Chapter Forty-Nine
When the young doctor returned into the courtyard, the staff were busy escorting the patients to their daily chores. Mainsermant and the policemen were gone. Ferrand was still standing in the corner of the yard. He held his back straight. Denis went to him.
“There seems to be a female patient missing,” Ferrand said, his eyes fixed on a distant spot between the trees that lined the boundaries of the men’s farm. “If this tragedy turns out to be what I fear, you will soon be trained by another director, Michel.”
“You think there has been a murder?”
The director nodded.
Silence.
Suddenly, Ferrand said, “In 1889, as a young and curious doctor, I followed a few colleges of Louis de La Vallée Poussin at the Sorbonne. A Belgian Tibet expert, revered in Buddhist circles. Th
