‘You didn’t mention any paintings to me,’ I said to Mark as we followed Ingrid into the little spare room. He didn’t answer, but gave me a look I recognised, the look that meant I should tread carefully.

‘They’re not paintings, really,’ Ingrid said. ‘More like daubs. Mind you, you could say the same thing about the local amateur art show, and they’re meant to be in full possession of their faculties.’

There were two unframed paintings leaning against the pale pink walls of the otherwise bare little room. One was large and rectangular, and the other was small and square. They had both been done with oil paints on canvas. Otherwise, they were alike only in being wildly different to each other and to anything else you might have expected to see in Ingrid’s flat.

The large painting was painstakingly detailed, and showed a landscape that was just about recognisable as the parkland surrounding us, with the wall that ran along the roadside and the wrought-iron, spike-topped gate that separated the end of the drive from the highway. It was all rendered in tiny circles in gaudy shades of brown and green; there was something peculiarly intense about it. It seemed to vibrate with energy, so much so that it was almost uncomfortable to look at.

The small square painting next to it was a complete contrast. It was little more than a series of outlines, done in a faded brick-red that looked like old blood; most of the canvas had been left blank. It showed a group of heads in profile, with bandaged eyes and toothless, open mouths.

‘This is all I kept,’ Ingrid said. ‘The old shower room was full of them. I got rid of the rest. I actually couldn’t face going through them all – they were rather depressing. I held on to these because they were on top of the first pile I came to.’

I said, ‘So these were done by people who were patients here? When it was still a hospital?’

‘Exactly,’ Ingrid said. ‘They would hardly have been done by the people who live here now. Mr Dobbs upstairs likes his colour-by-numbers, but on the whole we tend to prefer the tidier sorts of hobbies, like coin collecting and Sudoku and bridge.’

‘I had no idea you’d kept any of this stuff,’ Mark said.

‘It was as a memento of my father, really. He was so keen on all of this. He thought it might help to diagnose them. Very forward-thinking for the time, though these days people like to write nasty things about what went on in places like this. It must have been terribly difficult. Especially for him. Well, you know…’

She faltered. I said, ‘You mean because of your sister.’

Mark had told me very little about his aunt, who had spent most of her life being cared for in that very building, back when Ingrid’s father had worked there. I was curious; Ingrid never usually spoke about her. Mark had only discovered that she existed after her death, when Ingrid rang up out of the blue and told him about the funeral. That had been during our brief rocky patch, when he’d moved out for a couple of weeks, though thankfully, Ingrid didn’t know about that. It was just as well that she’d never found out about my long-ago crush on my work colleague; Mark might have just about forgiven me, but Ingrid would never have done.