Mist Walker. Barbara Fradkin
all his assignments in his therapy binder, and he attempts to do each one to the best of his ability. Which is unlike some of my patients, who’ve been avoiding social challenges and making excuses for themselves for so many years, that the habits are hard to break. Matt always tries. But within the group, he says very little. We always have a few who monopolize—”
“Like Janice Tanner?” Mike interjected.
“Well, yes, actually—” She managed before Emmerson Jones stopped her.
“Mrs. Black, please confine your remarks to Mr. Fraser.”
Leslie nodded, but not before Sharon caught the flash of anger in her eyes. How she hates this forced subjugation, Sharon thought.
“So Matt is a private person?” Mike encouraged, ignoring Emmerson-Jones.
“Private, but also very shy. Some private people talk endlessly about everyone else’s problems but their own. They try to take over my job, in fact. But Matt simply listened. He was intelligent, I could see that, and quite intuitive, but he kept his opinions to himself.”
“So he seemed rational, right until the end? No hint of strange obsessions or delusions?”
Here Leslie wavered. “Well, in truth… Dr. Emmerson Jones just told me what you said about Matt’s apartment. I had no idea. If I’d known, I would have checked into his mental state further. But he always presented as organized, neat and clean. He was OCD, of course—sorry, that’s obsessive-compulsive—but lots of people are. He looked poor, and his clothing sense was horrendous, although I think the baggy sweat clothes were part of his protective cover. But he was always able to keep track of group activities and follow the conversation.” Her voice faded, and she gazed into space, chewing her lip as if remembering some worrisome point. Sharon itched to pursue it, but Mike had the interview so well choreographed she didn’t dare disrupt it.
In the next instant Mike, as if reading her mind, picked up the thread himself. “But now, in retrospect, there were some signs?”
“Some of his comments were odd. One of the other patients has paranoid tendencies and was talking about being followed in the street. Matt asked him if he’d ever done anything bad, and then he said sometimes it’s not our imagination. Sometimes people do follow us, and it can be for things that happened long ago, that nobody else even remembers.”
“Did he elaborate, or did you ask if he was talking about himself?”
She shook her head. “His comment was off topic. Worse than that, it was feeding this individual’s anxieties. The fear that everyone is looking at you and thinking bad things about you is a core component of social phobias.”
“Was it usual for Fraser to say things like that?”
Leslie glanced across at her supervisor, and again Sharon had the feeling she wanted to say much more. “Matt tended to be more cynical than most, but given what he’s been through, that’s hardly surprising.”
“Did the others know about his past?”
“He never spoke of it. Of course, Dr. Emmerson-Jones and I knew, and—”
“It was not relevant to his treatment,” Emmerson-Jones cut in. “He needed to get out into the world again. That takes a well-planned series of small steps, not a whole lot of talking about the past.”
“Still, I imagine it was hard for him to just turn the memories off,” Mike said in an affable tone beneath which Sharon could recognize the sarcasm. “Did he talk about it indirectly? Allude to any strange worries or thoughts?”
Leslie was shaking her head. “In retrospect, I can see he’s been getting more agitated in recent weeks, as if he couldn’t get his mind off things. The last session, he kept scribbling furiously in his binder, he shifted in his chair and twirled his pen, he just couldn’t seem to relax. I was surprised when he missed the group last week, because he’s usually so conscientious.”
“Looking back at what you know about him now and what he revealed in discussions, have you got any idea if he felt he was being followed, and by whom?”
Emmerson-Jones silenced Leslie with an abrupt slice of his hand. “This is clearly beyond the issue of public safety, Inspector. You’re trying to pry information out of us to further your investigation.”
“They’re one and the same,” Mike replied, with an edge creeping into his voice. “Somebody might have been stalking him and waiting for the chance to settle accounts. In which case he may be in danger. Or dead.”
Emmerson-Jones and Leslie Black exchanged looks, and Sharon saw a sudden uncertainty in his. He doesn’t know what to do, she thought, because he doesn’t know his patient from Adam, beyond the anxiety rating scales Fraser had probably filled in during the initial consult. In clinical matters, Emmerson-Jones was not one to venture out on a limb. If he didn’t have his numbers and his data to support his opinion, he said nothing. Yet here, to say nothing might land him in serious professional trouble. In that glance to Leslie Black, he was asking her to go out on the limb for him. Clever little prick, Sharon thought with gritted teeth.
But if Leslie was aware of the dual purpose she served, she seemed unfazed. Sharon sensed she loved limbs, perhaps because she knew the clearest and farthest views could be had from them.
“Yes,” she said without a moment’s pause. “He did believe he was being followed, and he did say that some people would stop at nothing, even after years, and so he—”
Belatedly, she checked herself with a look of dismay, but Mike was not to be denied.
“He what?”
Leslie shifted in her chair, clearly reluctant. “Well, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. Out of context, it sounds ominous, but I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.”
Mike waited patiently, his pen poised.
As the silence ticked on, Leslie obliged. “He said he might have to stop them first.”
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