The Deceiver

by Priscilla Masters

  She would have liked to explore this phrase.

  Claire’s thoughts were twisting and turning. Yes. On the surface, she could agree with the GP. It looked like an obvious delusion. But she had already ascertained that Charles had edited the facts. What she wanted to know was what had he omitted from Claire’s version?

  More than ever, she realized she needed to see it all for herself – meet this woman, make her own decision, not rely on others’ testimonies, all flawed and full of holes where Charles, clever dog, had deliberately left out facts.

  And she felt a sense of resentment. She didn’t like the way that Dagmar Sylas was putting words into her mouth, feeding her breadcrumbs like ducks in the park. Though Claire was honest enough to admit that perhaps somewhere in this resentment was a little too much ego. On her side. Even she was tempted to chin up to the GP and ask the question: If you’ve already made your diagnosis, why collude with Charles and rope me in?

  Which would get her nowhere. But this whole situation was ice, and both of them knew this as they skated around each other in whirly figure eights. Claire was only too aware that the subtext of this phone call from GP to consultant was that Charles Tissot had requested the referral. He was spinning them around. Did he still believe, after all these years, that he could manipulate her with his charm? The Charles she’d known was certainly arrogant enough. If she declared Heather Krimble unreliable and sadly deluded, her allegations against Tissot would likely be dismissed without his suspension or any sort of enquiry or publicity. It would be swept under the rug, kept out of the press, the sister’s account dealt with later. Because however sweet, nice, balanced and sane Heather’s sister was, she would have been relying on Heather’s version of events.

  She must have been.

  Claire couldn’t resist asserting her position. ‘So you’re referring her as a …?’

  The GP was forced to break cover. ‘Look, I don’t like this any more than you do, Doctor Roget. But …’

  Claire was tempted to hold up a hand as a Stop sign to the doctor before she dug herself in any deeper.

  Don’t say it. Don’t voice the fact that we have to protect one of our own. And as a reward for your silence, I won’t ask whether you think it’s possible her story – whatever it is, and I haven’t heard a word of it yet except from Charles and the odd breadcrumb from you – just might be true.

  The silence between them was growing uncomfortable. Neither knew the other well enough to be able to assess their response. On the phone, there is no body language to give you those vital clues. No flicker of the eyes, no jerk of the chin, no drop of the gaze, no sudden scratching of the mouth or rubbing of the nose, no tightening of the lips and no hand stealing over your mouth, smothering your responses. Over the telephone, even the tone of your voice is muted, strained through the mouthpiece like tea leaves.

  ‘I’ll see her,’ Claire said finally. ‘I’ll ask Rita to send her the next available new patient appointment. You can fax through the referral.’

  No hurry, she was thinking. This is not an emergency. It should be easy to unravel, simple to know where the truth lies and what was simply the result of a disordered mind.

  THREE

  Wednesday, 17 June, 12.45 p.m.

  Dr Sylas wasted no time. The fax came through forty-five minutes later, buzzing through the machine like an impatient hornet, anxious for liberation, for attention, and at the same time with a sting in its tail.

  Which Rita was unaware of when she brought the pages through to Claire’s office. ‘Sounds interesting,’ she said. She never could resist the temptation to steal a peep.

  ‘Substitute interesting for troublesome,’ Claire responded, her eyes on Rita’s pleasingly plump figure, ‘and I might just agree with you.’

  She scanned the pages and was impressed. Give Dr Sylas credit. Considering the short time she’d had to compose the referral, she’d passed on a detailed history and covered the salient points.

  Her eyes slid down the sheet. From the desk drawer, she drew out a highlighter, fixed her elbows and hunched over the pages, ready to give it total absorption, shutting out everything else.

  Grant used to tease her about it. ‘You know, Claire, I think I could walk in here stark-bollock naked and do the rumba right in front of you and you wouldn’t even notice.’

  At which she’d looked up, laughing into those brown eyes. ‘Try me.’

  She bent even lower over the A4 sheet of paper. Shut out even this and read.

  Dear Dr Roget,

  Thank you for accepting this rather concerning lady with her potentially damaging allegations.

  Heather is a twenty-seven-year-old woman, married for eight years to her husband, Geoff. It appears, if not a happy marriage, at least it is peaceful. She was, in the past, she claims, physically abused by her father, who had a ‘short fuse’ and was ‘very strict’. According to Heather, he believed in the biblical teachings: spare the rod and spoil the child. No sexual abuse has been reported. The abuse took the form of systematic beatings.

  Claire underlined the last sentence, reached for her highlighter pen and continued to read.

  She has one sister, Ruth. She has a brother, Robin, five years older, but he left home when she was nineteen and she claims she has had no contact with him since. He has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared. No one knows what happened to him. I understand the police were informed and he’s officially listed as a missing person.

  Ruth is two years younger than her sister and unmarried. The two girls are interdependent, possibly bonded by shared negative childhood experiences and the loss of their brother, whom they both claim to have adored. The sisters are quite devoted. Almost abnormally so, to the exclusion of others, including Geoff.

  Heather’s father, Bailey, is a pharmacist who trained in Eastern Europe. Her mother is English and worked part-time as a school dinner lady. Heather’s mother, Winifred, appears to have had a very passive role in her three children’s lives and was either unable or unwilling to intervene when their father punished them. ‘She never spoke up or tried to stop him. She seemed to accept that this was the way of things,’ Heather said to me once. ‘Even when Dad brought out the strap or his belt or anything else that came to hand.’

  Her mother was addicted to prescription drugs – possibly supplied by the father? Heather doesn’t know. She has little contact with either parent now.

  Eight years ago, Heather married Geoff Krimble, a man a few years older than her who had lived with his widowed mother. He was trained as an electrician but, due to a diagnosis of Tourette’s, has had little work during their marriage. I can’t see that there has been a formal diagnosis of this Tourette’s, which he could have slapped on himself. He certainly has an intermittent problem with alcohol and occasional anti-social behaviour but has never been in prison. Heather’s husband’s patchy employment has meant fairly abject penury and a dependence on handouts and income support which has, as you know, recently been withdrawn or at least reduced.

  Heather has had two previous pregnancies. Both, unfortunately, resulting in cot death.

  Eliza, born 2010, died when she was six months old of a cot death.

  Freddie born 2012, died at two months old, also a cot death.

  Claire marked the passages with her highlighter pen before reading on. For the time being, she was wondering many things: how had the two deaths affected Heather Krimble’s already damaged mental state? She read on.

  Each time, late in the pregnancy, Heather had doubts about the parenthood of the baby. On both occasions, she claimed she was coerced into having sex with the father of the child. When each child was born she had prolonged periods of puerperal psychosis, which have been largely controlled in the community with neuroleptics (haloperidol) together with chlorpromazine for the anxiety. In both cases, she was treated by the community psychiatric team under the auspices of the community psychiatrist, Dr Laura Hodgkins, while Heather’s husband supervised the children. When Freddie died
at two months old, questions were raised as to whether it was possible that Heather might have been responsible for her children’s deaths. There was a thorough investigation but no cause for concern was found at post-mortem. It appears she was one of those unfortunates who are unlucky enough to have had two cot deaths.

  For a brief sentence, Dagmar Sylas stepped out of her role as GP. Perhaps the cot deaths have contributed to her unstable mental condition?

  But this, Claire mused, could not account for any abnormality surrounding Eliza’s birth and her initial allegation. Only with Freddie.

  Claire read on: Each time Heather appeared to recover and this pregnancy has been straightforward, until at around the twenty-eighth week when she asked to be referred to Mr Tissot. Naturally I obliged and the appointment was sent a week or two later. Initially she was seen by a midwife but asked to see Mr Tissot in person. That appointment, as you know, came through for yesterday and he saw her. But now he’s made me aware that she alleged that he, her obstetrician, was her lover and the father of the baby. I need not point out to you that to my knowledge Mr Tissot has only seen her on this one occasion.

  Claire lifted her chin and stared out of the window. Why, Charles? Why be so secretive? What have you got to hide?

  She continued reading. Quite naturally, he is refusing to see her again and has requested that Heather be referred to you for psychological assessment.

  With her tragic history of two cot deaths, she does need to be under a consultant obstetrician and the child at least seen by a neonatal paediatrician, but obviously, with these stories, Charles can’t continue to see her himself, even with a chaperone.

  She still needed more detail about Heather’s previous allegations. The bald truth. Nothing hidden or wrapped up. And she wondered how significant it was that Charles had kept secret the fact that he had met Heather socially, even if it was just that once.

  She started making notes in the margin.

  Who saw her through her previous two pregnancies? Another obstetrician?

  Speak to Laura Hodgkins.

  Interview paediatrician and pathologist re. previous cot deaths.

  Get DNA results of both babies for paternity tests?

  Heather should be under another consultant but could that result either in further allegations or in these original allegations spreading to someone else?

  Look into the two men she accused previously of having been the fathers of Eliza and Freddie. The two doomed children.

  What was Geoff Krimble’s take on all this?

  What influence has her parents’ treatment had on her?

  She looked up for a moment, still thinking furiously. This was going to be a challenging case and, in view of the circumstances, it was going to need kid-glove handling. But some things were already beginning to niggle her. And big among these was: if Heather had only ever met Charles Tissot once and at a party, why had she picked on him? How much contact had she had with the men she claimed had fathered her two previous pregnancies? She stared around the room, trying to recapture the thought that had just flitted in and out of her mind like a butterfly passing a window. Then gave up. No good. It had gone. Back to the letter.

  Dr Sylas concluded with: I wonder if you would assess her and consider admitting her, particularly if you believe the newborn could be in danger during the puerperium. Do we need to involve social services? In view of Heather’s precarious mental state and the two previous cot deaths, should we consider making the child a ward of court? As well as an assessment and possible treatment for the delusional state of mind. I feel that this time it might be more appropriate for her to be admitted rather than managed in the community.

  Many thanks

  With only part of the story, the GP’s mind was already made up? She’d mapped out the entire case? There was a P.S. which emphasized this viewpoint, handwritten this time. Please help, I hate to see a colleague put in this dreadful position, particularly Charles.

  Which planted another small seed in Claire’s constantly sceptical and enquiring mind. Just what was Dr Sylas’s involvement here? Charles … not Mr Tissot? There was some familiarity here. And knowing his way with women, had Dagmar Sylas come under his spell? Lost her objectivity?

  She read the letter through three times, each time finding another point to highlight with her fluorescent pen so the final version looked more like a child’s colouring book than a serious referral letter. Then she wandered along the corridor to Rita’s office and asked her to send Heather Krimble the next available new-patient appointment. She was curious. What would she be like?

  And it was as she was talking to her secretary that she realized what it was that was bugging her.

  What had Charles Tissot said? Ruth, Heather’s sister, worked for one of his colleagues. She scanned the letter again.

  No mention of that one very significant fact here, that there was this prior connection, so important that it loomed large in her own mind. Why not?

  The answer swam into view.

  Because Charles Tissot, cunning little snake as he was, must have known it would come out at some point but he had, presumably deliberately, kept it back from the GP, hoping it would stay hidden? Some hope. Claire made a face to herself. On a scale of 1–10, that was a ‘1’.

  She felt increasingly uncomfortable as she stepped across the shifting ice, listening out for that fateful, telling crack. Just because something couldn’t be proved to be a lie or an omission, deliberate or accidental, it did not necessarily lead back to the truth. And that was what this case was all about, wasn’t it? Truth and lies. And underpinning all this? A tangled web of professional loyalty and delusion, almost backed up by half truths. Into the pot she threw the supporting evidence of the sister, a sister whose loyalty was unquestioned. Unlike Heather, she had no history of mental pathology so the truth would have to be carefully unpicked.

  With an effort, she pushed the fax and the new referral to one side. For now. Heather Krimble was not, literally speaking, one of her patients yet.

  Others were. It was time to return to her current role and the questions she needed to respond to concerning her current caseload, the usual mixed bag of inpatient unsolvables.

  What happens to an elderly schizophrenic when he develops dementia?

  How do you deal with a fourteen-year-old girl who, at five-and-a-half stone, is convinced she is morbidly obese?

  What happens to a young man with paranoid schizophrenia when his medication is stopped by a new, young and enthusiastic but misguided GP?

  How do you protect the parents of a psychopath with severe personality problems who is not above inventing voices that order him to torture first his father and then his mother before turning on his sister?

  And the two problems that were currently boring holes in her head.

  Problem 1: Arthur Connolly.

  Arthur’s story was a sad one but not uncommon. His wife, Lindsay, had controlled every single tiny, dark corner of his life: control of money (he had no access to their joint bank account, had no cheque book and didn’t even have a debit card or know their PIN), what job he did (shelf-stacker in the local B&Q), what hours he worked (anything that was going), what he ate, what he wore (generally ill-fitting suits that looked as though they came from a charity shop), what he watched on television (same as her: soaps, soaps and more soaps). The areas of Arthur’s wife’s control were endless: whether they had children (in this case just the one son, on whom Lindsay lavished all the devotion Arthur missed out on), what they did at weekends (she – shopping, he – DIY, polishing windows, ironing). And the more he did the more his wife despised him. Her control and disdain had spread like a virus, infecting their son, Saul, who also despised his father. Lindsay’s rules even extended to the personal, as in when and how often Arthur took a bath (Saturday nights). And had a shower (every other day). Claire was only surprised Lindsay Connolly hadn’t extended this control to how often Arthur opened his bowels. It appeared that Lindsay’s husband had l
ost the ability to choose, to strike out on his own. Arthur made no decisions of his own.

  Except one. And that only because Lindsay hadn’t seen it coming.

  In the months before the attack, Arthur had become increasingly unhappy and anxious. According to him, the pressure had built up very, very slowly over the years on this meek, obliging man with zero self-esteem. However hard he’d tried, it had not always been possible to please Lindsay, and when he had failed she had expressed her dissatisfaction with fury. She would punish him, slap him, belittle him in front of others and deprive him of his one pleasure in life: tobacco. Missing his cigarettes, the anxiety he had suffered had compounded, mingled with resentment, festering like a boil, angry, red and swollen, until one day it had burst in a cloud of red. Arthur had grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed his wife in the chest four times, puncturing the lung three times and bouncing off the sternum on the fourth attempt but missing all the major blood vessels and the heart, which was a miracle. She might not have survived had a neighbour not heard the commotion and picked up on the strange fact that it wasn’t just Lindsay’s voice. There had been another. He said afterwards he couldn’t work out who was doing the shouting back. Surely it couldn’t be Arthur? Arthur who had no voice?

  Bemused, the neighbour had knocked on the back door and taken in the bloody scenario. He had burst through and taken the knife from Arthur’s hand. ‘Gave it up like a baby,’ he’d said later to the police. It had been the disarmed Arthur who had called 999 confessing to having stabbed his wife, which was one reason he had ended up at Greatbach rather than HMP Dovegate, one of the nearest remand prisons. The other reason was that his defence lawyer had raised the issue of Arthur Connolly’s mental state.

  And so, Claire had become involved.

  She had decided to keep him here at Greatbach, not in the secure ward but loosely under lock and key, as the charge was GBH, the CPS having bargained with the police to reduce it from attempted murder. Arthur was lucky, the SIO said, not to be up on a charge of actual murder. Arthur had lifted his eyes to the detective and then dropped them again.