As Jess’s concern for her client turns to panic, Phillip ends the call. She pockets her phone and races through the living room towards the patio. A few steps from the open French windows, she catches sight of two thin legs jutting beneath the hem of Flo’s red dressing gown, in the upper part of the doorframe. They hang in empty air outside, above the lawn. Distant trees in the glade are clearly visible below the slippered feet.

Jess pulls up. ‘Christ!’

The body of Flo abruptly drops from the air and crumples upon the lawn, the red gown pooling.

Jess snaps from a shocked, gaping stupor. Races across the remaining few feet of the living room floor and leaps through the open French windows, into the light of the garden. Where her client lies inert upon the lawn, her limbs profoundly motionless. Flo’s eyes are closed. Around the garden, birds shriek their alarm from on high.

Jess casts a nervous glance into the air in an attempt to see what it was that Flo had climbed up, or been raised by. But there is nothing there. Mystified, she drops to her knees beside her client, reaches for her hand and holds it. ‘Flo. Flo. Don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance.’ Jess fumbles her phone out of her pocket.

Within her inert head that lies upon the grass, Flo’s eyes open. And before Jess is able to raise the phone, the old woman darts forward from the waist, as quick as a snake, to seize Jess’s wrist and hold it fast between her jaws.

‘Shit!’ Jess drops the phone and tries to pull her arm free. But Flo doesn’t relent and, as Jess’s arm moves, Flo’s scrawny body bumps across the grass, attached to her carer by the mouth.

Jess rises to a crouch and pulls more forcefully. ‘Let go!’

Saliva foaming about her thin lips, her jaws locked, Flo’s entire body continues to follow along the ground as Jess stumbles in retreat. She might have been dragging the weight of a small crocodile, clamped to her limb. The old mouth fastened to her wrist begins to gnaw and the biter’s eyes enliven with a bestial ferocity. Jess withers from pain, from shock. Whimpers. In a last resort she draws her free hand back to strike her client.

Yet pauses. Some innate, internal reservation breaks the circuit, ends the compulsion, and she restrains herself from slapping the head of the elderly woman in her care. Instead, she slips her free hand into Flo’s armpit and raises the woman’s entire body from the ground. Then staggers and fumbles her onto the wheelchair. With a pained cry, she twists her arm free of Flo’s moist jaws.

Beside the wheelchair, Jess sways. She can do little but stare aghast at the wet, bruised flesh of her wrist.