‘Yes, it likes to give that impression,’ Rideout said, ‘but it’s a liar. Close your eyes, sir, and concentrate. Look for the pain. Look past the false shouts it gives – ignore the cheap ventriloquism – and locate it. You can do this. You must do it, if we’re to have any success.’

Newsome closed his eyes. For a space of ninety seconds there was no sound but the wind and the rain spattering against the windows like handfuls of fine gravel. Kat’s watch was the old-fashioned wind-up kind, a nursing school graduation present from her father many years ago, and when the wind lulled, the room was quiet enough for her to hear its self-important ticking. And something else: at the far end of the big house: elderly Tonya Marsden singing softly as she neatened up the kitchen at the end of another day. Froggy went a-courtin and he did ride, uh-huh.

At last Newsome said, ‘It’s in my chest. High in my chest. Or at the bottom of my throat, below the windpipe.’

‘Can you see it? Concentrate!’

Vertical lines appeared on Newsome’s forehead. Scars from the skin that had been flayed open during the accident wavered through these grooves of concentration. ‘I see it. It’s pulsing in time to my heartbeat.’ His lips pulled down in an expression of distaste. ‘It’s nasty.’

Rideout leaned closer. ‘Is it a ball? It is, isn’t it? A green ball.’

‘Yes. Yes! A little green ball that breathes!’

Like the rigged-up tennis ball you undoubtedly have either up your sleeve or in that big black lunchbox of yours, Rev, she thought.

And, as if she were controlling him with her mind (instead of just deducing where this foolish little playlet would go next), Rideout said, ‘Mr Jensen, sir. There’s a lunchbox under the chair I was sitting in. Get it and open it and stand next to me. You need to do no more than that for the moment. Just—’

Kat MacDonald snapped. It was a snap she actually heard in her head. It sounded like Roger Miller snapping his fingers during the intro to ‘King of the Road.’

She stepped up beside Rideout and shouldered him aside. It was easy. He was taller, but she had been turning and lifting patients for nearly half her life, and she was stronger. ‘Open your eyes, Andy. Open them right now. Look at me.’

Startled, Newsome did as she said. Melissa and Jensen (now with the lunchbox in his hands) looked alarmed. One of the facts of their working lives – and Kat’s own, at least until now – was that you didn’t command the boss. The boss commanded you. You most certainly did not startle him.

But she’d had quite enough. In another twenty minutes she might be crawling after her headlights along stormy roads to the only motel in the vicinity, but it didn’t matter. She simply couldn’t do this any longer.

‘This is bullshit, Andy,’ she said. ‘Are you hearing me? Bullshit.’

‘I think you better stop right there,’ Newsome said, beginning to smile – he had several smiles, and this wasn’t one of the good ones. ‘If you want to keep your job, that is. There are plenty of other nurses in Vermont who specialize in pain therapy.’

She might have stopped there, but Rideout said, ‘Let her speak, sir.’ It was the gentleness in his tone that drove her over the edge.

She leaned forward, into his space, and the words spilled out in a torrent.

‘For the last sixteen months – ever since your respiratory system improved enough to allow meaningful physiotherapy – I’ve watched you lie in this goddam expensive bed and insult your own body. It makes me sick. Do you know how lucky you are to be alive, when everyone else on that airplane was killed? What a miracle it is that your spine wasn’t severed, or your skull crushed into your brain, or your body burned – no, baked, baked like an apple – from head to toe? You would have lived four days, maybe even two weeks, in hellish agony. Instead you were thrown clear. You’re not a vegetable. You’re not a quadriplegic, although you choose to act like one. You won’t do the work. You look for some easier way. You want to pay your way out of your situation. If you died and went to hell, the first thing you’d do is try to grease Satan’s palm.’

Jensen and Melissa were staring at her in horror. Newsome’s mouth hung open. If he had ever been talked to in such a fashion, it had been long ago. Only Rideout looked at ease. He was the one smiling now. The way a father would smile at his wayward four-year-old. It drove her crazy.

‘You could have been walking by now. God knows I’ve tried to make you understand that, and God knows I’ve told you – over and over – the kind of work it would take to get you up out of that bed and back on your feet. Dr Dilawar in San Francisco had the guts to tell you – he was the only one – and you rewarded him by calling him a faggot.’

‘He was a faggot,’ Newsome said. His scarred hands had balled themselves into fists.

‘You’re in pain, yes. Of course you are. It’s manageable, though. I’ve seen it managed, not once but many times. But not by a rich man who tries to substitute his sense of entitlement for the plain old hard work and tears it takes to get better. You refuse. I’ve seen that, too, and I know what always happens next. The quacks and confidence men come, the way leeches come when a man with a cut leg wades into a stagnant pond. Sometimes the quacks have magic creams. Sometimes they have magic pills. The healers come with trumped-up claims about God’s power, the way this one has. Usually the marks get partial relief. Why wouldn’t they, when half the pain is in their heads, manufactured by lazy minds that only understand it will hurt to get better?’

She raised her voice to a wavering, childlike treble and bent close to him. ‘Daddy, it hurrr-rrrts! But the relief never lasts long, because the muscles have no tone, the tendons are still slack, the bones haven’t thickened enough to accommodate weight-bearing. And when you get this guy on the phone to tell him the pain’s back – if you can – do you know what he’ll say? That you didn’t have faith enough. If you used your brains on this the way you did on your manufacturing plants and various investments, you’d know there’s no little living tennis ball sitting at the base of your throat. You’re too fucking old to believe in Santa Claus, Andy.’

Tonya had come into the doorway and now stood beside Melissa, staring with wide eyes and a dishwiper hanging limp in one hand.

‘You’re fired,’ Newsome said, almost genially.

‘Yes,’ Kat said. ‘Of course I am. Although I must say that this is the best I’ve felt in almost a year.’

‘If you fire her,’ Rideout said, ‘I’ll have to take my leave.’

Newsome’s eyes rolled to the Reverend. His brow was knitted in perplexity. His hands now began to knead his hips and thighs, as they always did when his pain medication was overdue.

‘She needs educating, praise God’s Holy Name.’ Rideout leaned toward Newsome, his own hands clasped behind his back. He reminded Kat of a picture she’d seen once of Washington Irving’s schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane. ‘She’s had her say. Shall I have mine?’

Newsome was sweating more heavily, but he was smiling again. ‘Have at her. Rip and roar. I believe I want to hear this.’

Kat faced him. Those dark, socketed eyes were unsettling, but she met them. ‘Actually, so do I.’

Hands still clasped behind his back, pink skull shining mutedly through his thin hair, long face solemn, Rideout examined her. Then he said, ‘You’ve never suffered yourself, have you?’

Kat felt an urge to flinch at that, or look away, or both. She suppressed it. ‘I fell out of a tree when I was eleven and broke my arm.’

Rideout rounded his thin lips and whistled: one tuneless, almost toneless note. ‘Broke an arm while you were eleven. Yes, that must have been excruciating.’

She flushed. She felt it and hated it but couldn’t stop the heat. ‘Belittle me all you want. I based what I said on years of experience dealing with pain patients. It is a medical opinion.’