She waited for him to turn round, and then held out her hand.
“You must be Inspector Yates?”
Tim laughed. “Is it so obvious?”
“Well, there aren’t too many candidates, are there?” she responded. Her voice was clipped and brisk. “But if you’re asking whether I could spot that you are a policeman, the answer is yes; although you aren’t as obvious as some.”
Tim gave a slight bow. That will teach me, he thought.
Dr. Hemingway possessed the elegant angularity of a whippet, and her pale hair and finely-chiselled features served to reinforce the similarity. She was dressed in a biscuit-coloured wool suit with a very fine check and a tailored white shirt. Apart from an understated gold watch with a black leather strap, two tiny gold ear studs comprised her only jewellery. She wore no rings. Her shoes were highly-polished plain brown courts and, he guessed, expensive. She had no handbag, but one of those clever slimline briefcases that served as both attaché and handbag. She placed it carefully on the table. Tim could see at once that Dr. Hemingway and Professor Bertolasso were chalk and cheese, and he was not surprised that they had disagreed in their assessment of Dorothy Atkins.
“May I get you some breakfast, Dr. Hemingway?”
“Goodness, it’s a little late for breakfast!” she exclaimed, consulting her watch as if to check that it was not earlier than she had thought. “But some coffee would be wonderful: a double espresso, please. And my name is Claudia.”
Tim stood up. Immediately, the waiter who had shooed away the busker appeared at his side with an order pad. Tim was even more impressed than before: clearly the staff here knew when to intervene and when not to intrude. He reflected that they would make excellent witnesses, should a crime ever take place on this spot.
“First things first,” Claudia Hemingway was saying. “May I see your credentials?”
Surprised again, Tim fished out his identity card.
“Thank you. You realise that I can’t be too careful: Dorothy Atkins is a sensitive, not to say explosive, subject. There are some people, myself possibly included, who believe that she should never have been ‘released into the community’, as the government is pleased to put it.”
“She was hardly released into the community at large. My understanding is that upon leaving Broadmoor, she immediately entered a local authority sheltered housing scheme for the elderly, and from that eventually progressed into full-time nursing-home care.”
“And allowing a psychopath to bump off a few of the superfluous elderly is all right, I suppose.”
Her tone was hard and ironic, but when he met her light blue eyes he thought he discerned a glint of amusement there.
“But surely there isn’t any evidence that she . . .”
“No, none at all. And I don’t think that she has attempted any violence while she has been there – not of the physical kind, anyway. I’m sure that she will have inflicted mental torture on some of the inmates; on some of the more vulnerable of the nursing staff, too, in all probability. But Dorothy has her head screwed on when it comes to looking after Dorothy. Hence she has co-operated and so helped to prove the wisdom of our country’s wonderfully humane criminal care system: we have ‘cured’ Dorothy and are enabling her to live out a venerable and dignified old age.”
This time the irony was harsh, the tone unequivocal.
The waiter arrived with two double espressos and a chocolate muffin. Tim took the opportunity to lead the conversation out of the rather rocky cul-de-sac into which it had strayed.
“Shall we start at the beginning? For how long did you treat Dorothy Atkins? I’m assuming that you weren’t at Broadmoor when she was first admitted – you’re clearly too young for that.”
“You flatter me, Inspector Yates.” (“Tim, please!”). Dr. Claudia Hemingway looked and sounded not only like a woman who was beyond flattery, but also one who was offended by those who were tempted to try it.
“On the contrary . . .”
“For your information, I was at Broadmoor for the duration of Dorothy’s time there, but I was not always her psychiatrist. When she was first admitted, she came under the care of my old boss, Professor Theodore Rogers. I was his assistant and also working on a PhD thesis. Dorothy’s was a complex case and Professor Rogers, who was always generous in his encouragement of the younger members of his team, allowed me to attend some of his sessions with her. He would have allowed me to attend all of them if Dorothy herself had not sometimes objected.”
“She was allowed to object? Do you know why?”
“Patients in secure units and prisons have the same right to privacy and confidentiality as anyone else when it comes to medical or psychiatric care. He was her therapist, not me. There was no reason why she should agree to my being present in order to further my own understanding of my profession. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to understand why she sometimes agreed to my presence and sometimes would not tolerate it. The exercise of power was Dorothy’s raison d’être. She was a past mistress of her art, even within the confines of a secure institution.”
“What was she like when you first met her?”
“She was quite withdrawn. Not sulky, exactly, but haughty. And totally without guilt. Whatever she had or had not done, she believed that it had been right. Her capacity for understanding the interests and feelings of others was limited, to say the least. If I did not have a deep suspicion of dealing in absolutes, I would say non-existent.”
“Are these your own views, or those of Professor Rogers?”
“They are shared observations, my own conclusions. Professor Rogers made the same observations – her withdrawnness and arrogance could hardly be doubted – but he drew rather different conclusions. And of course you must remember that I did not make those conclusions at the time. They were based on years of working with Dorothy – if that is the correct way of describing our ‘professional’ relationship.” That irony in her voice again. She paused as if to satisfy herself that he had picked it up.
“How did Professor Rogers treat her?”
“At first he spent many hours talking to her. He also asked her to complete various written tests, which she agreed to – anything that made Dorothy the centre of attention usually gained her co-operation. He diagnosed depression, and prescribed Librium. Of course, criminal psychiatry was a relatively young science then and we had fewer diagnoses – and far fewer drugs – at our disposal. I also felt . . .”
She broke off, and looked – wary?
“Please go on. I assure you that this is an entirely off-the-record conversation. I need to understand Dorothy Atkins as well as I can in order to solve another murder – and perhaps to prevent others.”
Claudia Hemingway was still hesitant.
“It feels like professional disloyalty,” she said slowly. “And I must emphasise that I had the greatest respect for Professor Rogers. He had a fine mind and in the years that I worked with him he taught me a great deal. Almost always I admired his work. But his assessment of Dorothy Atkins was an exception. I don’t think he was ever really honest with himself about Dorothy. I understand perfectly how it happened. Rocco Bertolasso had been one of his students, and when Rocco was asked to give evidence as an expert witness, he consulted Theo. Theo suggested a range of possible disorders that might be relevant to Dorothy’s case, and Rocco – who was very nervous about the role in which he found himself and, I have to say, entirely unsuited to it – he is cut out to be an academic rather than a practitioner – offered a professional opinion that incorporated all of them. I’m sure that this is not what Theo intended; and I’m equally certain that he did not give Rocco permission to mention his name in court. But Rocco did – probably with the most innocent of intentions. It is my guess that he was just trying to give authority to his own inexperience. I believe that the defence lawyer questioned him quite incisively. Anyway, my view is t
hat when Dorothy became one of Theo’s patients, he did not start with a clean slate. He started with a collection of hypotheses put forward by Rocco which Theo himself appeared to have endorsed. At the outset, therefore, he had not only forfeited the total objectivity that every psychiatrist has to try to preserve, but also the absolute integrity that goes with it. God knows, it’s difficult enough to hang on to both of these once you have started working with the patient – especially a patient as intelligent and manipulative as Dorothy – but if you start by stacking the odds against yourself, you are lost.”
Tim was not sure what to make of this. Was the analysis that Claudia Hemingway offered correct – was it truthful, even – or had he just been listening to a cleverly-couched piece of professional jealousy? He decided that he would try to encourage Claudia to focus on fact rather than opinion.
“I’m afraid that some of this is getting a bit deep for me. I’m sure that over time I shall learn to understand better by remaining under your tutelage – if indeed you are prepared to give me more time.” He smiled engagingly, and managed to elicit a guarded smile in return. “Tell me, was Dorothy allowed visitors?”
“Of course. All the patients were, subject to the hospital’s rules. Psychiatric patients are believed to benefit from contact with the outside world. Whether the visitors benefit is of course another matter.” Her equilibrium and urbanity were evidently restored. Tim felt relief.
“Can you remember who visited her – or whether in fact anyone did?”
“She had quite a lot of visitors at first. Her solicitor, of course. Her husband came on a few occasions – I think primarily to settle the details of their divorce, which incidentally did not seem to worry Dorothy in the slightest. There was an elderly aunt – she had one of those old-fashioned Victorian names, which I can’t quite recall at the moment. And her husband’s Uncle Colin – he was a frequent visitor, for some reason, even though Dorothy had murdered his sister. And her son. Hedley. A strange young man – sometimes he came with Uncle Colin, sometimes without him. He would sit for hours without saying a word. Dorothy was obviously exasperated by his presence and I suppose that he understood that eventually. Anyway, he stopped coming. After a couple of years, no-one came to see her except Colin.”
“Did you ever see the daughter?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I did not know of her existence until I had been treating Dorothy for many years. She was one of several people that Dorothy never spoke of.”
“How did her name come up?”
“By accident. We had a new ward orderly called Bryony, and Dorothy was caught off guard. I heard her say to the woman that it was the name she had chosen for her own daughter. It was unlike Dorothy to give information away like that, but she was probably trying to get the woman onside for some reason. She had a habit of cultivating new staff.”
“Did you try to talk to her about Bryony – the daughter, I mean?”
“Yes, in her next therapy session. But she just clammed up completely. It was only what I expected. She behaved in the same way when I tried to get her to talk about her mother-in-law, Doris – the woman that she murdered – or, for some reason, her own mother.”
“Did she ever tell you anything about her father?”
“No, but I think that her reason for that was genuine enough. She didn’t know who he was – her mother never told her – though she had her suspicions. Self-aggrandising ones, actually. She seemed to think that he was probably one of her mother’s employers – her mother had worked as a housekeeper. Ronald Atkins told me that he had in fact been the chauffeur of one of them, though of course this information could not have been reliable, either. It was simply what he was told by one of the mother’s sisters.”
“There seem to have been a lot of things that Dorothy wouldn’t talk about. What did you discuss in your therapy sessions?”
“As I’ve said, I shouldn’t tell you: and although I’m prepared to give some indication, I won’t divulge details. We talked about her childhood, her thwarted ambitions and her unsatisfactory relationship with Ronald. All the things, in short, that Dorothy believed had led her to where she found herself at that point in her life. She did not accept any responsibility for her status as a convicted murderer. She regarded herself as being entirely the victim of circumstance.”
“What did this mean, from your professional viewpoint?”
“As far as I was concerned, it meant that none of the many hours of therapy which had been expended on Dorothy had worked. A first step towards rehabilitation for a criminal offender is usually to get them to experience remorse, which logically means understanding the hurt that they have inflicted on their victims and those close to them. Dorothy never progressed beyond seeing herself as the injured party; and she certainly never displayed any empathy for either Doris Atkins or the other people whose lives had been affected by her death.”
“If she was not ‘cured’ – I’m sure that is not the word you would use, but forgive me – you know what I mean – why was she allowed to leave Broadmoor and be released into the care of the old people’s home?”
“As I’ve said before, Dorothy is manipulative, and she is very clever. Theo Rogers had treated her before I did, and his notes had said that she was making progress. At the first case meeting that was held to assess whether she should be released, my advice that this would be unsafe was upheld; but Dorothy appealed, citing Theo’s notes and saying that her relationship with me was troubled by a clash of personalities. Through her solicitor, she asked for a second opinion, and two other psychiatrists were invited to examine her and make an assessment. They both said that they considered her to be harmless and recommended that she should be released into the community, on condition that she agreed to live in sheltered accommodation. Her medical doctor also testified that she was very frail and that in his view she could no longer be a risk to others. So that was that. It was my belief that a complex and devious character such as Dorothy’s – and in my long career of dealing with deviant personalities, she is the trickiest person I have ever met – could not be accurately assessed by them in such a small snapshot of time; and that although she may not have posed a physical threat to anyone, she was still capable of imposing mental duress, especially on the elderly.”
“Presumably you voiced these views?”
“Of course; but by this time there was an unspoken groundswell of opinion that I harboured some kind of personal resentment against her, and therefore that she was being victimised.”
“Was there any truth at all in this? Forgive me for asking – as I have explained, I am just trying to understand.”
Dr. Hemingway deliberated for a moment. “Perhaps,” she said. “I admit that I was frustrated that I could not at all pierce the psychological armour that she put up. But unless my own professional integrity has been seriously impaired – and believe me, I scrutinise my motives every day – I think that this was a minor factor. That I could not penetrate Dorothy’s psyche was the cause of my mistrust, not the result of a wound to my amour propre. I honestly believe that Dorothy was hiding something worse than the crime of which she had been convicted and that was why she was holding out on me.”
“What do you mean by ‘something worse’?”
“Given what I have just told you, of course you will realise that I cannot give a precise answer to that question. But I suspect very strongly that there is a clue in her refusal to speak about the three people that I have mentioned. I have no doubt that Dorothy blotted them out of her verbal recall, and possibly banished them from all her conscious thoughts, for a reason.”
“My God! Are you suggesting . . .”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Inspector. I’m trying to be as factual and straightforward as possible. I am telling you that there was a logic to Dorothy’s thought processes, and that eventually I discovered that she had blotted certain people from her mind. Cause and e
ffect. That is all. I will not speculate further.”
Chapter Sixteen
The journey in the Virgin Cross-Country train to Liverpool takes several hours. Peter has insisted on travelling First Class, and although I resent paying the extra money, I see as soon as we board why ‘Standard Class’ would never have done for him. There are far too many sticky-fingered children, matrons flanked by shopping bags and students butting into people with their rucksacks for him to have been able to cope.
We choose a table in the middle of the only first class carriage, each of us sitting by a window. Peter has bought a selection of newspapers and magazines at the station – the Daily Telegraph, Ideal Home, The English Garden, and somewhat bizarrely, The Lady – and for half an hour or so we sit reading them quietly, until the train stops at the next station and two men dressed in business suits come into our carriage and claim the two seats remaining at our table. Peter raises his eyebrows and scoops the magazines closer in to his quarter of the table. One of the men regards him with a certain hostility, but does not speak. Peter sighs.
“I probably shan’t be able to read any more now,” he says meaningfully. “Perhaps you’d like to chat instead.”
In the Family Page 11
