by Anne Buist
Liam looked at her for a long time. She stared hard at him without wavering.
Liam leaned forward on the desk. ‘You were the one who didn’t want to know about my wife.’
‘What?’ Natalie kept her voice hard as she tried to make sense of what was going on.
She hadn’t seen him since the law association gig. She started laughing. ‘Oh shit, you dickhead. This isn’t about Lauren. Or you.’
Seeing Liam was now confused, she stopped. Admittedly some of the new lyrics she’d extemporised were a bit over the top, a little risky, but Lauren couldn’t have known she was directing them at her husband. But that was beside the point; she’d come to see him about Tiphanie.
‘Look Liam, I’ve always known you were married and I don’t give a fuck. When I saw you there with Lauren Oldham, of all people, I couldn’t help but tease you with that song, but that’s all it was.’
Now she was looking for it, she realised how tense he had been. His shoulders slumped slightly. She almost felt sorry for him. He had been afraid she was going to turn into a bunny boiler.
‘So it’s business, and I’m seriously pissed off.’ She took a breath. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were arresting Tiphanie, and why murder, not infanticide? You know she’ll get a custodial sentence if she gets convicted, she might not even get bail. Was all that caring and sharing of information and cases just so I could set her up for you? I know that as far as you’re concerned my involvement in the case was purely a means to get into my pants, but like it or not, I have been involved.’
Liam nodded to a chair. ‘Why don’t you sit down? Coffee?’
‘No, I don’t want us to sit and have coffee like a couple of lawyers,’ said Natalie. ‘I care what happens to Tiphanie even if it’s just another case to you.’
‘You might be surprised.’
Liam stood up and went to a fridge in the corner of his office and got himself a beer. He offered her one and she ignored him, glaring at him, arms folded. He sat down in one of the lounge chairs by the window and pointed to the other. Natalie remained on her feet.
‘I didn’t know they were going to arrest her,’ he said. ‘I was in Hong Kong.’
‘And the murder charge?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Natalie. ‘Trouble is that won’t be how Tiphanie’s seeing it, whether she did it or not. She’ll be terrified.’
‘Good.’
‘Good?’ Natalie stared at him. ‘You really are a complete arsehole.’
She turned to leave but he was at the door before her, hand over her shoulder ensuring it stayed shut. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She wanted to screw him as much as she wanted to slug him.
‘I know she didn’t do it,’ he whispered into her ear.
All the anger drained from her. She turned around; their faces were only centimetres apart.
‘You want to scare her into dishing Travis up.’
Liam stood back. His eyes confirmed her guess.
Natalie shook her head. ‘I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing.’
Chapter 19
Justice Christina Stavrou delivered a coruscating lecture to the O.P.P. regarding their insistence that Tiphanie go to the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, and sent her to Yarra Bend for a psychiatric assessment. Natalie knew about it from the morning paper before arriving on the ward.
Before she could see Tiphanie, Natalie’s mobile rang: Amber calling from Lucia Cortini’s office at the gaol. Almost hysterical over Tiphanie’s arrest. Shit. She’d have to see her again. Surely even Declan would concede she had to put her patient first.
Tiphanie looked better than Natalie had expected. She reminded herself of the girl who had taken off to her grandmother’s with the pile of Cleos. There was backbone in there somewhere.
‘How are you feeling?’
Tiphanie forced a smile. ‘Crap.’
‘Want to tell me about it? What really happened?’
Tiphanie looked away. ‘I have.’
‘Yeah, well, we both know you haven’t told me everything. Maybe it’s time for the truth now. It can’t get you in any more trouble than you’re already in.’ This wasn’t entirely accurate, but then, Natalie wasn’t the police.
‘I didn’t carry Chloe anywhere screaming,’ Tiphanie said, her knuckles white. ‘And she didn’t scream in the backyard. They’re bloody liars.’ In a softer voice she added, ‘Chloe knew she was safe with me.’
Meaning Chloe would scream with Travis? Was Tiphanie denying carrying the child, or just denying that she had been crying?
‘So what did the neighbours see?’
‘They’re liars.’
‘May well be, but they aren’t lying about this, are they Tiphanie? They saw something.’
Tiphanie stared at the floor. ‘Do you think they’ll change the charge? To infanticide?’
Her lawyer would surely be working on it. Natalie knew she had to make a choice. Focus on her patient, or consider the bigger picture? Fulfil her responsibility as Tiphanie’s treating doctor, or buy into Liam’s scheme and scare her, which might also help Amber.
Natalie kept her tone even; she was just conveying the facts. ‘You can get five years for infanticide, more for murder.’
Tears started to trickle down Tiphanie’s cheek. ‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘Then tell the truth. But what you tell me, I want to be able to tell the police. Understand?’
Tiphanie looked up. ‘She played like she always did in the backyard that day. We make a lot of noise when we play; she hides—well pretends to—and I play animals tracking her down. She was laughing, yelling, we both were. We were having fun.’
Natalie didn’t have time to consider the likelihood of this scenario; wasn’t Chloe put in the front of the television all day? Wasn’t Tiphanie being treated for depression?
‘That night she wouldn’t sleep,’ Tiphanie continued. ‘I wasn’t coping. I…let her go with Travis.’ She was sobbing now. ‘I thought she’d sleep in the car…It’s worked before. He…he’s her father.’
The neighbours had said the bundle was packed into the car during the football match. But according to Damian, Travis had been at his mate’s place, with witnesses, for the entire game. Maybe the neighbours got the time wrong. Made sense; football supporters would be glued to the box, not monitoring the activity next door.
‘You’re feeling guilty that you didn’t protect her.’ Natalie deliberately softened her tone.
‘I love her!’ Tiphanie was screaming, loud enough that a nurse came running. Natalie waved her away.
‘I’m prepared to believe you didn’t kill her, Tiphanie,’ Natalie said, ‘but you might get charged as an accessory.’ She might have added that, like Amber, she would have to learn to live with the fact that she didn’t save her daughter by leaving long before the crisis point.
But it was too early for that. Her denial, the first stage of grief, was falling away and her feelings of guilt would now warrant Tiphanie being put on suicide watch. She relayed what she ha
d been told to Damian before heading out to see Tiphanie’s parents.
The Murchisons were in the waiting area beyond security.
‘How is she?’ Jim asked.
‘Feeling guilty.’
‘She didn’t do it,’ said Sandra.
‘No,’ agreed Natalie looking at Sandra. ‘But sometimes people feel guilty for the things they should have done, and didn’t.’
Sandra looked away.
By 6 p.m. all Natalie felt like was a bad television show and bed, but she had her appointment with Declan, as well as one with Georgia’s aunt. It was the only time they’d been able to agree on. Virginia’s husband had died three years earlier, and she liked to keep herself busy.
Virginia Parker would have been in her late sixties. Her long grey hair was pulled into a plait and she was dressed neatly in the alternative clothing of an earlier time: loose trousers and a long top, slippers and a necklace of bright beads. More California than Melbourne. Her smile was tight as Natalie ushered her into her consulting suite.
Natalie settled into a comfortable chair opposite Virginia, both with cups of herbal tea in hand. ‘Tell me about Georgia.’
‘God.’ Virginia’s sigh bordered on theatrical. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve been asked that? I suppose this is going to continue until the court case is finished.’
‘Only since the legal proceedings? Or earlier?’
‘Dr King, I, and everyone around Georgia, have been trying to understand her for the last thirty-seven years. I gave up. Perhaps you’ll do better.’
‘So let’s start from the beginning, when you first took her in. She was not quite three, is that right?’
‘Yes. We felt it was our duty. Understand, I barely knew Lee,’ said Virginia. ‘It was my father’s second marriage. He died. And after Lee did what she did, killed her husband, her mother wouldn’t take the child.’
‘So you were strangers to Georgia?’
‘Yes. We knew it would be hard. We thought, maybe tantrums? Bed wetting or stealing food? We read all the books. We were convinced that as long as we stayed steady, we’d get through.’
‘Did you?’
Virginia looped the beads through her fingers. ‘There wasn’t anything to get through. At least not the sort of things we’d read about and been told to expect. She was an angel. A delightful little girl who was placid and obliging.’
Natalie sensed the ‘but’ before they got there.
‘We thought we were tremendously fortunate. We hadn’t ever wanted to be parents, you understand.’
‘Until?’ Natalie prompted.
‘When we first took her the…blandness was a relief,’ said Virginia ignoring the question. ‘I mean, it wasn’t like we had to take her.’ She paused, Natalie felt, to emphasise her civic-mindedness. ‘We never could understand what the earlier issues were about. She did well at school, she had friends. And then she got married and cut us off as though we didn’t exist.’
‘As a child, there was nothing that worried you about her?’
‘I guess we mostly saw what we wanted to see. That’s what Vernon told me. She was hard to be close to I suppose, but we were private people. It didn’t seem strange to us.’
‘How did she get on with Vernon?’
‘The same. He worked of course, but he helped her with her homework as she got older.’
‘So what problems did other people have with her?’
‘Nothing really…no more than any other teenager.’ Virginia looked at Natalie, perhaps looking for signs of agreement. Natalie kept her expression neutral. Virginia reprised the dramatic sigh and continued. ‘She was accused of bullying once, but the other family were so obviously jealous. Their daughter wasn’t getting anything like Georgia’s grades, and was, to say the least, plain.’
‘Other things? Even little things?’
‘The teachers thought the other girls were friends with Georgia because they were scared of her. I suppose she changed friends a bit, but really? We’re talking teenage girls.’ Virginia looked at Natalie defiantly. ‘What would you make of that if it was your daughter? She was pretty, got A’s, went to parties. Perhaps she was a bit full of herself, but I thought she was covering up her insecurity about what Lee did. We wanted her to feel confident enough to make a place for herself in the world.’
‘How about with boys?’
‘I thought she was putting too much emphasis on them,’ said Virginia. ‘We fought. She could be quite vicious, but then I expect most teenagers can be.’
‘And Vernon?’
‘Left it to me. I think she scared him a bit. He was a quiet man, not fond of outbursts.’
‘You know her better, or at least for longer than anyone else I’ve spoken to.’ Natalie paused. ‘Do you think she killed them?’
Virginia looked out the window. Her answer was clear and crisp. ‘Yes.’
Natalie let out her breath. ‘Mrs Parker, this may seem a strange question, but how did you feel towards Georgia? I’m finding it hard to get a real sense of her; perhaps because this was how she came across, I’m not sure. Was she affectionate, or more remote? Do you think she loved you?’
Virginia looked at her hands and rubbed her wedding ring.
‘Have you seen the movie We Need to Talk about Kevin? Or read the book?’
Natalie had read it. A grim exploration of a pathological mother–son relationship that ended in mass murder.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to go to the movie,’ Virginia continued. ‘But reading the book I thought, for the first time in all the years I tried to be a mother to Georgia, that I wasn’t alone.’
Natalie waited.
‘Understand,’ said Virginia, looking at Natalie with an unflinching gaze, ‘that I read it before Georgia was charged.’ Natalie nodded.
‘What struck me was the inability of the mother to love. In the book she was his biological mother, and I’d always put my problem down to the fact that Georgia came to us late. That whatever happens when you give birth hadn’t happened for me and maybe three years old was too late for us both. After the book, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t me. Is it possible, Dr King, that some children are just not lovable?’
Natalie wished she had the answer, but Virginia was no more lovable than Georgia had been. In the end, she had failed to rise to the occasion and remember that she was the adult. Georgia, at the age of three, had already learned not to ask for hugs. This woman hadn’t thought to give them.
‘Tonight is a two-glass night,’ said Natalie.
‘Work or personal?’
‘Both. But believe me there’s more than enough work shit to justify two glasses.’
Declan raised an eyebrow as he poured her first glass.
Virginia was freshest in her mind. ‘Do you think children can be unlovable?’ She described her interview and then without a pause moved on to Sandra. Eventually Declan put a hand up.
‘Time to take a breath.’
Natalie stopped mid-sentence and took a gulp of wine. No, not manic.
‘You need
to take some time out to think.’
‘About whether Georgia is the female version of Kevin?’
‘No, about the dynamics,’ said Declan. He was sounding irritable. ‘When Georgia was young her mother didn’t measure up. You also need to look at the child’s contribution.’
He caught Natalie’s look.
‘I don’t mean the child was responsible, just that a relationship is a two-way thing. Some children who have abusive childhoods survive without turning into monsters or becoming psychiatrically unstable. So why? What resilience does the child have or not have? It seems to me that both Tiphanie and Georgia have some survival skills. Both left mothers who perhaps couldn’t nurture. Tiphanie’s sister is still there. Why? How does it help inform you where Tiphanie and Georgia are now, or were at some point in the past?’
Natalie mulled over Declan’s take on her patients and their maternal figures. ‘What really matters,’ she said, ‘is whether the abused daughter—or son—repeats the pattern or can shift the intergenerational repetition.’
‘So where does that take you?’
‘Doesn’t seem Tiphanie and Georgia have shifted far.’
‘Can they? Or others like them?’
Natalie thought of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Cathy was the mother from hell. Worse than Sandra or Virginia, wilfully malicious and self-serving. But one of her sons had come to the realisation that he could make choices about his own destiny. She didn’t think Georgia or Tiphanie were quite at this level of contemplation. Repetition was driven by a deep psychological need to master the emotions, and insight was needed for that mastery to actually be achieved.
She wondered for a moment about Lee, Georgia’s biological mother. Lee’s mother—Georgia’s grandmother—sounded as cold as Virginia, given she had not supported Lee or taken in Georgia. Lee must have gone to prison in New South Wales, where Georgia was born, but she would be out by now. Natalie was going to be in Sydney in a couple of weeks for a forensic conference; she made a mental note to ring one of her colleagues there, to see if they knew where she was.