The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [67]
“There’s not much I can say without breaching patient confidentiality…except to applaud your bravery.”
“Boring. It’s been done already. My boss in Baghdad shouted my courage from the rooftops to disguise the fact that I hadn’t shown as much as Adelina Bianca. They’ll keep pestering you until you give them something new.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever they persuade you to say. How, when, where and why did we meet? ‘Dr. C was called to the terrified woman when she broke down after being surrounded by a pack of dogs. She locked herself in her car and refused to get out. “She was trying to manage her fear by breathing into a paper bag,” he said.’ ”
“What then?”
“Door-stepping. Phone calls. Pictures. They’ll argue that my anonymity’s been blown because anyone with a surf engine will have worked out who I am from the Internet, so I might as well pose for the cameras rather than be taken unawares by a telephoto lens. And that’s before the twenty-four-hour news broadcasters muscle in on the act and force a press conference.”
He let a short silence develop before he said: “Is that it? Or does it get worse?”
“MacKenzie walks away scot-free and I get labelled a sick fantasist. I’ve already been accused of faking the abduction.” I leaned forward, hugging myself. “He didn’t leave any marks, so I can’t prove it happened…and now it’s a bit of a blur. If you can’t see, you don’t seem to record events so well.” I glanced at him. “There’s no way I can give evidence on that basis. I’ll be torn to shreds by any halfway decent barrister.”
Peter took some stapled pages out of a folder on the table in front of him. He’d brought it with him, along with a couple of reference books, when he returned from morning surgery. I was suspicious that he wanted to start a file on me, but he said it was just some research he’d done. “I’m a bog-standard GP, Connie. I have some experience of post-traumatic stress disorder because of Jess, but I need to consult the literature if I’m going to be of any real help to you.”
Oddly enough, I found that reassuring. I tend to have more confidence in people who admit the limitations of their knowledge, which was ironic in view of Jess’s tedious insistence that Peter’s answer to everything was chemical intervention. In fact, I felt it was she and Dan who were the more blinkered. Dan remained convinced that a few weeks’ sympathetic counselling was the cure to all ills, while Jess clung to the tougher approach of facing your fears and using a paper bag to deal with the after-effects. Perhaps it’s human nature to assume that if something works for you, it will work for everyone.
Peter pushed the sheaf of pages towards me. “Have you ever heard of the Istanbul protocol? It’s a set of international guidelines for the investigation and documentation of torture, and it’s used to evaluate and prepare evidence for trial. I’ve printed this copy off the net.”
“I didn’t say I’d been tortured.”
“I’d still like you to read it. It might help convince you that you’ll be taken seriously. Among other things, it contains a comprehensive list of the psychological consequences of ill-treatment and abuse. I’ve jotted down some of the commonest responses on the front page—you’ve shown a fair number of them in the last fifteen minutes—although your panic attacks are the clearest indicators that something catastrophic happened.”
I inched forward to read what he’d written. “Flashbacks. Nightmares. Insomnia. Personal detachment. Social withdrawal. Agoraphobia. Avoidance of people and places. Profound anxiety. Mistrust. Irritability. Feelings of guilt. Loss of appetite. Inability to recall important aspects of the trauma. Thoughts of death.”
“Jess shows a fair number of those,” I pointed out, “and she’s not claiming abuse.”
“So? The trauma of losing her family was considerable.”
“Then any trauma can produce similar symptoms. It doesn’t prove that my version of events happened. Perhaps I’m more easily frightened than most people, and just being blindfolded for three days led to panic attacks.”
“Why are you so determined