‘Oh, the usual family scrap,’ he said, breezily. ‘After my dear mother died, my father could barely wait a month to remarry. His second, much younger, wife is a ghastly woman, and the thought of her living in my mother’s house and touching her possessions made me ill. The first thing she did was to toss all my mother’s lovely things into a skip. And with my father’s blessing.’

‘How terrible.’ Babette’s expression was one of horrified glee.

‘Indeed.’ The humid air, suffused with the scent of eucalyptus and pine, was making him drowsy. ‘We’d been estranged for years, my father and I, ever since his marriage to that woman, but then he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, so I travelled to the family home to say goodbye. But the moment I walked in the door, I knew it was a mistake.’ He closed his eyes and pulled the cotton blanket up to his neck, preparing to doze.

‘Don’t leave me hanging.’ She smacked him on the shoulder. ‘What happened?’

He shifted away, regretting now his attempt to rile her up. ‘The first thing I noticed was that there was nothing of my mother’s in the house. The loathsome second wife was out, so I had a chance to look through the rooms. Everything I’d known from my childhood had been stripped away. I shouted at my father that he had effectively murdered my mother. She died from grief, her heart broken by his endless affairs. The last with the woman who became his second wife. My hands moved of their own accord and wrapped themselves around his neck. I can still feel how his windpipe flattened under my thumbs.’ Vidor raised his hands and made a choking gesture.

Her face was alive with excitement. An actual, almost murderer.

‘My brother pulled me off just in time, but I took a swing at him and knocked him against the stone fireplace. I grabbed my things and fled the house, this time for ever, I thought, but when I arrived home, the local police were waiting for me outside my flat.’

She stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘So nobody died.’

Clearly, she was disappointed by his little tale. ‘Nobody died,’ he said, with an air of sorrow.

A sharp line appeared between her eyes. ‘So, you’ve never killed anyone?’

He frowned at her. ‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’

She shifted her gaze to the window. ‘I saw you with that other patient, Ismail, on the day he went missing. You followed him into that copse of trees near the boundary.’ She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I didn’t say anything to the police, but they might have guessed I was hiding something. So clever at reading people’s faces, aren’t they?