‘Odd that I could have forgotten this one particular memory,’ Vidor was saying, ‘because it frightened me terribly as a child. For months, I was afraid to sleep in my own bed. So, I would creep into my parents’ room and stretch out on the floor, but they always woke up, and my mother carried me back to my room. She would help me check under the bed and in the cupboard, to prove there was nothing there.’

Gessen was all ears now. ‘What was it that frightened you?’

‘A strange man. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. Early summer it must have been, as my mother wanted to buy apricots to make a tart, and she’d brought me with her to the market. I saw the man stepping into a trolley car going in the opposite direction, but when we got to the market, there he was, standing by the butcher shop. So he couldn’t have boarded that other trolley. Unless he was a magician – or had a twin.

‘After the market, my mother and I went into a teashop with an ornate ceiling and chandeliers. She said they made the best anise biscuits in the city. While my mother poured the tea, I dropped my napkin on the floor. When I bent to pick it up, I saw the trolley man seated at the next table. He turned his head and grinned at me, flashing a mouthful of blackened teeth. His milky eyes reminded me of dead fish. I shrieked in terror, and babbled to my mother about a dead man. I could smell his decaying body and see the strips of skin peeling off him like dried paint.’

Gessen waited as the silence thickened between them. What an interesting story. A scary man, so telling in the details. Was this sudden outpouring of memory the result of Ursula’s newest strategy? Suggesting to Vidor that he invent a fake childhood trauma to throw Gessen off the scent. A case of good cop, bad cop. An unsavoury tactic, Gessen believed, but at this point, trickery might be the only way to break the deadlock. And fake memory or not, buried in a lie was always a glimmer of truth. Even if the ‘scary man’ story was nonsense, it had come from the depths of Vidor’s subconscious, where the real problem, yet to be revealed, lurked in the shadows.

‘How frightened you must have been,’ Gessen said, pausing to look at his phone. Still no word. ‘Any idea who the man might be?’

The couch creaked as Vidor shifted his legs. ‘My mother said no one was there. But I saw him, and I couldn’t have imagined it, because I distinctly remember his smell. Like a rotting corpse.’

The tip of Gessen’s pencil scratched the notepad. Scary man, anise cookies, putrid smell.