But first things first. He smiled at her.

‘Have you done your homework?’

She frowned in puzzlement.

‘Your thought diary?’ he said.

‘Oh that. Sorry, I completely forgot about it.’

He sighed. This didn’t come as a total surprise to him.

‘Like I said in our previous meeting, Bailey, if you want to get better, then you have to want to help yourself.’

‘I’m sorry, Doctor. It genuinely slipped my mind. I got sidetracked with some other stuff.’

He gestured at the sheets of paper on the table in front of him. ‘These are the tests you did last time you were here. Remember? The results are quite revealing.’

‘Revealing?’ A wary look.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You were referred to me because you threw yourself off a balcony. An attempt at suicide or self-harm tells me that you’re clearly troubled in some way. Looking at your test results, I’m wondering if this is down to a traumatic experience which happened to you in the past.’

He saw a flash of something in her eyes. Raw emotion. Pain. Fear. But then, just as quickly, it was gone, the grey eyes staring at him cool and calm once again.

‘You can tell that just from this test?’ she said, a sceptical tone in her voice.

In truth, he didn’t need a test to know that something unpleasant was locked up inside that head of hers. With her mannerisms and her scar, which he guessed was the outcome of some violent encounter, it was hardly an outlandish assumption to make. And with almost twenty years’ experience as a forensic psychologist he had become particularly attuned to reading people like her.

‘Would you like to talk about it?’ he asked.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Traumatic experiences, if unaddressed, can be the cause of major mental health issues. They can lead to suicide attempts, self-harm and other highly detrimental behaviour.’ He paused. ‘Have you heard of something called post-traumatic stress disorder?’

She nodded and looked away.

‘When we undergo a particularly traumatic experience, the mind can compartmentalise that experience. It’s like a defence mechanism in order to help us preserve a functional sense of self and prevent emotionally unacceptable material from entering our consciousness. But because those memories aren’t properly integrated, they’re not anchored in any context of time or place like normal memories are. That means that when they intrude, which can happen quite suddenly, it feels like—’

‘Like they’re happening right now,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Like you’re re-living them. Like you’re actually there all over again, seeing the same things, feeling the same feelings, smelling the same smells.’

Excitement gripped him. At last, he was getting somewhere! He had finally broken through that defensive shell of hers.

‘Yes, Bailey! That’s precisely it! I’m so glad you understand what I’m saying. You see, talking about it, although it might be painful, can help to reintegrate those traumatic memories into your consciousness and thus get rid of those unpleasant intrusions.’

He saw the shutters come down – a tautening in her jaw muscles, a sudden frostiness in her eyes.