Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  ‘What sort of queries, exactly?’

  ‘Regarding my initial diagnosis of Ellie.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Mae tapped the biro against his lip. ‘Go on.’

  ‘His belief was that there was more to Ellie’s condition than it had maybe appeared.’

  ‘And that rattled your cage, being undermined like that. Him, just a layman, thinking he’d spotted something you’d missed.’

  Cox smiled but it wasn’t goading. More just sad. ‘But I had spotted it. I just wasn’t able to treat it, because she disappeared.’

  ‘You’re saying you diagnosed … you think it’s something other than DID?’

  ‘I’m of the opinion that while I was seeing her, there were elements of her history and … home life which demonstrated a risk of … other concerns.’

  Mae frowned, laid his pen down in line with his notepad. ‘Let me put this simply. You were found last night with a bag belonging to a missing man, containing several thousand pounds in cash. You previously stole a laptop belonging to this man, and attempted to conceal its return once you became aware we were looking for it. You are not in a position right now to be playing word games with us.’

  Cox nodded. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  He inhaled deeply, resignedly, as if preparing for a dive he didn’t wish to undertake.

  ‘Three weeks before Jodie disappeared I went on a conference trip to the Balkans. I’d been before: it was every few years, I’d got to know people out there. I added in an extra week to talk to a few colleagues about Ellie’s case. What I discovered when I was out there shed significant new light on what I had previously thought about her case.

  ‘Ellie had come to me, without her mother’s permission, as you know, in 2006. She wanted to talk about her condition, her experience of what we call an alter. Dissociative Identity Disorder was something I had an interest in. We started with a traditional gestalt methodology: I was primarily trying to search for a way for her to speak about the underlying trauma.’

  ‘The cause, you mean,’ Kit said.

  ‘After a fashion, yes. The problem was that she was very – closed off. She’d spent a long time living with her condition in absolute secrecy. It was almost cultlike, the level of betrayal she was feeling about talking about her history without her mother knowing. I tried some regression, a few other techniques. What I discovered was that her recall of events of her very early childhood was actually very revealing. It was,’ he paused, sighed, ‘incredible. It turned out she actually knew swathes of detail that she’d locked up.’

  ‘We’re talking recovered memory?’ Mae said. ‘Wasn’t that stuff all debunked?’

  Cox shook his head tightly. ‘It’s still hugely controversial actually, but that’s not what we were doing. I wasn’t looking to trigger the memories as such, it was just a matter of bringing the alter to the fore, to give that aspect of her personality a chance to be heard.’

  Clearing her throat, the solicitor said, ‘I fail to see how all of this can possibly be relevant to you.’

  Cox waved it away. ‘No, no I want to cooperate. I want it noted that I am cooperating.’

  Mae and Kit swapped half a glance.

  ‘Of course,’ Mae said.

  Cox poured himself a plastic cup of water from the jug on the table. ‘I wanted to get to the bottom of the trauma, what happened that was so frightening to Ellie that she couldn’t process it and retain full control of her identity. From what Ellie had told me, I understood that she and her mother had already sought help, but what concerned me was an enormous taboo between them around Ellie’s early life. She didn’t even know the name of her father, and she had these,’ he gestured loosely across the back of his own body, ‘these marks, scars that she had no good explanation for. Her dissociation seemed like a classic response to …’ he paused, tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Good god, the years I’ve spent protecting the confidentiality of my patients and now I’m telling you this without even asking her.’

  Mae waited. Eventually, Cox’s crisis passed and he continued.

  ‘Her condition appeared to be a classic response to abuse. Fear is a major catalyst in cases of dissociation: a child may be so afraid of showing their true emotions that they essentially split off a part of their identity in a subconscious attempt to control or hide that emotion. These fugues, as she called them—’

  Mae held up a hand. ‘As she called them? What do you call them?

  Cox met his eye. ‘I don’t call them anything.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning I see her condition differently.’

  ‘So you saw something in her that went unnoticed by all of the other therapists she saw over the years?’

  He considered this. ‘But which therapists, exactly? Because I have never seen any evidence that she did see any therapists.’

  ‘You think she’s making them up?’

  ‘I try to deal with evidence. Which is why I wanted to substantiate what I was hearing about the fugue states. I wanted to ask Ellie’s mother, but Ellie was against me contacting her. Vociferously so.’

  Kit squinted at him, head tipped to one aside, confused. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a good question. To my shame, it wasn’t one I asked myself at the time. In retrospect, it was obviously for the same reason that she lied about her age. She didn’t want Christine knowing I was treating her.’

  ‘And that would have been because—?’

  He shrugged expansively. ‘You’ll have to ask her.’

  Kit flipped a new page of her notebook. ‘You mentioned the Balkans.’

  After a mouthful of water, Cox nodded. ‘One of Ellie’s prevailing fears was of men in uniform. We worked on this during one particular session and she very courageously agreed to confront this fear, really look at it. We found when we talked about it that it wasn’t just generic uniform, it was the green or khaki you associate with infantry, armies. But we also found that the root fear involved a very scruffy soldier, very unkempt. It wasn’t just one incident, it was a few different scenes that seemed to surface. That rang alarm bells for me: that sounded like someone – one or more people – acting outside of a recognized unit.’

  Kit stopped chewing her thumb. ‘So she’s scared of guerrillas?’

  ‘Let him finish,’ Mae told her, lifting his hand. ‘Go on.’

  Cox looked at his hands. ‘She had this recurring nightmare about the death of a little boy, a toddler. I wanted to see if there was a connection between this traumatic event and Ellie’s injuries. I just didn’t buy the official line that there’d been a domestic accident with a pan of water. All the time I was thinking, someone close to Ellie must have the information about where she got those scars. I became preoccupied with it: obsessed, almost.

  ‘Anyway, when I was abroad at a conference, I mentioned this to a colleague who happens to be a Bosnian Serb involved in a childhood PTSD charity, very involved in reconciliation, that kind of thing. Obviously, I didn’t initially concentrate on the details of the trauma itself but after giving him a few vague outlines he insisted I go into the details. What he told me was that this story of Ellie’s – about a young boy being murdered by a soldier – was very like something that had been reported by a witness in The Hague, years later. He dug out the transcript, and we discovered that much of what Ellie talked about in this dream matched this … event. It was a real-life thing that had happened.

  ‘But there was no way Ellie could have seen it. Not only would she have been too young to process it at all – she’d never even left the UK. But I couldn’t let it go, it was just too – the details were too similar.’

  Mae pressed his fingertips into his forehead, his mind scrabbling for purchase on what he was hearing. ‘I’m sorry, you’re telling me you think Ellie’s trauma came from … what are you saying? That she heard about this thing in the news? That she astral-projected when she was a baby, or something?’
>
  ‘No, that’s not it. I had this friend help me track down the incident. I couldn’t let go of the idea that there was some kind of link. It was laborious work, took days to get anywhere at all because so many place names had changed since the war, and people were still afraid of talking. But we tracked down the person who had given that evidence: she worked at a refugee centre on the site of an old technical college in another town from the incident, across what had temporarily been a border. It’s a charity place now, or was last time I was in touch.

  ‘I managed to get her – the witness – on the satellite phone. Rana Filipovic, her name was. Perfect English. So off we went to meet her, find out about it. I was excited about it, so I made a call back to England to tell Ellie that I-I don’t know, that I thought I had found something. But when I rang, I got Christine instead.’ There was a pause. ‘And she was furious.’

  Mae let his chair rock forwards, planting the front legs back on the carpet. ‘Christine was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Me. The fact that I’d even spoken to her daughter. It was the first time I’d had any contact with Christine. That phone call, that was when I discovered I’d been deceived about Ellie’s age. She’d told me she was sixteen and I believed her. Anyone would have. But she was two years younger, meaning I needed a parent’s permission to see her.’

  ‘What happened after that call?’

  Cox gave his head a little shake, met Mae’s eye.

  ‘I hadn’t realized before I spoke to Ellie’s mother, but I saw a connection. She had been a war reporter. It occurred to me that Christine Power could have been there.’

  ‘Right, but that still doesn’t explain anything about Ellie, does it?’ Kit said, shaking her head, eyes screwed up. ‘Would she even have been born when it happened?’

  Mae, though, was beginning to see a path through it. Reporters took photographs, footage. Could Ellie have seen this thing second-hand, this trauma that had affected her so badly? But was it even possible that her condition could be caused by that?

  ‘Look, the thing was,’ Cox went on, ‘I had got so close. We’d found the woman who had given the evidence at The Hague, I’d planned to go and see her. But suddenly after speaking to Christine, the whole thing folded. Later the same day when I got over there, this woman Filipovic, just shut down. Wouldn’t let me through the door. Said she didn’t know anything about the evidence, told me to leave, and not to contact her again. I practically begged her, but.’ He lifted his hands into wall in front of him. ‘No dice. So I came home.’

  ‘And what did Ellie say, when you told her?’

  ‘I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t. I had Christine on my back saying that Ellie was getting worse, the stress of what she referred to as digging everything up. Lucy had—’

  ‘Lucy Arden?’ Kit interrupted, looking up from her notes.

  He nodded. ‘She’d started being suspicious about Jodie at this point, and Jodie was calling me all the time, wanting me to tell her everything. She had this mad notion that she’d go out there herself and finish what I’d started.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ Mae asked him.

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of Ellie, Christine wouldn’t open the door, and then the next thing I knew, Jodie Arden was missing and Ellie … well, you know what Ellie did, after that.’

  Kit was scribbling notes. Mae waited for her to catch up, then went on.

  ‘You took on Ellie’s care after she was discharged from hospital after the-the suicide attempt.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you told her about this new information at that point?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was unable to continue treating her.’

  Mae gripped his eyes shut, trying to process it. ‘You’re telling me her care was transferred specifically to you—’

  ‘Which must have been sanctioned by her next of kin, given that she was still a minor,’ Kit pointed out, looking up.

  ‘But you were unable to carry out your responsibilities to her because … because why, exactly?’

  Cox looked him square in the eye. ‘Because Christine refused.’

  Kit rubbed her face with her hands. She gave a joyless, exasperated laugh, and linked her fingers onto a dome on the desk.

  ‘OK,’ she started. ‘So, I’ve probably got this wrong, yeah, but if you’ve been legally designated as the provider of psychiatric care after a Mental Health Act section has expired or been removed, aren’t you legally bound to either provide that care or alert the co-signatory of the discharge notice. Or failing that, whoever’s the mental health lead at the relevant PCT?’

  It was all Mae could do not to laugh out loud.

  But Cox didn’t look at all amused. ‘You’re very well-versed in my field, constable.’

  ‘Detective Constable,’ Mae corrected.

  Kit jerked her chin at Cox. ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you allowed someone else’s demands to trump Ellie’s needs.’

  ‘It wasn’t just someone else. It was her mother.’

  ‘Sure. But you let her come between the child whose care was entrusted to you, and their health, without reporting it? Isn’t that, like—’ she broke off, turned to Mae. ‘What’s the word?’

  Mae made a show of recalling the term. ‘Negligence, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, snapping her fingers then fixing Cox with a look. ‘That’s the one. Medical negligence.’ She paused. ‘Or, criminal negligence. Dr Cox?’

  The solicitor, cage rattled, flipped over a clean sheet of her legal pad. ‘It’s not my client’s job to determine the charges for you.’

  Kit conceded it with a tip of her head: like she’d been doing this for years. ‘Tell me though,’ she asked him simply, ‘why was it that Christine Power managed to get in between you and your professional responsibility to this child?’

  Cox’s shoulders dropped, and he muttered something inaudible.

  Mae leaned forward. ‘For the tape, Dr Cox.’

  ‘I said, because of the photographs.’

  ‘We’re going to need more detail than that, Charles.’

  Cox drank the water slowly. All of it. Then he straightened his collar. This layering of little tasks, this series of gestures: this was a tell Mae knew well. It came before the gathering point of the interview, always, when the interviewee made the final step, and revealed the thing they knew they wouldn’t be able to hide any longer. He could almost feel the air tighten around him.

  ‘I photographed the marks on Ellie’s body. My theory was that as she couldn’t clearly remember the accident that had caused them, that it was likely to be connected to the trauma that triggered her dissociation. She thinks that the scarring was a result of burns, an overturned pan of boiling liquid. But – well, without going into the dermatology of it, I wasn’t so sure. There were sections of the burns across her legs, for example, that looked to correspond more with contact burns, or exposure to flame.’

  Mae shrugged. ‘Right. So you took a picture of her legs. That doesn’t seem so bad.’

  Cox said nothing.

  Mae poured himself a cup of water. Watched Cox over the rim. ‘But it wasn’t just legs.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Her whole body.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Including the extremely intimate parts of her body.’

  ‘There were scars all around the very top of one of her legs. Across the pubic area.’

  ‘Right,’ Mae said.

  ‘So I needed images of that area, too. I was going to consult an orthopaedic surgeon I know of. I took a total of fifty-five photographs of Ellie.’

  ‘And these photographs were—’

  ‘Ellie was naked, yes, and that would have been fine because Ellie gave permission, and, I believed, she was of age to give that permission. But then Christine became aware of the images, after I returned from my trip. I realized pretty
quickly after that what had happened, and that what I had done – innocently – could be used against me.’

  Kit said, ‘Are you saying you were blackmailed, Dr Cox?’

  ‘Christine demanded that I sever contact completely, not speak to Ellie ever again, not discuss any of my findings in Bosnia, or she would alert the police to what she called—’ His eyes fluttered shut, and he took a breath before he finished it, his voice almost a whisper. ‘The sexual abuse of her daughter.’

  Quietly, Kit asked, ‘And did you abuse her?’

  Cox’s eyes flew wide open. ‘No! God, no! No. I did not.’

  ‘Or sell those images?

  ‘No. No. I would never—’

  ‘Share them around?’

  He looked as if he was about to cry. ‘After making absolutely certain Matthew was who he said he was, I shared my file with him. The photos were in the file.’

  Mae cleared his throat. ‘OK, excuse my ignorance here but how is Christine Power blackmailing you if you’ve got nothing to hide?’

  Cox shook back his hair, a note of defiance about him. ‘We all know how it works, Detective. No smoke without fire.’

  ‘Hold on, though,’ Kit said, setting her pen down. ‘You’re telling us that it was Christine who wanted you to keep quiet about what you found in Bosnia?’

  Cox nodded.

  ‘And so that floppy disk you said you’d lost, the one with all of the information about what you’d discovered out there—’

  ‘I destroyed it.’

  This was too much for Kit. She groaned in exasperation and slammed her hand flat on the table. ‘What was on it, though?! What was so bad that you couldn’t share it with Ellie? That her own mother didn’t want her to know?’

  Cox seemed to shrink, deflate, like someone was bleeding the life out of him. ‘It was a shameful thing to do. I lied to a patient, a child, who had been relying on me for the truth. I just couldn’t forget about it. It followed me around. It was-it was just …’

  He trailed off, rubbed his eyes and huffed out a heavy breath, composing himself.

  ‘Look, I don’t expect your sympathy. But the guilt of it was just enormous. Being so close to the answers but being told to keep away from the person who needed them most. I don’t know. There was this one evening at this family party, after I got back from my trip, I got drunk and ended up talking to Jodie about it. I’d been avoiding her, if I’m honest. Things had already started to cool, and it was so complicated with her mother.’