Later, in his bedroom, Anton lay awake, listening to the sound of a church bell that struck the half-hour remorselessly. In quieter moments he heard the wind coming up off the lake and the noise of some creature in anguish.

In the morning, there was breakfast in the dining room. He took a newspaper from a rack, poured some coffee and sat by the window. There were only half a dozen others, helping themselves to rolls and jam from the sideboard; the mentally unwell were late risers, it seemed.

A young woman had materialised by his side. She wore the staff uniform with a strip of purple ribbon visible beneath the lace cap.

‘Would you like some eggs?’ she said.

Anton looked up from an article by Engelbert Dollfuss, the diminutive chancellor, on why he had dissolved Parliament to assume absolute leadership of Austria.

‘Yes, please. Some scrambled egg. Thank you.’

The girl blushed as she caught his eye and turned hurriedly away. How sensitive all the people in this place seemed to be, Anton thought; but perhaps that was hardly surprising in a nerve clinic.

He turned to foreign news. In Paris there was unrest on the streets, a fight to save the value of the franc as depression gripped; in Panama, it was reported, the Communist Party was making ground. There was only one word, he thought, to describe that. He hoped Pop Dawson was not making too many demands of his old friend. Twenty years had passed since they met in Colón, so it was possible Maxwell had by now retired to the seaside house he had always hoped to buy in a town called, if he remembered correctly, Southwold.

At nine thirty, as arranged, he knocked on Martha’s door.

She asked him about his room and if he had passed a restful night; he thought it best not to mention the unpredictable wailing or the clock’s all-too-regular clang.

‘So where do we stand?’ he said, sitting down opposite her. ‘Is there hope?’

Martha smiled and sucked in her breath. ‘Of course there’s hope. Hope is what we live in. But this is not the great age of belief any more. We’re a third of the way through the new century. But the great advance in medicine and science has stopped. Instead, we’re trying to understand the death of ten million men.’

He saw her glance towards the framed photograph of a young soldier in British uniform and wondered for a second if he had fought against him.

‘There are some advances?’

‘Of course. In physics, for instance, and biology. But I was thinking of medicine. And our branch of it.’

‘And did you ever believe, personally, that Dr Freud and his followers had discovered a panacea? A universal cure?’

‘Are you teasing me, Herr Heideck?’

‘No.’

‘Regrettably, some doctors have tried to apply methods from one discipline to another.’

‘Could you explain?’ He knew what she meant, but wanted to hear her phrase it so that he could quote her words.