The West London counselling centre looked unremarkable on a wet Saturday morning. The small car park at the front was empty, except for a drizzle-spattered people carrier in a bay marked ‘Reserved for doctors’.
‘Looks deserted,’ I said, suddenly irritated. ‘You’d have thought if anywhere needed to be open at the weekend, it’d be a clinic like this. All those people working in stressful jobs all week, why can’t they—’
Clare cut me off.
‘You’re anxious,’ she said, tapping the access code into a pad by the door. ‘I get it. But bear in mind that Gil might not be able to help. Don’t build your hopes up: it’s unlikely that anything will happen today. Therapy is a process, not a quick fix. It could take six months of sessions. You do know that, right?’
‘Martin will be in prison in six months if I can’t help him,’ I said, stepping inside and shaking the collar of my raincoat. ‘You know that, right?’
Clare looked as if she was about to reply, but paused and nodded instead, giving me the slightest of weary smiles as she led me down the white corridors. I knew she was willing to tolerate my loyalty to Martin, but she didn’t like it. She was helping me, not Martin.
‘This way,’ she said, using a swipe card to open a door. ‘Gil’s on the top floor.’
The stairwell was a glass box, silver ribbons of rainwater running top to bottom, making the outside world look distorted, displaced. I could hear each footstep on every stair, echoing upwards.
Clare seemed nervous too; but I found that reassuring. At the end of a long passage, a single door was open, fanning a wedge of grey light into the corridor.
‘Gil?’ said Clare, politely tapping on the doorframe.
‘Oh, hello, hello.’ A tall man jumped up from behind his desk. ‘Come in, come in, both of you.’
He was in his late forties, a thin face with a receding hairline, but he was surprisingly fashionably dressed, like a trendy sixth-form teacher. The most striking feature, though, were his eyes: coal-dark and mischievous. I liked Gil Moore on sight.
‘You must be Fran,’ he said, shaking my hand. I wondered how much Clare had told him, then immediately wondered how much I should tell him.
‘Excuse the room,’ said Gil, scooping up a half-eaten sandwich and dropping it into a wastepaper basket. ‘Crappiest space in the building, but I’m only here two days a week.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘My office is no better. Where are you usually based?’
‘At Baverstock Hospital,’ he said, distractedly rearranging his desk like a housewife surprised by visitors. ‘I mainly do trauma work: patients with post-traumatic stress disorder – a lot of ex-military, as you might imagine.’
There were some framed certificates on the wall next to a pile of CD cases on a shelf. Tilting my head, I could see The Smiths, Jesus Jones, Royal Blood. I don’t know what I had been expecting – someone old and fusty in a black turtleneck, gentle classical music playing in the background, perhaps.
‘I should leave you to it,’ said Clare, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. ‘My desk could do with a tidy too.’
‘Says the most anally retentive person in the building,’ smiled Gil.
Clare looked down, colouring a little. ‘You know me too well,’ she mumbled, then with raised eyebrows towards me, disappeared. Interesting, I thought, feeling a pang of regret. Partly due to the realization that here was a corner of my best friend’s life I knew nothing about, and partly disappointment that Clare hadn’t ended up with someone like this smart, compassionate man. Instead she had chosen Dom; or let herself be chosen.
Gil took my dripping coat and hung it on a rack by the door. He waved me to a grey fabric sofa – Habitat, once upon a time, I thought – and slid his office chair into position opposite me.
‘So you’re Clare’s best friend?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, perching awkwardly on the sofa. ‘I’m surprised we haven’t met before.’
‘I’ve only been here six months, hence the smallest room in the building,’ Gil explained. ‘I was in America for a long time before that.’
He shifted, leaning on the armrest.
‘Clare tells me you had a blackout?’
So we were straight into the session. Efficient, direct: my kind of guy. Clare had chosen well.
‘I need to remember what happened,’ I said, watching him for a reaction – disapproval, perhaps, or hesitation – but he simply nodded. Clare’s friend or not, I suppose I was just a patient, another problem to be solved.
‘Good, well why don’t you tell me what you do remember?’
Haltingly, I gave Gil a brief outline of how I had arrived at my neighbour’s flat at two in the morning, stressed and agitated, with very few memories of what had gone before. I thought my bipolar might be relevant, so I filled him in on that too.
‘Do you have a history of blackouts?’ he asked.
‘Not really. Not since university. I was a binge drinker in my first year – nothing too unusual there, I suppose, but I’d go to a Wine Society meeting and wake up the next day fully clothed, not remembering a thing. For a while I assumed it was the booze, but I was lucky enough to run into a GP at the college practice who paid attention, especially aften an episode of self-harming. Eventually, I was diagnosed with bipolar.’
Gil nodded, making a note on a pad on his lap.
‘I take it you gave up Wine Soc?’ he smiled.
‘Switched to badminton,’ I said. I liked how easy it was to talk to him, but there was also something that had been weighing on my mind.
‘Clare said if I was drunk I won’t ever be able to remember. Is that true?’
Gil let out a breath and sat back, lacing his hands behind his head.
‘The real answer to that question is, it depends. The trouble with therapy is that the brain is infinitely complex. If you’re a heart surgeon, you’re basically working with a few pipes. Fit them all together in the right way, and you can reasonably expect everything to work once you’ve sewn the patient back up. Not the same with the mind, I’m afraid.’
He must have sensed my distress, because he smiled reassuringly.
‘That’s not to say we haven’t worked out a few things over the years,’ he went on. ‘Yes, Clare’s right in saying that sometimes memories lost in a blackout can’t be brought back, but that’s assuming the blackout was related to your alcohol consumption.’
‘So there are other possibilities?’
‘Lots of them. For example, I hear a lot of anecdotal evidence of minor memory lapses in bipolar patients. Psychosis, fugue states, any sort of dissociation – which is my field of expertise, happily.’
He gave me an ironic smile. ‘Or not so happily, depending on your point of view. Heart surgeons don’t often have crying patients to treat.’
‘That’s because they’re usually asleep,’ I said.
‘Good point,’ he grinned. ‘Should pay more attention with a barrister, shouldn’t I? All right, tell me about the night you can’t remember.’
I nodded, looking down at my clasped hands, surprised at how nervous I felt. I had wanted so badly to remember that night, but now the moment was here, I was frightened. Frightened that I wouldn’t remember and frightened that I would. More than anything, I wanted to help prove Martin’s innocence, but did I really want to relive seeing my boyfriend with his wife? Did I want it confirmed that he thought so little of me that they had slept together? And of course, there was the accusation Pete Carroll had added to the mix: that I had been involved in Donna’s disappearance. I certainly wasn’t sure I wanted to relive that, if it was true.
‘Relax,’ said Gil, his voice deep, smooth. ‘Just the broad strokes of what happened that night for now. So I can get an idea.’
I had no option but to tell him. I described how I’d followed my boyfriend to his ex-wife’s house, watching from the pub opposite. How my next memory was waking up in a neighbour’s flat, apparently having been helped inside, my memory all but wiped, like a book with missing pages.
‘How much did you drink that night?’
‘That’s the point: I can’t remember. Nothing beyond the first drink anyway.’
‘And I assume you were upset that your boyfriend was going to his wife’s house for sex?’
My eyes met his, but there was no judgement there, just curiosity and shrewdness. That unnerved me, and again I wondered how much I was prepared to reveal to this stranger.
‘Have you heard of this term “dissociation”?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘It’s the separation of reality,’ said Gil, putting his pen down. ‘It can be as mild as daydreaming or as extreme as alternative identities. I see it a lot with combat and abuse victims – they block out those disturbing memories. It’s the brain’s way of protecting itself from uncomfortable feelings – it simply pretends it never happened.’
‘And you think that’s what my amnesia is? Dissociation?’
Gil nodded. ‘It’s what we call a dissociation fugue – a one-off event. Generally it’s caused by trauma, but it can be brought on by drugs or alcohol. The patient has memories but the mind has essentially closed them off. The brain is in denial.’
‘So in those cases, it’s possible to retrieve the memories. How?’ I asked, eager to get started.
‘By kicking the doors in,’ he said, standing up. He moved across to the corner of his office and with a quiet grunt, picked up a piece of equipment and began setting it up. It looked like a portable projector screen, only more high-tech. ‘The problem with the subconscious is in the name,’ said Gil as he worked, folding out the apparatus. ‘It’s sub-conscious, below our consciousness. All this interesting stuff is going on in there, but we can’t get to it. So we need to find a way to trick the brain into opening up.’
‘There, I think that’ll do it.’ He stood back to admire his handiwork: a long thin box sitting on top of a tripod, wires trailing from the back.
‘What we’re doing here today is a version of that,’ said Gil, crossing to the window and pulling the blinds. ‘It’s called EMDR: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which is just a fancy title for this.’ He clicked a hand-held controller and blue lights pulsed across the front of the box from left to right, accompanied by a low-level ‘zip’ noise with each pulse. Another click and it stopped.
‘That’s it?’
‘Looks daft, but it’s very effective, I assure you. What’s happening is that we’re mimicking the movements of the eye during REM sleep – the part of sleep where you’re dreaming, when the brain is shuffling things around and trying to make sense of what you saw and did during the day. Once we can access that state, we tend to find the memories just come tumbling out.’
I looked at the box, then back to Gil, my stomach tightening.
‘You’re anxious,’ said Gil, sitting down. ‘Don’t be. The beauty of EMDR is that we’re asking the brain to look at these memories in a detached way. It’s as if you’re viewing it on a movie screen, without the attendant trauma. We use this for combat veterans and rape victims: it wouldn’t be very productive to make them go through all that again, you’d just be re-traumatizing them, compounding the terror. But EMDR can still be dramatic; I’ve had abuse victims turn back into children, even their speech patterns change to kiddy-speak.’
He held up a finger. ‘Note I said dramatic, not traumatic. When it works, it’s usually quite liberating.’
I nodded, telling myself I could do this.
‘All right, sit back,’ he said. ‘Get as comfortable as you can and tell me about Martin.’
His voice was soft and deep, calming. And yet I was nervous, hands clammy, fighting the urge to wipe them on my skirt. I closed my eyes and tried to get used to the dark. I was disorientated – as if I had lost time and been plunged back into night.
‘Martin’s my boyfriend,’ I began slowly. ‘Well, sort of. He’s a client of mine. We shouldn’t really be seeing one another.’
‘Presumably that was a source of anxiety. A relationship that was out of bounds.’
‘Yes. I’m also applying for silk – that’s a big promotion for me. You have to be good, responsible. Affairs with clients, clients that are still officially married, don’t really go with the job description.’ I tried for a smile, but it didn’t quite fit.
‘Are you in love?’ asked Gil simply.
I gave a nervous laugh, but suddenly wanted to admit the force of my feelings to someone.
‘Yes, I am. I love him so much that it scares me. I’ve never felt like this before, it’s as if I have woken up and just experienced all these emotions for the first time.’
‘Do your emotions feel out of control sometimes?’
‘Yes.’ It was almost a whisper, but in the dark, in that intimate room, it felt like a shout. My voice shook as I continued:
‘Most of the time I feel like a car with no brakes. When I’m with him, it’s like I’m freewheeling and I’ve got the wind in my hair and I’m so happy. But I’m never really calm.’
‘And that’s why you were feeling stressed that night?’
‘I was stressed because I thought he was still sleeping with his wife. That’s why I followed them.’
‘OK, describe what happened. As much as you can remember. What were you wearing?’
I opened my eyes and looked at him.
‘What was I wearing?’ I frowned, surprised to discover that I couldn’t remember. I could recall Donna’s pink coat, but me? Nothing.
‘I don’t know.’
‘OK,’ said Gil, and clicked his remote. The blue lights flashed across the screen. Zip … zip … zip.
I laughed. It all seemed so stupid, like some Sixties spy movie where a camp megalomaniac was trying to brainwash the hero.
‘Just go with it,’ said Gil. I nodded, taking a deep breath. I had to do this. For Martin, if nothing else. I watched the blue lights bumping across the box. It was kind of restful, like fairy lights on a Christmas tree. Zip … zip … zip.
‘OK,’ said Gil, clicking his remote to shut off the lights. ‘Now tell me what you were wearing.’
‘A black coat.’
Obviously I was wearing my black coat. I always wore my black coat.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Gil, clicking the lights back on. ‘No rush, just relax and watch the lights.’
I sank back as they skidded past, zip … zip … zip. They weren’t bright, a soft azure blue, like the sea on a poster advertising Greece or Italy. Santorini, I thought suddenly. I’d been there in my twenties, the beaches were amazing …
‘Black coat, a green scarf …’ I said, unsure if these were details I had gleaned from the Evening Standard e-fit, or whether I was beginning to remember. As I concentrated harder, more came into focus. I could almost see myself walking down the street. ‘I was wearing what I usually wear for work. A white shirt, dark skirt.’
Gil clicked off the lights.
‘Now describe the weather.’
I frowned, straining. I could almost feel it, but it wasn’t quite there.
‘No, I … I can’t quite …’
‘Fine,’ said Gil, switching on the box. ‘Go with the lights again.’
Zip … zip. It was soothing now, watching them move, like water over rocks.
‘It was horrible – the weather, I mean,’ I blurted, the words forming without thought. ‘It was raining, cold, so cold I put my hat on. I remember thinking the rain would wash my make-up away.’
Gil clicked the lights off.
‘You’re doing really well. So what did you see first?’
I narrowed my eyes, peering into the gloom.
‘I saw Donna. I followed her from work and I saw her meet him in a restaurant. They were laughing, drinking wine. They went back to her house. I went to the pub. I got a drink and sat by the window.’
‘And then what?’
‘I can’t remember,’ I said feeling distressed.
‘It’s just pictures, Fran. Nothing can hurt you here,’ said Gil, his voice rich in the darkness.
The lights came again. Zip … zip. Blue and soft, blue, blue, green, seeing new tints here and there.
‘I remember his hand touching the small of her back,’ I said haltingly. ‘I saw this, this easy familiarity between them, something I didn’t have.’
Oh God, he was so relaxed with her. Zip … zip. Then Gil’s voice again, reassuring, strong.
‘And how did that make you feel?’
‘It made me realize that everything Martin had told me had been a lie.’
‘What else? What else, Fran?’
‘I didn’t blame him. Why not have sex with two women, if you could get away with it?’
I opened my eyes, looked at my new confidant, defiant, challenging him to react, but his face was impassive.
‘What do you remember about the pub?’
Gil seemed to be turning the lights on and off at random now, or perhaps I wasn’t following the sequence any more. Somehow I felt I was in both places at once; in the clinic, safe and relaxed, and back in the pub, staring across the street.
‘It was busy. Busier than a normal Monday night. I think there was a party or a quiz night in the room upstairs. When I went to the bar, someone asked me if I knew the answer to a question. I like quizzes. And I knew the answer, but I had to get back to my seat to watch the house.’
The memories were coming, but I could feel myself getting more and more stressed. Or rather, I was feeling the distress from that night, feeling the tightness in my stomach as I watched Martin touch her, felt the fluttering pulse – zip, zip, zip – but at the same time it wasn’t me there, it was someone else.
‘Why do you think Martin lied to you?’ asked Gil.
‘He screwed his wife,’ I said bitterly, my words a little slurred. God, I needed a drink.
‘How do you know? Maybe they weren’t having sex.’
‘They were,’ I said flatly. ‘I remember the way she looked up at him when they got to the house. I remember the way he touched her shoulder, urging her inside. A light was on.’
A blue light, flashing on and off. On and off.
‘What else, Fran? Just go with it.’
‘A light went on,’ I said. ‘In the upstairs window. Her bedroom.’
‘Why do you think that means they were having sex?’
I knew the tactics he was using and it was working, but I still couldn’t give myself over to it completely. Gil had said people could relive the trauma, feel those same feelings and that was true. I could feel bile rising in my throat, feel the burn of the vodka, the pain in my chest as the implications sank in. I felt it all, as if I was sitting there in the pub, staring across the street, but at the same time it didn’t feel real. The upset was there, the anger and the betrayal, but it was more like I was noting it, observing it.
‘I know what they were doing,’ I said, my voice low but strong. My head was swimming and my T-shirt felt tight around my throat, but I still felt good, it was like the picture was coming into focus. I could see them in the house, just as I had seen them that night, seen every act of pleasure I had ever enjoyed with Martin, except instead of my face, my naked body in the slideshow, it was Donna’s body writhing beneath his. But Gil was right. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen any of that. All I had seen was a light. A light.
‘That’s what I saw,’ I said, jumping up.
‘Fran, wait – please.’
‘No, I can’t,’ I said, suddenly feeling strong, unburdened. ‘Gil, I know what happened.’
Gil stood up and opened the blinds, flooding the room with daylight, his figure backlit – like Martin. And then I remembered it all. Not just fragments, but the whole thing, joined up, a memory I could grasp.
‘I remember.’
I remembered it being dark and cold. I remembered Donna and Martin going into the house. I remembered the pub, the vodka tonic, the seat in the window. I remembered the quiz question: ‘Name Queen’s bass player.’ I remembered the upstairs light going on and all the assumptions I had made. And then I remembered the front door of Donna’s townhouse opening, that overhead porch light illuminating Martin from behind as he ran down the steps and disappeared into the darkness.
‘He left, Martin left,’ I said.
And I remembered looking back up at the tall, white building, and seeing someone open the thin slats of the shutters. The cloud of hair and delicate features of Donna watching Martin go. Donna Joy was at the window. She was still alive when Martin left the house. Which meant, almost certainly, that he didn’t kill her.
It meant he was innocent.