And in Ismail’s case, he was suffering from more than a spell of depression. Incandescent with fury, from the day he arrived, he’d been looking for ways to escape. To return to his studies and the girl waiting for him, though he’d never mentioned her specifically in their sessions together. Ismail might not realise it, but Gessen was on his side. In the course of Ismail’s therapy, he hoped to give the young man the tools needed to stand up to his father. Not as a rebellious son intent on vanquishing a monstrous patriarch, but as a man in his own right, with agency and autonomy. A delicate needle to thread. If only Ismail would be patient and give his treatment the time it deserved.

But now he was missing. Gessen cursed himself under his breath for leaving the clinic twice in the space of two weeks. All in a futile search to dig up Vidor’s past. A disastrous mistake to let his personal feelings interfere with professional judgement. Now it was time to pay the piper. He was a bloody fool for chasing after some imagined mystery that lived in his head. What was the chance that the boy he’d known in Paris had anything to do with Vidor at all? In his ceaseless quest to heal the unease over his own feelings of guilt and exile, he was all too easily drawn into the shadowy corners of others like him. Misfits and loners, hobbled by a dark history.

* * *

Ursula met him at the funicular, her face nearly hidden under the hood of her parka. As they walked towards the clinic’s gates, his shoulders hunched against the biting wind, he could sense her growing panic.

‘Ismail was fine during our session yesterday,’ she said. ‘He was telling me about his first days in England, and how entranced he’d been by the college and the green fields of Oxfordshire. He spent a good ten minutes talking about those green fields, and how he’d taught himself to ride a bicycle, so he could cycle in the lanes.’ She stopped to catch her breath. ‘It was while cycling on a towpath along the Thames, his first spring at Oxford, that he realised he could never take over the mantel he’d been groomed for since birth. And that his destiny was to spend the rest of his days in England. At that moment, he told me, all thoughts of Cairo, and whatever pleasures it might once have held, vanished like smoke.’

‘So, you think he’s run away?’

In an attempt to map all the possibilities, Gessen’s mind galloped ahead as the two of them trudged towards the gates. He was winded by the walk, his leg muscles trembling, as if in the short space of time since Ursula’s call, he’d aged twenty years.