‘So she’s faking it?’ persisted Perry, easily able to dance to a different rhythm.
‘I don’t think that, either.’
There was a sharp sideways look from Lloyd. The neurologist gave no reaction and Hall presumed the two specialists had fully discussed everything before their arrival. He had to remember the absence of the voice, as well as raise the query from the long ago Cambridge debate. He said, ‘Until this moment I’ve understood everything you’ve said. Now you’re losing me.’
‘What was the first thing that interested her when we met, knowing I was a psychiatrist?’ demanded Mason.
Perry shook his head.
‘Your name,’ recalled Hall.
‘Exactly. And she smiled. A schizophrenic wouldn’t have been interested in my name. Nor have smiled, to fit the circumstances of the introduction. Facial reaction is usually dysfunctional, out of context or keeping with the moment: she frowned in the right places at the right time and she smiled in the right places at the right time.’ Mason seemed surprised his polystyrene container was empty and added to it. ‘Mouthing obscenities is a common manifestation. But being embarrassed by them isn’t. When she told me Jane had called her a good fuck and I asked her if she was, she visibly blushed, discomfited, although she admits to using the word herself. The context of everything she did and said is vitally important. And everything she did and said fitted, as if there was a person none of us was aware of, taking part in the discussion…’
Perry sighed, too heavily, and Mason grinned at him. ‘You think I’m enjoying saying this… even considering possession…!
‘Faked!’ dismissed the solicitor.
‘Then answer me this!’ demanded Mason, coming forward with the challenge that reminded Hall again of his Cambridge tutor when he’d laid a trap for an inattentive student. ‘If you were faking a mental illness and were confronted by two supposed experts…’ He waved his hand towards the neurologist. ‘… Like George and I, what would be absolutely vital for you to know…!’
Once again, uncomfortably, Perry shook his head.
‘Whether we believed you or not,’ supplied Fosdyke, re-entering the conversation and confirming Hall’s guess of a rehearsal. ‘When we came out of the scanner Peter and I said we had sufficient and Hall asked if it was enough for a preliminary finding-’
‘-And Jennifer stopped either of us replying,’ came in Mason. ‘She actually said “Not in front of me: I don’t want her to know” and claimed the voice called her a bitch for not letting us speak, even if we’d intended to.’
‘All part of a damned clever act,’ suggested Perry.
‘I’ve never encountered a schizophrenic that clever that quickly: they’re cunning but not conventionally or logically so,’ insisted Mason. ‘We need to know a lot more about her personal history – a hugely lot more, in fact – but we do know from the newspapers she was a highly intelligent trader in Lomax’s office before they got married. Some papers are calling her a genius. So OK, let’s go along with your disbelief that she’s genuinely ilclass="underline" that she’s faking it. If she’s faking it, why is her only concern to be declared sane! That doesn’t make any sense. Mentally ill she has a defence, a sympathetic sentence. Sane and she’s a calculating murderer looking at life.’
‘Could the voice be her own invention, without her realizing it?’ suggested Perry. ‘Her guilt that Jane died after she’d started the affair: imposing her own punishment upon herself?’
Mason smiled at the lay effort. ‘A very outside possibility. There would have been symptoms before that would have shown up on her medical records, I would have thought.’
‘So would I,’ agreed Fosdyke.
‘What other contradictory features are there?’ intruded Hall.
‘People who are mentally ill don’t argue as forcefully or as logically as she did: they shout and scream but again out of context. She argued logically. Schizophrenics don’t complain of feeling frustrated or impotent at their condition. She does,’ recited Mason. ‘The meeting today was disjointed, on our part…’ Once more he gestured towards the neurologist. ‘… In fact the closest we came to a structured Schneider clinical interview was when George asked her the personal questions…’
‘During which I intentionally miscalculated how old she was, after she told me her date of birth,’ Fosdyke pointed out.
‘She corrected him at once,’ reminded Mason. ‘That wouldn’t have been important to anyone suffering a schizophrenic dysfunction.’
‘That all?’ queried Hall, anxious now to get to his own points.
The psychiatrist shook his head. ‘There are appearance exceptions – there’s even a clinical description for it – but predominantly mentally ill people don’t bother about how they dress: they’re usually a mess, with no attempt at colour co-ordination. Her appearance upset Jennifer: she was embarrassed at looking like she did, in a hospital gown and robe that somebody else would have worn before her and didn’t fit her anyway…’ He paused, needing more coffee. ‘And I’ve got a problem about the uncontrollable limb movements. That’s why I wanted her to walk to the scanner, even before I knew there was going to be sudden arm or leg movements. If she was faking, she would have performed something as we walked down the corridor for the scan. She didn’t…’
‘And I’ve never got a genuinely mentally ill person into a scanner unless they’ve been catatonic or sedated,’ said Fosdyke. ‘They’re invariably terrified of being put into what looks like a claustrophobic tunnel. We actually hesitated, to test her out. She asked us what we were waiting for.’
There was an abrupt, empty silence in the room. The concentration settled upon Hall, who stood up and used the coffee machine as Mason had to become the centre of everyone’s attention. By letting him do so – instead of hurrying condescendingly to fill the vacuum – Perry had deferred to him, establishing the proper solicitor-barrister relationship. Hall hoped it wasn’t an isolated concession: he didn’t enjoy the idea of being manipulated by Perry and Feltham, as he was sure he was being manipulated. Perry hadn’t even bothered to argue against the accusation when confronted with it.
Hall said, ‘I’m still confused but I’d like to get some things clear in my mind. After an initial examination you can’t say she’s suffering a mental illness, nor can you say she’s faking one?’
‘No, I can’t,’ agreed Mason.
‘A person – a very clever person, like Jennifer Lomax – could have learned of schizophrenic symptoms, even know what Schneider guidance is, by reading a psychiatric text book?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Mason.
‘And there’s no pathological reason for how she’s behaving?’
‘None,’ agreed Fosdyke.
‘I haven’t read up on it yet, but I remember a discussion when I was a law student about-’
‘Multiple Personality Disorder?’ anticipated the psychiatrist, smiling once more at a lay question.
‘Wouldn’t that come within the range of schizophrenia?’ agreed Hall, wishing he hadn’t been interrupted.
‘It’s an American favourite,’ said Mason, still smiling although not patronizingly. ‘It goes all the way back to 1957 and the film The Three Faces of Eve. Joanne Woodward won an Oscar playing a woman in whose body three separate personalities existed, a housewife, a good-time girl, a sophisticated woman…’
‘I’m not interested in Hollywood films,’ dismissed Hall, aware of Humphrey Perry’s vague smirk.
‘The American Psychological Association is,’ offered Mason. ‘It has published accepted Papers that the condition affects up to five hundred thousand Americans, practically all women. In nineteen-eighty it was accepted as an official psychiatric diagnosis, even though at that time only two hundred cases recognized as genuine were on record
… in nineteen-ninety a man in Wisconsin was charged with rape for having sexual intercourse with a consenting twenty-six-year old who became a six-year-old child during the act: at the beginning of the trial each of the twenty-one personalities occupying the woman had to be sworn in separately…’