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battle to remember you’ve been consulted by a person rather than a duodenal ulcer, at the best of times.
    Then the miracle begins. The divine human gift is adaptability, and once the surprise is past the horror fades, then the pity, and before much longer even the acute awareness of difference. By the time you’ve known this mutilated, devastated creature long enough to know his wife’s name and have seen his children’s photographs, he’s an individual with a background, with problems and hopes that go back further and reach out beyond the ones that brought him to you, and it’s a little jolt to remember at intervals just how distorted his appearance is, and then how little it affects the quintessential humanity resident in his soul. The important things, like strength and courage and kindness, and whether you like someone or not, don’t so much transcend the deformity as come from somewhere else in the first place. No-one ever liked someone less because he was ugly than they would have done had he been fair.
    So, almost before I had fully mapped out the extent of his disfigurement, I was aware that what had happened to make Frazer McAllister look like that mattered much less, to him and to the world on which he imposed his authority, than what had happened to make him the kind of man he was. The face was fancy wrapping-paper, no reflection of and no guide to the contents.
    The other thing you learn early about pain and suffering is that, contrary to popular opinion, they have no ennobling qualities whatever. Nice people suffer dreadful accidents and diseases, but so do absolute bastards, and the man who was an absolute bastard in his glorious entirety is unlikely to be significantly nicer if fate deprives him of one or more extremities.
    It was too early in our acquaintance for me to categorise McAllister as an absolute bastard. What I was sure of, from that powerful, magnetic aura surrounding the man like a force-field, from the arrogance of his eyes and the pugnacity of his broad, square, expensively upholstered shoulders, was that he had the capacity to be one.
    All this took less time to happen than to describe, so that before he’d finished his sentence I had got my attention off both his face and his personality and onto what he was saying, which was: “You saw my wife’s boat burn up?”
    I shook my head. “It didn’t burn up, it blew up. It was gone before we could get on deck. She couldn’t have known a thing about it.” It felt almost stranger than anything that had happened, to be making the same reassuring noises to the woman’s husband as only minutes before I had been making to her lover.
    â€œThat’s something to be grateful for, anyway,” said McAllister gruffly.
    I said, “If you’ve finished threatening Dr. Burns’s patient, at least for the moment, I think we should go and explain to the policeman who’s on his way here that his presence is no longer required.”
    â€œPoliceman?” He said it the Glasgow way, the emphasis on the first syllable, and there was something like injured innocence in his ravaged face.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have told the receptionist you were Curragh’s father.”
    â€œI didnae. I asked her was he here. She asked was I a relative. I said I was. She didnae ask me whose.” He sounded like a schoolboy who’d got away with cheeking his Latin teacher by quoting from Catullus.
    We seemed to be losing sight of the reason for his presence here, the fact that his wife had just died. I touched his sleeve. “If you’ll come with me, Mr. McAllister, I’ll tell you what I know of what happened.”
    He followed me towards the door. But there he stopped and turned back, and his voice rasped like slow machine-gun fire. “Curragh, I know what you are. I know what you’ve done. Take it from me, you’re not going to get away with it.”
    Then McAllister