'I don't know. Maybe. But, then, I've either fallen in love lots of times, or hardly ever. There's the bit where you can't sleep and you can't eat and you feel sick and breathless, and you don't know if you're very happy or completely wretched. You just want to be with him and the rest of the world can go hang.'
'Yes.'
'I've had that feeling quite a lot of times. But it doesn't last long. Sometimes just a few days; sometimes until the moment after you've had sex. It settles down and then you have to see what you're left with. And usually it's not much. Like ashes after the fire's gone out. You think: God, what was that all about? And sometimes you still care, feel affection, desire. But is that love? The time I was most intensely in love was when I was at university. God, I adored him. But it didn't last.'
'Did he leave you?'
'Yes. I cried for weeks. I thought I'd never get over it.'
'What about Terry? Has the relationship with him been stronger than other ones?'
'Longer, at least, which must count for something, some kind of commitment. Or endurance.' I gave a laugh that didn't sound quite like my normal laugh. 'I mean, I feel I know him really well, now. I know him in a way that I hardly know anyone. All the intimate little things, all the things he hides from other people .. . And the more I know him the more reason there is to leave him, but the harder it gets to do it. If that makes sense?'
'You make it sound as if you're trapped.'
'Lots of people feel trapped in their relationships at times, don't they?'
'So you feel trapped at work and trapped at home?'
'That's a bit dramatic. I've just let things get into a rut.'
'Which you've wanted to escape from?'
'You get into things gradually, and you don't realize quite where you are until it's a crisis and you suddenly see.'
'So you're saying .. . ?'
'This is my crisis.'
The next day when Irene came to my room .. . My room. I would catch myself saying that. As if it was where I was going to spend the rest of my life. As if I wouldn't be able to cope with a world outside where I would have to buy things for myself, make decisions.
She was as composed as always. She smiled and asked me how I'd slept. In the real world, people might sometimes ask you how you were, but they didn't really want to know. You were just meant to answer, 'Fine.' They didn't ask you how you'd slept, how you were eating, how you were feeling, and really want to know the answer. Irene Beddoes wanted to know. She would look at me with her intelligent eyes and wait for me to speak. So I said I'd slept fine, but it wasn't true. That was yet another thing about hospital. I had my own private room, of course, but unless your room was on an island in the middle of the Pacific you were always going to be woken at about two thirty in the morning by some woman screaming. Someone would come and deal with her but I'd be left staring at the dark, thinking about dying and being dead and about that cellar and the voice in my ear.
'Yes, fine,' I said.
'Your file arrived,' she said.
'What file?'
'From your GP. Your basic NHS file.'
'Oh, God,' I said. 'I'd forgotten about that. I suppose it's full of stuff that's going to be taken down and used in evidence against me.'
'Why do you say that?'
'It was just a joke. Now you're going to say that there's no such thing as 'just a joke'.'
'You didn't tell me you'd been treated for depression.'
'Have I?'
She glanced down at her notebook. 'You were prescribed an SSRI in November 1995.'
'What's that?'
'An antidepressant.'
'I don't remember that.'
'Try.'
I thought for a moment. 1995. University. Wreckage.
'That must have been when I split up with Jules. I told you about that yesterday. I got into a terrible state; I thought my heart was broken. Well, I suppose it was. I wasn't getting out of bed in the morning. I was crying all the time. I couldn't seem to stop. Strange how much water there is inside you. So a friend of mine made me go to the college doctor. He prescribed some pills, but I can't even remember taking them.' I caught myself and laughed. 'When I say I can't remember, I don't mean more amnesia. It just never seemed important.'
'Why didn't you mention it to me before?'
'When I was about eight I was given a penknife for my birthday. Unbelievable, but true. About eight minutes later I was trying to carve a bit of wood in the garden and the knife went into my finger.' I held up my left hand. 'Look, there's still quite a nice scar. It bled like anything. I may be imagining it, but when I look at the scar I can feel what it was like when the knife slipped and went in. I didn't mention that either.'
'Abbie, we've been talking about your mood. We've been talking about how you react to stress. But you didn't mention it.'
'Are you saying that I forgot it, the way I can't remember being grabbed by this man? But I did mention it. I told you about it when we talked yesterday.'
'Yes, but you didn't mention that you received medical treatment.'
'Only because I didn't think of it as relevant. I had an affair with someone at university then got depressed when it went wrong. Oh, OK, maybe it's relevant. Everything's relevant, I suppose. Maybe I didn't mention it because it was so sad and I felt so abandoned.'
'Abandoned?'
'Yes. Well, of course. I was in love and he wasn't.'
'I was interested, looking through your files, in how you had reacted to other episodes of stress in your life.'
'If you want to compare me being held prisoner by someone who wanted to kill me with bits of my life where I broke up with a boyfriend or where I had some kind of eczema that took about two years to go away have you reached that bit of the file? well, then, all I can say is that there is no comparison.'
'There is one thing they all have in common, which is that they happen to you. And I look for patterns. This has become an event in your life. Like everything that happens in your life it will change you in some way. I hope I can help you to make sure it doesn't affect you in a bad way.'
'But there are things that happen in life that are just bad and that is one of them. It's always going to be bad. I can't turn it to good. The only thing I can think of that's really important is for this incredibly dangerous man to be found and locked away where he can never do this again to anyone else.' I looked out of the window. Over the buildings I could see a clear blue sky. I couldn't feel the cold outside but somehow I could see it. Even looking at it made this hateful room unbearably stuffy. 'There's another thing.'
'What?' said Irene.
'I need to leave here. I really do, or I'll never be able to. I need to be in ordinary life again. I suppose I can't just get up and put on these borrowed clothes though, come to think of it, I don't know why not but I'm going to track down Dr. Burns, or leave a message with his secretary, and tell him that I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll leave a forwarding address with Jack Cross. And if you still feel that it's worth talking to me, then I can come and meet you at any place you suggest. But I can't stay here any longer.'
Irene Beddoes always reacted as if it was always just what she had been expecting me to say, and that she quite understood.
'That may be right,' she said. 'Could you do us one favour? As we've talked about before, you're being seen by all sorts of different people and departments. I'm sorry about all the delays but as you can imagine it's a logistical nightmare getting everybody together at the same time to agree on a decision. I've just heard that there's going to be a meeting tomorrow morning with absolutely everybody. We're going to talk about where we go from here. One of the obvious issues is about you leaving.'
'Can I come?'
