The kitchen table was strewn with papers. Corinne hadn’t taken all the files, of course, but even the relatively small number that Geraldine Buckley had grudgingly allowed her to borrow were enough to cover the entirety of the scratched wood surface.
And still she hadn’t come up with anything that cast Dr Roberts in any substantially different light.
True, three of his female patients had threatened to join the class action against the clinic. But it was Professor Dunmore’s philosophy and leadership that were in question. Roberts and the other junior psychiatrist who worked in the clinic were only following guidelines set by their boss. The official investigation, with which Roberts had fully cooperated, had wholly exonerated them.
Corinne had the files of the three patients concerned, all women ranging in age from twelve to twenty-three. She’d been through their case notes thoroughly, looking for evidence of malpractice, and had bristled at how, in the margin of a transcript of a young woman describing how her uncle used to call the abuse ‘being nice to each other time’, he’d written, ‘Sounds rehearsed,’ and on another one ‘Therapy-speak?’. Her heart ached for these broken girls who’d already been through so much and then were disbelieved by the very person who was supposed to be helping put them back together.
There was a registration form for each patient on which Geraldine Buckley had carefully blacked out the address and phone number, together with a small photograph. Corinne studied the face of each girl, looking for anything that might be of help to Hannah, but there was nothing. When it came to the youngest patient, whose name was Catherine Pryor, there was a momentary flicker of something, but it disappeared on closer examination. Corinne found she could hardly look at Catherine’s trusting grey eyes, in her plump, still-unformed face, without her own eyes filming over with tears.
There was a newspaper cutting in the files from 1998 in which Professor Dunmore talked about being on a mission to reconcile families ripped apart by the ‘torpedo’ of false memory. It was accompanied by an anonymous boxed-out account of a woman whose family had been destroyed when her adult daughter made false allegations of abuse against her husband after consulting a therapist for depression. The woman, who appeared in a photograph with her face pixellated, had been forced to choose between her husband and her daughter, and had been cut out of her daughter’s life when she stood by her husband. She’d despaired of ever finding a way out of the nightmare they were plunged into, until her sister had read about Professor Dunmore and persuaded her niece to visit the clinic. ‘It’s no exaggeration to say that decision saved us,’ the woman said.
Corinne was torn. This woman had clearly suffered terribly and, by debunking the false memory, Dunmore had transformed her family’s life. Yet at what cost to the genuine survivors of abuse who came after?
For a brief moment, she felt a warm glow of gratitude that her own little family had emerged from the maelstrom of the girls’ adolescence relatively unscathed.
Then she remembered where her older daughter was, and felt sick all over again.