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  63. Acknowledgements

He ended the call and buzzed Mathilde to have her forward the clinic’s information straight away. His mind was already leaping ahead. If Kiraly agreed to the transfer, he would send Ursula to Copenhagen to accompany him on the trip to Saint-Odile. A skilled clinical psychologist, Ursula would be furious if she suspected he was using her as a lure. But it certainly didn’t hurt that along with a keen analytical mind and excellent language skills, she was blessed with a quiet grace and winning smile. Something about this case suggested that a male doctor, appearing at Kiraly’s bedside to offer a solution to his problem, might be contentious, even threatening. With Les Hirondelles as an enticement and Ursula as his ambassador, Gessen might persuade Kiraly to seek relief from his affliction where others had failed.

5

Clinique Les Hirondelles
Saint-Odile, Switzerland
2 November 2008

Far below, lights spring on in the gathering dusk. Cowbells sound a mournful note as an ancient herder leads his charges down the mountain. The peaks, craggy indeed, are dusted with a layer of snow that turns to peach – no, scratch that – turns to… apricot as the light fades. Alpine serenity. Tout est parfait…

Vidor groaned and tossed the notebook on the bench. Penning such drivel had given him a throbbing headache. But the delightful Dr Lindstrom, who possessed not only an engaging mind but also the face of a Botticelli angel, had encouraged him to write down his thoughts, or whatever else came to mind. So why not oblige?

At the back of the notebook he’d begun a sketch of the grounds and flipped to the page to add a few more details to his map. Once, as a young boy on a family outing to the countryside near Budapest, he had wandered away and got lost in a forest so dense that little light reached the ground. A terrifying experience he’d no wish to repeat. Ever after, upon finding himself in a new place, it was his habit to sketch out the terrain. Entrances and exits. Landmarks and escape routes. Places of seclusion, should he wish to be alone.

A hundred paces from the high front gate to his assigned living quarters, and another eighty or so to the stone manor house at the centre of the grounds. An architectural mishmash of turrets, peaked roofs, and mullioned windows. Some long-dead industrialist’s idea of a castle in the sky. It amused him to imagine the Herculean effort it must have taken to haul all that stone up the mountain. Only one way up and one way down, according to the info-packet in his room, with the single-carriage funicular their only link to civilisation. A creaky toy-sized train he couldn’t remember boarding.