Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Wouldn’t a hole in the ground be the first place where the police would look?’

‘But it wasn’t a hole in the ground, don’t you see? When Natalie was last seen on the twenty-seventh, the barbecue had already been in situ for more than twenty-four hours. It would obviously be impossible to place a corpse under a brick barbecue that had already been constructed.’

‘Well, yes, so aren’t you answering your own question?’

‘You’re not following me. Natalie couldn’t have died on the twenty-seventh, let alone the twenty-eighth, when she was reported missing. She was already dead and buried by the morning of the party on the twenty-sixth.’

Thelma looked puzzled, but she was alert now.

‘But you said that she was actually seen on the twenty-seventh?’

‘Yes. But what if I told you that Natalie and I were the same age, we had the same complexions, dressed in the same clothes. And also that she was well known in the neighbourhood and I was only there in the summer, so that there were plenty of local people who had never met me? And if I now seem to have discovered that I was in the same place at the same time where Natalie was last seen alive. What then?’

A very slow smile spread across Thelma’s face like flame through a newspaper. She was thinking hard now.

‘Are you sure about this barbecue?’ she demanded.

‘Absolutely. I found fragments of tile on every side of the spot where she was found. She was definitely underneath it.’

‘And are you positive that it wasn’t completed a few days later? Maybe it wasn’t finished in time for the party.’

‘It was the centrepiece of the party. I’ve got photographs of people queuing up for their spare ribs and hot dogs.’

Another objection occurred to Thelma. ‘But does any of this really matter? Alan confessed. The police would say that you just got the date wrong.’

‘But Alan wasn’t there. My father met Alan and Martha off the boat at Southampton on the morning of the party. They’d just come by steamer from the West Indies. They didn’t arrive at the Stead until early evening, just when the party was starting. Alan couldn’t have murdered Natalie. There’s just one problem.’

‘What’s that?’

I threw up my hands in despair. ‘I saw him do it. And he confessed.’

Thelma laughed out loud. ‘Oh is that all?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I never believed any of that.’

‘Are you saying I imagined it all?’

I may have been shouting.

‘Jane, I’m going to have a whisky and you’re going to have one too and I’m going to allow you to smoke your awful cigarettes and we’re going to have a serious talk. All right?’

‘Yes, all right.’

She produced two inordinately chunky tumblers, and then an equally chunky glass ashtray. I wouldn’t have allowed any of them in my house.

‘Here,’ she said, slurping what looked like a quintuple scotch into each one. ‘None of your trendy single-malt rubbish. This is good blended whisky, the way it was meant to be drunk. Cheers.’

I took a gulp and a blissful drag on a cigarette.

‘So?’ I said.

‘Tell me about your sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The process by which you recovered this memory. How did it work?’

I gave a brief account of the little ritual that Alex and I had gone through, each time I’d placed myself back there by the Col. As I spoke, Thelma first frowned and then her frown became a smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘is something funny?’

‘No. Carry on.’

‘That’s it. So what do you think?’

‘Did the prosecution lawyers show any willingness to put you in the witness box?’

‘There was no need. Alan confessed.’

‘Yes, of course. But did they seem eager about the prospect of your testimony?’

‘I don’t know. A couple of the lawyers seemed a bit uneasy.’

‘Let me tell you that Alan Martello would never have been convicted solely on your testimony. It might not even have been admissible.’

‘Why?’

‘Because hypnosis alters memory, and you were hypnotised.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, I know what I did and I just lay on the couch and tried to remember. I’d know if I had been hypnotised.’

‘I don’t think you would. There’s no hocus pocus about this. It’s my guess that you are a highly receptive subject. I could put you in a trance now and tell you that, oh, I don’t know, that you saw somebody run over by a car when you walked here from Shepherd’s Bush. When I woke you up, you would be convinced that it was true.’

‘Even if that’s true, Alex didn’t tell me what to remember.’

‘I know, but with all the repetition and reinforcement, you were going through an accretion of memorial reconstruction. Each time you added a little more to the story and then the following time you were remembering that detail you had added the previous time and adding a bit more. Your memory is real in a way, but it’s a memory of memories.’

‘But what about the final terrible crime? I saw it in so much detail.’

‘The whole process was leading up to something like that. Alex Dermot-Brown was preparing you for it, he was assuring you that everything you remembered was genuine and he used his professional status and the analytical authority he had over you to convince you that you were witnessing rather than constructing.’

‘Is that possible ?’

‘Yes, it’s possible.’

‘Was Alex doing it deliberately? Was he trying to implant a false memory?’

‘Definitely not. But sometimes you can create what you’re looking for. I know that Dr Dermot-Brown believes passionately in the phenomenon of recovered memory. I am convinced he wants to help these sufferers and now he has hitched his entire career to it.’

‘Are you saying that he is definitely wrong?’

‘What other explanation have you got, Jane?’

‘But what about the women who said they were abused as children? Are you saying that that’s all fantasy, the way that Freud did?’

Thelma took a large gulp of whisky. ‘No. I’m treating half a dozen abuse victims at the moment. Two of them are sisters who each had two children by their father before they were sixteen years old. I gave evidence at the trial that helped, I hope, to convict him. I also know that abuse is sometimes difficult to prove. I know of specific abusers who are currently getting away with it and it fills me with despair. Perhaps that’s why I drink more of this than I should.’ She gave her whisky glass a little shake. There wasn’t much left in the tumbler. ‘But I don’t believe that abuse exists in a universe of its own in which normal rules – and I mean rules of law or of science – cease to apply. Just because abuse is exceptionally difficult to prove, that doesn’t mean we should try to convict people accused of abuse without proof.’

‘But these cases aren’t without proof. Those women I met at the workshop. They remember being abused.’

‘Do they? All of them? I’ve seen reports of young women, from apparently loving, functional families, entering analysis and emerging a year or two later with accounts of obscene abuse throughout their entire childhood. They give accounts of repeated ritual rape, sodomy, torture, the ingestion of faeces, satanic ritual. Some of us might say that unprecedented claims require a particular rigour of proof, but the supporters of these sad women say that we must demand no proof at all beyond their own testimony. Anything less is collaboration with the abuser. There isn’t even a neurological model to explain the process. We all know about memory loss after a single blow on the head in a traffic accident. But there is no precedent for the systematic amnesia of regular, separate incidents occurring over many years. Your own supposed witnessing of your father-in-law murdering your cousin is trivial by comparison.’