Whenever Corinne thought of Oxford, she envisaged honey-coloured stone and rambling detached houses overrun with ivy, and bikes with wicker baskets leaning up against the walls.
The Oxford Geraldine Buckley lived in wasn’t like that at all.
Around five miles from the city centre, it was in an area of housing estates and ring roads where the only greenery was on the hoarding of the local betting shop, and any bike leaning against a wall was unlikely to be there long, as the smattering of lone front wheels still locked to lamp posts attested.
If you’d asked Corinne what she was doing here, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you. The fact was, as with the visit to the Garitsons in Tunbridge Wells, doing something felt better than nothing.
Hannah, having appeared to be getting better, now seemed to be regressing in her recovery, with Charlie’s death triggering a deep-seated and worrying paranoia. When Corinne had visited the day before, Hannah had been barely coherent, rambling on about a toy rabbit with broken ears and something about her wretched colouring book, and distrusting everyone from Dr Roberts down to the woman who cleaned her room (this last one linked to the sudden appearance of the rabbit). But when Corinne had said, ‘So discharge yourself. We’ll find somewhere else if this place upsets you,’ Hannah had yelled at her, ‘I can’t. If I discharge myself, Danny will leave me. And I know that’s what you want. You’ve never liked him. You don’t want me to be happy. You want me to be single and miserable like you.’
Well. That had surprised them both.
Without mentioning Steffie, which would entail admitting she’d snooped in Hannah’s room, there was little Corinne could say to explain her recent antipathy towards her son-in-law, which Hannah had clearly picked up on. Instead, she’d tried to reassure her by promising to investigate the background of the clinic and its staff, making doubly sure that this was the safest place for Hannah to be.
It wasn’t until she’d come home from the clinic, called out a cheerful ‘hello’ to her next-door neighbour and let herself in through her front door that she’d allowed herself to slide down the wall of the hallway with her head in her hands.
The savagery of Corinne’s despair had taken her by surprise. Even at the start, when she’d first found out about the pseudocyesis, she hadn’t felt this level of bleakness. Then it had been about shock and the search for solutions and reasons; she’d been sure that, if she looked hard enough, researched thoroughly enough, she’d find the key that unlocked the door back into Hannah’s old life. The diagnosis was traumatic, but at least it held within it the possibility of cure. If you knew what was wrong, you could find out how to fix it. But this new downturn, just as they’d seemed to be making progress, seemed so bitterly unfair.
Nevertheless, by the time she’d hauled herself to her feet off the hallway floor, weak from crying and something in her knee making an ominous clicking noise as she straightened it, Corinne was flooded with new resolve.
She hadn’t managed to find a phone number for Geraldine Buckley, but she’d sent her a message on Facebook and, within two hours, she had a message back. And now here she was, on a dismal road on the outskirts of Oxford, piling coins into a parking meter and being shocked all over again at how much it was possible to be charged for the privilege of parking your car outside an off-licence and a kebab takeaway.
Geraldine Buckley’s flat was in a modern block that was set back from the road through a metal gate next to a wall with a notice on it saying ‘NO DUMPING’ that someone had vandalized so it read ‘NO HUMPING’.
Once the intercom had buzzed her in, Corinne was relieved to find the block was well maintained and smelled reassuringly of bleach.
Geraldine Buckley also wasn’t as Corinne had imagined. She’d been expecting to find her wild-haired and drink-ravaged, with shaking hands and egg stains down her top, but instead, the former clinic manager was a neatly groomed woman in her late fifties with well-cut brown hair framing a pleasant, squarish face.
‘Three years sober now,’ Geraldine told her after she’d made them both tea and shown Corinne to a sofa in her small but bright open-plan living room. ‘Well, three years, five months and two weeks, give or take a day or two.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Don’t get too carried away. It’s still a full-time job. Staying off the booze.’
‘So you never went back to work after you left Westbridge House?’
‘Oh yes, I had a couple of other jobs. One in a leisure centre, one in a dentist’s surgery. But I lost those. It seems customers don’t like being greeted by a receptionist who reeks of last night’s vodka.’
In her Facebook message, Corinne had again fallen back on her bogus British Medical Journal profile story, reasoning that Geraldine Buckley would be more likely to share information with a journalist than a worry-stricken parent she’d never heard of. She’d been hoping for a few background details and had been taken aback when Geraldine suggested she drive over in person.
‘I expect you’re wondering why I asked you to come all this way,’ said Geraldine, reading her thoughts. ‘I wanted to be sure you were who you said you were. I could be in a very vulnerable position if certain things ever got out but, at the same time, I’m glad people are digging around into what went on at Westbridge House. Lives were destroyed and, so far, no one has had to pay for it.’
Corinne didn’t know how to react to this information. It startled her. All she wanted was confirmation – that Dr Roberts was exactly as he represented himself, that Hannah was in the best hands. Cold needles of unease began to prick at her spine.
‘I took the files.’
Corinne couldn’t at first work out what it was Geraldine was saying.
‘The filing cabinet that contained all the clinic’s records – the staff details, the patient case notes. I took it.’
There was a flare of pink in each of Geraldine’s cheeks, and Corinne formed the definite impression that this was the first time the former clinic manager had confessed to what she’d done.
‘I was so furious when they sacked me. I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I had a drink problem, so for them to imply I was an alcoholic was something I couldn’t stomach. I’d already had two written warnings and I’d managed to come up with a rebuttal for both of them. I hadn’t been drunk that afternoon, I’d been taking antidepressants that made me slur my words. I hadn’t been drinking at breaktime – the smell of booze was because I’d been out at a friend’s leaving do the night before. In my own head, I’d squared it all, so when they told me I had to leave I flipped. I had a spare set of office keys at home because I often came in at weekends, when there was just a skeleton staff.
‘So I came back with my brother and we loaded the filing cabinet into the back of my Golf. Nearly broke my back into the bargain!’
Corinne was hearing the words but not following their meaning. Why would Geraldine Buckley steal a filing cabinet? ‘I’m afraid I don’t really understand,’ she said.
‘Sorry. I don’t have a lot of company these days. I alienated a lot of friends during my drinking years. I’m a bit out of practice in holding a proper conversation.
‘The filing cabinet was my insurance policy. I had some wild notion of claiming for unfair dismissal, so I wanted all the records. I thought I could make a case that they were getting rid of me because I knew too much about what had happened there. In the end, the lawyer I went to see took one look at me, smelled my breath and said there was nothing he could do. Uptight little sod he was. He said the disciplinary procedure had been followed to the letter. So the bloody filing cabinet has just festered here ever since.’
‘You’ve still got it?’
‘Of course. I’m too scared to try to get rid of it. This is all off the record, by the way, isn’t it?’
For a moment, Corinne teetered on the edge of the truth. She found that she liked Geraldine Buckley, with her square chin and her tidy little flat. She was eternally thankful that she hadn’t been born with the addiction gene, because she didn’t know how she’d be able to resist the lure of the cold bottle of wine in the fridge on days when the world seemed out to get her. Recovering addicts had to do battle each and every day, and Geraldine’s struggle was written into every fine line of her face.
But if she told her the truth, she might never find out what had happened at Westbridge House. If the Meadows’ director had any secrets lurking in his past that made him unfit to care for her daughter, Corinne needed to know about them.
After hesitating, she said, ‘Of course it’s off the record. So what’s the big secret?’
Geraldine bit down on her lower lip, as if debating a point inside her head. Then she began:
‘The first director of Westbridge House was a very controlling individual called Professor Dunmore, who ran the place like a kind of Svengali. Incredibly smart and ambitious, but no room for dissent.’
‘And Oliver Roberts? I’m assuming he did work there, right?’
Geraldine nodded.
‘He was the professor’s protégé. I think he was already in his mid-thirties when he worked with us.’
Mid-thirties? Corinne was thrown.
‘So we’re not talking about the late 1980s?’
Geraldine shook her head. ‘Sorry. You’re about a decade out. Dr Roberts had come to psychiatry late. I seem to remember something about him starting in a different branch of medicine but switching direction. Surely you’d know all about that, if you’re writing a profile piece on him?’
Geraldine frowned, and Corinne quickly tried to move the subject on.
‘Of course. So Professor Dunmore took a liking to Dr Roberts?’
‘In as much as Dunmore ever really liked anyone. Roberts moulded himself into a mini version of the professor. And Professor Dunmore was arrogant enough to be flattered by that.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘The time period we’re talking about was just after the False Memory Syndrome scandal had erupted.’
‘False Memory Syndrome?’
Corinne had heard the phrase, but her mind was frustratingly blank.
‘It’s when a therapist, all too often poorly qualified, asks leading questions of a vulnerable patient so that he or she comes to believe their problems are down to abuse that happened in their past; abuse that is so traumatic their subconscious has buried it. The therapist will say something like “I’ve seen symptoms like yours before, always triggered by abuse. Could that have happened to you? Try to think who might have been in a position to do that to you.” It’s amazing how quickly repeated suggestion can become fact.’
Now it came back to her. An article she’d read somewhere years ago about a middle-aged woman who’d accused her elderly father of abusing her forty years before, after a therapist had ‘unlocked’ those memories. By the time the false memories had been debunked – using old diaries and photographs to prove that the events described could not possibly have taken place – the old man had died, distraught and estranged from his family.
‘Professor Dunmore had treated a case of False Memory Syndrome in which a once close, loving family had been torn apart by an allegation that later proved to be false. The professor was hugely affected by it, becoming convinced that many of the cases we were seeing at the clinic where the patient was alleging childhood abuse could actually be cases of FMS, where the memories had been planted by a previous therapist. In the mid- to late 1990s, this was a really “sexy”’ – here Geraldine made ironic quote marks in the air with her fingers – ‘topic. There were lawsuits in which therapists were sued for implanting false memories of sexual or even satanic abuse. I think Dunmore, who like I say was quite a cold, ruthless person, saw it as a way of grabbing media exposure. And Roberts followed where his master led.’
‘But some of the cases were genuine?’
‘Of course. In fact, I’d say probably all of them were. Do you know how hard it is for someone to own up to something like this? Secrets they’ve been carrying around their whole lives? Secrets that make them feel grubby and unclean?’
There was something about Geraldine Buckley’s intensity that set the cogs in Corinne’s mind whirring and made her wonder about the demons in Geraldine’s own past that had led her to seek obliteration at the bottom of a bottle.
‘Professor Dunmore became something of an expert on the subject of FMS and how to treat it. So, not surprisingly, we started to see young women, and a couple of men too, persuaded into attending the clinic by relatives who wanted, for whatever reason, to be told that the abuse never happened, that it was just a fantasy that had been planted in the patient’s head.’
‘And they were all treated by Professor Dunmore?’
‘Or Oliver Roberts.’
‘And what happened?’
‘One of the women killed herself, leaving a note explicitly blaming Dunmore for negating what had happened to her. It caused a big public scandal. Afterwards, some of the other women who’d been treated at the clinic threatened a class action, although that didn’t come to anything. In the end, Dunmore had to resign and was later struck off. Roberts stayed on a few months after that, but he didn’t get on with Dunmore’s replacement and he got a job somewhere else. And a short while later I was dismissed.’
‘So Roberts himself was never implicated?’
‘No. The General Medical Council decided Dunmore was a domineering figure and the rest of the staff couldn’t be blamed for following the ethos of the clinic. There was a rumour that Roberts turned on his mentor in interviews with the investigators and gave them the evidence they needed to force a resignation, in return for complete exoneration for himself, though he always vehemently denied it.’
‘And you took the files because—’
‘Because I was so angry and so screwed up I thought I could blackmail them into giving me my job back, or sue them for unfair dismissal and use the files to show what a shit company they were. And also …’
‘Also?’
‘I felt a responsibility to those women. The ones who’d had their stories disbelieved. There were still rumours of a class action and I wanted their case notes to be safe.’
Corinne was trying to work out what it all meant – whether, indeed, it meant anything. She couldn’t see a connection between what had happened at Westbridge House and the deaths at The Meadows, but still those cold pricks of unease on her back told her there was something here worth pursuing. She took a deep breath.
‘Is there any chance I could take a look at the files in the cabinet?’
Her eyes sought out Geraldine’s and she held her gaze, hoping that the other woman would see that, even if she wasn’t telling the truth about being a journalist, her motives were pure. ‘Oliver Roberts currently heads up a psychiatric clinic where he has charge of fifteen vulnerable women. I need to make sure he is fit for the job.’
A shadow flitted across Geraldine’s pale eyes that looked like they’d been washed and wrung out one too many times – and Corinne held her breath, half expecting a refusal.
‘OK,’ said Geraldine.