Authors: David Thomas
Wray looked at me again, and now there was kindness, or more accurately, perhaps, compassion in his eyes.
‘Wait,’ he said, ‘maybe I can help you … just a little.’
17
Dr Tony Wray got up, walked over to his desk and scrabbled through the mess until he had found a pen and a ring-bound notepad. Then he came back and pulled his chair next to mine. He drew a small circle near the top of the page. ‘This is a child,’ he said. ‘A very small child, maybe just a baby.’
He drew arrows pointing at the child. ‘These are the hurts inflicted by its parents. Maybe they are absent and don’t give the child enough love and attention. They don’t respond to its need for food or comfort, for example. Maybe they are actively abusive in some way: sexually, emotionally, physically, you know the kind of thing. Or they are inappropriate and make the child feel responsible for their state, like the mother who says, “Now look what you made me do!” or, “You made me cry.” I mean, we all do this to our children to some degree, no matter how hard we try not to.’
‘“They fuck you up, your mum and dad …”’
‘Exactly. So, anyway, the child assumes that if its parent, the most important, powerful person in its life, is behaving towards it in this way, then it must deserve this bad treatment. And it doesn’t have to be a parent: any adult with a close relationship to the child can have the same effect. The point is, the child assumes blame, guilt and, above all, shame. It knows that it’s bad, or dirty in some way. And, ah … it buries this shame deep inside itself, like so …’
Wray drew a dot inside the circle. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘it’s obviously very important to the child that people should not know about this shame. It has to stay out of sight. So the child creates a shell around itself, like a wall, to keep the shame well hidden.’
This time he drew a black square that enclosed the circle and the dot.
Was he talking about Mariana? He can’t have had time to diagnose her properly yet. But he’d have seen the case notes, maybe talked to the Forensic Medical Examiner. And in a place like this, he’d be used to people who kill.
Wray went on: ‘If the growing child fears that it is not lovable, it may develop incredible charm to compensate. It may be perceived as immensely likable, attractive, even charismatic. But none of the affection that it receives ever changes its deep, inner feeling of self-loathing. The child, or the adult it becomes, simply feels like a fraud. It sincerely believes that it would not be liked or loved if anyone knew its true personality, its actual, hidden self.
‘Now, when a patient goes into therapy, one of the things the therapist will try to do is expose the original shame, to let the light in on it …’
Wray drew lines breaking through the square like shafts of sunlight: ‘You see, once the shame is exposed and admitted to and even shared with other people – a sort of coming-out – then its potency swiftly diminishes. Patients discover, more likely than not, that things aren’t as bad as they feared and people don’t think any the less of them.’
‘I sense a great, big “but” coming on,’ I said.
Wray smiled, ‘Ha! Indeed you do. Let’s go back to the very beginning of the process, to the creation of the shame. Sometimes this occurs as the result of a genuinely terrible event that goes far beyond the day-to-day failings of an ordinary, fallible parent.’
‘Some kind of abuse, you mean?’
‘Yes, or it could be the loss of a parent or family member, particularly in violent circumstances; even witnessing some terrible event. There are lots of ways any of us can become profoundly traumatized at any age, after all. Some theorists even suggest that unresolved traumas can be passed on like, ah … unexploded bombs through the generations, so that we may have to suffer for wrongs committed before we were ever born. In any case, this extreme trauma is buried, just as before. The patient builds a wall, just as before. But this psychic wound is much more dangerous. It may be completely forgotten by the child’s conscious mind, but it sits imprinted in the unconscious like a ticking bomb, just waiting for something to set it off: a trigger, if you will.’
I asked: ‘About this “bomb”: you’re speaking purely in general terms, I assume?’
‘Of course,’ Wray replied. But he would not be telling me any of this if it did not contain the key to understanding someone like Mariana. And now I realized something else. Though he could not possibly say so, he was as keen to learn from me as I was from him. After all, he was going to need information to work with, too.
‘And this trigger, what might it be?’ I asked.
‘Oh, er … anything really that creates an immediate connection: an association of ideas that suddenly brings the hidden trauma from the subconscious back into the conscious mind. Suppose a child has been harmed in a room in which there is a large grandfather clock, ticking away. The sound of a ticking clock might, at a later date, trigger off an explosion of that mental bomb … I mean, I’m being fanciful here. I’m just trying to give you a rough idea.’
‘And that reaction could be violent?’
‘Possibly.’
‘And it’s uncontrollable, right? I mean, the bomb just goes off inside someone’s head and they flip. It’s not something they planned or anything. They’re not even aware of what they’re doing?’
‘That’s right,’ Wray nodded.
I felt a sudden surge of hope. If I could find out what had set Mariana off, and establish a connection to her early life, then I might be able to explain why she’d lashed out at Andy and provide the evidence needed to mitigate her sentence.
‘You said it can take years to get to the bottom of this kind of thing and find out what made someone act a certain way, and why.’
‘Well, a psychiatrist isn’t like a police detective,’ Wray replied. ‘We don’t have any clues to work with apart from the ones in a person’s head. And they can take a while to dig out.’
‘But if you could actually go and investigate someone, like a detective does, that would save a lot of time, wouldn’t it?’
Wray laughed. ‘I really don’t know! I suppose so.’
There was a chance, then. In which case, there was one more thing I needed Wray to tell me: ‘These triggers you were talking about: would they include something somebody said? I mean, suppose you had been abused and I asked you, straight out, “Were you abused as a child?” would that do it?’
Wray shook his head thoughtfully: ‘No … oddly enough, I doubt it. I mean, it’s possible, I suppose. But a direct question such as that would be dealt with by the conscious mind. And the conscious mind has blanked out the truth. Chances are the person would just reply. “No, of course not”, and honestly believe they were telling the truth. So it’s more likely to come from something that bypasses our rational minds: a non-verbal sense experience; sight, sound, smell, taste …’
‘And that sort of thing could unlock memories that might have a violent reaction?’
‘Quite so,’ Wray replied. Then he snapped into a different mood, looked at his watch and said, ‘Well, I have another appointment! It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr Crookham. I hope I’ve been of some help. And if you do find out anything useful …’
‘I’ll let you know.’
The two goons showed me back to the main entrance. Every time we turned a corner I prayed that somehow I’d see Mariana coming the other way. Just to catch a glimpse of her in the distance would be something. But she never appeared. My journey had, on that level, been in vain. I was as frustrated as ever about that. But on the other hand, I did now have a purpose.
The only way Mariana was going to receive a light sentence was if someone found out why she had killed Andy. As far as the police were concerned, their job was done. Dr Wray himself had said it could take years for him to find an answer. The lawyers were just going to work their way through the whole case in their usual, routine way.
So that just left me.
EAST BERLIN: 1984
Hans-Peter Tretow lifted his four-year-old daughter and threw her, shrieking with a blissful mixture of fear and excitement, up into the air. He caught her again, planted a big kiss on her forehead and put her back down on the path outside the family’s apartment building.
‘Me! Me!’ squealed his son, a chubby-cheeked little lad of two, holding out his arms to be picked up just like his sister. Tretow obliged, laughing along with his children. His wife watched the whole scene with an indulgent, maternal smile wreathing a face as bright and pink-flushed as an apple. With her cornflower-blue eyes and golden hair – a gift she’d passed on to her daughter – she had the well-fed, docile, obedient look of the perfect German hausfrau.
Sometimes she was so dumbly, infuriatingly obliging that Tretow felt compelled to give her face a good smack, just to shake her up a little. On these occasions Frau Tretow cried, promised to do better in future, but never complained or threatened to leave her husband. This was one of the many clues that had convinced Tretow that she was a Stasi agent, planted on him to make sure he did not stray too far from an acceptable way of life. Added evidence for his theory came from her remarkable resemblance, in both appearance and character, to Judith, the wife he’d left behind in Frankfurt. It was surely too much of a coincidence that such a
doppelgänger
could possibly be employed at the carpet factory where, thanks to Stasi influence, he had worked as a sales executive since his arrival from the West; too good to be true that she should then be so available and so willing to satisfy him in ways that totally belied her air of homely decency.
He wondered sometimes whether he would meet his Stasi spouse one day in an interrogation room, her mask torn away to reveal the hard, flinty stare of a secret policewoman, her docility replaced by cold-blooded professional savagery as she tortured a confession from him. She must surely have been longing to avenge the slaps, the betrayals and the routine, petty humiliations he had inflicted upon her. Recently he had almost been daring her to break out of her assigned character and show her true feelings towards him: he wanted to see, close up, all the hatred and anger she must feel.
And yet their lives continued in the same old settled routine. So maybe he was mistaken, and had merely imagined the whole thing. He pondered this as he wandered from the apartment block, one of the prefabricated
plattenbau
projects that had sprung up all over Berlin. Tretow and his family were housed in a top-of-the-range model, brand new and built to a Swedish design. It was located barely two hundred metres from the Wall, so close that he could see into West Berlin from his fourth-floor balcony: a constant reminder of what he had left behind. Rumour had it that the block had been erected directly above the site of Hitler’s bunker, where he’d spent the final weeks of his life as the Third Reich disintegrated around him. It saddened Tretow that he could not invite his father to come and stay. He’d have loved to have seen the old bastard’s face when he told him that this was the spot where his beloved Führer met his end.
A Trabant, painted in an excremental shade of brown, awaited Tretow at the kerb. The days when he drove fast, rock-solid, eternally reliable Mercedes were long gone. Now he had to stagger down the road in a wheezing, fume-belching joke of a car, whose body was built of a mix of fibreglass and an edible resin: left in a busy farmyard, it was said, a Trabant could be consumed by passing cattle in a matter of days. Such were the joys of life in the German Democratic Republic.
When he got to his office Tretow would attempt to hawk as many metres as he could of his company’s vile carpets. Their colours seemed calculated to depress or disgust: drab grey, lifeless green, virulent mustard-yellow, a brownish oxblood-red and perhaps the greatest achievement of all, a green-tinged sea shade that managed to make even blue look nauseating. It was Tretow’s daily task to offload them to customers throughout the Soviet bloc, who presumably knew no better, and to bottom-of-the-market furniture stores in the West, whose customers were too cash-strapped to afford anything else. Still, it beat being dead, which would have been the alternative had he stayed in Frankfurt.
When he reached his office, Tretow strode jauntily through the entrance hall, giving a characteristically flirtatious greeting to the receptionist, a peculiarly plain and scrawny woman in late middle age. ‘Good morning, Fräulein Schinckel, you look particularly lovely today, if I may say so,’ he declared.
Fräulein Schinckel did not simper coyly, or feign outrage – her two standard responses to Tretow’s phoney advances. Instead she turned her head, avoiding his eye, saying nothing at all. This was not a good sign.
Tretow’s stomach was already beginning to tighten as he walked down the corridor – fake wooden panelling on one side, the glazed walls of rabbit-hutch offices on the other – towards his place of work. He paused before he turned the door handle and walked in, only to have his worst fears immediately confirmed.
Two men were waiting for him. They wore normal civilian clothes, rather than uniforms, but they were unmistakably Stasi officers nonetheless: Tretow knew the type well enough by now.
‘You will accompany us,’ one of the Stasi said. It was neither an order, nor a polite request, but a simple statement of fact. Tretow did not debate it. Over the previous six years he had regularly been summoned to meetings or interviews with Stasi officers as they mined him for information that was useful to them and damaging to their enemies in the West. This, however, felt different. It smacked of discipline and punishment. He was sweating with fear and nausea as he proceeded back down the corridor, sandwiched between the two men.
Bad things were about to happen to Hans-Peter Tretow, he was certain of it. As he got into the Stasi men’s car – another Trabant, naturally – he wondered whether his wife would be waiting to meet him when they got to the interview room.
18
FRIDAY
Nick had said that I knew nothing whatever about being a detective and of course he was right. But I did know about project management. I knew about starting with a vacant site and an empty sheet of paper and ending up with a finished house. I knew about planning the work; assembling information and materials; proceeding logically towards an end point; calling in the right professionals to help. So why not apply those problem-solving skills to the questions I faced here?