Алекс Михаэлидес - The Silent Patient

Max sighed and lowered the phone to say something unintelligible to Tanya.

“Five minutes,” he said. “That’s all you get.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it. You mentioned Alicia’s suicide attempt. I was wondering, which hospital treated her?”

“She wasn’t admitted to hospital.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No. She recovered at home. My brother looked after her.”

“But—surely she saw a doctor? It was an overdose, you said?”

“Yes. And of course Gabriel got a doctor over. And he … the doctor—agreed to keep it quiet.”

“Who was the doctor? Do you remember his name?”

There was a pause as Max thought for a moment. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.… I can’t recall.”

“Was it their GP?”

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t. My brother and I shared a GP. I remember Gabriel made a point of asking me not to mention it to him.”

“And you’re sure you can’t remember a name?”

“I’m sorry. Is that all? I have to go.”

“Just one more thing … I was curious about the terms of Gabriel’s will.”

A slight intake of breath, and Max’s tone instantly sharpened. “His will? I really don’t see the relevance—”

“Was Alicia the main beneficiary?”

“I must say, I find that rather an odd question.”

“Well, I’m trying to understand—”

“Understand what?” Max went on without waiting for a reply, sounding annoyed. “I was the main beneficiary. Alicia had inherited a great deal of money from her father, so Gabriel felt she was well provided for. And so he left the bulk of his estate to me. Of course, he had no idea his estate would become so valuable after his death. Is that it?”

“And what about Alicia’s will? When she dies, who inherits?”

“That,” Max said firmly, “is more than I can tell you. And I sincerely hope this will be our last conversation.”

There was a click as he hung up. But something in his tone told me this wouldn’t be the last I’d hear from Max Berenson.

I didn’t have to wait long.

* * *

Diomedes called me into his office after lunch. He looked up when I walked in but didn’t smile. “What is the matter with you?”

“With me?”

“Don’t play the idiot. You know who I had a call from this morning? Max Berenson. He says you contacted him twice and asked a lot of personal questions.”

“I asked him for some information about Alicia. He seemed fine with it.”

“Well, he’s not fine now. He’s calling it harassment.”

“Oh, come on—”

“The last thing we need is a lawyer making a fuss. Everything you do must be within the confines of the unit, and under my supervision. Understood?”

I was angry, but I nodded. I stared at the floor like a sullen teenager.

Diomedes responded appropriately, giving me a paternal pat on the shoulder. “Theo. Let me give you some advice. You’re going about this the wrong way. You’re asking questions, searching for clues, like it’s a detective story.” He laughed and shook his head. “You won’t get to it like that.”

“Get to what?”

“The truth. Remember Bion: ‘No memory—no desire.’ No agenda—as a therapist, your only goal is to be present and receptive to your feelings as you sit with her. That’s all you need to do. The rest will take care of itself.”

“I know. You’re right.”

“Yes, I am. And don’t let me hear you’ve been making any more visits to Alicia’s relations, understood?”

“You have my word.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THAT AFTERNOON I WENT TO CAMBRIDGE, to visit Alicia’s cousin, Paul Rose.

As the train approached the station, the landscape flattened out and the fields let in an expanse of cold blue light. I felt glad to be out of London—the sky was less oppressive, and I could breathe more easily.

I left the train along with a trickle of students and tourists, using the map on my phone to guide me. The streets were quiet; I could hear my footsteps on the pavement echoing. Abruptly the road stopped. A wasteland lay ahead, muddy earth and grass leading to the river.

Only one house stood alone by the river. Obstinate and imposing, like a large red brick thrust into the mud. It was ugly, a Victorian monster. The walls were overgrown with ivy, and the garden had been overtaken by plants, weeds mostly. I got the sense of nature encroaching, reclaiming territory that had once been hers. This was the house where Alicia had been born. It was where she spent the first eighteen years of her life. Within these walls her personality had been formed: the roots of her adult life, all causes and subsequent choices, were buried here. Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with pedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers, but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.” As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love, and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenseless, but she can—and must—harbor vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive. Something bad happened to Alicia, probably early in her childhood, to provoke the murderous impulses that emerged all those years later. Whatever the provocation, not everyone in this world would have picked up the gun and fired it point-blank into Gabriel’s face—most people could not. That Alicia did so points to something disordered in her internal world. That’s why it was crucial for me to understand what life had been like for her in this house, to find out what happened to shape her, make her into the person she became—a person capable of murder.

I wandered farther into the overgrown garden, through the weeds and waving wildflowers, and made my way along the side of the house. At the back was a large willow tree—a beautiful tree, majestic, with long bare branches sweeping to the ground. I pictured Alicia as a child playing around it and in the secret, magical world beneath its branches. I smiled.

Then I felt uneasy suddenly. I could sense someone’s eyes on me.

I looked up at the house. A face appeared at an upstairs window. An ugly face, an old woman’s face, pressed against the glass—staring straight at me. I felt a strange, inexplicable shiver of fear.

I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me until too late. There was a bang—a heavy thud—and a stab of pain at the back of my head.

Everything went black.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I WOKE UP ON THE HARD, cold ground, on my back. My first sensation was pain. My head was throbbing, stabbing, as if my skull had been cracked open. I reached up and gingerly touched the back of my head.

“No blood,” said a voice. “But you’ll have a nasty bruise tomorrow. Not to mention a cracking headache.”

I looked up and saw Paul Rose for the first time. He was standing above me, holding a baseball bat. He was about my age, but taller, and broad with it. He had a boyish face and a shock of red hair, the same color as Alicia’s. He reeked of whiskey.

I tried to sit up but couldn’t quite manage it.

“Better stay there. Recover for a sec.”

“I think I’ve got concussion.”

“Possibly.”

“What the fuck did you do that for?”