“I can bring your copy if you authorize it.”

I told him where it was.

Clara had agreed that the records could be supplied to investigators.

I asked him to bring them and to come as my friend, without a military detail or a claim to command the hospital.

“Understood,” he said.

Those were the words I had heard from him hundreds of times at work.

That night, they meant that somebody would bring a folder and sit beside me when I could not manage both tasks myself.

Hospital security had an office downstairs.