'Die, my dear doctor – that's the last thing I shall do.'

The mysterious behaviour of George Headingley had its roots in what had happened out on the Paradise Road earlier that evening; or perhaps even in what had happened during Dr John Sowden's medical training a few years before, for Dr Sowden's ethical attitudes had matured much more rapidly than his clinical knowledge.

As a second year student, he was already proclaiming a doctor's first duty was to his patient, not to some semi-religious philosophical abstraction. He found no difficulty with abortion; the mother was his patient, not the foetus. And at the other end of existence, the only difficulty he found with euthanasia was its illegality, but he would certainly not strive officiously to keep alive patients who ought to be switched off.

These were the pragmatic points of view which deserved to be maintained by a modern young doctor. Somewhere within their clinically rigid framework, there should have been a space perfectly tailored to contain the death of Philip Cater Westerman, to whom surgery could at best have given only a couple of years of probably bedridden life. Yet in some peculiarly illogical way, even though he had done everything possible for the man, which in all truth was precious little, it was to Dr Sowden as if the thought that Westerman would be better off dead had somehow transplanted itself into action.