‘Rebecca Harper first came to Greene Parks over two decades ago, twenty-four years ago to be precise. She was nine or perhaps ten at the time she arrived here, I forget which, transferred from a young offender’s institute as it was clear that she was suffering with mental-health issues and needed specific care. She should never have been put into mainstream care to begin with in my opinion; she arrived in a terrible condition. She was assigned to me, my first ever case after qualifying as a psychiatrist actually, perhaps this is why I have such a…’ Dr Magnesson is searching for the right words. I suspect she is going to say ‘fondness’ though wisely she stops short of it.

But I understand her feelings better than she knows.

‘To this day Detective, after twenty-four years at this hospital, of all the patients I have seen who have been under my care, Becca remains one of the most difficult, and frankly fascinating cases I have ever worked with.’

‘You say this like it’s some kind of accolade Doctor.’

She smiles, wistfully. ‘Well, from a professional point of view, Becca was a rarity.’

‘Oh, and why is that?’ I sip the water and quickly place it on the desk. My hands are shaking.

‘She was a child psychopath, though many of my contemporaries prefer to give the condition other, more palatable labels, especially when it comes to minors, but this does not prevent it from being what it is. What she is – in my professional opinion, of course. But she scored extremely highly on the Levenson Scale, which was relatively new at the time.

‘The Levenson Scale?’

‘Yes, the psychopathy test invented by Michel Levenson. It’s a series of yes or no questions. This of course is not to be confused with the Leveson Inquiry, which is quite a different thing altogether.’ She smiles, seemingly self-satisfied with such a topical political joke.

‘Rebecca Davis was incarcerated here because she killed her mother, is that correct?’ Davis asks.

‘Yes. Supposedly. Although the inquest recorded the death as accidental. There was no evidence, just a confession from Becca.’

‘Do you believe she was responsible?’

‘It does not matter what I believe really, Detective Riley. Importantly she believed she was responsible, though it is just as likely that her mother took her own life.’

‘If that was the case then why on earth would Rebecca claim to have killed her own mother? Have herself incarcerated as a result?’

Dr Magnesson pauses and meets my eyes directly. ‘I should explain a little more about the case. It’s complex, really not as straightforward as you may think – and not very pleasant.’

‘I think nothing, Dr Magnesson, that’s why I’m here, so that you can tell me. Why would a child confess to murdering their own mother if this was not true?’

She exhales again. ‘All of us possess psychopathic traits, Detective Riley, in the right measure they can be highly beneficial to navigating through life and achieving success, no doubt in your line of work too.’ She gently raises an eyebrow. ‘Becca was textbook really, completely lacking in empathy, charming and persuasive, extremely likeable in fact. However, she was a highly manipulative fantasist, grandiose, fearless, completely unfazed by her own destructive behavior and the effect it had on others. It is probable that she killed her mother, but also equally as probable that she enjoyed the attention she received for saying that she had. Her story would change to suit her; in one version she would cast herself as the victim, in another she was the unrepentant perpetrator.’

‘You said Rebecca was just nine years old when she arrived here. That’s so young,’ Davis says, unable to hide the sadness in her voice, ‘do you think she was born a psychopath?’

Dr Magnesson opens her hands. ‘Ahh, the great debate. Some experts believe this is possible, yes, others, no, and many more are undecided. It is not an exact science.’

‘So where do you fit in Doctor?’

Magnesson ponders the question carefully. ‘Each case is individual but with Becca, her brain patterns were different, the structures of her prefrontal cortex,’ she points above her eyes, running her finger horizontally above them, ‘this part here is responsible for your emotions, rage, anger, happiness, joy, pain, the ability to feel empathy, love, sexual pleasure, fear; it regulates them all, releases chemicals in response… This part of Becca’s brain, after tests, showed impaired responses and unusual patterns. I remember once she took part in an experiment where we showed her various images, monitoring her responses and blink reflexes. The images ranged from the very cute and cuddly, kittens and babies, fields full of flowers, beautiful scenery and the like, to dismembered bodies, the charred remains of children who’d perished in fires, grizzly murder scenes, quite sickening stuff, not least for a child to see. The results were striking. Becca’s reflexes and responses were almost identical to all of the images she’d been shown – meaning that she could distinguish no emotional difference between seeing a headless corpse and a cute puppy; she was neither moved nor repulsed, unfazed by both. It was unusual to see this in someone so young.’

‘You didn’t answer the question, Doctor.’

‘The difference between a psychopath becoming the CEO of a successful company and going on to become a cold-blooded murderer I think is a fairly straightforward one…’

‘It is? How?’

‘Trauma,’ she says, ‘abuse. The psychopathic killers I have encountered throughout my career have all suffered abuse or early childhood trauma of some sort without exception. So to answer your question, yes and no. In my opinion I believe Becca was born with distinguishable differences in her prefrontal cortex and brain patterns, so perhaps genetics played a part, but it was the abuse and trauma she suffered as a young child that triggered these characteristics and turned her into what she was and is.’

‘Which is?’

‘A psychopath, Detective, like I’ve said.’

I don’t want to get into the nature or nurture debate with Dr Magnesson; I suspect she has twenty-four more years of experience to draw upon than me.

‘Rebecca seems to have assumed many identities in her time Dr Magnesson. Used aliases and disguises.’

‘Yes, this is not so surprising. Becca claimed, when she was in my charge, to have more than one personality. Though she was certainly not schizophrenic, not in the traditional sense. She genuinely believed she was more than one person with a completely separate, unique set of emotions, thoughts, and opinions. In medical terms we call this “splitting”, whereby a severely traumatised individual who has internalised their defective feelings creates different personas as a coping mechanism. Essentially, those afflicted discard their true selves in favour of a more… palatable personality, a mask if you will, though one which, I should point out, is very real indeed. You see, mostly, their authentic selves, feelings and emotions have betrayed them, gone unmet or been ridiculed, ignored or disparaged somehow, therefore they rid themselves of those feelings altogether by becoming someone else. To feel something would make them human, force them to face their deep, emotional wounds, and this would be far too painful, perhaps even induce suicide, which I have seen in some cases with psychotic patients who have attempted to heal their core wounds.’ She looks depleted as she says this, ‘Rebecca Harper was deeply disturbed, perhaps the most disturbed child of her age that I had ever treated in my career. She was also exhibiting bipolar and anti-social behaviour when she arrived.’

Top of everyone’s birthday party list then.

‘She was not a well little girl, Detective. But she was still a little girl.’

‘A little girl who killed her mother.’ Davis adds.

Dr Magnesson stands then. She’s small and curvy. I wonder if she has children of her own. ‘That’s as may be. But in Becca’s mind she truly believed that what she was doing was an act of mercy not murder, her mother’s death was a mercy killing in her mind, or so she had us believe.’

‘And did you, believe her I mean?’

She exhales again. ‘Becca was, even back then, a highly manipulative individual, intelligent, very plausible, showing all the marked traits of such individuals afflicted with psychopathy. She fooled many people in authority, I think,’ Magnesson adds, ‘even me, at times. It’s a complicated, complex disorder… I shall be honest Detective, I was never sure whether Becca herself believed that what she had done was indeed an act of mercy, or if she simply tried to make us believe this in a bid to control and manipulate her surroundings. One thing I am convinced of however, was that she did suffer abuse at the hands of her parents, and most certainly her father. A fantasist she may be, but my experience, my intuition told me from the beginning that she was not lying about the abuse.’

Ahh, the old intuition thing again.

‘How did she do it?’ Davis asks, which was going to be my next question. ‘How did she kill her mother?’

‘She said her mother fell down the stairs, only it didn’t kill her outright so she put a pillow over her face to complete the job, though this was not documented in the inquest. There was no record of asphyxiation anywhere in the post-mortem.’

‘And she attempted to cover it up by making it look like her mother had committed suicide?’

Nobody’s fool then. Even at nine.

‘That would take a calculated mind, wouldn’t it Dr Magnesson, to deliberately try to cover up one’s crimes?’

She peers at me over the rim of her glasses, which are perched back on her nose again. ‘The police thought this initially, yes. But actually I believe Becca wanted to be found out. In doing what she did, Becca told me that by removing her own mother she hoped she too would be removed from her diabolical situation – an act of desperation, of self-preservation. She told me that her father was a brutal deviant of the very worst kind; that he brought prostitutes back to the home and would tie them up and abuse them while Becca and her mother were present. During regression therapy she recounted early memories of hearing these women’s screams of terror and pain. Sometimes, she said, he would make her and her mother watch as he raped them or force his wife to join in with the abuse. She claims he beat them both regularly and viciously but was careful to ensure most of their bruises were hidden and unseen – the worst being the psychological ones of course. Another time she recalled an occasion when she ate some sweets before dinnertime, a common childhood misdemeanour. As punishment she claimed that her father burnt her tongue so badly with an iron that it swelled to three times its size and she was unable to talk or eat for well over a week. Her mother gave up trying to protect her in the end and became so desensitised to the abuse that eventually she was like the walking dead, a zombie. Often during our conversations Becca referred to her mother as the ‘ghost’. So adept, she said, was her father at conditioning and controlling their environment that in the end Becca told me that she and her mother sometimes fought over who could take the bigger beating. It actually became a competition between them who could withstand the most punishment. When she arrived here at the hospital her cortisol level was off the Richter scale. The girl was in constant fight-or-flight mode and did not appear to understand any other way of existing, which certainly fits with the abuse she described.’

‘Didn’t anyone notice what was going on? The school, a relative, a neighbour – anyone? Why weren’t the authorities alerted? Surely someone must have suspected they were being so mistreated. Was the father ever brought before police, was there any investigation?’

‘There was no record ever of any reported or even suspected abuse, Detective, but this is not to say it never took place. I’m sure you know well in your position, just how clever and manipulative these people can be, psychopaths and abusers, and I am truly of the opinion that Becca’s father was probably one himself. They will go to great lengths to ensure they slip under the radar undetected. And it’s usually completely plausible. Psychopaths are by their very nature incredibly believable. In fact, their believability is one of the greatest symptoms of psychopathy itself.’ She pauses.

‘Assuming it’s all true of course.’

Magnesson looks at me intensely. ‘He denied any wrongdoing of course, the father. On the occasions we spoke to him to give feedback on his daughter he told us that he truly believed that Rebecca had been born evil. He told us that he and his wife had noticed she had exhibited ‘unusual’ behavior practically from birth and that on numerous occasions he suspected she had harmed or maimed various pets in the neighbourhood. He told us a story of a rabbit they bought her for her seventh birthday. How Becca had adored it and became inseparable from it, until one day she’d attempted to put it back in its cage and the animal had scratched her. The next day the rabbit was discovered dead with its neck broken and an eye missing. Becca had told her parents that she mustn’t have shut the cage properly and that a fox had attacked and killed it, and then she casually asked what was for dinner.

‘However, Becca’s stories were highly contrastable; she explained how her father began sexually abusing her at five years old and that eventually she learned to look forward to the abuse, and the love and affection he would show her after it had taken place. It was this brief window, this five minutes of favour that she longed for. The abuse itself was just an unpleasant prelude to reaching that moment of comfort.’

Five years old.

Davis and I exchange looks.

‘To be frank Detective, I wanted to help Rebecca Harper more than I’ve ever wanted to help another child in my entire career. But she was so damaged it was like trying to glue together a pane of glass that has shattered into a million tiny shards. I – we – did try of course: psychotherapy, drugs, CBT, regression, electric-shock therapy, hours upon hours of treatment both conventional and unconventional. But the drugs didn’t work.’

They just make you worse…

‘Not really anyway; they kept her in a calm, almost vegetative state sometimes, but they did not undo the damage. There were times when I felt we had made progress; she was, is a highly intelligent girl, well, woman now, but all empathy had been killed off within her, essentially rendering her little more than an emotionally-barren shell. During puberty she became suicidal, suffered from eating disorders and self-harmed.’

I think of her body; I’ve seen it, I didn’t look closely, not closely enough.

‘I was under no illusions about Becca’s prognosis,’ she continues, ‘but I always hoped I could help her reach a level where she might go on to lead a relatively normal life, one where she would not continue to carry so much trauma. Where she could learn to manage her condition, to control it, if not to cure it. Which brings us back round to your original question. If one is born a psychopath, it can no more be cured than you or I can change our eye or hair colour. A colleague of mine once described it like this: a psychopath is a cat among mice. You can teach the cat to act like the mouse, and the cat may learn how to act like the mouse and live among them, but it will always be a cat.’

It’s obvious that Dr Magnesson is a woman who cares very much about her patients, that she takes her responsibilities seriously and personally. It’s admirable. I think of the night in the Japanese restaurant, of the woman I’d sat with and ended up holding in my arms; the pretty, almost beautiful, witty, intelligent woman who had even fleetingly reminded me a little of my Rachel, and I can’t reconcile her with the person Magnesson is describing now. I’m consumed by guilt and regret and anger all at once, like I’ve eaten every one of my least-favourite foods at the same time and I’m about to throw them all up.

Davis’ phone goes and she gets up, excuses herself from the room.

‘Do you think Rebecca Harper is capable of murdering a child, Dr Magnesson?’ I ask.

She pours herself some water from the jug and takes a sip, audibly swallowing as she pulls her lips back over her teeth. ‘I think, Detective, that Becca is purging herself and her past with these killings; the man represents her father, the woman, her mother and the child…’ she pauses, ‘the child is the equivalent, in her mind, of killing off herself, her false self – perhaps allowing her to become whole again, in her mind, of course. So, to answer your question Detective,’ she says gravely, ‘yes, regrettably I do.’