by Anne Buist
‘Shit place.’
Natalie wasn’t sure if she meant the town or the nursing home. ‘Bad memories?’
‘And some.’
More silence. Her father’s illness had brought up things Jessie wasn’t in any rush to share, and it was too early in therapy to open them up. Natalie concentrated on helping her cope with the here and now—which for Jessie was going to be hard enough.
‘Sounds like he’s somewhere where he can get care and you can visit. Write down your feelings when they come to you,’ said Natalie. ‘Then bring them here so we can talk about them.’ Where it was safe.
Some fathers, Natalie mused as the session ended, had a lot to answer for. Liam’s da’, whose example had been rejected. Or her own: her mother refused to tell her anything about him except he had left when she was a toddler and, Natalie could only assume, traumatised them both sufficiently to not even feature on her birth certificate.
She was certain Jessie’s had been worse than both, though the details had yet to emerge.
‘It’s Morecombe Legal Service on the phone.’
Natalie was in her office writing a letter when Beverley called her. ‘Did they say which lawyer or which client?’
‘No, hold on.’ A moment later Beverley was back. ‘Barrister called Jacqueline Barrett. About Georgia Latimer.’
‘Put her through.’
Ms Barrett was straight to the point. ‘Your name has been suggested as someone to monitor my client if she gets bail.’
Who by? Not someone from Morecombe, because she’d never heard of them.
‘Is she likely to?’
‘We have an excellent case. Are you able to see her?’
‘That depends,’ Natalie said.
‘On what?’
‘Whether your client is prepared to see me.’
‘Exactly the point,’ the lawyer said. ‘Georgia will do what the court instructs, but she is worried you are not sympathetic to her.’
‘If by that she means I question what she tells me, she’s right,’ said Natalie. ‘If she would prefer to see Professor Wadhwa—’
‘No,’ said Ms Barrett almost too quickly. Had Wadhwa managed to piss them off somehow? More likely they thought that Natalie, younger and less experienced, would be easier to play. Perhaps they just needed a female on side? It was no coincidence that the barrister was a woman, Natalie was sure.
‘She wants you, but she wants to be certain you are open to her side of the story.’
‘I’m always open to the truth,’ Natalie replied. ‘In all its strange presentations.’
‘Good,’ said Ms Barrett. ‘I have to tell you, we are looking into her husband. I’ll be in touch. If you can get me a report as soon as possible that would be helpful.’
With that she hung up, leaving Natalie wondering, not for the first time, about Georgia’s husband.
When the mail came, there was another red envelope. With another USB stick.
Natalie felt a surge of adrenaline, almost immediately followed by anger. She had put the last message to the back of her mind and her preoccupation with Liam and Travis and Amber had allowed her to forget it. Stupid. What was this about? She opened it on her computer.
Getting close can be dangerous for your mental health.
Vague. A threat all the same. Her mind raced. Why had the first letter been handwritten and the subsequent ones so much more calculated? All three had arrived on one of the two days she worked at these rooms. She thought of Travis’s flash of anger; wondered if he wanted to get at her for taking him on before Amber’s court case. He wouldn’t have enjoyed cowering before someone thirty kilos lighter than him, and a woman in particular. It was on national television news and then again in the documentary; some of his friends might have seen it.
Could he have known in advance she was going to be asked to his interview, like Kay almost certainly had? Had it reignited his anger? She needed to report this; wondered at her reluctance to do so. She reread the document. Mental health jumped off the page. He couldn’t know she was on medication, could he? She had been a little high on the court steps but Travis wouldn’t have known that. Maybe it was just referencing her being a psychiatrist.
‘Drop them in,’ said the policeman who answered the phone.
‘Will you be able to do anything?’
‘Not without the memory sticks we can’t.’
‘But can you trace anything from an envelope and a USB?’
‘Are they actually threatening you with anything specific?’ The voice was polite, but what she heard was, ‘Stop wasting my time’.
She hung up.
Chapter 10
Natalie threw her bag on the sofa, called Welbury police station and asked for the senior sergeant. He hadn’t been on duty earlier in the day when she had tried.
‘McBride speaking.’
‘This is Dr King.’ She paused to make sure he had placed her. ‘I want to first thank you for letting me watch Travis’s interview.’
‘And second?’
‘Apologise that you hadn’t been pre-warned. I hadn’t been fully informed either.’
There was a pause but before she could fill it, Damian spoke again.
‘Is there a third?’
‘Yes.’ Natalie took a breath. ‘I’m going to be in town on Friday. Any chance of me being able to interview Tiphanie?’
There was a longer silence. ‘O’Shea put you up to this?’
‘No. I haven’t spoken to him.’
‘I suppose it’s just coincidence then that his office was on the phone asking the same thing?’
She set her Italian coffee maker on the stove and sat on the sofa with the file she’d brought home from work: Amber’s. She took detailed notes, a habit acquired when she had been less sure of herself. In forensic psychiatry it was essential.
The triple zero transcript and the police summary report of the discovery of the baby, at least, were typed. Amber had called the emergency line when six-week-old Bella-Kaye drowned in the bath.
Natalie could still hear in her head the recording that had been played in court. It had cemented the prosecution’s case.
Amber, can you just go back and get her out of the bath.
Silence.
Amber, listen to me. Just go back and get her out of the bath.
A whisper. I can’t.
Amber. The operator was now between panic and fury. Amber, it won’t make anything worse and it might help. Please. Go. Back. Now. Get Bella-Kaye out of the bath.
Silence.
It’s too late.
A click. Amber had hung up.
Amber refused to apply for bail. She would probably have been successful: as Natalie realised later, the State of Victoria tended towards leniency in infanticide cases. Amber’s lawyer managed to get the plea hearing listed earlier than it would normally have been. Women charged with infanticide usually didn’t serve time, he argued. But in the meantime Amber was in prison and Natalie visited her weekly.
&nbs
p; Natalie’s notes for the first few visits suggested Amber was still in shock, saying not much at all, and nothing meaningful. Mostly she reiterated her disbelief that Bella-Kaye was dead. She walked in and out of the room in a daze, crying intermittently and sometimes barely speaking. When Natalie first saw Travis, bewildered but hugging his wife and saying all the right things, she thought him likeable enough.
A different story eventually emerged. Amber had coped poorly from the moment of the child’s birth. Travis had derided her as a useless wife when his meal wasn’t ready as he watched the six o’clock news and a pathetic mother when Bella-Kaye interrupted his viewing by crying. The final straw had been Travis’s insistence that they go to New Zealand for a rugby match when the baby was three weeks old. Neither recognised that Amber was depressed.
‘Why would I be depressed?’ she wept. ‘Bella-Kaye was all I ever wanted. There was nothing to be depressed about.’ Amber and Travis had believed that the difficulties they were having were the same as those of any new parents.
The death of her baby and the resulting guilt had exacerbated Amber’s depression. The prison terrified her. Part of her felt she deserved it, but accepting blame didn’t help her deal with the fear that left her sleepless and without appetite. Natalie had prescribed antidepressants.
Amber avoided discussing events leading up to her daughter’s death. Eventually, it was talking about the trauma of imprisonment that opened her up, encouraged her to talk about Travis’s abuse—and enabled Natalie to feel sympathy. Before her was a vulnerable girl, barely more than a child herself, in manner if not age, who was quite simply not capable of malicious intent.
Amber had been weak perhaps, but not evil. When she described being taken to court in the prison van, separated from the other women by a mesh but still in fear of her life, her terror and bewilderment had been stark.
The defence called Dianne Fisher, then Natalie’s boss, an expert on perinatal mental illness.
‘In a US cohort convicted of infanticide,’ Dianne told the court, ‘Spinelli concluded that most had a dissociative psychosis.’ She had gone on to explain, ‘These women’s minds briefly cut themselves off from reality, an acute stress reaction as a way of coping with something that, for them, has pushed them beyond their mental capacity. Depression, sleep deprivation, crying child—they all contribute to overwhelming women who have an underlying vulnerability.’
Amber fitted the mould: her memory of the event was categorised by panic, anxiety and a separation of emotion and thought. In the police interview she had been vague and initially seemed intellectually impaired. Natalie had thought it a reasonable defence, compatible with the forensic evidence. But it incensed her that the defence barrister wouldn’t let her volunteer the information about Travis that had come out in therapy.
‘Absolutely not. The prosecution will annihilate you,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Battered Wife Syndrome isn’t a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. If it’s not in DSM, we can’t use it. It’ll only muddy the waters.’
Natalie had fumed: too junior, too green and idealistic to understand that the complexities of motive and influence were almost irrelevant. She knew now that a successful trial was a game well played, not a revelation of the truth. Because of the incident on the courtroom steps she had never got the chance to raise it anyhow.
The real issue had been with the judge. A few weeks previously Justice Tanner had been the subject of criticism after he had accepted a sleepwalking defence in a domestic violence case. Liam O’Shea had naturally been at pains to use it to advantage the prosecution case, with repeated references to ‘delivery of justice demanded by the community’.
With the judge unprepared to accept dissociation as a mitigating factor and Natalie barred from giving evidence at all, Amber was left without any real defence and had crumbled under Liam’s cross-examination.
Natalie turned it over in her mind again. Maybe not testifying hadn’t made any difference to Amber’s case. Amber had admitted her guilt, and Liam had been certain she was wholly responsible. But if the evidence now suggested something different, he had shown he was prepared to revisit the case.
Kay Long had said he did it. But what exactly had Travis confessed to? Maybe abusing Amber and driving her to it rather than actually killing Bella-Kaye?
Was Tiphanie feeling the same as Amber had, or was the situation different? Feelings of guilt could add to the pain. Natalie thought she had glimpsed that mix of emotions in the brief encounter on the streets of Welbury. But what was the shame or guilt for? For going back to bed and allowing Chloe to wander? Harming her as Amber had harmed Bella-Kaye? Or for not protecting her from Travis?
‘Hey Natalie, open the fucking door!’ It was Tom’s voice shouting from downstairs.
Immersed in the notes, Natalie hadn’t heard the doorbell. Or rescued the coffee. She turned it off and went to let him in.
‘Want some dinner?’ Without waiting for a response he pushed past with his takeaway bags. It smelled like Chinese: Tom liked cooking as much as Natalie did.
‘Didn’t see anyone outside again did you?’ she asked.
Tom shook his head and waited. Natalie hesitated.
‘Nat, I know that look.’
She explained about the USB warnings.
‘So who’s behind them?’
‘No idea.’
‘Yeah but what type of person?’
Natalie laughed. ‘I’m not a profiler, Tom.’
‘You understand weird people. What sort of person would send notes like that?’ He grabbed some plates and cutlery and laid out the Chinese food on the coffee table.
Natalie was more used to the history unfolding in a way that allowed her to make sense of the crime, rather than working backwards from the crime to understand the criminal. But she knew about stalkers. For the first time she let the idea incubate. She’d been wishing the problem would go away, but it apparently wasn’t going to.
‘Depends on what the intent is.’
‘Mad or bad?’ asked Tom between mouthfuls.
‘Bad, which is to say personality-driven rather than a psychosis. Could be a delusional disorder but I sense he wants to enjoy the feeling of power. Sits at home and gets his jollies by imagining how uncomfortable I’m feeling.’
‘Sexual?’ Tom flexed his substantial biceps. He wasn’t tall, but he’d done a lot of working out in his youth and had more than once appointed himself as Natalie’s protector.
Natalie shrugged. The predatory and resentful stalker types came to mind. ‘Not enough evidence to say. If it is sexual’—she added incompetent suitor and intimacy seeking to the list of possibilities—‘then it’s more about power, getting back at a dominating, critical and maybe abusive parent; mother, I would guess. He is probably still scared of her—hence the need to project his anger at someone he isn’t scared of but believes he has power over in some way.’
‘Sorry I asked. Just tell me, does that put you in danger?’
Natalie’s immediate response was no. She stopped herself. Not just the content of the notes, but the fact that he had sent them over three weeks, suggested repressed anger. She’d assessed murderers who had given less warning than this. ‘Yes. Potentially.’<
br />
‘You want me to move in for a while?’
Natalie shook her head. ‘If it escalates I’ll call.’
She took some time out to eat, trying to think of anything other than her stalker.
‘Shaun’s asking us for a favour,’ Tom said through a mouthful of sweet and sour pork.
‘Let me guess. Singer in the wedding band is sick again.’
‘He needs us both. Singer’s got an interstate audition and she’s taking the drummer with her.’ Natalie raised an eyebrow and he shrugged. ‘They’re married. Anyway, it leaves him in the lurch for the next gig.’
Natalie finished her Chinese.
‘Some sort of corporate ball. “Proud Mary” and “Brown-Eyed Girl”.’
‘Tom, since when did I start to look like a ball type of person?’
‘He needs the money.’
Tom knew she’d agree, though three sets of seventies covers was not something to look forward to.
He gave her the date. Horribly close. Shaun owed them.
Declan was finishing a session with an emergency patient and Natalie took advantage of the time to check out his bookshelf in the waiting room. He had a predilection for Irish poets, but it was an early edition Yeats that caught her attention. His patients must be very different from hers.
Her patients. Did one of them have a copy of John Fowles’ The Collector? Most serial killers did.
At first Natalie thought Declan was as distracted as she was tonight. Perhaps still thinking about his last patient. But the quick glances when he thought she wasn’t looking made her wonder if it was his curiosity about the trip with Liam. Natalie silently congratulated him for resisting the temptation to question her. She intended to avoid the topic. If Declan found out how Travis featured in her dalliance with Liam, he’d start questioning her judgment and they’d be back talking lithium and blood tests.