Mercy

23:22 PDT (07:22 BST)

Susan White lived in a box-sized room in a nearby flat, just a minute’s walk away from the clinic. But she could never sleep comfortably there. It was too close to work. There was too much of a sense of being “on call.”

But that wasn’t the only thing that was disturbing her sleep. There was the thought of that innocent man on death row. She had sent the letter to his lawyers — with Stuart Lloyd’s forged signature. But she hadn’t been able to follow up on it. There were too many people about. She had wanted to phone them and ask what was happening. But she was afraid of someone overhearing. Even now she was afraid of being discovered. She could lose her job over the forgery. She could even be prosecuted for it.

And then there were the original shenanigans with the Dorothy Olsen case. It had been Stuart’s decision to fiddle the dates. But Susan had been a party to it. At minimum, it was gross professional misconduct. And it might well have been a crime in its own right. Even if Stuart was the principal guilty party, she was clearly complicit as she had countersigned the forms. And she had been there when Dorothy was admitted.

Susan looked at her watch. She couldn’t have had more than five hours’ sleep. She was still desperately tired. Her next shift didn’t start until ten. But she knew what would probably happen. She would toss and turn desperately trying to get back to sleep and then would nod off just before her alarm clock was set to go off.

But she was determined to at least try and get some sleep.

She felt her eyelids drooping and felt a wave of tiredness wafting over her. But, as she sank back into the realms of sleep, the face that appeared before her was that of Dorothy Olsen — the tearful face of a vulnerable young girl begging them not to make her wait any longer, pleading with them to put her out of her misery.

23:23 PDT

“I … I don’t understand,” said Alex.

“Edgar always wanted a son and when I gave him a daughter he was bitterly disappointed.”

“Was this because of the son from his first marriage that he lost?”

Her eyes widened.

“You know about that?”

“I spoke to Anita Morgan. She told me the whole thing: the car accident, the decline in their marriage, Edgar’s sterility, your desperation to give him a son.”

“Yes, but do you know why I was so desperate to give him a son?”

“I don’t know … to make him happy I guess.”

“No, Mr. Sedaka it was not to make him happy. It was to stop him being unhappy. Because when Edgar was unhappy he took it out on other people. And the person he took it out on most was Dorothy. Even when she was a baby.”

“What did he do to her?”

“Oh he didn’t hit her or anything like that. He just shunned her. He would hardly talk to her. When she started to walk, he would leave the room if she crawled in. He never picked her up, never held her in his arms.”

“Was that because he knew that she wasn’t his daughter?”

“It was that, plus the fact that she was a girl. I think he would have forgiven me if it had been a boy. I mean, Jimmy wasn’t his son either. And also, he never took out his frustration on Jonathan. But Dorothy bore the brunt of it.”

“Did you try to talk to him about it?”

“You couldn’t talk to him. He would cut you off with a sarcastic comment or if you stood up to him he’d just walk out of the room.”

“Mrs. Olsen, you said before that it wasn’t sexual abuse. But we know that Edgar once held Dorothy in front of a mirror and ripped her clothes off. Jonathan said that it was something to do with her ‘flaunting her sexuality in front of him.’ Do you know what he meant by that?”

“Yes. And it was partly my fault. You see, I think I made her what she became.”

Alex wasn’t sure if he was in the mood for a Freudian analysis, but he had to let her tell it in her own words.

“How?”

“When she was about four and Edgar was being cold toward her, I sat her down and explained to her that he wanted a boy. It was a stupid thing to do but I did it. I couldn’t talk to him about it, so I was reduced to talking to her. I told her that he wanted a boy so that they could do boy things together. And she asked me what are boy things…”

There were tears welling up in Esther Olsen’s eyes. She brushed them aside and carried on.

“And I told her that it’s the way they dress and the things that interest them like cars and electrical things. So she started acting like the way she thought a boy acted. She even got hold of a pair of scissors and cut her hair short so she’d look more like a boy. But the more she did it the angrier it made him.”

“And this was before Jonathan was born?”

“Yes, but it carried on after that. You see, after Jonathan was born, he treated Jonathan well and he was bit less cold toward me — even though he knew that he wasn’t Jonathan’s father — but he was just as cold and unkind to Dorothy. And the more he rejected her, the more she tried to act like a boy. When she reached puberty she continued dressing like a boy — and of course by then she had her own allowance so she could buy clothes for herself.”

“I’d’ve thought that that sort of thing would have made her a target for ridicule from her peers. And that would surely have been a deterrent.”

“You’d’ve thought so but Dorothy had been so toughened up by the harsh treatment Edgar meted out that she was oblivious to anything her classmates could have thrown at her.”

“Oblivious?”

“Well maybe not completely oblivious, but certainly indifferent.”

“So was it just cross-dressing? I mean, Jonathan didn’t say cross-dresser, he just said ‘her sexuality.’ And Clayton Burrow called her a lesbian.”

“It started with cross-dressing, but it pretty soon developed into other things. She started getting pictures of pretty girls and putting them on her walls. Edgar tore them down a couple of times, but she just put them back up. And she kept a scrapbook of pictures of girls in swimsuits. He didn’t know that because she kept it under her bed.”

“Was it just an act or did she really like girls — sexually, I mean?”

“It probably started as an act, but developed into something more than that. I mean, she did experiment with girls. She found girls online who shared her interest and she even used to date them.”

“Did you try to stop her — or did Edgar?”

“He didn’t pay enough attention to her to know what was going on. It was only what she flaunted in his presence that angered him.”

“But didn’t you think of telling her that she was only making it worse by the way she was behaving?”

“Yes, but you see, at least this way, she was getting some reaction from him. When she kept a low profile he just ignored her altogether, shunned her. So for her, the choice wasn’t a good reaction from him or a bad reaction: it was a bad reaction or none at all. She chose a bad reaction as the lesser of two evils.”

“But it must have hurt her. I mean, she wrote a poem that betrays her feelings and shows how much he hurt her.”

“Oh I’m sure it did. She didn’t show it to anyone round her but the only way I could sense it was by the constant hurt look in her eyes.”