Medea's Curse (10 page)

Could he have known in advance she was going to be asked to his interview, like Kay
almost certainly had? Had it reignited his anger? She needed to report this; wondered
at her reluctance to do so. She reread the document.
Mental health
jumped off the
page. He couldn’t know she was on medication, could he? She had been a little high
on the court steps but Travis wouldn’t have known that. Maybe it was just referencing
her being a psychiatrist.

‘Drop them in,’ said the policeman who answered the phone.

‘Will you be able to do anything?’

‘Not without the memory sticks we can’t.’

‘But can you trace anything from an envelope and a USB?’

‘Are they actually threatening you with anything specific?’ The voice was polite,
but what she heard was, ‘Stop wasting my time’.

She hung up.

Chapter 10

Natalie threw her bag on the sofa, called Welbury police station and asked for the
senior sergeant. He hadn’t been on duty earlier in the day when she had tried.

‘McBride speaking.’

‘This is Dr King.’ She paused to make sure he had placed her. ‘I want to first thank
you for letting me watch Travis’s interview.’

‘And second?’

‘Apologise that you hadn’t been pre-warned. I hadn’t been fully informed either.’

There was a pause but before she could fill it, Damian spoke again.

‘Is there a third?’

‘Yes.’ Natalie took a breath. ‘I’m going to be in town on Friday. Any chance of me
being able to interview Tiphanie?’

There was a longer silence. ‘O’Shea put you up to this?’

‘No. I haven’t spoken to him.’

‘I suppose it’s just coincidence then that his office was on the phone asking the
same thing?’

She set her Italian coffee maker on the stove and sat on the sofa with the file she’d
brought home from work: Amber’s. She took detailed notes, a habit acquired when she
had been less sure of herself. In forensic psychiatry it was essential.

The triple zero transcript and the police summary report of the discovery of the
baby, at least, were typed. Amber had called the emergency line when six-week-old
Bella-Kaye drowned in the bath.

Natalie could still hear in her head the recording that had been played in court.
It had cemented the prosecution’s case.

Amber, can you just go back and get her out of the bath.

Silence.

Amber, listen to me. Just go back and get her out of the bath.

A whisper.
I can’t.

Amber.
The operator was now between panic and fury.
Amber, it won’t make anything
worse and it might help. Please. Go. Back. Now. Get Bella-Kaye out of the bath.

Silence.

It’s too late.

A click. Amber had hung up.

Amber refused to apply for bail. She would probably have been successful: as Natalie
realised later, the State of Victoria tended towards leniency in infanticide cases.
Amber’s lawyer managed to get the plea hearing listed earlier than it would normally
have been. Women charged with infanticide usually didn’t serve time, he argued. But
in the meantime Amber was in prison and Natalie visited her weekly.

Natalie’s notes for the first few visits suggested Amber was still in shock, saying
not much at all, and nothing
meaningful. Mostly she reiterated her disbelief that
Bella-Kaye was dead. She walked in and out of the room in a daze, crying intermittently
and sometimes barely speaking. When Natalie first saw Travis, bewildered but hugging
his wife and saying all the right things, she thought him likeable enough.

A different story eventually emerged. Amber had coped poorly from the moment of the
child’s birth. Travis had derided her as a useless wife when his meal wasn’t ready
as he watched the six o’clock news and a pathetic mother when Bella-Kaye interrupted
his viewing by crying. The final straw had been Travis’s insistence that they go
to New Zealand for a rugby match when the baby was three weeks old. Neither recognised
that Amber was depressed.

‘Why would I be depressed?’ she wept. ‘Bella-Kaye was all I ever wanted. There was
nothing to be depressed about.’ Amber and Travis had believed that the difficulties
they were having were the same as those of any new parents.

The death of her baby and the resulting guilt had exacerbated Amber’s depression.
The prison terrified her. Part of her felt she deserved it, but accepting blame didn’t
help her deal with the fear that left her sleepless and without appetite. Natalie
had prescribed antidepressants.

Amber avoided discussing events leading up to her daughter’s death. Eventually, it
was talking about the trauma of imprisonment that opened her up, encouraged her to
talk about Travis’s abuse—and enabled Natalie to feel sympathy. Before her was a
vulnerable girl, barely more than a child herself, in manner if not age, who was
quite simply not capable of malicious intent.

Amber had been weak perhaps, but not evil. When she described being taken to court
in the prison van, separated
from the other women by a mesh but still in fear of
her life, her terror and bewilderment had been stark.

The defence called Dianne Fisher, then Natalie’s boss, an expert on perinatal mental
illness.

‘In a US cohort convicted of infanticide,’ Dianne told the court, ‘Spinelli concluded
that most had a dissociative psychosis.’ She had gone on to explain, ‘These women’s
minds briefly cut themselves off from reality, an acute stress reaction as a way
of coping with something that, for them, has pushed them beyond their mental capacity.
Depression, sleep deprivation, crying child—they all contribute to overwhelming women
who have an underlying vulnerability.’

Amber fitted the mould: her memory of the event was categorised by panic, anxiety
and a separation of emotion and thought. In the police interview she had been vague
and initially seemed intellectually impaired. Natalie had thought it a reasonable
defence, compatible with the forensic evidence. But it incensed her that the defence
barrister wouldn’t let her volunteer the information about Travis that had come out
in therapy.

‘Absolutely not. The prosecution will annihilate you,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Battered
Wife Syndrome isn’t a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. If it’s not in DSM, we can’t
use it. It’ll only muddy the waters.’

Natalie had fumed: too junior, too green and idealistic to understand that the complexities
of motive and influence were almost irrelevant. She knew now that a successful trial
was a game well played, not a revelation of the truth. Because of the incident on
the courtroom steps she had never got the chance to raise it anyhow.

The real issue had been with the judge. A few weeks previously Justice Tanner had
been the subject of criticism
after he had accepted a sleepwalking defence in a domestic
violence case. Liam O’Shea had naturally been at pains to use it to advantage the
prosecution case, with repeated references to ‘delivery of justice demanded by the
community’.

With the judge unprepared to accept dissociation as a mitigating factor and Natalie
barred from giving evidence at all, Amber was left without any real defence and had
crumbled under Liam’s cross-examination.

Natalie turned it over in her mind again. Maybe not testifying hadn’t made any difference
to Amber’s case. Amber had admitted her guilt, and Liam had been certain she was
wholly responsible. But if the evidence now suggested something different, he had
shown he was prepared to revisit the case.

Kay Long had said
he did it.
But what exactly had Travis confessed to? Maybe abusing
Amber and driving her to it rather than actually killing Bella-Kaye?

Was Tiphanie feeling the same as Amber had, or was the situation different? Feelings
of guilt could add to the pain. Natalie thought she had glimpsed that mix of emotions
in the brief encounter on the streets of Welbury. But what was the shame or guilt
for? For going back to bed and allowing Chloe to wander? Harming her as Amber had
harmed Bella-Kaye? Or for not protecting her from Travis?

‘Hey Natalie, open the fucking door!’ It was Tom’s voice shouting from downstairs.

Immersed in the notes, Natalie hadn’t heard the doorbell. Or rescued the coffee.
She turned it off and went to let him in.

‘Want some dinner?’ Without waiting for a response he pushed past with his takeaway
bags. It smelled like Chinese: Tom liked cooking as much as Natalie did.

‘Didn’t see anyone outside again did you?’ she asked.

Tom shook his head and waited. Natalie hesitated.

‘Nat, I know that look.’

She explained about the USB warnings.

‘So who’s behind them?’

‘No idea.’

‘Yeah but what type of person?’

Natalie laughed. ‘I’m not a profiler, Tom.’

‘You understand weird people. What sort of person would send notes like that?’ He
grabbed some plates and cutlery and laid out the Chinese food on the coffee table.

Natalie was more used to the history unfolding in a way that allowed her to make
sense of the crime, rather than working backwards from the crime to understand the
criminal. But she knew about stalkers. For the first time she let the idea incubate.
She’d been wishing the problem would go away, but it apparently wasn’t going to.

‘Depends on what the intent is.’

‘Mad or bad?’ asked Tom between mouthfuls.

‘Bad, which is to say personality-driven rather than a psychosis. Could be a delusional
disorder but I sense he wants to enjoy the feeling of power. Sits at home and gets
his jollies by imagining how uncomfortable I’m feeling.’

‘Sexual?’ Tom flexed his substantial biceps. He wasn’t tall, but he’d done a lot
of working out in his youth and had more than once appointed himself as Natalie’s
protector.

Natalie shrugged. The
predatory
and
resentful
stalker types came to mind. ‘Not enough
evidence to say. If it is sexual’—she added
incompetent suitor
and
intimacy seeking
to the list of possibilities—‘then it’s more about power, getting back at a dominating,
critical and maybe abusive parent; mother, I would guess. He is probably still scared
of
her—hence the need to project his anger at someone he isn’t scared of but believes
he has power over in some way.’

‘Sorry I asked. Just tell me, does that put you in danger?’

Natalie’s immediate response was
no
. She stopped herself. Not just the content of
the notes, but the fact that he had sent them over three weeks, suggested repressed
anger. She’d assessed murderers who had given less warning than this. ‘Yes. Potentially.’

‘You want me to move in for a while?’

Natalie shook her head. ‘If it escalates I’ll call.’

She took some time out to eat, trying to think of anything other than her stalker.

‘Shaun’s asking us for a favour,’ Tom said through a mouthful of sweet and sour pork.

‘Let me guess. Singer in the wedding band is sick again.’

‘He needs us both. Singer’s got an interstate audition and she’s taking the drummer
with her.’ Natalie raised an eyebrow and he shrugged. ‘They’re married. Anyway, it
leaves him in the lurch for the next gig.’

Natalie finished her Chinese.

‘Some sort of corporate ball. “Proud Mary” and “Brown-Eyed Girl”.’

‘Tom, since when did I start to look like a ball type of person?’

‘He needs the money.’

Tom knew she’d agree, though three sets of seventies covers was not something to
look forward to.

He gave her the date. Horribly close. Shaun owed them.

Declan was finishing a session with an emergency patient and Natalie took advantage
of the time to check out his bookshelf in the waiting room. He had a predilection
for
Irish poets, but it was an early edition Yeats that caught her attention. His
patients must be very different from hers.

Her
patients. Did one of them have a copy of John Fowles’
The Collector
? Most serial
killers did.

At first Natalie thought Declan was as distracted as she was tonight. Perhaps still
thinking about his last patient. But the quick glances when he thought she wasn’t
looking made her wonder if it was his curiosity about the trip with Liam. Natalie
silently congratulated him for resisting the temptation to question her. She intended
to avoid the topic. If Declan found out how Travis featured in her dalliance with
Liam, he’d start questioning her judgment and they’d be back talking lithium and
blood tests.

She went to the safer topic of Jessie, but it was early days and there had been little
progress. It would get tougher when their alliance was stronger. Patients like Jessie
tended to create havoc; testing out authority and pushing boundaries had more serious
consequences as an adult than as a child. Mostly they created more trouble for themselves
than anyone else.

Inevitably the conversation turned to Georgia.