Scott smiles at Cooper. “As you can see, we’ve created some safeguards.”

Emma isn’t concentrating on the exchange between Scott and Cooper. She’s working to control her breathing. She can do this, she reminds herself. Confronting McMurtry has stiffened her spine.

She finds that Dr. Scott has taken her hand.

“Now,” Scott says, “there is an exclusion zone around his cell—under no circumstances should you enter or reach over it. Don’t take anything he offers you, and don’t step inside the barricade. It’s just a precaution, of course.”

“Of course.” Emma fights hard against the sense that she is falling, rights herself in her mind.

Scott pats her hand. “Go in there with a cheerful outlook. He’ll appreciate that. But take everything he says to you with a grain of salt—Simon can be prone to exaggeration.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll be right here when you come out. Remember my instructions.”

“I will,” Emma says. “Thank you.”

Scott smiles at her kindly. Scott is scared of Gutmunsson, Emma realizes with a jolt. She looks to Cooper one last time, but he is looking at the floor. Coward, she thinks.

Emma feels the fear in her chest like a raven tapping at a window. It’s too late for misgivings, though. The door is open. A large male orderly stands sentry, securing her passage to the place beyond sanity, and Emma steps inside.

CHAPTER NINE

Scott referred to this as “the big room”—Emma discovers that it is, in fact, a former chapel. The space is large, and there are high, buttressed ceilings. Decommissioned pews are stacked together against the walls. Light enters through a set of charming stained-glass windows at the far end of the room, in the apse; their charm is offset to some extent by the high-security steel bars covering them.

Moth-eaten velvet curtains are drawn back on either side to frame the chancel; by some irony, Simon Gutmunsson’s cell sits exactly where the altar should be. The cell is a large box made of metal bars, surrounded by wooden police barricade sawhorses, and it stands like an island in the room. The aesthetic clash between the cell and the chapel’s old-world solemnity is jarring, like seeing an actor wearing a digital watch in a period film.

The large orderly is a Sikh man with a name tag that reads PRADEEP. At a desk beside the door, he notes Emma’s name and checks her manila folder of paperwork for contraband staples and paper clips before she’s allowed to proceed to the cell.

“Mr. Gutmunsson is reading, at present.” Pradeep’s voice is deep, his vowels rounded. “Dr. Scott told you about the barricade? Then you may go now—you will be all right.”

There is no way to approach the cell without its occupant seeing her coming. Emma straightens her shoulders and walks across the burnished wooden floor until she is immediately before the cell. The barricade prohibits her from coming within six feet of the bars. Finally, she looks up.

Simon Gutmunsson has fashioned his cell into something like a salon, with the bed set beside a small desk on the left, both draped with linens, as if awaiting a servant to whip the dustcovers aside upon the lord’s return. The pillows have been liberally arranged. Another sheet has been suspended halfway up the bars behind the bed, to create the illusion of a partial wall. A privacy screen cordons off a commode on the far right. Piles of books stand on the desk, on the floor by the bed, by the front wall of bars, by the privacy screen. Also on the desk is a roll of butcher paper, writing implements, and a wooden bowl with a selection of seasonal fruit.