I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

That is all it was. A gap in a rota and a sore gum.

And one more thing, which I have not seen anybody mention when this gets retold.

I went into that room at about ten past two because it is the far end of the floor.

If the house had been laid out differently — if the sick room had been near the stairs, or next to the kitchen, or anywhere that a crying baby would have carried — I would not have gone in.

I would have walked that corridor for another hour and gone back to bed at four and been sacked in the November for a different reason.

A man survived because of where somebody in 1981 decided to put a bedroom.

PART 5

The nephew is not the one who thought of it. I want to be fair about that, and it is not much of a defence.

He is the one who signs.

I have watched that man for six weeks and I would put money on him not having asked a single question at any point.

He is thirty-four. He came into that house three or four times a week and stood at the foot of a bed with his phone in his hand and asked a carer how his uncle was, and never once looked at him.