‘Thank you,’ said Frieda, taking the mug. ‘I wasn’t thinking that at all. I know lots of doctors who think everything would be fine if it weren’t for the patients.’
‘So, are you going to tell me about your patient?’
Frieda shook her head. ‘I want you to come and see her.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘Now? Where is she?’
‘She’s in a hospital in Lewisham.’
‘Why on earth would I do that?’
Frieda drained her coffee mug. ‘I think you’ll find her philosophically interesting.’
‘Are we allowed to do this?’ asked Berryman.
‘They know me there,’ said Frieda. ‘And, anyway, we’re both doctors. Doctors can go anywhere.’
When Berryman first saw Michelle Doyce, he seemed slightly disappointed. She was sitting reading Hello! magazine with great concentration. She looked utterly normal. He and Frieda pulled over two chairs and sat down. Berryman took his heavy brown suede jacket off and draped it over the back of his chair. Outside the small window there was a grey wall. It was starting to rain heavily from a blank, low sky.
‘Remember me?’ said Frieda.
‘Yes,’ said Michelle. ‘Yes.’
‘This is Andrew. We’d both like to have a chat with you.’
Berryman looked at Frieda with a puzzled expression. She had been almost silent as he had driven her across London, and had said nothing about the case. Now she leaned across to Michelle. ‘Could you tell Andrew about the man who was staying with you?’
Michelle seemed puzzled as well, as if she was being forced to state the obvious. ‘He was just staying with me,’ she said.
‘How did you meet him?’ asked Frieda.
‘Drakes and … and …’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘And … and … boats.’
Frieda looked at Andrew, then asked, ‘And what did you do for him?’
‘I looked after him,’ said Michelle.
‘Because he was in a bit of a state,’ said Frieda.
‘He was,’ said Michelle. ‘He was in a state.’
‘He needed looking after.’
‘I made him tea,’ said Michelle. ‘He needed tidying up. He was messy.’ She paused. ‘Where is he? Where’s he gone?’
‘He had to go away,’ said Frieda. She looked at Andrew. He gave a cough and stood up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been nice meeting you both but I’m afraid …’
‘Hang on.’ Frieda turned to Michelle. ‘Can you excuse us for a moment?’
She took Berryman’s arm and led him a few yards away.
‘What do you make of her?’
He shrugged. ‘Seems lucid enough to me,’ he said. ‘Mildly dissociative. But not worth coming to Lewisham for.’
‘That man she was talking about,’ said Frieda.
‘Yes?’
‘When a social worker called on her, the man was sitting on her sofa. He was naked and he was dead and in an early state of decay. She had been living with him during that time. So?’
Berryman was silent. Then a slow smile spread across his face. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’
‘My first question,’ said Frieda, ‘is that this is so weird, so completely off the wall, that maybe she’s faking. She could have killed the man. She probably did kill him. And now she’s pretending to be crazy.’
‘She’s not faking.’ Berryman’s tone was almost one of admiration. ‘Nobody could fake that.’
‘We still don’t know the identity of the man, whether he was a friend or relative of hers, or whether she even knew him.’
‘Who cares about that?’ Berryman wandered up the ward to where some people were sitting, watching TV. Frieda saw him leaning over a bed. When he came back he was carrying a small brown teddy bear.
‘Did you ask if you could borrow that?’
Berryman shook his head. ‘The woman was asleep. I’ll put it back later.’
He walked over and sat down in front of Michelle. He put the bear on his lap. ‘This is a bear,’ he said. She looked puzzled. ‘Where do you think he lives?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about them.’
‘If you had to guess,’ he said. ‘Do you think he lives in a forest or a desert?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘He lives here.’
‘And if you had to guess, what do you think he eats? Little animals? Fish?’
‘I don’t know. Just what people give him, I suppose.’
‘I think that’s a good guess.’
‘Is he hungry?’
‘I don’t know – what do you think?’
‘He doesn’t look hungry, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.’
‘You’re right, it is.’ He smiled at her in delight. ‘Thanks very much.’
Then he got up and walked along the ward, tossing the bear from one hand to the other.
‘Excellent,’ he said, as he returned to Frieda. ‘What I’ll need to do is pop her into the MRI but I think I can guess what I’ll find. There’ll be lesions of some kind in the inferior temporal cortex and the amygdala and –’
‘Sorry,’ Frieda interrupted. ‘What’s this about?’
Berryman looked around, almost as if he’d forgotten Frieda was there.
‘She’s terrific,’ he announced firmly. ‘We just need to get her into a laboratory.’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘What we need to do is to cure her, then find out who the man is and who killed him.’
Berryman shook his head. ‘It won’t be curable. Steroids may relieve some cranial pressure.’
‘But why is she behaving like that?’ Frieda asked.
‘That’s the interesting bit. Have you heard of Capgras Syndrome?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ he said. ‘I mean, unless you get it. People start believing someone close to them, like their wife or husband, has been replaced by an impostor. Did you ever see that movie Invasion of the Bodysnatchers? Like that. The point is, when we look at someone we know, our brain does two things. One bit recognizes the face and another bit tells us that we have an emotional bond to that person. If that second bit doesn’t work, the brain decides there must be something wrong with the person because we’re not feeling anything for them.’
‘But that’s not what Michelle Doyce is doing.’
‘No, no,’ said Berryman, gesturing towards Michelle as if she were a wonderful exhibit. ‘She’s better. There’s an even rarer syndrome that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes – well, hardly ever – get, in which there’s an emergence of delusional companions. It means they invest objects with life, just as Michelle Doyce did with that teddy bear. But she’s even more interesting than that. You know how toddlers, all toddlers, start out as animists –’
‘Which means?’
‘That they don’t make a distinction between their sister or their doll or even the wind blowing or a stone rolling down a hill. For them a leaf is falling because it wants to fall. As they grow up, the brain develops, and we can only interact with the world by making constant subconscious decisions about what in our environment is like us and is responsible and makes decisions, and what doesn’t. If I twisted your ear, you’d make a screaming sound, and if I scrape my foot on the floor it’ll make a screaming sound. You and I know that there’s a difference. I’d guess that when someone gets Michelle into a lab …’