That she was his mistress, in addition to his housekeeper, while a titillating detail, wasn’t as interesting as the bit about his behaviour: sleepwalking, sobbing in the garden, nocturnal shouting, possible trance states. Not to mention the headaches. Symptoms that could point to a neurological disorder, such as temporal or frontal lobe epilepsy, possibly exacerbated by repressed childhood trauma. Both disorders were associated with psychosis and defensive aggression in the face of a threat.

She had certainly spilled the beans, Mrs Bartosz, as everything she wrote contradicted Vidor’s earlier claim that he was a sound sleeper and in excellent health.

‘Thank you, Mrs Bartosz,’ he said aloud, sending her a note of gratitude through the airwaves, before folding up the letter and locking it in his desk drawer. At long last, he was getting somewhere.

16

Through the window, Gessen studied the heavy clouds massing above the high peaks. So far, they’d only had a few flurries, but it wouldn’t be long before the first heavy snowfall of the year arrived in a fury of white, each storm bringing with it the threat – or promise, depending on one’s mood – of being cut off from the world.

He had arranged a meeting with Ursula and took the seat across from her at the table in his office. An exemplary clinical psychologist, she had joined his staff seven years ago, following her doctoral studies in Bern. They made a good team, perfectly in sync with each other’s approach to patient care. But last Monday, after arriving at the clinic from her flat in Spiez, where she lived at the weekends when not on call, he’d noticed a ring on her left hand. A band of white gold adorned with three square-cut diamonds. His heart sank when he saw it. She looked radiant, and he was happy for her, of course. But any day now, he expected Ursula to announce she was leaving.

He poured out two coffees and handed her a cup. ‘How did he seem while I was away?’

‘Vidor Kiraly?’ She dropped her pen and focused on the wall behind his head.

He could practically hear the gears of her finely tuned mind clicking into place.

‘Watchful and alert are the words that come to mind.’ Her eyes met his. ‘He was curious about where you were and what I might have in store for him, as if the two of us, you and I, that is,’ she said, ‘were laying some kind of trap.’

He wouldn’t be wrong there. The weaving of psychological snares, so subtle as to be undetectable, was Ursula’s speciality. Gessen smiled. ‘Did you catch anything?’