When She Was Bad (2 page)

By the time they arrived at reception, five floors down from their office, Paula was out of breath. She really ought to start going to the gym or something, she thought, try to get rid of the extra two stone that seemed to have attached itself to her in the last couple of years without her even noticing it, so that now, at fifty-five, she hardly recognized herself. In the lift, she kept her head down, for fear of seeing her own mother looking back at her from the mirrored walls.

Why had she worn that awful old top today? The shapeless blue T-shirt was made of the kind of thin cotton that clings damply to clammy skin. If she’d known she was going to meet a new boss, she’d have made more of an effort. And she certainly wouldn’t have worn these black trousers. At least the waistband was covered by her top, so you couldn’t tell it was elasticated.

Bustling through the door of the office, her coat already half shrugged off, Paula’s nerves were on edge. Please don’t let Rachel Masters have arrived already. But a quick glance towards what used to be Gill’s office confirmed her worst fears. The door was shut. Someone was in there.

For five minutes, Paula sat at her desk not knowing what to do. Though the blinds were down there was a narrow gap between the slats, through which she caught a glimpse of a woman bent over the desk that until that morning had been strewn with Gill’s personal effects. Her face was partially hidden by a curtain of glossy dark hair. She couldn’t get a good look, but she could tell immediately that Rachel Masters was ten, maybe fifteen years younger than her. That meant Paula had all the advantages of experience. Rachel would be glad of a safe pair of hands.

Emboldened, Paula took another peek and felt herself relax. Rachel Masters looked so alone there in that office. She was probably feeling much more nervous than they were and desperate for someone to come and introduce themselves. And as her new deputy, it really ought to be Paula herself.

Taking a deep breath, she crossed the few feet of blue carpet to her new boss’s office.

‘Yes,’ came the reply to her knock.

Paula stepped through the door.

‘I just wanted to welcome you—’

‘Is it normal for the entire staff to take a two-hour lunch break?’

Rachel didn’t look up and Paula was conscious of her smile shrivelling on her lips.

‘No. We were just—’

‘Can you call everyone together, please? I’d like to have a few words.’

‘Of course. Out on the main floor?’

Finally Rachel glanced up at Paula from eyes of palest blue offset by spiky black lashes. Paula felt her cheeks burning.

‘Well, unless we sit on each other’s laps, we’re hardly about to squeeze seven people in here, are we?’

Rachel’s mouth, a red lipsticked slash, flattened into a tight smile.

Paula was aware of the sweat prickling under her arms and made a note to herself to keep her hands clamped to her sides. She felt her cheeks burning.

‘Will do. You’ll find we’re a pretty friendly bunch.’

Again the smile that failed to reach the eyes.

‘I’m not here to make friends.’

3
Anne

I was shocked, the first time I saw her. That’s how naïve I was. I thought that somehow, what had happened to her would be written on her skin. Despite all my training, all those lectures and clinic hours and nights spent poring over textbooks, I didn’t think you could be unmarked by something like that.

When I think about the young woman I was then, the one who slipped in through the run-down back entrance of the teaching hospital that first morning to avoid the scrum of reporters outside the front, feeling shyly self-important as she flashed her credentials to the police guarding the lift access, she doesn’t seem like me at all but someone else entirely. A woman of principle, ambitious enough to worry that her blonde hair would stop her being taken seriously and vain enough to keep it long anyway. A woman who didn’t smile often but when she did, you knew she meant it.

Nowadays my smile is like a facial tic. I hardly even know I’m doing it.

Going up in the lift, I was apprehensive but excited. I had that fluttering thing going on where you’re both proud –
I must be good at my job
– but at the same time terrified –
what if they find out I’m no good at my job?
Like most women who reach a certain level of success, I worried about being unmasked as a fraud.

I didn’t know why I’d been picked. My PhD on the long-term effects of acute trauma in minors had won me some small amount of localized acclaim, and the university press had turned it into a book that sold well for an academic tome. I was up and coming, but I was by no means an authority. All these years later, I feel even less so, despite all the letters after my name and the corner office with the nameplate on the door, and the shelves with the foreign editions of my books lined up like trophies. If you stripped them away one by one, these trappings and badges of knowledge, I wonder if there’d be anything left underneath.

The rumours going around the department at the time said that Professor Kowalsky and I were lovers and that’s why he’d picked me as his assistant in one of the two assessments he’d been charged with carrying out. No such rumours attached themselves to his choice of Dan Oppenheimer to assist him in the other one. Though the same level as me, Dan was far more ambitious and contributed well-regarded papers to several international journals. That the rumours about me and Kowalsky probably originated from Dan himself did little to lessen their sting.

Professor Kowalsky was waiting in the lobby. I say ‘lobby’ as if it was some kind of grand affair, but nothing was grand back then. A few squares of carpet tile of some dingy hue, a central ceiling light. And Ed Kowalsky standing there with a clipboard in his hands and all his teeth on show. He was trying to look like it was all in a day’s work, but his hands gave him away, fluttering up to run his fingers through his hair again and again. He was proud of that hair.

‘Dr Cater,’ he said. And then: ‘Anne.’ He held my hand between both of his like he was pressing a flower.

‘Professor Kowalsky . . .’

‘Ed. Please.’

‘Ed. I just want to tell you how incredibly grateful I am for this opportunity. A case this high profile, you must have had so many people asking for a chance to work with you.’

‘Oh my gosh, yes.’

That’s how he spoke.

‘But you know, Anne, you have the right research background and, more to the point, you have sound practical experience of dealing with post-traumatized young children. Of course there were people more highly qualified than you who would have bitten my hand off to get near this case, but I have to be sure this is about the child and what’s best for the child, not about professional ego. I don’t want to walk into a bookstore next year and see an exposé of this case written by someone whose agenda was based on something other than helping the patient.’

In other words, he’d chosen me because I wouldn’t try to capitalize on his case. I was too junior to be a threat. In view of this it seemed to me that Kowalsky might have underestimated the scale of Dan Oppenheimer’s ambition, but in truth I didn’t mind. I was flattered by the recognition. And yes, excited at the chance of working with a child that damaged and of helping repair some of that damage.

The corridor of the Psychiatry Department of La Luz City University Medical Facility was a sterile affair. Since then it’s been painted in a mellow magnolia and there’s some framed artwork on the walls. We had a memo before the prints went up, checking whether we considered them suitably ‘non-stimulating’. We all joked about that for a long time afterwards. ‘Nice jacket,’ we’d say, ‘but are you sure it’s non-stimulating enough?’

Sometimes when I think about how I’m still here all these years later, I can’t breathe. I keep a paper bag in the top drawer of the desk to blow into when the panic rises.

Room 238 was the most child-friendly of all the consulting rooms. There were padded grey chairs and a low coffee table in lieu of a desk, and a filing cabinet in the corner stuffed with specially chosen toys. On the coffee table was a stack of children’s books. The
Sesame Street
annual was on the top, looking slightly frayed around the edges of its cardboard cover. Along the back wall was a shelving unit with more books and, discreetly positioned at the far end, a tape recorder.

‘As you know, our role here is to assess rather than to treat,’ Ed Kowalsky said. He was standing by the window with its slatted blinds which divided the view of the concrete and glass courthouse across the street into neat grey horizontal lines. I could tell he was too nervous to sit down. His hands were again busy with his hair. Flutter, pat, comb. Flutter, pat, comb.

‘With that in mind, I propose we don’t take notes during the sessions themselves. Obviously we’ll record them, and then after Laurie has left we’ll discuss and make proper records.’

Laurie. The news reports had referred to her as ‘The Minor’ or ‘Child L’. Her brother, David, whose own psychiatric assessment was being carried out in tandem by Ed and Dan Oppenheimer, was Child D. Hearing Laurie’s name gave me a jolt. That was probably the first time I’d really thought about her as a child, rather than a case study. The understanding that someone real had gone through what she went through and seen what she’d seen, caused a painful tightening in my chest. What would that do to a person?

Suddenly, I was terribly aware that I was way out of my depth.

There was a knock.

‘Come in,’ said Ed Kowalsky and I watched him unzip his smile.

First through the door was a stocky middle-aged woman with a wide moon-face and neat brown hair tucked behind her ears. She was wearing a loose-fitting cream top in the kind of linen fabric that creases easily, and a calf-length brown skirt that rubbed against her sheer flesh-coloured pantyhose, creating a static field around her legs. A large canvas bag was slung over one shoulder, while on the other arm a thin leather watch-strap cut into her wrist so that the pale flesh bulged over it on either side. On the end of that arm, her plump fingers were closed around the hand of a child.

‘Hi, y’all. I’m Debra Albright from the Child Welfare Agency. And this here is Laurie.’

You’ll think I’m just saying this with the benefit of hindsight, but I swear as the small figure followed the social worker into the room, the temperature dropped around ten degrees. Cold prickled at the back of my neck despite the balmy, early-fall day outside.

‘Hi, Laurie.’ Ed dropped into a squat, his knees creaking as he did so, and held out a hand.

The little girl gave a shy smile that was like a light going on under her skin. Without letting go of her social worker, she reached out and shook Professor Kowalsky’s hand. He shot me a brief sideways glance, so fleeting I would have missed it if I’d blinked, but I knew exactly what it meant. Despite everything that had happened to her, all the horror she had witnessed, Laurie hadn’t shied away from human contact.

It was a hopeful sign.

Given everything that came afterwards, I now realize just how alert we were for such signs, and how vulnerable that made us.

And how dangerous.

4
Amira

Paula seemed flustered when she came out. Amira instantly dropped her head and frowned intently at her computer screen, trying to look deep in concentration and not as if she’d just been staring through the glass walls of the executive manager’s office, attempting to lipread the conversation.

‘Hello, everyone, can I have your attention?’

Paula was standing awkwardly on the periphery of the open-plan office, trying to project her voice. She half raised her hand and then dropped it instantly, her cheeks flaring pink, but not before Amira had caught a glimpse of dark circles under the arms of her colleague’s pale-blue T-shirt. Poor Paula had been having a hard time of it recently. Not that she’d ever admit it.

‘Could you all gather round, please? Rachel would like to say a few words.’

‘Yeah, like “here’s your P45”,’ muttered Charlie under his breath.

Amira’s heart jolted. Though they’d all been making gallows-humour jokes about losing their jobs on the way back from the pub, the truth was, Amira was scared stiff at the possibility of being made redundant. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth of scared. That’s how big the mortgage was that she’d basically forced Tom to take on so that they could finally move into their own flat. Without her salary, they could not afford to carry on living there. And the way things were going in the recruitment world, she was unlikely to waltz straight into another job. She and Tom had been getting on so badly recently, partly due to the financial strain under which the move had put them, plus the added pressure of dealing with her perennially unhappy mother who still couldn’t understand why they hadn’t wanted to carry on living with her. Losing her job, Amira felt, could tip them over the edge.

The door to what Amira still thought of as Gill’s office swung open and Rachel Masters stepped out. You couldn’t deny she was attractive, with sleek black hair that fell past her shoulders, cheekbones sharp as Toblerones, oyster-coloured silk shirt tucked into a slim skirt and gym-toned legs ending in nude heels so high you suddenly realized how tiny she must be without them. Her face had that healthy outdoors glow that good quality make-up gives you and she was wearing a very particular scent that Amira couldn’t identify. Musky, smoky – almost overpowering. She must have given herself a spray before she came out, Amira decided. Bit of Dutch courage. Seemed to be working wonders on Ewan though. He was a tall guy anyway, but he visibly pulled himself up straighter as the new boss passed, his handsome boy/man face turning to follow her as if drawn by an invisible string. Plonker. But you couldn’t hold it against him any more than you could resent a puppy for jumping up at you. Amira knew she had a reputation for being too plain-spoken, so she had a soft spot for Ewan and his total lack of guile.