‘No, no, no!’
Adam slammed his hand on the table, beating out the rhythm of his defiance.
‘It was never my intention to put my clients in danger.’
‘And yet that’s exactly what you did,’ Dr Gould countered forcefully. ‘You endangered the life of a vulnerable teenage girl, endangered your own life …’
‘And that was wrong. I’ve admitted as much. But I felt that, in the circumstances, we had no choice. A woman’s life was in danger and the police weren’t doing anything –’
‘So you chose to follow your client to Lake Calumet –’
‘I felt I had to, to protect her.’
‘Chose to believe the testimony of a troubled young woman,’ Dr Bown added.
‘If she was deluded, if she was making it up, then there would be no danger,’ Adam retorted quickly. ‘But if she wasn’t, if there was some truth in what she was saying, then I couldn’t let her go there alone.’
‘The proper course of action would have been to have sectioned her, for her own safety, and then to have removed yourself from responsibility for her care,’ Gould continued. ‘You have obviously become far too close to her.’
‘I have already passed responsibility for her on to a colleague, but as to sectioning her, I had no grounds to do so. She was cogent, she was lucid, she wasn’t in the midst of a mental health breakdown –’
‘So, you’re saying you believed her? You took her visions at face value?’ Dr Barkley asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then why were you there? If you didn’t believe her story, why did you go to the lake?’
There was no answer to this, of course. Not one which made sense anyway. Adam had been twisting on the wire ever since he met Kassie and was still no closer to defining the root or substance of her affliction.
‘Well?’
The question hung in the air. The massed faces of the board were expecting an answer, but what was the point? They would only follow it up with more unanswerable accusations. Why hadn’t he intervened more forcefully when Kassie first exhibited these self-destructive tendencies? Why had he revealed Rochelle Stevens’ private address to a client? Broken into her home? Why had he disregarded his training, every rule and protocol he’d ever been taught?
Rising to his feet, he stared at his accusers for a moment, surprising even himself by saying:
‘Do what you want.’
Then, turning, he marched towards the door.