by Jo Bannister
The woman’s eyes dipped, hiding tears.
Roy Burgess’s jawline was white. “She remembered nothing of the kind. The idea was planted in her head by someone she was meant to trust, and she was too young and vulnerable to fight it. He persuaded her it had happened and she believed him. But it never happened. Nothing like it ever happened.”
“I know,” said Rosie, “I know. The jury knew; and the medical profession is well aware of False Memory Syndrome. It’s no comfort, I know, but yours isn’t the first happy family to be broken up by it. Initially it was known as Recovered Memory, and treated as though what someone remembered under such conditions was the deepest kind of truth. The fact that they’d remembered nothing before was taken as further proof: the only reason people wouldn’t remember details of their childhood was if there was something to repress. The family has to seem normal because of the devastating secret at its heart.
“There are cases where genuine abuse emerges from such therapy. But psychiatry is the same as other branches of medicine: at its best dealing with real problems. If a patient presents from a dysfunctional background and complains of difficulty relating to other people on a wide range of levels, and then hypnosis brings up memories of abuse, that’s a scenario where you have to listen to what she’s saying. Or he – it’s as likely to be a man as a woman.
“But Debbie? She was tired and depressed because her studies were harder than she’d expected and her first adult relationship had just ended badly. With a history like that, picking a decent family apart in the hopes of finding a rotton core is the psychiatric equivalent of vivisection.”
She shook her head in grim wonder. “Your daughter was very badly served by my profession. You all were. Thank God the legal system did a better job.”
Roy Burgess looked as if he’d been struck by a gentle thunderbolt. He was used to telling this story, or having it told. He was used to the cautious expressions of people who thought it was in everybody’s best interests to assume that the jury got it right. He was not used to people understanding the mechanisms by which his family had been fragmented. The jury had believed him; his wife believed him; he wasn’t sure there was anyone else who genuinely did, until now. If he hadn’t had the honour of the SAS to uphold he might very well have cried.
“Not good enough to give me my daughter back,” said Mrs Burgess thickly.
“Does she still believe …?”
“I don’t know that she believes it; but she still feels as if it happened. She remembers it. I think she accepts, logically, that the jury were probably right when they decided her memory was unreliable. But when she’s in a room with her father she feels she’s standing next to a man who raped her when she was too young to stop him or even ask for help. She feels violated.”
“She was violated,” Rosie agreed hotly, “just not by the man she blames. I hope you made an official complaint.”
“Oh yes,” said Burgess wearily. “Fat lot of good that did us. The powers-that-be decided that the relevant guidelines had not been breached. That, however regrettable the consequences, Debbie appeared to have been treated in good faith and in line with current practice.”
Through her anger Rosie was aware that they’d drifted off the point. She’d come looking for Debbie Burgess, and to see if her father made a plausible villain. She’d found, inconveniently enough, that he didn’t; which left her with her original purpose. To find Debbie, talk to her, ask what Jackie Pickering had talked about last time she phoned.
And Rosie rocked in her chair as the answer that had been staring her in the face finally resorted to slapping it to get her attention.
Jackie wanted a big story that nobody else knew about. She also wanted vengeance for her friend on the man who abused her. Not her father: even Debbie knew that, Jackie certainly did. No, the blame lay with the man who made Debbie Burgess believe she’d been the victim of her father’s carnal desires when there wasn’t the least fragment of evidence to that effect.
Now Jackie was in a position to do something about it. When she confronted him with the consequences of his mind games in front of a television audience, she would launch her own career and end his. He was a successful professional man with the confidence of the medical establishment – but only until Jackie Pickering made her programme on False Memory Syndrome.
So who had a motive to murder Jackie Pickering? A young man with a curious talent for whom exposure might mean mockery, mistrust, a few vacancies on his round as a jobbing gardener? Or a psychotherapist with a lucrative practice entirely dependent on his reputation, his good standing with his profession and his ability to avoid being publicly denounced?
Rosie stared at Prufrock; and Prufrock, using that radar for trouble which had served so well in his own career, picked the kernels of understanding as it were straight from her brain. “You think … the therapist …?”
But Rosie’s thoughts had already leapfrogged ahead. A man who had killed to protect his reputation had nothing to lose. “What’s his name?”
It was just enough of a non-sequitur to make Mrs Burgess blink. “Who – Debbie’s psychiatrist?”
“Of course Debbie’s psychiatrist,” growled Rosie. “He’s the key to all of this. Not just to your tragedy – to Jackie’s. Who is he, what’s his name?”
The Burgesses exchanged a glance, shocked and horrified and yet not altogether displeased if it should be so. This man had put them through hell. If their daughter’s friend had died trying to prove it, that was appalling. But if the fat woman with the home perm hairdo could finish the job – if he was going to pay for Jackie – he could pay for them all.
Neither of them needed to look it up: it was engraved in their memories. Roy Burgess’s voice was thin but sure. “Cunningham. Andrew Cunningham. I can get you his address …”
But Rosie was already diving for the phone. “No need,” she gritted as she dialled. “I know where to find him.”
Chapter Nineteen
Detective Superintendent Marsh was not in his office. Rosie had had difficulty composing a message that he would understand and act on with sufficient urgency; she had no idea what to say to his sergeant.
“Get hold of him as soon as you can,” she said tersely. “Tell him I have to speak to him – nothing he’s doing is more important.”
Of course she didn’t know then that what Marsh was doing was trying to prevent a hostile crowd from burning down the Chronicle building.
She gave him her mobile number. “In the meantime, get Shad Lucas out of Fellowes Hall and into protective custody. Don’t call ahead, just go and get him. Don’t take no for an answer.”
“But … but …” Detective Sergeant Burton wasn’t used to being browbeaten like this by his superior, let alone a member of the public.
“Please,” she growled, “there is absolutely no time to discuss it. It’s a matter of life and death, and I promise you Superintendent Marsh will not have your guts for garters if you do as I say!” She took his stammering as acquiescence and put the phone down.
“Arthur, time we left.”
Even with motorways most of the way – even with Rosie driving – they were ninety minutes from Fellowes Hall. Ninety minutes in which, unless Sergeant Burton was prepared to act on his own initiative, Shad Lucas would be at the mercy of a man who needed him dead. Or if not dead then destroyed: his mind shattered, his memory past retrieval.
Rosie could guess, could frame a theory, could maybe cast enough doubt to shift suspicion from Shad on to the man treating him, but only Shad himself could know what happened in Skipley railway yards. Maybe he couldn’t get at the information right now, maybe he was confused – maybe strenuous efforts had been made to confuse him – but somewhere deep inside the knowledge existed. He knew what had happened to him and what had happened to Jackie.
And the man who killed her needed nothing in the world so much as to bury that knowledge where it could never be found. He needed a scapegoat, and who more plausible than a young ma
n who was known to be peculiar, who could be convinced that he himself committed the murder, who would say so to the senior investigating officer before letting his damaged mind slip off the cusp of reality altogether? And if it wasn’t ready to slip, it could be pushed.
Their best hope now was that Cunningham had no idea how urgent the matter was, how close to his heels the hounds snapped. If he thought he had time – and for the past several days Marsh’s only access to the suspect had been through his psychiatrist – he could chart convincingly Shad Lucas’s descent into madness. But if time ran short the job could undoubtedly be done in five minutes with a syringe of something that would fry his brain. As long as he didn’t die, as long as an autopsy wasn’t an option, he’d get away with it. As far as Cunningham knew, no one had any reason to suspect him. With Shad insane, no one ever would.
“I still don’t understand,” Prufrock said thinly as they travelled, “why Shad thinks he killed Jackie Pickering. Amnesia is one thing, but why does he think he remembers something that didn’t happen?”
“That’s exactly what false memory is,” gritted Rosie, bearing down on a rep cruising in the outside lane until he crossed himself and veered out of her way. “Once planted, a false memory is indistinguishable subjectively from the real thing. Those affected believe in it because they remember it happening – they were there. Debbie Burgess may know her father never raped her, but she believes he did because she remembers it. Shad believes he killed Jackie Pickering because an expert in Recovered Memory got hold of him when he was at his most vulnerable and coached him into remembering what he needed him to remember.”
“But … it’s so real to him!”
“Of course it’s real, Arthur! It was real to Debbie Burgess, and she’s like you and me. Shad isn’t. He’s a powerful natural psychic: he can pick other people’s thoughts, feelings and memories clean out of their heads. He was there, or nearby, when Jackie died – he knows what she felt. He also knows what her killer felt. With that to work on, someone much less experienced – and much less motivated – than Cunningham could have made him think those were his memories, his reasons. It only needed a little careful manipulation to make him confess to the crime. And the real murderer is safe.”
Prufrock thought about that. “Not entirely. Not while there’s any chance of Shad starting to recover – to recognise the difference between adopted memories and real ones. He’ll only be safe when …” The glance he shot her was sharp with fear. “When he’s rendered Shad incapable of stringing two coherent thoughts together. Permanently.”
“We’ll be there in half an hour,” Rosie said in her teeth. “If Marsh got our message, he’s already safe.”
“If Marsh had got your message he’d have phoned.”
Rosie thought so too. “Or maybe Sergeant Burton will have dealt with it himself?”
Prufrock looked doubtful. “I don’t think that’s how you make Chief Constable – using your initiative.” But he was thinking of something else. The word ‘message’was running round inside his head looking for something to connect with. “Oh no!”
“What?” She cranked round so quickly the car swerved.
“The message we left for Shad. If Cunningham’s seen it – and he will have seen it, he’ll be making sure he sees everything to do with Shad – he knows we’re on to something. He’ll assume we’re on to him. We weren’t, then, but he’ll think we were. He’ll think he’s out of time. He’ll do whatever’s necessary to break the trail between him and Jackie Pickering.”
Rosie glanced at the speedometer. The big car was already way over the speed limit. She pumped the pedal some more and the clock edged towards ninety.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Andrew Cunningham calmly.
“ECT was routine therapy when I started in this business. It was practised in every psychiatric ward in the country. It was considered safe and beneficial, and it achieved some excellent results. It was only as the new generation of psychotropic drugs became available that it was sidelined. But there have always been some patients who respond to it after the drugs have failed. Let’s hope you’re going to be one of them.”
“Will it hurt?”
“You won’t know a thing about it.”
After five o’clock, when the offices closed and the factory shifts changed, the crowd in Moss Street swelled until you couldn’t have got a bicycle along it, much less a newspaper van. The pages for tomorrow’s Chronicle were ready to go to the press, stacked up inside the back door like charter flights waiting to land.
Dan Sale was pacing up and down beside them, making everyone nervous. He’d brought papers out late before – strikes, power cuts and, on one memorable occasion, an unexploded bomb had torn up the schedule and thrown it on the fire – but he’d never missed an issue and he didn’t mean to start now. He had his phone in his hand as he paced, contacting everyone he could think of who might be able to help. At one point he called the airfield to see if a helicopter could land in the back yard. But there wasn’t enough space for safety, and while the pilot might have risked it to pluck someone from the jaws of death he didn’t view Sale’s batting average in the same light.
Even if he’d been willing to try, Harry Marsh would have vetoed it. It was the date on a damned newspaper they were talking about, for heaven’s sake! If a helicopter touched an overhead wire and came down on the crowd it would kill scores of people.
“Then move them!” snapped Sale.
“If they don’t disperse we will move them,” promised Marsh. “But if you’re expecting me to whistle up a squadron of Cossacks to charge them with drawn sabres you’re going to be disappointed.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Wait,” said Marsh, unperturbed. “Boredom clears more streets than force. Keep telling them there’s nothing to see, that neither Lucas nor Rosie is in the building. If nothing happens for an hour, most of them will start wanting their tea.”
“An hour?” Sale could live with an hour’s delay. An hour’s delay had been nothing in the days when an apprentice printer could trip over the shop cat and send a day’s work fountaining into the air in a thousand slugs of type.
“Two, tops,” Marsh nodded encouragingly.
“What, actually, do they want?” Matt thought it might be a naive question but somebody had to ask it.
“Mostly they want not to miss anything. They’ve got wind of something unusual, they know the Chronicle is involved, and it’s a nice handy place to picket. Part of the price you pay for a town-centre location, I’m afraid.”
“They’re not friends of Jackie Pickering’s then.”
“I doubt if half of them would recognise her name. No, they know a girl was killed; they know she worked for a television company that had a dispute with the Chronicle; they know there’s a suspect who also has a connection with the Chronicle. A mob is like an amoeba: it can only process information in the simplest of terms. Lucas being a friend of Ms Holland’s implicates the paper. Where is she, by the way?”
Sale shrugged. “Nottingham. Don’t ask me why – I never have more than the vaguest idea where Rosie is and what she’s up to.”
“It hardly matters,” said Marsh, “as long as she’s not here. As long as neither of the people they want to throw stones at is available, sooner or later they’ll get bored and go home. Rosie waving at them from a window just to prove she’s not afraid could be enough to start a riot.”
“They were talking about black magic,” said Alex faintly.
Marsh grunted derisively. “Amoeba thinking. Slap a sexy label on something and you don’t have to bother working out why it was done, or why it was done that way. Black magic – explains everything, doesn’t it? Nobody expects to understand it so it isn’t a problem when they don’t.”
“It means they know about Shad,” said Alex tautly. “Not just that you have a suspect, not just that he’s a friend of Rosie’s, but who he is and what he does. If they thought I’d killed Jack
ie Pickering, or Matt had, nobody’d be talking about black magic. It’s because Shad’s a psychic. It’s because of what he’s done for the police in the past that there’s a mob baying for his blood right now!”
This was an exaggeration but nobody said so. There was a general recognition that if it wasn’t strictly true now it might be later.
“We won’t let them hurt him, Miss Fisher,” Marsh said quietly.
“I don’t doubt your good intentions, Superintendent. But this thing is going one of two ways, and I doubt your ability to protect him in either eventuality. If he did it he’ll go to prison. The talk will follow him. A police nark who sacrificed a young girl in a black magic ritual? – they’ll crucify him.
“Or you’ll find someone else did it – or anyway you won’t be able to prove Shad did – and you’ll let him go. You think that’ll be the end of it as far as these people are concerned? They’ll think he got away with it. Because he helped you in the past, you let him go. They’ll drive him out of town. This is where he lives, where he works, but not after this. He’s a dead man in prison, a pariah out of it. I don’t know how anyone can protect him.”
Harry Marsh would have liked to dismiss her concern as hysterical, but he knew better. Guilty or innocent, Shad Lucas was going to pay for Jackie Pickering’s death, and go on paying probably for the rest of his life.
Lacking an adequate reply, he turned back to the window. The crowd had stabilised at perhaps three hundred people. For every new arrival now, someone else sloped away to see what was on the TV. As long as nothing happened to hold their interest he was going to be right. At least about that.
“You’d better get hold of Ms Holland, let her know what’s going on. She doesn’t want to walk into the middle of this.”
Alex nodded. “I tried her mobile earlier, couldn’t get through. I’ll keep trying.”
“Good enough. I’ll be at Brickfields if anyone wants me.” The police station enjoyed one of the most desirable locations in town, overlooking Skipley’s answer to Central Park.