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.

I followed a corridor. I followed a corridor because it was the far end and because I had been told that afternoon what would happen if that baby cried again.

There is no heart anywhere in the actual sequence of that night until about four in the morning, and by then he was already awake.

It has been two years.

Rendel walks now, slowly, with a stick, and his left hand does not do what he asks it to and probably will not.

There was a process about Halloran and there is another one still running about the loan, and I gave evidence twice and I am not going to write about either, because neither of them is finished and because the useful part was never in a courtroom.

The useful part was a chart with blank lines on it, kept by somebody nobody thought was reading.

What I actually did, in the end, was not brave and took about nine minutes.

I photographed six weeks of my own chart on my phone in the bathroom at twenty past two in the morning.

Then I emailed it to myself, and to a solicitor whose name I got off a leaflet in a doctor’s waiting room in the town, with four sentences of explanation and no accusations in it at all.