She was blessed with no more copy of wit, but to serve his humour thus.

If the afternoon was fine they strolled together in the park, very slowly, and with pauses to draw breath wherever the ground sloped upward. The slightest effort made the patient cough.

The boy seemed streetwise yet clearly unaware that this was an officer whose slam-bang interrogation methods were a legend.

All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence).