Each day he took three doses of medicine. Each morning he took an intramuscular injection straight in the backside. The prevalent side-effect was skin ulcers. Sooner or later the nurses ran out of unpunctured bumskin and would have to shoot the drug into an old wound. You could spot the longer-serving patients. They tended to stand for an hour or two each morning. Troy was lucky. He healed fast. His skin closed and repaired itself with the mechanical ease of a zipfastener, and he began to realise that whatever the ebb of his spirits, his body was mending. He was thin and he was weak, but compared to, say, a man of Catesby’s age, he had good recuperative powers. Four months after Rod dropped him off at the door, they told him he could leave. ‘You’ll feel tired,’ they said. ‘And you must rest and not work, but you can leave.’