‘Bring him along,’ she’d said to Angélique. ‘I look forward to meeting him.’ But the last thing I need in my life right now is a man, she thought to herself.

There were eight for dinner. Angélique had strategically managed to ensure that Dr Legrand was seated beside Anna at the top of the table. She’d been right-he was very charming and handsome in a well-tailored suit, hair greying at the temples.

The conversation had dwelt for a while on a modern art exhibition that many of the guests had attended in Nice. Now they were all keen to know more about Anna’s new book project.

‘Please, I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Anna. ‘It’s so depressing. I have writer’s block. I just don’t seem to be able to do it. Maybe it’s because I’m writing a book of fiction for the first time, a novel.’

The guests were surprised and intrigued. ‘A novel? What about?’

Anna sighed. ‘It’s a mystery story about the Cathars. The trouble is that I have such difficulty imagining my characters.’

‘Ah, but I have the right man here to help you,’ Angélique said, seeing her opportunity. ‘Dr Legrand is a famous psychiatrist and can help anyone with any kind of mental problem.’

Legrand laughed. ‘Anna hasn’t got a mental problem. Many of the most talented people have sometimes suffered from temporary loss of inspiration. Even Rachmaninov, the great composer, found his creativity blocked and had to be hypnotized in order to create his greatest works.’

‘Thank you, Dr Legrand,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘But your analogy does me far too much credit. I’m no Rachmaninov.’

‘Please, call me Edouard. But I’m sure you are very talented.’ He paused. ‘However, if it’s interesting characters you’re looking for, with a taste of the mysterious and the gothic, there I may be able to help you.’

‘Dr Legrand is director of the Institut Legrand,’ said Madame Chabrol, a music teacher from Cannes.

‘The Institut Legrand?’ asked Anna.

‘A psychiatric hospital,’ Angélique filled in.

‘Just a small private establishment,’ Legrand said. ‘Not far from here, outside Limoux.’

‘Edouard, are you referring to that strange man you once told me about?’ Angélique asked.

He nodded. ‘One of our most curious and fascinating patients. He’s been with us for about five years now. His name is Rheinfeld, Klaus Rheinfeld.’

‘His name sounds like Renfield, from the Dracula story,’ Anna commented.

‘That’s quite apt, although I haven’t yet observed him eating flies,’ Legrand replied, and everyone laughed. ‘But certainly he’s an interesting case. He’s a religious maniac. He was found not far from here, in a village, by a priest. He self-mutilates-his body’s covered in scars. He raves about demons and angels, convinced he’s in Hell-or sometimes in Heaven. He continually recites Latin phrases, and is obsessed with meaningless series of numbers and letters. He scrawls them all over the walls of his ce-…his room.’

‘Why do you allow him to have a pen, Dr Legrand?’ asked Madame Chabrol. ‘Could that not be dangerous?’

‘We don’t, any longer,’ he said. ‘He writes them in his own blood, urine and faeces.’

Everyone around the table looked shocked and disgusted, except Anna. ‘He sounds terribly unhappy,’ she said.

Legrand nodded. ‘Yes, I believe he probably is,’ he agreed.

‘But why would anyone want to…mutilate themselves, Edouard?’ asked Angélique, wrinkling her nose. ‘Such an awful thing to do.’

‘Rheinfeld displays stereotypic behaviour,’ Legrand replied. ‘That is to say, he suffers from what we call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be triggered by chronic stress and frustration. In his case, we think that the mental disorder was caused by his years of fruitless searching for something.’

‘What was he searching for?’ Anna asked.

Legrand shrugged. ‘We don’t really know for sure. He seems to believe he was on some form of quest for buried treasure, lost secrets, that sort of thing. It’s a common mania among the mentally ill.’ He smiled. ‘We’ve had a number of other intrepid treasure hunters in our care over the years. As well as our share of Jesus Christs, Napoleon Buonapartes and Adolf Hitlers. I’m afraid they’re often not very imaginative in their choice of delusions.’

‘A lost treasure,’ Anna said, half to herself. ‘And you say he was found not far from here…’ Her voice trailed off in reflection.

‘Can nothing be done to help him, Edouard?’ asked Angélique.

Legrand shook his head. ‘We’ve tried. When he first came to us, he received psychoanalysis and occupational therapy. For the first few months he appeared to respond to treatment. He was given a notebook to record his dreams. But then we discovered that he was filling its pages with insane babble. Over a period of time, his mental state deteriorated and he began to self-mutilate again. We had to take away his writing implements and increase his medication. Since then, I’m afraid to say, he’s descended deeper and deeper into what I can only describe as madness.’

‘What a terrible pity,’ Anna breathed.

Legrand turned to her with a charming smile. ‘In any case you would be more than welcome to have a tour of our little establishment, Anna. And if it could help you gain inspiration for your book, I could arrange for you to meet Rheinfeld in person-under supervision of course. Nobody ever comes to see him. You never know, it might do him good to have a visitor.’

Paris

The pieces of the puzzle were virtually flying together for Luc Simon. The description that the two seriously embarrassed officers had given of the man who’d bundled them into Roberta Ryder’s cupboard exactly matched Ben Hope.

Then had come the report about the Mercedes limo involved in the recent railway incident. The car itself was hot as hell. No registered owner. False plates. Numbers filed off both engine and chassis. Its internal locking system had been altered like a kidnap car. It looked as though it had been used for that kind of purpose too, as someone had obviously been trying to shoot their way out of it with a 9mm handgun.

Whoever that someone was, judging by the analysis report on the spent 9mm case found in the back, they were the same person as the mystery shooter from the scene of the riverside killings. And who was he? It had seemed impossible to find out. But then the cops at the scene of the railway incident had found a business card inside the Mercedes. The name on the card was Benedict Hope.

There was more. In the parking lot of a nearby bar-restaurant they’d found the Citroën 2CV that had been mixed up in the railway incident. The missing grille badge, traces of paint from the Mercedes, even the dirt on the wheels, all matched the railway scene. The 2CV was registered to Dr Roberta Ryder.

And it got even better. When the forensic team had gone through Ryder’s apartment with a fine-tooth comb, they’d found something. Right in the spot where she’d claimed her attacker had been lying dead, a speck of blood that whoever had cleaned the place up had missed. Simon bullied forensics into the fastest DNA test they’d ever done, comparing it against samples from Ryder’s hairbrush and other personal effects. The blood wasn’t hers. It did, however, match DNA samples from a grisly find that had turned up in the Parc Monceau. A severed human hand.

The hand’s previous owner had been one Gustave LePou, a criminal with a long history of sex offences, aggravated rape, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and two suspected murders to his credit. It looked as though Ryder had been telling him the truth after all. But why had LePou been in her apartment? Was it just burglary? No chance. Something bigger was going on. Someone must have hired LePou to kill her, or to steal something from her-or maybe both. Simon felt like kicking himself that he hadn’t taken her seriously at the time.