But the deep green shade of the garden was soothing to look out on. She closed her eyes and opened them again at a slight sound. The blackbird had gone.

The movement in the room was quick and soft so that by the time she had registered what had happened, he was standing beside the couch. Magda started to shift about, trying to pull herself up.

“Hello then, Miss,” he said quietly. “I’m hoping you remember me.”

She stared, trying to place him. He was very tall and he wore jeans and a T-shirt with Atlanta Olympic Games 1996 stamped but barely still visible on the front. Something about him, something c she managed to sit almost upright. But not enough.

“Come on, come on, Miss, you have to remember me.” His voice was both threatening and pleading. “It’s no good telling me you forgotten, Miss.”

“How did you get in?”

“Ah, that’s our secret. Only if you don’t remember me, which is a sad thing and all, you’ll remember my mate Jiggy, he come here not long ago, Miss.”

“The one who broke in and took things and hit me, is that your mate Jiggy?”

“Sounds like you do remember him then, so you try and remember me. I think I’m sitting down a bit here.” He did so, in the chair opposite her, but he pulled it across the room first, so that he was closer. “Now you look into my face, Miss, and tell me you remember? That’d be something.”

She found that she had to look into his face. She could do nothing else.

“Remember now, come on, Miss.”

“Why are you calling me Miss? I don’t remember you, not at all.”

“OK, OK then, Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Now you’ll remember me.”

She put her hand to her eyes and closed them, blotting him out. He had huge teeth, wide-spaced, with a broken one at the side. Huge hands.

“Doctor.”

“If you’ve come to take things, take them c whatever Jiggy left. Just take and go.”

“No, no, no. I’m not taking anything. No, no.” He laughed. He had his knees apart and his huge hands resting on them. “That’s not my idea. No.”

“What is your idea? What are you doing here? Please go. I want you to go. I’m not well and I need to sleep. Please, just leave that way.”

“I know the way. The way in, the way out. Only I’m for staying here. Till you remember me, which you should, which you’d better.”

“Why should I remember you? I’ve never seen you before.”

“Oh yes, oh yes, Miss Doctor, Miss Doctor, you’ve seen me, you’ve seen me a dozen times, maybe more, in your room, in your office, where you wore glasses. No glasses today. No glasses.” He laughed.

She looked into the tiny pupils in his egg-white eyes. “You were a patient? You came to my clinic?”

“Hey yes, now then, you see? Hey. Good. Now we’re getting along fine, a lot better. OK.”

“I don’t remember you.”

His face tightened and he suddenly slapped his fist on to his knee. “You better tell me you do.”

“It must have been years ago.”

“Many, many years. Many years. I was six or seven c or eight years old. You see, now I don’t remember. Remembering is hard, isn’t it, Miss Doctor? A little boy then. But I remember everything else. I remember you talking and talking and talking and I remember the writing you did, writing and writing, and the questions and questions and questions. I remember. I didn’t know the answers all the time, I just heard the questions and the talking and saw the writing. Then I was sent away. You remember now maybe?”

“Sent away?”

“Nobody forgets being sent away.”

“But I didn’t send you away.”

“You did so. You asked questions and wrote stuff and wrote stuff and I kept being back in your room and then one time I got sent away. I don’t forget that.”

“What’s your name?”

“You pretending you don’t remember that now?”

“No, I don’t remember. What is your name?”

“Mikey”

“I didn’t send you away. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the authority to send children away.”

“Maybe you told someone else then. Maybe that. I only know what happened. I remember that OK c that’s why.”

“Why?”

He got up and came to stand over her so that she shrank back. He smelled of something sweet, but it was not a sweetness she recognised.

“Where I went, Miss, I remember that. I remember everything. You remember nothing. That’s too bad. I know what Iremember and who made it happen and that is you, Miss, you, Doctor Doctor, and I’ve waited to come and help you remember and here I am.”

He was speaking more and more quickly, the words running together. Once or twice she felt his spittle on her hand and then on her cheek.

And suddenly, she saw him, a stick-thin boy with huge hands and scabs on his head, bruises round his neck and on his arms. He was sitting on a straight chair in her room looking at the floor, touching his ear or his leg now and again in a gesture that was more than random, that was as someone touches a talisman. He was shocked into silence, malnourished, angry with a confused, hurt, pent-up anger, too frightened to release even a whisper to her. She saw him time after time and, once, only once, she heard him speak, but she could not catch what he was saying. A word she had never caught.

“I remember,” Magda said. “Mikey” His smile was triumphant, wide, gap-toothed, a mouth of a smile which opened into a roar of what she thought was delighted laughter, a second before she recognised it as rage.

In that second, she lifted up her arms to shield her face before he came down upon her savagely, roaring still, as the light shrank to a pinpoint behind her eyes and then went out.

Forty-eight

He had thought he would wait until it was dark but he felt in pain with the frustration of waiting, of the heat, of being able to do nothing else, of having it bang against the inside of his head. He rinsed his head under the cold tap in the kitchen and went out just before seven. The pavements radiated the heat of the day back up and the tarmac was melting at the sides of the road. He turned to take the canal path. It was a longer route but shady, pleasanter. No one was about except one old man on a broken bench, whispering to himself.

They had come here a few times to walk, in winter, in spring. Lizzie had longed to see a kingfisher and someone had told her kingfishers occasionally flashed blue from bank to bank of the canal and nested under the willows, but she had died and the kingfisher remained unseen. Now he stood staring at the willows, still in the early-evening heat. Nothing.

He passed the lock-keeper’s cottage and the warehouses. Lizzie had come there for him but when he had reached out to her she had run away, tripped, fallen, cried and sent for the police. It had been a confusion and a misunderstanding but he had not been able to explain adequately, they had seemed obtuse. But then, he had always believed that policemen were obtuse, overtrained and undereducated, without subtlety or fastidious intelligence.

The cathedral bells rang the hour.

Lizzie’s death was someone’s fault. Whoever had once fed her contaminated meat. Doctors who had diagnosed her disease too late. Doctors who had failed to treat her. Doctors who had stood by watching her symptoms crawl into her brain and eat it away. Nurses in the hospice. People whose prayers were useless. God. God. God and God’s priests.

He crossed the canal at the narrow iron bridge on to the town side. Here, the backs of terraced houses overlooked it; people might look out of their bedrooms on to the green-black surface of the water, on to the cardboard carton bobbing against the base of the bridge, on to the supermarket trolley embedded in the undergrowth, on to the peeing dogs and the narrow boats and the willows and the secret kingfishers.

He pushed his way through a patch of nettles and briers, through a broken-down gate and up a long tube of a garden without grass. No one saw him. No one came. A dog barked somewhere.