Perhaps the lad was just jerking his chain. Giving his bodyguard the slip again to show he was nobody’s fool. He must have suspected from the start that Sendak had been hired by his father to keep him on a short leash. A source of bitter resentment. Imprisoned on all sides, was how Ismail described it. Accusing Gessen of siding with his father in a ploy to keep him trapped in the mountains. Presumably for a great wad of cash – his father’s usual form of bait – when there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. He’d practically spit the words in Gessen’s face, during the first of these painful conversations. The desire to choose his own path in life, Ismail fumed, rather than take over the reins of his father’s hateful business, was not a mental illness.

‘I’ll be there in two hours. Ismail couldn’t have got very far, so try not to worry. And get Mr Sendak to help you. That’s what he’s paid for.’

Gessen dropped the phone on the empty seat beside him, then picked it up again to call his head of Security. A former officer in the Swiss Army, Walter Keller was a model of discretion and calm. But after speaking with him, an attack of anxiety cramped Gessen’s gut and he bent double from the pain. Three years ago, following the escape of a patient with Susto syndrome, a woman in a constant state of terror from her disturbing condition, he’d made extensive changes to the clinic’s security protocol. The electronic wristbands, concealed CCTV cameras, and hidden sensors studding the perimeter provided round-the-clock surveillance, while maintaining an illusion, however minor, of the freedom to come and go.

Tilda, the woman with Susto, had been a model patient for nearly six months, when she gave her minder the slip one afternoon and failed to return from the village. Though she’d acted up in minor ways before, it was nothing too serious. Little rebellions to assert her independence. Sending food back to the kitchen, claiming it tasted funny, or leaving her bed to wander the grounds after dark in a filmy nightdress, frightening the more fragile patients.

But the situation with Ismail was different. Tilda, in spite of her shenanigans, knew she was ill and accepted that staying at the clinic was her best hope for recovery. A disordered mind would not do one’s bidding at the snap of a finger, like a well-trained collie. It took time to unravel the tangled knot of years. Time and patience.