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mane of greying hair which burst out like an expression of the man’s energy, slightly long and slightly frizzy. He might have had one artificial toe stuck in the wall socket.
    His voice rumbled up from his deep barrel of a chest. “Sonny, I’m Frazer McAllister. There’s more of my money in this hospital than you’re likely to see in your lifetime. There’s almost no part of this city where I don’t have business.”
    But Neil Burns in his jeans and trainers was invulnerable to the intimidation of sheer money. I saw his lip wrinkle. “Mr. McAllister, I don’t doubt your taxes run three wings of Barlinnie Prison as well. That’s where people who assault my patients end up.”
    McAllister snorted at him, but I got the strong impression that he was not displeased. He was a man who radiated emotions, all of them powerful, like a pharos sheds light. Radiating from him now, as well as and somehow distinct from the violence of his anger, was a compound of surprise and amusement and respect for someone who was prepared to stand up to him. But then, he’d have looked the same way at a dog walking on its hind legs.
    The imminent prospect of a punch-up seemed to have retreated. I sidled along the wall to where I could see what was going to happen instead. McAllister’s big body swivelled like an executive’s revolving chair. “Who the hell are you?”
    Burns gave me no time to answer. “Dr. Marsh saved Curragh’s life. If it had happened differently—if Mrs. McAllister had been on deck while Curragh cooked breakfast—you’d be standing here thanking her.”
    McAllister growled, “Aye,” low in his throat. It was true, but it was asking a lot of him to accept the purely medical view that one life has much the same value as another, that his wife’s lover was as much worth saving as his wife.
    Yet he was not distraught in his grief. Mostly what he felt thus far was anger—a legitimate reaction in the circumstances—and even that was something that he possessed rather than possessed him. There was no loss of control. What he had done and said was no more or other than he had intended. He hadn’t been suddenly overwhelmed by an access of unbearable passion when he hauled Alex Curragh from his bed, sending the pain beating through his battered skull and leaving his arm to trail useless as a bird’s broken wing. What he had said could not be dismissed as the ravings of someone temporarily out of his mind with shock. Frazer McAllister gave a powerful impression of a man totally in command of himself and his destiny.
    It was an impression which his big scarred face did nothing to contradict; though to refer to his scars is misleading. Almost half his face, from his left ear to his nose and from his eyebrow over the granite bluff of his jaw and down his throat, was nothing but scar tissue, dark and pitted and granular, as if he’d been stitched together from very small pieces—which is what grafting is. Usually it works better than this, but then I didn’t know how deep the damage had gone or what complications had arisen. Also, this wasn’t recent. The healing was long done. This was the best he was going to look.
    And then, as quickly as that, with the man still staring at me with his eyes, including the puckered one, steady and arrogant, and his mouth, including the undamaged side, twisted into a sneer of austere interest, I felt the miracle begin—that special miracle wrought by, or on, the grossly deformed. At first sight the spoiled face, the crooked limb or the hunched back seems totally to dominate the victim, or at least the way you relate to him. You’re embarrassed by your inability to see past it. You might suppose that doctors, inured by familiarity, might be better at seeing the essential human being locked up in the burlesque, but in fact we’re often rather worse. It’s a constant