The Memory Game Read online

  And as we talked she prepared and ate the most enormous selection of food: pistachios, olives stuffed with anchovies and chillies, tortilla chips dipped in a guacamole from the fridge, focaccia with mozzarella and Parma ham with a large splash of olive oil.

  ‘Are you a psychoanalyst?’

  ‘No, I’m a psychiatrist. Does it matter?’

  ‘You know what happened to me, what I’ve done, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so. But you tell me.’

  God, I wanted a cigarette. To help me think. For something to do with my hands. I had to concentrate.

  ‘I’ve been in therapy with Alex Dermot-Brown since November. I’d had some emotional problems after the body of my dear friend, Natalie, was found. She’d gone missing in the summer of 1969. Alex was particularly interested when I told him that I had been close by when she was last seen alive. We worked over and over that scene, visualising it, and I gradually recovered the memory of seeing her being murdered by her father, my father-in-law, Alan Martello. I confronted him with it and he confessed. He’s now… well, you’ve read the papers.’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘I’ve got to ask you something, Dr Scott. Two things, really. Is it possible that someone would confess to a crime they hadn’t committed? I mean, why would they?’

  ‘Hang on a second,’ Dr Scott said. ‘This takes concentration.’ She was slicing her focaccia construction into sections. ‘There we are. Now, why would you want to ask me that?’

  ‘What I really want to ask is, is it possible to remember something that then turns out to be false? I mean a clear, detailed visual memory.’ She started to reply but I carried on speaking. ‘I felt I was doing something like retrieving a file on my computer that had been accidentally lost. Once I’d got it back I would never doubt that it was the actual file that I’d typed, would I?’

  Dr Scott was now seated at the kitchen table with plates of food radiating out from her. When it became clear that an answer was required, her mouth was full of sandwich and she had to chew energetically and then swallow.

  ‘Call me Thelma, by the way. My name’s an interesting example of the problems of transmission. It comes from a Marie Corelli novel written in the 1880s. It’s the name of the heroine, who is Norwegian. I once went to a conference in Bergen and began my speech by saying that it was appropriate I was there because I had a Norwegian name et cetera et cetera. Afterwards, a man came up to me and told me that actually Thelma wasn’t a Norwegian name at all. Corelli must have misheard, or something. Or made it up.’

  ‘So your name is a mistake?’

  ‘Yes, all of us Thelmas ought to be recalled and given authentic names.’ She laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as one doesn’t take ideas about cultural tradition too seriously.

  ‘Your comparison with the computer is interesting. Even neurologists have no precise model for the way that memory works, so we all invent our own rough-and-ready metaphors. Sometimes the memory can be like a filing system. A whole section of it might get lost, perhaps the bit dealing with a class you were in at school. Then, by chance, you meet somebody who was in that class, he provides a few clues and you suddenly recapture a whole lot of memories you didn’t know you had.

  ‘The problem is when metaphors take over and start to assume a false reality. The filing system comparison might lead you to believe that everything you have ever experienced can potentially be recaptured and re-experienced, provided you can find the right stimulus. I would compare some memories to a sandcastle on a beach. Once the sea has come in and washed it away, it is gone, and it can’t be precisely recreated, even in theory. Is that all you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m desperate and I don’t know whom to talk to.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to Alex Dermot-Brown?’

  ‘I don’t think Alex would be very receptive to what I’m about to say.’

  ‘And you think I’m hostile enough to Alex to believe it,’ said Thelma, pouring herself a third (or was it a fourth?) large glass of wine.

  ‘Look, at the conference where we met, I also met some good, damaged women who said that they would support me and believe me and not question me. I’m standing on the edge of something terrible but what’s important is that I don’t want to be supported. I don’t want to be believed if I’m wrong. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘Not quite, but go on.’

  ‘Let me give you the important details. The last witness who saw Natalie alive saw her by a river near her home on Sunday 27 July 1969. The work on my memory with Alex was based on the fact that I was there, right by where it had happened at the very same time. I was having a passionate love affair with Natalie’s brother at the time and I went down to the River Col, and sat there with my back against the small hill that separated me from Natalie. In an impulsive adolescent gesture I took some poems I had written, screwed them up, threw them into the river and watched them drift away round the bend of the river.’

  Thelma raised an eyebrow. ‘Is all this relevant?’

  ‘Yes, very. This was the original account I gave Alex, the bit I remembered without any question, the bit there’s no doubt about.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I walked down to the river this morning, for the first time since it happened. When I got to the spot I’d remembered, the river was flowing the wrong way.’

  ‘How do you mean “the wrong way”?’

  ‘It sounds stupid but it’s true. I threw a piece of paper and it didn’t float away from me, but towards me.’

  Thelma looked disappointed. She shrugged. Was this all?

  ‘It was quite simple,’ I continued. ‘I turned and walked over the small rise to the other side, and I realised that this was where I had sat and thrown the paper in. In fact, I threw another piece in and it floated away and around the bend, just as I had remembered.’

  Thelma’s expression had chilled now. She looked distant, a little embarrassed. She wasn’t even eating with the same energy. I could see that she was starting to wonder how she could get rid of me without too much fuss.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I’m being dense but I can’t quite see where we’re heading. I don’t see why it matters that you got things the wrong way round.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the wrong way round. The bridge from where the witness saw Natalie was on that side of the hill as well. But bear with me for just one more minute. For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve just received a whole lot of stuff from when I used to spend summers at Natalie’s house. It included the diary I kept during that summer. It finished two days before Natalie was last seen, so I didn’t pay it much attention. But then when I looked at it today, an interesting detail occurred to me. It always seemed strange that Natalie’s body was never found. When she was discovered in October, it seemed – to me, at least – even stranger. It was a brilliant place to bury a body because it was right under our noses, in the garden just a few yards from the house. But how could it be done?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tell me,’ said Thelma with obvious impatience.

  ‘My diary reminded me that a barbecue was being built in front of the house and it was completed on the very morning of a party that was held on Saturday the twenty-sixth of July, the day before Natalie was last seen. This morning I looked at the hole where Natalie’s body was found, and I saw the remains of that barbecue. The barbecue was made of brick installed in clay tiles set in concrete mortar. There are only bits of it now because the barbecue was removed and the clay tiles broken up when Martha – that’s my mother-in-law – extended the lawn. But the point is that the murderer buried Natalie’s body in the hole knowing that it was about to be covered with concrete, tiles and a heavy brick construction.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a hole in the ground be the first place where the police would look?’

  ‘But it wasn’t a hole in the ground, don’t you see? When Natalie was last seen on the twenty-seventh, the barbecue had already been in situ for
more than twenty-four hours. It would obviously be impossible to place a corpse under a brick barbecue that had already been constructed.’

  ‘Well, yes, so aren’t you answering your own question?’

  ‘You’re not following me. Natalie couldn’t have died on the twenty-seventh, let alone the twenty-eighth, when she was reported missing. She was already dead and buried by the morning of the party on the twenty-sixth.’

  Thelma looked puzzled, but she was alert now.

  ‘But you said that she was actually seen on the twenty-seventh?’

  ‘Yes. But what if I told you that Natalie and I were the same age, we had the same complexions, dressed in the same clothes. And also that she was well known in the neighbourhood and I was only there in the summer, so that there were plenty of local people who had never met me? And if I now seem to have discovered that I was in the same place at the same time where Natalie was last seen alive. What then?’

  A very slow smile spread across Thelma’s face like flame through a newspaper. She was thinking hard now.

  ‘Are you sure about this barbecue?’ she demanded.

  ‘Absolutely. I found fragments of tile on every side of the spot where she was found. She was definitely underneath it.’

  ‘And are you positive that it wasn’t completed a few days later? Maybe it wasn’t finished in time for the party.’

  ‘It was the centrepiece of the party. I’ve got photographs of people queuing up for their spare ribs and hot dogs.’

  Another objection occurred to Thelma. ‘But does any of this really matter? Alan confessed. The police would say that you just got the date wrong.’

  ‘But Alan wasn’t there. My father met Alan and Martha off the boat at Southampton on the morning of the party. They’d just come by steamer from the West Indies. They didn’t arrive at the Stead until early evening, just when the party was starting. Alan couldn’t have murdered Natalie. There’s just one problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I threw up my hands in despair. ‘I saw him do it. And he confessed.’

  Thelma laughed out loud. ‘Oh is that all?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I never believed any of that.’

  ‘Are you saying I imagined it all?’

  I may have been shouting.

  ‘Jane, I’m going to have a whisky and you’re going to have one too and I’m going to allow you to smoke your awful cigarettes and we’re going to have a serious talk. All right?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  She produced two inordinately chunky tumblers, and then an equally chunky glass ashtray. I wouldn’t have allowed any of them in my house.

  ‘Here,’ she said, slurping what looked like a quintuple scotch into each one. ‘None of your trendy single-malt rubbish. This is good blended whisky, the way it was meant to be drunk. Cheers.’

  I took a gulp and a blissful drag on a cigarette.

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘Tell me about your sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The process by which you recovered this memory. How did it work?’

  I gave a brief account of the little ritual that Alex and I had gone through, each time I’d placed myself back there by the Col. As I spoke, Thelma first frowned and then her frown became a smile.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘is something funny?’

  ‘No. Carry on.’

  ‘That’s it. So what do you think?’

  ‘Did the prosecution lawyers show any willingness to put you in the witness box?’

  ‘There was no need. Alan confessed.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But did they seem eager about the prospect of your testimony?’

  ‘I don’t know. A couple of the lawyers seemed a bit uneasy.’

  ‘Let me tell you that Alan Martello would never have been convicted solely on your testimony. It might not even have been admissible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because hypnosis alters memory, and you were hypnotised.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I know what I did and I just lay on the couch and tried to remember. I’d know if I had been hypnotised.’

  ‘I don’t think you would. There’s no hocus pocus about this. It’s my guess that you are a highly receptive subject. I could put you in a trance now and tell you that, oh, I don’t know, that you saw somebody run over by a car when you walked here from Shepherd’s Bush. When I woke you up, you would be convinced that it was true.’

  ‘Even if that’s true, Alex didn’t tell me what to remember.’

  ‘I know, but with all the repetition and reinforcement, you were going through an accretion of memorial reconstruction. Each time you added a little more to the story and then the following time you were remembering that detail you had added the previous time and adding a bit more. Your memory is real in a way, but it’s a memory of memories.’

  ‘But what about the final terrible crime? I saw it in so much detail.’

  ‘The whole process was leading up to something like that. Alex Dermot-Brown was preparing you for it, he was assuring you that everything you remembered was genuine and he used his professional status and the analytical authority he had over you to convince you that you were witnessing rather than constructing.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Yes, it’s possible.’

  ‘Was Alex doing it deliberately? Was he trying to implant a false memory?’

  ‘Definitely not. But sometimes you can create what you’re looking for. I know that Dr Dermot-Brown believes passionately in the phenomenon of recovered memory. I am convinced he wants to help these sufferers and now he has hitched his entire career to it.’

  ‘Are you saying that he is definitely wrong?’

  ‘What other explanation have you got, Jane?’

  ‘But what about the women who said they were abused as children? Are you saying that that’s all fantasy, the way that Freud did?’

  Thelma took a large gulp of whisky. ‘No. I’m treating half a dozen abuse victims at the moment. Two of them are sisters who each had two children by their father before they were sixteen years old. I gave evidence at the trial that helped, I hope, to convict him. I also know that abuse is sometimes difficult to prove. I know of specific abusers who are currently getting away with it and it fills me with despair. Perhaps that’s why I drink more of this than I should.’ She gave her whisky glass a little shake. There wasn’t much left in the tumbler. ‘But I don’t believe that abuse exists in a universe of its own in which normal rules – and I mean rules of law or of science – cease to apply. Just because abuse is exceptionally difficult to prove, that doesn’t mean we should try to convict people accused of abuse without proof.’

  ‘But these cases aren’t without proof. Those women I met at the workshop. They remember being abused.’

  ‘Do they? All of them? I’ve seen reports of young women, from apparently loving, functional families, entering analysis and emerging a year or two later with accounts of obscene abuse throughout their entire childhood. They give accounts of repeated ritual rape, sodomy, torture, the ingestion of faeces, satanic ritual. Some of us might say that unprecedented claims require a particular rigour of proof, but the supporters of these sad women say that we must demand no proof at all beyond their own testimony. Anything less is collaboration with the abuser. There isn’t even a neurological model to explain the process. We all know about memory loss after a single blow on the head in a traffic accident. But there is no precedent for the systematic amnesia of regular, separate incidents occurring over many years. Your own supposed witnessing of your father-in-law murdering your cousin is trivial by comparison.’

  ‘But why did it happen to be Alan that I saw?’

  Thelma shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. You’re the one who knows him. It may be that he was the focus for particular strong feelings during the period of your analysis. At a time when your creative mind was searching for a villain, he seemed like somebo
dy who could be violent to a woman. The imagined murder was the moment when your inner and outer worlds coincided. In a perverse way, it was something of a triumph for the psychoanalytic method. It’s unfortunate that reality has intervened so stubbornly.’

  ‘But why on earth did he confess?’

  ‘People do, you know. They have their reasons.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said, and my head slumped into my hands. ‘You’re asking if Alan Martello is the sort of man who might deal with feelings of guilt and despair by making a wild, self-destructive, theatrical gesture? You’re fucking right he is.’

  Thelma drained her glass. ‘So there you are then.’

  I looked at my own glass. No chance of draining that. There was at least a triple scotch left and I already felt drunk. I stood up, a little unsteadily. ‘I think I’d better go,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’ She did so and it was barely a couple of minutes before the doorbell rang.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to use me as an exhibit in the crusade against recovered memory,’ I said as I stood in the doorway.

  She gave a sad smile. ‘No, don’t worry. Your experience will have no effect whatsoever on their certainties.’

  ‘That can’t be true.’

  ‘No? What about you? What would you have thought if you had arrived at your river and found it flowing the right way?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look after yourself on the way home,’ she said, as I got into the cab. ‘You’ll have to phone the police tomorrow morning. They’ll need a whole new murder inquiry.’

  ‘Oh no they won’t,’ I said.

  Thelma looked puzzled but the cab was moving off and I was already too far away to say anything.

  Forty

  We drove out of London on the A12, against the commuter traffic, and were quickly in the pseudo-countryside between the fringes of London and the Essex flats beyond. I had the road atlas open on my lap. Except for my directions, nobody spoke. We left the main road and entered the mess of roundabouts, corridor villages, industrial estates. A bypass was being constructed, and we sat for half an hour in a single line of traffic, looking at a man rotate a sign. Stop, go. Stop, go. I looked at my watch repeatedly.