‘Thank you,’ said Anton. ‘Most of these are patient records, I suppose.’

‘I’d say so. We can take two hundred people when we’re full. So over the forty years, that’s … Well …’

‘That’s a lot of notes.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘It depends what I find. An hour.’ He looked round the walls. ‘A year.’

‘I’ll send one of the girls up with a tray.’

‘Don’t bother. Maybe a glass of water at some point.’

‘A glass of water? We can do better than that.’ Hans backed out and went carefully downstairs.

The attic was surprisingly clean, Anton thought. There was not the airless or musty smell one might have expected, nor the impression that the roof had leaked at any point. Despite the size of what awaited him, he felt a sense of excitement as he began. It was important to understand the organising principle of the person who had been in charge, this Sonia Rebière, wife of one co-founder, Jacques, and sister of the other, Thomas Midwinter. Anton had already, in the three weeks he had been at the Schloss Seeblick, sensed the esteem in which Sonia was held. An oil portrait of her hung in the hall, an undistinguished thing by an ex-patient, but enough to give the sense of a worldly, humorous woman.

The deed boxes contained accounts, bills and legal documents; there were also architects’ and engineers’ drawings of fantastic intricacy concerning a cableway. These would be useful to him, he thought, in the part of his article that would describe the hubris of the clinic’s ambition, when it had relocated itself on a mountaintop, from which to proclaim its revolutionary understanding of the human creature and what ailed it.

Meanwhile, the real drama lay in the patients’ records, which were in the metal cabinets, organised by year and name. After a couple of hours, he could distinguish between the doctors’ different hands and styles. Jacques was florid, wrote often in French and was for the most part speculative or psychological. Andritsch was an inexhaustible recorder of blood pressure and temperature in thick-nibbed black. Thomas was sometimes illegible, in a mixture of English and German, with post-mortem and histological detail, interrupted by quotations from Shakespeare.

And this was what the agonies of those people had come down to. A name and a diagnosis with many outriding question marks; slight improvements, blank journal entries when ideas had run short, letters of discharge, death certificates. Water treatments, powders and sedatives; massage and the faradic brush, whatever that had been. Here, reduced to inky letters, were the Joan of Arcs and John the Baptists, their brain cells burned out by the last stages of syphilis. Alongside them were the ones so frightened of the air they could not risk moving a hand. In other records were the casualties of ordinary life, its turns and crashes, whose defences had run out of natural tears and sleep and had had to resort to removing the world from them, or them from the world, into a no man’s land where nothing, so they reported, felt real to them.