OK, so she probably did have some sort of doctorate, he conceded, and maybe he’d been being petty, suggesting it was in basket weaving. But you couldn’t get doctorates in massage. He knew that. He’d checked. He’d checked five minutes after he’d unsuccessfully tried to clean his shoes.

So the doctorate she was using to promote her massage business must be in something esoteric-like the mating habits of North Baluchistan dung beetles or the literary comparison of Byron and Tennyson or…or something, and she couldn’t make a living so she’d turned to massage and was using her doctorate to attract patients.

That was a guess, he conceded. Nearly everything was a guess when it came to Ally. As much as the locals were pleased to see her, no one knew what she’d been doing in the last twenty years or so.

‘Her mother brought her home to her grandpa when she was tiny,’ Betty told him, unasked, as she was sorting patient records he needed for the afternoon. ‘There was a really unhappy marriage and her father went to jail. I can’t remember all the details but I know old Doc Westruther wouldn’t speak of him. Her mother didn’t stay very long-she disappeared and no one knew where she went-but when she went she left the little girl behind. Then suddenly the old doc died and her father turned up to claim her. There were so many people who would have taken her in but her father just said, “She’s my kid and she comes with me.” There was nothing we could do about it. No one knew where her mother was. I remember her father dragging her into a beat-up old jalopy and Sue, her best friend, wailing at the top of her lungs. I saw them leave town. Her little face was pressed against the car’s back window and…well, the memory never left me. I wondered and wondered. Her father seemed brutal.’

Brutal. Darcy was trying to concentrate on reading Mrs Skye’s patient notes. Elsie Skye’s gout had been playing up and she was coming to see him for the third time. If the treatment he had her on wasn’t working then he needed to think about reasons. What blood tests were appropriate? This level of gout might even indicate malignancy. He needed to check.