‘Possibly.’ She flipped open her notebook. ‘There was an odd moment during the word association exercise when his eyes glazed over, as if he’d gone into a trance. Then he pointed at the painting on the wall and cried out.’ She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘I can show you the tape, if you’d like.’

‘A trance?’ He made a note.

‘First time I’ve seen anything like it,’ Ursula said, ‘though it could be he dozed off and had a few seconds of REM sleep before waking again.’

This was a new development. Had Vidor accessed a repressed memory during the exercise? It wouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes. Not enough time to reach REM sleep – the realm of dreams and out-of-body sensations – though it was possible. ‘I’ll have a look at the tape.’ He stood. ‘And thank you again for holding the fort while I was gone. I wouldn’t know what to do without you.’ He avoided looking at her ring. If she was planning on resigning, he would hear about it soon enough.

After Ursula left his office, he spent a few moments in silent meditation before returning to his desk to cast an eye over the logbook to see how his other patients had fared in his absence. It wasn’t often that he was away from the clinic, but on the few occasions he’d had to travel to a medical conference or provide a consultation in Zurich or Basel or Bern, he’d always felt comfortable leaving things in Ursula’s capable hands.

While Gessen was nosing around Cambridge, Vidor, according to the log, had passed an unremarkable two days. Mornings were spent in his room, afternoons in the Zen garden. In the session with Ursula on the first day of his absence, exactly the time he was poking around Vidor’s study, Vidor had apparently undergone some kind of transient attack. Perhaps he had sensed Gessen rifling through his things and experienced something akin to a telepathic seizure at the very moment Gessen discovered the photo of the small boy stuck behind the bookcase. There was no way to ask Vidor about the photo, though, without revealing that he’d gone through his personal things. A breach of privacy that would shatter any trust he’d managed to build so far.

He bent his head over the logbook. On the second day of Gessen’s absence, Vidor had headed over to the front gate, where he remained for nearly twenty minutes. Doing what, it was impossible to say. Looking for a way out? Or checking to see if his doctor had returned from wherever he’d gone?

* * *