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Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I . . . did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is – sentiment. Which is even cheaper.

‘At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centres in the brain – I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been .

 . . asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal now. It turned out that you couldn’t just put those years back.’

Covington took a deep, ragged breath. ‘So we had a hard choice,’ he said. ‘Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land – a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I just administered his property as though it was mine.

That would look like malfeasance: it was exactly what we wanted to avoid.

‘We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet – working on a strictly enforced rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept the whole routine up until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much. The job was done.

‘But so was the damage.

Now that it was too late, I could see – could really see, for the first time – what a monstrous thing we were doing. How big an obscenity we were.

‘I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what had been done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him – when he got too old, and they let him go at last – I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least: I was trying for happy, but most of the time comfortable is what we can manage.

He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his fault.

‘So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them that was the real crisis. For me – the camel’s back was already well and truly fucked.