The inside had been decorated with a mural of the seafront, blue sky, white clouds, red sails. Some total wanker had graffitied BMX across the sky and there was a list of names crudely painted down the side wall — BROOKE T., EMILY B., and LESLIE M. They were just in the right location to have been painted by a bored teenager slumped on the corner of the bench. You didn’t need to be a copper to see that this was where the yoofs of Brightlingsea came to hang out in that difficult gap between the age of criminal responsibility and that of legal drinking.

Leslie pulled an iPad clone out of her bag and fired it up. She typed in keyboard mode and the iPad spoke — somebody in her family must have installed a speech synthesizer. It was a basic model with an American accent that made Leslie sound like an autistic surfer dude, but at least we could have an almost normal conversation.

She didn’t bother with small talk.

“Can magic fix?” she asked.

“I thought Dr. Walid had talked to you about that.” I’d been dreading this question.

“Want you say,” she said.

“What?”

Leslie leaned over her pad and stabbed deliberately at the screen with her finger. She typed several separate lines before hitting return.

“I want to hear it from you,” said the iPad.

“Why?”

“Because I trust you.”

I took a breath. A pair of old-age pensioners raced past the shelter on mobility scooters.

“As far as I can tell magic works within the same framework of physical laws as everything else,” I said.

“What magic do,” said the iPad, “magic can undo.”

“If you burn your hand on fire or electricity it’s still a burn — you fix it with bandages and cream and stuff like that. You don’t use more electricity or more fire. You …”

Had the skin and muscles of your face been pulled out of shape by a fucking malevolent spirit — your jaw was all smashed up and the whole thing was held together with magic and when that ran out your face fell off. Your beautiful face. I was there, I watched it happen. And there was nothing I could do.