The question now was a matter of awareness. If a second identity lurked inside Vidor, did he suspect, on some level, that another persona, with a different name and history, shared his psyche? Had it been a conscious choice to reinvent himself as a Hungarian named Vidor Kiraly Sovàny, a boy who’d presumably died by drowning? Or was it an authentic case of dissociative identity? In his long career as a psychiatrist, Gessen had only come across one case of multiple personality disorder. A skittish young woman, badly abused by her mother as a child, had harboured four distinct personalities, or alters, one of whom was a middle-aged man named Roland with a craggy voice and dark sense of humour, who liked single malt whisky and unfiltered cigarettes.

His thoughts bounced from one possibility to another. But no matter how he labelled it, this glimmer of insight into Vidor’s strange behaviour provided the evidence he needed to move forward.

He stood and walked to the window, but there was nothing to see but a thick covering of mist, with the high mountains lost behind the clouds. Only the second week of December, but all signs pointed to a bitter winter to come. The local Mountain Rescue would be busy this season. In the weeks since Ismail’s unfortunate death, they had taken three other bodies off the mountains. Ismail’s remains had been flown to Egypt for burial, and the civil lawsuit was working its way through the courts. At some point, according to Gessen’s lawyer, he would be called to give a deposition, but he had no desire to think about that now.

He rang his assistant for coffee and jotted down a few notes, hoping to strengthen his case in favour of dissociative identity. Both judge and jury. For the sake of argument, Gessen surmised, let’s say that two different men, the one in the village and the man at the awards ceremony, had triggered a painful childhood memory. Not in Vidor’s mind, but in the mind of his subconscious alter. Perhaps in the guise of the boy from the Sorbonne, who he could no longer think of as Milen. The name didn’t sound right, but for this speculative exercise he would call him ‘M’.

Those two strange men, under vastly different circumstances, had clearly triggered something in M. A memory so terrifying it manifested as a recurring trauma. But if Vidor’s core persona was M, when had the transformation to Vidor Kiraly occurred? The other option, a dissociative disorder, or perhaps an extended fugue state, could mean that Vidor had acquired an alter that had nothing to do with his own life. What terrible traumas might he have suffered to cause his personality to split?