lives, though she remains gravely ill and her recovery is in no way assured.’

He said more but Alasdair found himself at the window, and after a moment or two found he looked out upon the courtyard at the rear of the hospital, at a circle of lawn and a fountain mounted on a sandstone plinth. He tried to make sense of the scene but could not. He turned back to the room and to its jumble of chaotic images which now sorted themselves once more into a man seated at a desk, talking.

‘You are aware that Miss Trent was in police custody when she was brought here?’

But the man’s words made no sense. Alasdair sat down, seizing the chair as a sinner seizes absolution. ‘I think not. You have made an error, sir.’

The realisation that they were talking at cross purposes, that this man was speaking of some other woman entirely and Verity might, after all, be lying in the morgue, was an agony beyond endurance.

Gregson frowned so deeply he was required to place his forefinger and thumb on the pince-nez so that they did not fall off. He studied again the records laid before him.

‘Miss Verity Trent of Woolloomooloo. Brought in on Saturday morning last, under the charge of two constables. Suffering severe loss of blood and possible internal injury and infection.’

Alasdair shook his head. He did not speak for a time. ‘I do not understand,’ he said finally.