The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [124]
The intelligent response would have been surprised disbelief—“a terror campaign?”—and a finger pointed straight at Lily and her Alzheimer’s: “It must have been Mummy who did it. You know what old people are like. They’re always worrying about the cost of living.” Instead, she offered me her pre-prepared “culprit.” In some ways it was laughable. I could almost hear her brain whirring as she produced the “line” that she and Nathaniel had rehearsed.
“There’s only one person in Winterbourne Barton who’s that disturbed,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “I tried to warn you but you wouldn’t listen.”
Her eagerness to implicate Jess was faintly disgusting. She looked pleased, as if I’d finally asked a question that she knew the answer to. “Jess?” I suggested.
“Of course. She was obsessed with my mother. She was always creating problems so that Mummy would have to call her up. Her favourite trick was to put the Aga out because she was the only one who knew how to relight it.” She leaned forward. “It’s not her fault—a psychiatrist friend says she probably has Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—but it never occurred to me she’d go as far as turning off the water and the electricity.”
I smiled doubtfully. “So why didn’t she follow through?”
“On what?”
“Milking the benefits. Munchausen by proxy is an attention-seeking syndrome. It needs an audience. Sufferers make other people ill so that they can present themselves in a caring light.”
“That’s exactly what she did. She wanted Mummy to be grateful to her.”
I shook my head. “It’s not the victim who’s the audience—victims tend to be babies and toddlers who can’t speak for themselves—it’s the sympathy and admiration of neighbours and doctors that sufferers want.”
Annoyance hardened her eyes. “I’m not an expert. I’m merely repeating what a psychiatrist told me.”
“Who’s never met Jess, and doesn’t know that she’s so reluctant to attract attention to herself that hardly anyone in Winterbourne Barton knows her.”
“You don’t know her either,” she snapped. “It was Mummy’s attention she wanted—her undivided attention—and she lost interest as soon as the Alzheimer’s took over. She was happy being the constant companion but she wasn’t going to play nursemaid. That’s what that letter was about—” she jerked her chin towards the piece of paper—“shuffling off the responsibility as soon as it became arduous.”
“What’s wrong with that? She wasn’t even related to Lily.”
There was the shortest of hesitations. “Then she had no business to insist on Mummy being sectioned. Why was it done in such a hurry? What was Jess trying to hide?”
“Peter told me it was social services who ordered it, and they did it for her own safety. It was a temporary measure while they tried to locate you and her solicitor. Jess wasn’t involved…except to give them your phone number and the name of the solicitor.”
“That’s Jess’s story. It doesn’t mean it’s true. You should ask yourself why Mummy had to be silenced so abruptly…and why Jess was so keen to accuse everyone else of neglecting her. If that’s not attention-seeking, I don’t what is.”
If you repeat a lie often enough people start to believe it—it’s a truism that’s seared into the brains of tyrants and spin doctors—but of all Madeleine’s lies, the most pernicious was her use of “Mummy.” She used it to paint a picture of innocent love that didn’t exist, and I was amazed at how many people found it charming. Most of those who condemned Jess as unnatural for hanging pictures of her dead family on her walls never questioned whether Madeleine’s relationship with Lily was healthy and close.
“But Lily was neglected, Madeleine. As far as I can make out, she lived here for seven weeks in the most appalling conditions until Jess found her half-dead beside the fishpond. Peter went away…the surgery safety net didn’t work…the neighbours weren’t interested…and you stayed as far away as possible.