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‘Let me tell you about Kenny,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe that’s the best way of explaining this.’

I started with the story of how me and Kenny had fought our one-sided duel on the roof of the tinworks, jumped forward to Kenny bleeding out in a car with my name on the windscreen, then went back and filled in as many of the gaps as Nicky’s brief orientation lecture and my own ferreting around the Salisbury would allow. I played down the demon-weavings, played up the wanting to find out what it was that Kenny had to tell me that was worth wasting a pint of his own blood to do it.

From about two minutes in, I could tell from her expression that Nurse Ryall wasn’t buying it. Her frankly lovely face looked like a hod full of hard-core. And as soon as I’d finished, she shook her head.

‘If what you’re telling me is true,’ she said, ‘then why were you interested in the other man on the ward, too? The one with the puncture wounds.’

She had me there. By putting the emphasis so much on me and Kenny, I’d left out too much of the bigger picture - which maybe she needed to make sense of the other stuff.

I tried again, this time telling her about some of the stuff that was happening at the Salisbury - the epidemic of violence, the weird graffiti, the tranced kid trying to jump off the walkway. But it made things worse, not better. There wasn’t any thread of logic connecting these things, and that became more and more obvious the more I talked about it. I was just whistling in the dark, trying to make a whole out of a bunch of parts that I didn’t even understand separately.

I decided to finish what I’d started, but more from mule-headedness than from any feeling that it would do any good. By the time I got to Nicky’s stats, I could hear the hollow echo of my own words in the silent ward, and when I finally wound down Nurse Ryall didn’t make any answer at all.

But her expression was unhappy, and it was noticeable that she wasn’t telling me that I was a rabid dog who ought to be put down for the good of humanity.

I waited her out, and at last she spoke.

‘Can you walk?’ she asked, very quietly.

‘Normally, I’m proficient,’ I said. ‘Tonight, I don’t know, but I’m prepared to give it a shot. What do you fancy? A movie? A Brick Lane curry?’

She didn’t seem to hear the lame joke. ‘Get your dressing gown on, then,’ she instructed me. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed.