He grabbed her arm and together they ran up the path. As they burst out the other side of the trees and the manor house came into view, Gessen stopped short, then dropped to his knees. The whole building was in flames. Great sparks flew upwards to the starless sky. He raised his arm to shield his face from the heat.

‘We have to get him out.’ But the words died in his throat. Far too late to do anything. Vidor must have doused the place with the diesel fuel stored in the cellar for emergencies. As the heat grew and the inferno roared, the windows in the tower shattered and shards of glass rained to the ground. Flames leapt out, greedily licking the air. He sank into the snow.

‘Why did he do it?’ Gessen’s words were lost in the roar of the fire.

Revenge, retribution, annihilation? They would never know.

‘I sat with him in his room while he ate dinner,’ Ursula said. ‘He seemed subdued, but…’

The flames leapt higher and Gessen looked away.

‘He asked after Hélène,’ Ursula said, her voice catching in her throat, ‘and we spoke for a few minutes of trivial things.’ She started to babble, and he squeezed her hand. ‘Then he wished me a happy life. Before I left, he asked me to count the number of sandpipers in the painting on the wall. When I told him there were ten, he smiled. ‘Just as I thought,’ he said, before lying down on the bed and closing his eyes.’

Huddled next to him in the snow, she shivered. ‘What made him do it?’

Gessen shook his head. The man, a chimera of two psyches, who’d fought every attempt to parse his thoughts and character, would forever remain a mystery. Perhaps he could imagine no other recourse. Unmasked as an imposter, his life and career destroyed. Accused of one count of murder. Possibly responsible for two more. Trapped in a web of his own creation, Vidor had left no avenue for escape. Transforming himself back into Malik Sayid, a wounded young man, imprisoned in time, was impossible. The other option, moving forward in disgrace, stripped of his academic credentials and everything he’d worked for, meant a life sentence of ridicule and pain.

Unless… a disturbing thought came to him as the cinders rained down. Unless Vidor started the fire as a cover for his escape. No identifiable remains would be found in a conflagration of this magnitude.

Sheikh mat. The king is dead.