He gave a start. ‘Of course not. The foundation’s approach to so-called repressed memories is clear. Decades of research into memory has not produced any evidence that people are able to repress traumatic events. In fact, the opposite is true. Memories of terrible events are more vivid and longer-lasting than other memories.’ He was about to continue, but then he smiled. ‘I don’t know how aware you are of the latest theories on memory, or how much you want to know?’
‘Take it that I don’t know anything. Please enlighten me.’
‘We are still discovering how wonderfully creative and adaptive our minds are, but also how treacherously wrong our memories can be,’ he said. ‘Research shows that about thirty per cent of us can be induced to believe in traumatic events that are completely made up, but which feel as emotionally true as real traumas. Scientists have devised a theory to explain this phenomenon, called retrieval induced forgetting. Simply put, it states that the process of remembering is also a process of forgetting. Instead of consolidating a memory every time we recall it, and thus strengthening its accuracy, we are actually recreating the memory from scratch to be stored again. So we throw away the old memory and copy a new version, which is then stored in its place.’ He tapped his temple, and smiled, checking that she was following him. ‘Unfortunately, the theory has serious ramifications for the therapeutic process because it suggests that every time a past event is recalled, it is vulnerable to distortion. In fact, during therapy, inaccurate information can be introduced by the therapist when discussing the past, and then incorporated into the patient’s memory.’
‘In other words,’ said Herron, ‘their memories can be hijacked or misled to plant false memories.’
‘Or rather memories recovered during therapy are likely to have been created by the therapeutic process itself. We now suspect that patients undergoing intensive therapy, while being treated with benzodiazepines, are constantly floating between reality and fantasy. They have a poor or damaged awareness and knowledge of their own memory, and find it difficult to distinguish between things they imagined and those they really observed or participated in.’
‘Why then did Sinden persist with his therapies?’
‘Unfortunately, it appears that he did not care for the latest scientific research.’
‘But he’s a trained professional working as part of a team. I thought psychiatry was a research-based study.’
‘No,’ he replied, giving her a tired smile. ‘Primarily, it’s a battleground. Open warfare waged between different schools who launch critical attacks on each other. There are those who persist in believing that repressed memories exist, and those who don’t.’
She thought of the patients on Ward G, the hopelessness in their faces, and the confessions that were not their own. ‘When a therapist plants a false memory in a patient, how do you get rid of it?’
‘You don’t. Especially if it’s a traumatic memory. Once you’ve slipped poison into a well, you can never get rid of it.’
He paused and Herron could sense his exhaustion, as though the notion of false memories was capable of haunting him, of shattering reputations and ruining lives. She asked him how long he was staying in Scotland.
‘Two weeks. I’m going to hire a car and drive up to the Trossachs. No phones or internet connections. Just trees and peace. Nobody will be able to get hold of me and I can walk wherever I want. No limits.’
He’s dreaming, thought Herron. There was no escape for Reichmann now that he and his foundation were part of a murder investigation.
He shook her hand as if to say goodbye.
‘I’ll be in touch with you again,’ said Herron. ‘You’ll have to leave me a contact number.’
Reichmann stiffened slightly but agreed. Before leaving, he asked for a favour in return. ‘I’d like to spend a few minutes alone in Jane’s consulting room,’ he said. ‘She described it to me so often in her letters, especially the vista of trees she could see from her balcony.’
He seemed completely innocent of the ramifications of his request. ‘I can’t authorise that,’ she said. ‘It’s a crime scene.’
‘You can search me when I come out. I’ll not touch anything. All I ask is a private moment or two in the room where she did most of her listening.’ He saw her seriousness but smiled, as if he were asking her to indulge the sentimental whim of an old friend.
‘That might be the case, but I could not possibly—’
‘I don’t think you understand. I’m in mourning for a dear friend and colleague. Just a moment, that’s all I ask. I want to take in her view of the forest.’
‘Unless you have something specific to help the investigation I can’t let you near there.’
He glanced at her as if about to make a trade. ‘If I see her room, I might remember more, something she said that could be important.’ He waited several moments for her response. ‘I only want something very simple. To listen to the silence of her beloved forest.’
‘OK, Professor Reichmann. You can see her room, but I’ll have to be with you at all times. And you can’t touch a thing.’
21
Herron drove Reichmann to Dr Pochard’s house in the forest. The psychotherapist had never visited her home before; their meetings had usually taken place at his lakeside home in Switzerland. The road meandered along the bottom of a lonely river valley dotted with sheep, and then it began to climb through the pine trees. Reichmann sensed the change in the landscape and stared through his passenger window, his twisted mouth slightly open, his face expressionless. The road was completely immersed in the forest’s shadow, the trees forming a high rampart against the wind and sun, the same fixed view of pine trunks and densely needled branches travelling alongside them, like a single image stuck in a broken projector.
‘You know that Jung believed the forest was an archetype,’ said Reichmann as the car laboured up a steep turn. ‘That it exists in our collective unconscious.’
Herron kept her concentration on the narrow road. She knew Pochard’s house was not far away, yet it seemed inaccessible amid the encroaching trees.
‘Look at all these trees rising up to the sky,’ said the professor, ‘trying to connect us to heaven and the sun. Yet nothing can compete with a forest for signalling our darkest, most earthly fears.’ He turned to her and spoke more softly. ‘What do you feel, Sergeant Herron? Do the forests give you a sense of terror or ecstasy?’
She shrugged and frowned, staring at the road ahead. She glanced at Reichmann and saw that he was smiling at her in a friendly, inviting way, but his eyes looked perplexed by her lack of interest, disappointed even that she was not prepared to share his enthusiasm for their surroundings.
Through the side window, the view of trees unspooled, glimmering with sunlight refracted through the pine needles. She remembered the track through the forest leading to the stone chamber, and Pochard’s eyes staring up at her. She felt a physical sensation, a tightness in her throat at the thought of returning to the forest’s strange depths.
‘Jane told me that the forest calmed and inspired her,’ said Reichmann. He took a measure of Herron’s silence. ‘What was the scene in the forest like?’ he asked.
She knew that he was referring to the murder scene, but she could not express her feelings. She kept watching the road, impatient to get to her destination. For a while, she thought they were lost, and then the road curved and she saw a chimney pot rising above the treetops. She turned up a gravelled lane and found the house, its front turned discreetly away from the road, its windows blank and empty. Already an air of dereliction hung over the building, which was still surrounded by police tape. The clapboard walls on the north side were green with algae. Ivy had crept along the guttering and poked through cracks in the eaves.
Herron and Reichmann got out of the car and simultaneously turned to take in the view. There was a slight breeze wafting up from the valley, and the pine trees should have been moving, but they were completely still, adding to the eerie mood
of the place. Further up the valley hung a plume of smoke that seemed to have lost its direction, floating almost at a standstill.
They went straight upstairs to Pochard’s consulting room. Herron expected Reichmann to glide over to the French doors leading to the balcony, but he seemed more interested in the interior of the room, scanning the pair of leather seats, and between them, the small coffee table with the box of tissues and the pot plant.
‘It’s strange,’ said Reichmann. ‘I feel she is so close, sitting right there in her leather chair.’
Herron saw that he was talking about the larger of the seats. However, the forensics team had found Pochard’s fingernail down the back of the smaller one. What did that signify?
‘This is her room,’ he said. ‘She is near. I can’t believe I’ll never see her again.’
Reichmann seemed so present in the room, so willing to share his thoughts and feelings, so determined there should be no shadows in his delivery. However, Herron tried to tune in to what was behind his words. What was he not saying? She did not know what he was hiding, only that it was probably bound up with the reputation of the foundation. And because it represented a professional threat, the professor was both charming and intense, performing in front of her with all the authority of a man who had spent a lifetime neutralising such threats.
Reichmann opened the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. She joined him and stared at the view. She had the sense that standing there with the forest stretching all around them she should be able to hear everything in the secret depths of the valley, but there was not a single sound. She felt her hair stand on end, and wished for a signal to reach her, but none came.
‘Now I understand why Jane worked here,’ he said. ‘The forest throws you back upon yourself. By threatening you with absorption in its total quietness, it makes self-expression a necessity.’
She nodded and thought she understood. The quietness of the forest seemed so mysterious and abundant. Already it had summoned up a cascade of images, sweeping her memory back to the forest clearing and waterfall.
‘Do you think the murderer was a patient of hers?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t like admitting my ignorance. Patients start out in poor emotional states, and there’s always a tendency to relapse. More than likely some of them had dangerous histories and spent time in secure mental units.’
Herron asked him again about the cryptic ‘S’ in Pochard’s diary, and the lack of her usual patient commentary. ‘Why would she have kept S’s identity a secret?’
Again, he looked unhappy to be unsure of himself. He stared at the empty leather seats. ‘Perhaps the client wanted to remain anonymous. He or she might have some important role in the community.’
Eight o’clock on Friday evening, thought Herron. The moment of intrusion by a stranger, a dark noise against the silence of the forest, a shadow in the world of a respected psychotherapist who usually kept meticulous notes about her clients.
‘This inquiry you’re holding,’ she asked. ‘Have the staff at Deepwell cooperated so far?’
‘Up to a point. But they won’t give me the name of Sinden’s supervisor. I’m convinced that Sinden was not acting alone in mounting these strange memory experiments. He was relatively inexperienced. There would have been special precautions, procedures put in place to prevent mistakes. He must have had high-level support from within the clinical management team at Deepwell.’
‘You mean another psychotherapist collaborated with Sinden?’
‘More than collaborated. I believed Sinden was directed and controlled by someone who is doing everything they can to cover their traces.’ He stared meaningfully at Herron.
‘You want me to help you find out who this person is?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘In other words, you have no proof that they exist at all.’
‘We will have proof. Once you have concluded your murder investigation.’ His voice had grown flat, lacking any theatrical twist. ‘Dr Barker is no fool. As soon as I announced the inquiry, he understood that it wasn’t Sinden I was after, but his supervisor and the management at Deepwell. He has been very clever. I suspect he has promised Sinden his old job back in return for his complicity.’
‘What’s to stop Deepwell closing ranks completely now that Pochard is dead? Most of her notes have been burnt. What if she was the only one prepared to speak out?’
‘I have more evidence of clinical malpractice at Deepwell, apart from what Dr Pochard was prepared to reveal.’ Reichmann’s eyes glowed. ‘Evidence I have been collecting for a long time. Jane was going to provide the final proof I needed.’
‘What is this other evidence?’
Reichmann smiled. ‘You will have to wait, Sergeant Herron, until I have prepared my notes. Be patient and then you will see.’
A gust of wind picked up and rustled the branches of the nearby trees. Reichmann seemed to relax as the physical presence of the trees drew closer, interrupting their conversation and halting Herron’s scrutiny.
22
He woke in a strange house and, at first, could not remember where he was. From the darkness, he could tell that it was night outside. Relief flooded through him. Dreaded daylight, the weight of all that light and the knowing eyes following his movements was enough to drive him deeper into insanity.
Walking with the slowness of a sleepwalker, he stumbled against a table and knocked over a bottle that rolled along the tiled floor. In spite of the unfamiliar surroundings, he managed to find his plastic tray of tablets in the fridge, his tranquillisers laid out in their little compartments according to the time of day and dose. He fumbled several of the capsules into his mouth. Now he just needed to find his therapist and talk to him. He had no friends in the outside world, and what family he had left had long grown sick of his drug-taking and crazed behaviour.
For years, his fellow inmates on Ward G had been his only company, but they were just as disturbed as he was, fantasists and attention-seekers, and none of them had exactly been sympathetic company. No, his only hope of escape from near total loneliness had been his trusted therapist. He wished that he were here with him now, asking him those gentle questions, gripping his restless mind in the trance of his overwhelming understanding. He remembered the flooding sense of relief at being able to reveal his innermost thoughts to a truly great listener, a trained professional who could sit for hours, a whole lifetime if necessary, tuning himself to the tone of his troubled soul. Not a day had passed since leaving Deepwell that he had not thought of the man. Often, his tall figure appeared to him, on the shadowy threshold between his waking and dreaming, listening to his words, reminding him of the therapeutic contract he had yet to fulfil.
He tried to let the quiet of the house envelop him, the peace of its warm shadows gather him in, but a sense of tension rose in his body. His therapist’s plan was under way. Already, he had completed the first part and now he was somewhere in the middle with one more murder to commit. But was he where he should be? Had he somehow stepped out of the tunnel his mind was meant to be travelling along?
He checked all the doors in the log cabin, apart from the one that had been locked shut. He wondered where it led. He worried that he had strayed from the plan he had been rehearsing in his mind for the last six months. He stood in the hall by the mirror. There was no way to clear the sense of confusion in his mind.
The minutes passed. Slowly the tablets took effect, and he felt the tunnel open before him again. He grew convinced that his doctor was waiting behind the locked door. He could hear fidgeting, a chair scraping the floor, faint sounds as though whoever made them was trying not to be overheard. He pressed down the handle, but the door did not budge. He banged the door, demanding that it be opened, but the furtive sounds within abruptly ceased. The locked room marked him out as an outsider in a strange house, a lonely eavesdropper, a crazy fantasist who was trying to intrude upon someone else’s story. He tried to stifle his rage, and r
ested his forehead against the wood of the door. His understanding of what was happening to him kept flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb. When the drugs wore off, his mind would be eclipsed into darkness once again. Determined now, he walked into the kitchen and found a screwdriver in one of the drawers. He marched back to the door and with a practised movement wrenched the lock loose.
As soon as he entered the room, it became clear to him that his therapist had not yet arrived. Instead, he identified the woman tied to a chair in the centre of the room, recognised her voice as he heard her scream, a desperate uninhibited shriek that rippled through his entire body, and then changed in pitch to the raw huskiness of someone who’d been left alone for days.
Her name was Laura Dunnock, and he knew with clarity that she was his next victim.
23
When Carla got home, she found David sitting by the TV with a beer. She gave him a quick kiss on his cheek. Looking up she saw her mother-in-law standing in the kitchen wearing a pair of oven gloves. She was watching Carla with the staring look of someone practised in the silent art of reproach. A freshly baked lasagne was sitting on the table and the children were already in bed, even though it was only seven o’clock.
‘How are the children?’ asked Carla.
‘They’re right as rain,’ said David.
‘Then why are they in bed so early?’
‘Because. Now give me another kiss.’ He expelled a belch and excused himself. She realised it was not his first beer of the evening.
‘Not with your mother watching,’ she said under her breath.
Upstairs, she found the children fast asleep with open storybooks next to their beds. She stumbled a little as she bent to kiss Alice’s composed face. A new domestic world was taking shape around her, softer lights, tidier rooms, smells of soap and air fresheners, quiet children. It all contrasted so sharply with the way things had been before Mrs Herron’s arrival.
The Listeners Page 14
