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lying on its side along the bottom.’
    â€˜Don’t you?’
    â€˜More symbolism?’ The white gown at the bottom of the mural was the opposite—almost a mirror image—of the saint’s one at the top of the mural. Whereas, though the arms of the saint stretched out and down, those of the gown down below stuck upwards in a stiff imploring fashion as if beseeching help.
    â€˜The underneath one’s a shroud,’ said Adrian Gomm, applying his brush to the wall.
    â€˜Oh … oh, I see.’ She looked around. ‘Then what about the other gown?’
    â€˜The one on the right?’
    â€˜Yes. Tell me, is that a straitjacket or something?’ Dr Teal was hoping one day to become a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist—hence the importance of Mr Maldonson to her career prospects—not a psychiatrist, and hadn’t actually ever set eyes on a straitjacket.
    â€˜That’s symbolic, too,’ said Adrian Gomm from somewhere level with her head. ‘If you look carefully you can see that its strings tie into the saint’s robes and the shroud, just like those on the operation gown do on the other side.’
    â€˜But what is it?’ asked Marion, interested in spite of herself.
    â€˜Something called a sanbenito.’ Gomm hitched up his paint-stained jeans.
    â€˜I’ve never heard of it,’ she said, some of her preoccupation with Mr Maldonson fading.
    â€˜It was a robe worn by heretics,’ Gomm informed her, ‘before they were burned at the stake.’
    Marion Teal shivered. Perhaps she was getting her own problems out of proportion.
    â€˜Although,’ Adrian Gomm tightened his lips cynically, ‘I dare say those in the operating gowns died without blessing often enough, too, don’t you?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t know about that,’ she murmured, drifting back to the front door where she would be able to see Mr Maldonson come in.
    If he did.
    For Dr Martin Friar, on the other hand, the day was improving.
    He had indeed diagnosed something interesting in the medical clinic he was taking for the absent Dr Meggie and, as the Out-Patient Department Sister had been sure he would, had brightened up quite markedly after doing so—and having had his coffee, of course.
    â€˜How long have you been feeling like this, Mrs Allison?’ he asked the patient, a stout countrywoman from one of the more rural villages of Calleshire’s hinterland.
    Her answer confounded him.
    â€˜â€™Bout since last Michaelmas, Doctor.’
    â€˜I see,’ he murmured noncommittally. ‘And then?’
    â€˜Then after Christmas the pain got worse. I was fair winded, too, every time I tried to do anything.’
    â€˜Housework, you mean?’
    She stared at him. ‘Well, that and seeing to the hens and geese. Got so that I couldn’t bend to get the eggs, see? Not without the pain coming on.’ She looked intently into Dr Friar’s face, anxious that he should fully understand about her pain. ‘Then, when I come to give m’husband a hand with the farrowing in the night, I came over really queer and we had to have the doctor out. Haven’t done that since the children were young.’
    â€˜I see.’ He made a note on the clean new record. He’d been brought up in the town himself and didn’t really understand the urgencies of rural life.
    â€˜Then there was the shopping, doctor.’
    â€˜What about the shopping?’ asked the registrar who didn’t really understand that either.
    â€˜Carrying it, of course,’ retorted Mrs Allison, for the moment quite forgetting to be over-awed by her surroundings. ‘A week’s shopping gets quite heavy, I can tell you. And it’s a tidy step from the bus at Great Rooden up the hill to the farm after a morning on your feet at the market at Berebury.’
    The registrar reached for his sphygmomanometer while Mrs Allison looked round the