TWO

Ursula Kelly’s office was on the second floor of an old building on Castle Hill Road. A back room, it was graced with a superb view over the formal gardens and the river to the eyesore of the East End Estate and the vale beyond. Not that you could see much today but a uniform shroud of white through which the occasional clump of trees, redbrick street or telegraph pole poked its head.

The waiting room was cramped and chilly, and none of the magazines were to Banks’s taste. It wasn’t an interview he was looking forward to. He had a great professional resistance to questioning doctors and psychiatrists during a case; much as they were obliged and bound by law, they had never, in his experience, proved useful sources of information. The only one he really trusted was Jenny Fuller, who had helped him out once or twice. As he looked out the window at the snow, he wondered what Jenny would make of Gary Hartley and the whole situation. Pity she was away.

After about ten minutes, Dr Ursula Kelly admitted him to her inner sanctum. She was a severe-looking woman in her early fifties, with grey hair swept back tight and held firm in a bun. The lines of what might once have been a beautiful if harsh face were softened only by the plumpness of middle age. Her eyes, though guarded, couldn’t help but twinkle with curiosity and irony. Apart from a few bookcases housing texts and journals, and the desk and couch in the corner, the consulting room was surprisingly bare. Ursula Kelly sat behind the desk with her back to the picture window, and Banks placed himself in front of her. She was wearing a fawn cardigan over her cream blouse, no white coat in evidence.

‘What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?’ she asked, tapping the eraser of a yellow HB pencil on a sheaf of papers in front of her. She spoke with a faint foreign accent. Austrian, German, Swiss? Banks couldn’t quite place it.

‘I’m sure you know why I’m here,’ he said. ‘My detective sergeant dropped by to see you the other day. Caroline Hartley.’

‘What about her?’

Banks sighed. It was going to be just as hard as he had expected. Question – answer, question – answer.

‘I just wondered if you might be able to tell me a little more than you told him. How long had she been a patient of yours?’

‘I had been seeing Caroline for just over three years.’

‘Is that a long time?’

Ursula Kelly pursed her lips before answering. ‘It depends. Some people have been coming for ten years or more. I wouldn’t call it long, no.’

‘What was wrong with her?’

The doctor dropped the pencil and leaned back in her chair. She eyed Banks for a long time before answering. ‘Let’s get this clear,’ she said finally. ‘I’m not a medical doctor, I’m an analyst, primarily using Jungian methods, if that means anything to you.’

‘I’ve heard of Jung.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Good. Well, without going into all the ins and outs of it, people don’t have to be ill to start seeing me. In the sense that you mean, there was nothing wrong with Caroline Hartley.’

‘So why did she come? And pay? I’m assuming your services aren’t free.’

Dr Kelly smiled. ‘Are yours? She came because she was unhappy and she felt her unhappiness was preventing her from living fully. That is why people come to me.’

‘And you make them happy?’

She laughed. ‘Would that it were as easy as that. I do very little, actually, but listen. If the patient makes the connections, they cut so much deeper. The people who consult me generally feel that they are living empty lives, living illusions, if you like. They are aware of what potential they have; they know that life should mean more than it does to them; they know that they are capable of achieving, of feeling more. But they are emotionally numb. So they come for analysis. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t prescribe drugs. I don’t treat schizophrenics or psychotics. I treat people you would perceive as perfectly normal, on the outside.’

‘And inside?’

‘Ah! Aren’t we all a mass of contradictions inside? Our parents, whether they mean to or not, bequeath us a lot we’d be better off without.’

Banks thought of Gary Hartley and the terrible struggles he had to live with. He also thought of the Philip Larkin poem that Veronica Shildon had quoted.

‘Can you tell me anything at all about Caroline Hartley’s problems?’ he asked. ‘Anything that might help solve her murder?’

‘I understand your concern,’ Ursula Kelly said, ‘and believe me, I sympathize with your task, but there is nothing I can tell you.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Take it whichever way you wish. But don’t think I’m trying to impede your investigation. The things Caroline and I worked on were childhood traumas, often nebulous in the extreme. They could have nothing to do with her death, I assure you. How could the way a child felt about… say… a lost doll result in her murder twenty years later?’

‘Don’t you think I’d be the best judge of that, as one professional to another?’

‘There is nothing I can tell you. It was her feelings I dealt with. We tried to uncover why she felt the way she did about certain things, what the roots of her fears and insecurities were.’

‘And what were they?’

She smiled. ‘Even in ten years, Chief Inspector, we might not have uncovered them all. I can see by the way you’re fidgeting you need a cigarette. Please smoke, if you wish. I don’t, but it doesn’t bother me. Many of my patients feel the need for infantile oral gratification.’

Banks ignored the barb and lit up. ‘I don’t suppose I need to remind you,’ he said, ‘that the rule of privilege doesn’t apply to doctor-patient relationships as it does to those between lawyer and client?’

‘It is not a matter of reminding me. I never even thought about it.’

‘Well, it doesn’t. You are, by law, obliged to disclose any information you acquired while practising your profession. If necessary, I could get a court order to make you hand over your files.’

‘Pah! Do it, then. There is nothing in my files that would interest you very much.’ She tapped her head. ‘It is all in here. Look, the women had problems. They came to me. Neither of them hurt anyone. They are not criminals, and they do not have any dangerous psychological disorders. Isn’t that what you want to know?’

Banks sighed. ‘Okay. Can you at least tell me what kind of progress Caroline was making? Was she happy lately? Was anything bothering her?’

‘As far as I could tell, she seemed fine. Certainly she wasn’t worried about anything. In fact, we’d come to…

‘Yes?’

‘Let’s just say that she’d recently worked through a particularly difficult trauma. They occur from time to time in analysis and they can be painful.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me about it?’

‘She had confronted one of her demons and won. And people are usually happy when they overcome a major stumbling block, at least for a while.’

‘Did she ever talk about her brother, Gary?’

‘It’s not unusual for patients to talk about their families.’

‘What did she have to say about him?’

‘Nothing of interest to you.’

‘She treated him very badly. Did she feel no guilt?’

‘We all feel guilt, Chief Inspector. Do you not think so?’

‘Perhaps he should have been your patient. He certainly seems to have his problems, thanks to his sister.’

‘I don’t choose my patients. They choose me.’

‘Veronica Shildon was a patient of yours, too, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes. But I can say even less about her. She’s still alive.’

Judging by how little Ursula Kelly had said about Caroline, Banks knew not to expect very much.

‘Was Veronica particularly upset about anything that last session?’

She shook her head. ‘Your sergeant asked me that, and the answer is the same. No. It was a perfectly normal session as far as I was concerned.’