conference at Liverpool.”
“And Dr. Ott?”
“Just finished a seminar in room nineteen.”
Simon Ott looked up in surprise when I found him rewinding a tape. I asked if he could spare a few minutes. We weren’t well-known to each other, but that, for me, was an encouragement.
“I'm trying to clarify something slightly contentious,” I explained.
“Concerning me?” A guarded expression dropped over his face like a visor. Small, neat, and in his thirties, he went in for dark suits and cream-colored shirts with one-color ties, that color generally being in the brown range.
“Me. I’m after advice.”
“Ah.” He looked marginally more approachable, then said, “I don’t have much time. A meeting at two.”
“Could I join you for lunch, perhaps?”
He glanced at my stick. “I generally take a walk.”
“You think I wouldn’t keep up?”
He hesitated. “If it doesn’t concern me personally…”
“Your special field is the memory and how it functions, isn’t it?”
The face did a double take. The mention of memory triggered an interested response, and the revelation that I’d made some inquiries about him turned him pink. Happily for me, curiosity prevailed. We compromised on a slow stroll across Whiteknights Park.
Without much preamble I told him what I remembered having seen in the small barn at Gifford Farm on Thanksgiving Day, 1943. I told him about Barbara’s suicide, leaving out the murder and the trial. There was no need to go into all that sensational stuff. “The point is that I was required to make a statement,” I said, letting him assume that it was for the inquest. “It’s on record, so I can check my memory against what I said then. It hasn’t altered. I can picture everything as I described it. What I saw was definitely a violent sexual attack. But quite recently someone has claimed that I gave an inaccurate account of what really took place-that in fact it was passionate lovemaking. There’s some secondary evidence to back up this theory. I won’t say it’s shaken my confidence, because it hasn’t.”
“Why come to me, then?” Ott reasonably asked.
I flapped my hand vaguely. “There’s that old saying about memory playing tricks.”
He looked away, following the flight of some starlings to a mown stretch of grass.near the Museum of Rural Life. “Tell me, did you know the people involved?”
“The girl, better than the man. He was virtually a stranger.”
“But you knew her. Would you say that you liked her enough to identify emotionally with her?”
“Yes, I would.”
“So this experience-whatever it was-must have distressed you?”
“Certainly. I was in tears.”
We walked on for some way while he reflected on this. He resumed. “The brain has various defense mechanisms for coping with anxiety. We can, for example, repress certain stressful or disturbing memories by pushing them down into the unconscious.”
I said, “That’s a way of forgetting, isn’t it? In my case we’re talking about
“True.”
“I mean, could I have been distorting the memory?”
“That’s possible,” said Ott. “The classic example was cited by Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, who remembered a man trying to kidnap him from his pram in the Champs-Ely-sees. His nurse managed to fight off the kidnapper and was scratched across the face. The man fled when a gendarme with a short cloak and white baton arrived. Piaget retained a sharp visual memory of the scene right into adolescence. When he was fifteen, his father received a letter from the nurse, who had long since left the family. She was joining the Salvation Army, and she wanted to confess something. In particular, she wanted to return the watch she’d been given as a reward for saving the child. The story was untrue. She’d given herself the scratches.”
“So Piaget imagined it?”
“His explanation was that he must have heard the story from his parents and projected it into the past as a memory.”
“What I saw definitely happened.”
Ott didn’t challenge my assertion. With the skill of the analyst he found a way of justifying it while raising serious doubts. “You must have heard accounts from other sources. It’s not impossible that you modified your memory to fit someone else’s version of what happened. Research suggests that memory isn’t totally reliable. It’s influenced by what we subsequently think. So a stressful memory might well be modified in retrospect. Do you often picture this scene of rape?”
We’re getting into Freudian theory, I thought. He thinks I’m a sexual kink. “No. It’s something I prefer not to think about.”
“So you suppress it.”
“Listen,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “Aren’t you missing the point? The scene I’m unable to visualize is this other nonviolent one, where they are actually lovers.”
“Quite. And there’s evidence to support it?”
“She was two months’ pregnant. The facts point to the same guy who was with her in the barn.”
He brooded silently. We’d turned and were approaching the Faculty of Arts building again. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered him.
Finally, he stopped and said, “There is a possible explanation. You were emotionally attached to the girl. You idolized her to some extent. It may be that the sight of her giving herself in love to a stranger was what really disturbed you. You couldn’t accept it, so you invented a set of circumstances that left her blameless in your eyes. A rape was more acceptable than her complicity in the act of love.” He studied me keenly with his pale eyes. “Is that a feasible interpretation?”
I pondered it. “?ou’re saying I invented the rape to obliterate something that was even more unthinkable?”
“It’s only a hypothesis.”
“Is there any way I could test it?”
“You’d need the help of an analyst, I think. You see, it’s possible that there are other factors at work.”
“Such as?”
“Your feelings of guilt.”
I felt a crawling sensation across my scalp. Had he known all along about the Donovan case?
He explained, “You, presumably, raised the alarm when you found the couple together. The girl subsequently committed suicide. Perhaps you blame yourself.”
I thanked him and said the discussion had been illuminating.
At one-thirty I went out to my car and drove out of White-knights Park and down Redlands Road to the main campus where the red-brick admin block and science labs were situated.
Having parked in the London Road, I unlocked the boot and took out a leather briefcase containing the Colt.45 that had been used to murder Cliff Morton. I carried it through the cloisters and into the physics lab. No one was inside. At the far end were two prep rooms. I was fortunate. The man I wanted, Danny Leftwich, was in there alone.
He put down his coffee. “Hey, what’s this? Off limits, Dr. Sinclair?”
“Just slumming, Danny.” There was a running battle about the antiquated facilities here, compared with our glass-and-concrete palace up at Whiteknights. Personally, I hankered after a return to the London Road site with its high ceilings and better ventilation, but it wasn’t diplomatic to say so.
Danny offered me a coffee. We’d met often at the bridge table. He was the senior lab technician in the physics department, an intelligent man in his thirties, a polymath without the least desire to earn a living lecturing students. He reckoned to polish off the crosswords in
