The Deceiver

by Priscilla Masters

  It took a while for all this to sink in. Claire felt her eyes narrow. ‘And you’re saying there’s no truth in this? In any of this?’

  ‘Absolutely bloody well not. The woman’s bonkers.’

  He turned his anger on her now for trying to verify the facts instead of simply accepting his own version.

  ‘So why …?’

  ‘Not blackmail. She hasn’t asked for money. She’s just waiting for me to declare myself. Christ, Claire. This is awful. She just sat there throughout the consultation with this stupid, crazy smile on her face. When I told her, quite gently of course, that she’s got the wrong end of the stick, she came back saying it’s me who is mistaken. That she quite understands why I can’t be more open about it. She says that she wouldn’t do anything that would harm my career. That our baby …’ he was shouting now, ‘… will be most welcome. She couldn’t be farther from the truth. She is completely fixated on me. There seems to be nothing I can say to dissuade her. God, if word of this got out …’ He dragged in a hoarse breath, tension in his voice speeding up the sentences. ‘She seems to expect me to enter into this horrible and dangerous fantasy, and the more I try to tell her, quite politely, that she is mistaken, the more she appears to be convinced that I am doing this purely to preserve my professional integrity. She talked about a future together, about the child. She called it our child, Claire.’ His voice was rising again. ‘She is dangerous. To me. This could ruin my career.’

  She brought the conversation back down to the role she was expected to play. ‘And you want me to see her?’

  ‘Make an assessment,’ he begged. ‘There’s not a scrap of truth in these wild claims. But you know what the MDU are like.’

  She did. The Medical Defence Union invariably guarded its members slightly less assiduously than the innocent general public it vowed to protect. But whoever’s side they might be on, there were strict rules to be obeyed. ‘Have you informed them?’

  ‘Not yet, but time is of the essence. The longer this goes on the worse it will be for me. She makes me shudder, Claire. When I examined her this morning she just lay there giving me this doe-eyed look. Tried to stroke my hand.’

  She was alarmed now. ‘Please tell me you had a chaperone.’

  ‘Of course. I’m not a complete idiot. But she spent half the time winking at the chaperone as though she was in on the act. The poor girl, first-year pupil midwife …’ He couldn’t resist tacking on, ‘Pretty little thing with lovely, silky blonde hair and …’ Before remembering. ‘Poor girl. She didn’t know where to look. What to do. It’s embarrassing, as well as dangerous. The woman is seriously odd. When I tried to speak to her, her response was something about love. Love is patient or some such crap. Even her sister, who was with her this afternoon, put her hand on my arm and stroked it. Please, Claire. You’ve got to help me out here.’

  He did sound desperate.

  But she knew that before she got her hands dirty she had to ask again. ‘I take it there’s no truth in …’

  He headed her off at the pass. ‘Absolutely none. Have you been listening?’

  She had to hear it just one more time.

  ‘If you’re asking did I shag her at this party, whenever it was, the answer is categorically no. It did not happen. Absolute balderdash.’ It was unfortunate that in that last word he had reverted to public school-speak. It sounded a tad too pat.

  He continued in a calmer vein, reflecting now. ‘Folk are often a bit funny about male obstetricians in the first place. Think we like firking around in—’

  Claire cut in quickly, ‘She will have to be referred to me.’

  ‘Couldn’t I do that?’

  ‘No.’ Already sensing conflict, she had to be firm about this. ‘I think if we’re going to have any chance of making this right and minimizing harm to you,’ she emphasized, ‘we’re going to have to play it by the rule book, Charles. She’s got to be referred by her GP. I think it might be an idea for you to have a word with her doctor to explain the situation.’

  ‘The fewer people who know, the better.’ He sounded alarmed. ‘I don’t want to tell the whole bloody world, Claire.’

  ‘And there’s no need to. You don’t have to go into great detail. Just say that you think she’s suffering from delusions and needs psychiatric intervention. You can say you’ve discussed the case with me and I’ve agreed to see her. That should help. I can take it from there. If she’s not intending on going public about this you needn’t elaborate on the claims she’s making about you. Just give the bare essentials. I can be the one to unearth the detail at a later date, after something like a psychiatric assessment has been made. Then I can use it as evidence. But Charles …’ She could practically see him sit up and take notice. And even though he wouldn’t be able to see it, she needed the visual. Thumb and forefinger almost touching, even if only to illustrate the precarious predicament to herself, ‘You’re this far from being suspended pending …’

  His response was understandably angry. ‘I know that. Fucking GMC.’

  Claire moved on. ‘Who is her GP anyway?’

  ‘Dagmar Sylas.’

  Claire knew her vaguely. She had a blurred image of a young, homely woman, plump and secure in her own skin with magical cow-brown eyes. ‘Right. I don’t know her very well.’

  ‘She’s good,’ Charles supplied. ‘Works hard. Married. Couple of kids, I think. Special interest in breast cancer.’

  ‘Well, I think you should be the one to speak to her without going into too much detail. What’s the patient’s name, by the way? So I recognize it when she’s referred.’

  ‘Heather,’ he said with venom. ‘Heather Krimble. K-r-i-m-b-l-e.’

  Claire made a note on her pad. ‘Suggest Doctor Sylas refer Heather to me for an initial assessment. Is that OK? Tell her to ring me first and tell me a bit about the patient. Off the record. I’ll accept a faxed referral and assess Heather’s mental state in the clinic.’

  Charles scooped in a deep, relieved breath. ‘Thanks, Claire, you’ve saved my—’

  ‘I’ve saved nothing yet, Charles,’ she said drily. ‘Nothing. And you understand, once this …’ She glanced down at her scribble to set the name in her mind. ‘Once Heather Krimble has become my patient, I won’t be able to discuss her mental condition with you except where it impinges on her obstetric well-being.’

  ‘And mine,’ he finished glumly.

  ‘And yours,’ she echoed, adding, ‘and that of her unborn infant.’

  But Charles had already put the phone down.

  TWO

  Claire was left searching the bare walls of her office with its bland colour scheme for a clue. What was it that was giving her this uncomfortable feeling that she had missed picking up on something significant? A vagueness where there shouldn’t have been one. She frowned and half closed her eyes to blot out her surroundings – cream walls, electric light, background noise – until she found it and knew. She and Charles had history.

  When they had been medical students together they had had a brief encounter. Strange, because he wasn’t her type at all. Let’s face it, Claire, you know your type. The pirate, trimmed beard, ripped jeans, paint-spattered T-shirt look with a wicked gleam in his eye. Your type is Grant Steadman. Whereas Charles was the Posh Boy. A bit preppy in trousers with knife-edged creases, collar and tie – even, on one horrid occasion, a cardigan. His sense of style proclaimed his background – public schoolboy with a plum in his mouth. Tall, overconfident, horribly sure of himself. Unlike her. She was half French. Unwanted. Damaged goods. The Frog. Yet there had still been that one brief encounter. Although, truthfully, she now acknowledged it hadn’t been so much an encounter as a drunken fumble/one-night stand. To top it all, in the back of his car. And it was that phrase that had initially snagged her attention. There were parallels with Heather’s story. But still, she was smiling with the memory of long-ago student days, days when drunken fumbling happened and ambition was the sun rising over the horizon. The MbCh
B they all strove towards.

  Drunken fumbling? She blinked. Who was she trying to kid? It hadn’t been that at all. Charles had been a big, strong guy, six feet tall; a fit, muscular rugby player for the varsity team, she a seven-stone girl with nothing like his bulk or musculature to equalize the competition. There had been no competition.

  And there was something else.

  In Charles’s history, there had been what appeared to be deliberate vagueness. An avoidance of detail. The … At a party last year some time …

  He was an obstetrician, for goodness’ sake. Estimated dates of delivery, last menstrual period, date of conception. These would all roll off the tongue as comfortably and easily as the recipe for a Victoria sponge to a cook. Besides … how many parties did he go to in a year held by a specific colleague? So why was he muddying the waters? Why had he not been more precise?

  The dark voice bouncing around her room reminded her that a few short moments ago she had made a wish.

  Be careful what you wish for, Claire Roget. Sometimes, when the gods wish to cause mischief, they grant them.

  So, she had been given her drama, handed it on a plate, but it had dragged baggage in its wake, evoked a memory she thought she’d buried deep enough for it never to resurface.

  Never resurface? Mouth tightening, she mocked herself. And you, a psychiatrist? Then you should have known there is no place that deep.

  Claire was thoughtful, twiddling her pen between her thumb and forefinger, eyes unfocused. These days, what had happened between her and Charles on that freezing November night in the back of his Vauxhall Astra would be classed as date rape. But of course, back then there was no such tidy phrase to describe drunkenness, reluctance, persuasion, fumbling, dominance and penetration. She couldn’t even remember the exact sequence of events, whether she’d actually said no out loud, whether he had been too drunk to … She frowned back into the past, wishing she could erase even this vague memory, these fuzzy details. And acknowledged that even though she had believed the memory had been erased, like red wine on a plain, pale carpet, however hard you scrub, however many proprietary cleaners you apply, the stain is still there. Intermittently visible. You might forget it for a while and then one day you walk into a room and there it is, that irregularly shaped faint shadow, ambushing you.

  Just like today.

  She hadn’t thought about it for years, had relegated it right to the back of her mind. But now she recalled that subsequently, after the incident, whenever she had been in contact with him, even at opposite ends of the same room, though the memories were always indistinct, she had experienced a very slight nausea. If accidentally alone in a room with him, she had checked for an escape route, a door, even an open window, and with a sense of panic searched for other people to join them. If he was at a mess party she would leave early. And so, she had successfully avoided him. And forgotten – or so she had thought. Now she realized she had simply skirted round it.

  They had reached their clinical years, he in a different set, studying on another rotation, moving through the specialities under different firms, often in different hospitals, so after that she had hardly seen him. Through the Old Fellows grapevine, she had been vaguely aware that he had married and some years later been appointed as a consultant at the newly named University Hospital of the North Midlands (to distance it from the ill-fated Stafford General Infirmary). The paths of psychiatry and obstetrics don’t cross that often and so she had almost forgotten about the entire incident and, until now, proceeded with her life, such as it was.

  Not great.

  Grant, her live-in boyfriend, had disappeared from her life, only to reappear six months later with an explanation (of sorts) of a demanding and manipulative sick sister and a mother who couldn’t cope. It had been their joint demands on him, he claimed, which had led to his wordless abandonment of her. Reluctantly she had reflected that he had probably been the best boyfriend she’d ever had or ever would have. Ce’est la vie. Let it go. Float downstream.

  Nice, jaunty phrases. Harder than they sound.

  Whenever she thought of Grant now, it was with an accompanying sigh and a heavy heart, a memory of a dark beard and merry eyes, someone who laughed often, was easy-going, lazy, a perfect foil to her wound up, type-A personality. She wanted to move on. She needed to move on. She had bought him out of their house and waved him off. But he was still there, in her heart, in her mind.

  Go away.

  She had done everything she humanly could, filling her time outside work with activities. She’d taken up running again, booked a couple of singles holidays, met up with friends, even tried an Internet date or two. And that wasn’t all. She had deleted him from her mobile phone and wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter, though that wasn’t solely to avoid electronic contact with her ex. No forensic psychiatrist in anything approaching their right mind would risk exposure on social media.

  But nothing had worked. So far, she was still a bit stuck in the past, with only the mantra that every day she was distancing herself a little further from Grant to act as a crutch.

  So, go away.

  The call came on the following day, via a penitent Rita.

  Dr Sylas had a voice that sounded warm and quite friendly. A chocolate voice to match those chocolate eyes. Having introduced herself, she spoke in an only slightly embarrassed tone. ‘I understand that Charles Tissot has already been in touch with you concerning a pregnant patient who is making claims about him?’

  Claire kept it short. ‘He has.’

  ‘He’s asked me to refer her to you.’ There was a slight pause, which set Claire wondering. Was she sensing disapproval, or what? Dr Sylas continued, ‘I can fax you over her details.’

  ‘Thank you. Do you believe …?’ She had been going to ask whether the doctor believed there could possibly be any truth in the allegations, but she got no further.

  ‘Heather has had a traumatic life,’ Dr Sylas said crisply. ‘She has had her ups and downs. She has had two cot deaths in the past.’

  This triggered a faint alarm bell in Claire. Two cot deaths were not impossible as had once been believed, to the detriment of innocent women. But they were certainly an issue.

  Dagmar Sylas continued, ‘Her family history is poor. Her father was a controlling man with strong religious beliefs. He believed in the spare the rod philosophy, you understand. Her mother appears to have been largely passive in her children’s upbringing. But Heather does have a very loyal, balanced and sweet-natured sister, Ruth, who is a medical secretary.’

  Claire was listening hard for undertones as Dagmar Sylas carried on. ‘Ruth appears to back up Heather’s allegations that somehow …’ She couldn’t resist shoving her own opinion in. ‘I cannot believe there is any truth in this ridiculous story.’

  So, Claire thought, she had declared herself. And privately, Claire agreed with her. People do change over the years. Medical students morph into respectable consultants or GPs. But when accepting a new referral it is never a good idea to form preconceived opinions. And if you had fallen into that particular pit then it was best to keep those opinions tightly to yourself, not share them when you make a referral and ask for a specialist’s opinion. ‘No,’ she said, tentative and non-committal. ‘So, give me a bit of background information.’

  A heave of a sigh from the GP. ‘She has a partner but Heather’s husband is a very odd man. There is a spurious diagnosis of Tourette’s but I don’t think this is as a result of a formal assessment. He appears passive, quite fond of his wife, unable to hold down a job. He has intermittent problems with alcohol. Sometimes he appears inadequate and then at others he seems to pull himself together. I guess you’d say he’s emotionally labile. Unstable.’

  ‘You say she’s had two infant cot deaths. Any living children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On what grounds are you referring Mrs Krimble?’ She wanted to add apart from a response to the request from Charles Tissot, but it would have put the GP’s back up.
There was another longer pause before the doctor answered her question. Defensively. ‘I suppose on the grounds of the allegations she’s making. They’re patently the result of a delusional state. I mean, she didn’t even meet Charles until she was referred by me, already seven months pregnant.’

  Claire’s toes were tingling. That wasn’t quite the truth, was it? Charles had already admitted it. They had met at a party. He was being selective in the facts he was feeding the GP. She listened harder to the GP, to seek out any undertones. ‘She has previous history?’

  Silence before the question was answered reluctantly. ‘She has made allegations before along the same lines.’

  ‘Allegations of affairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which were denied?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they proved to be false?’

  ‘I would say so.’

  It wasn’t quite as firm an assertion as Claire would have liked. But there would be time enough to tease out and analyse the details at a later date. Check facts.

  ‘Well, look at it this way,’ Dr Sylas was on the defensive again. ‘She asked to be referred to Charles when she was twenty-eight weeks pregnant. So for her to claim he is the father of this child is patently ridiculous.’

  Claire was listening hard.

  ‘Not only has she categorically assured me that Charles is the father of the child …’ Her anger burst through then. ‘She’s convinced he’s in love with her but is hiding it from professional consideration because he thinks he’ll lose his job. It’s just …’ Again, she was searching for a phrase. ‘Fantasy land. Particularly when you consider what sort of a man Charles Tissot is.’

  There was a warning there that Claire picked up on. When you consider what sort of a man Charles Tissot is?