‘You haven’t actually found the dress, have you?’ asks Torquil.
‘She had plenty of time to get rid of it,’ someone says.
‘This coincidence enabled us to run fingerprints we had on file following an alleged break-in at Dr Lloyd’s house,’ Delilah continues. ‘From that we were able to confirm that Felicity Lloyd’s fingerprints and Shane’s fingerprints are the same. She broke into Joe’s flat. She is Shane.’
‘I’d like the meeting to acknowledge that she is extremely convincing as a man,’ Joe says.
Several puzzled faces turn his way.
‘Duly acknowledged,’ says Downey.
‘This next bit is circumstantial,’ Delilah says, ‘but significant. Felicity Lloyd was admitted to hospital with minor injuries and claiming amnesia on the same night that Bella Barnes was found stabbed to death.’
She stops to take a breath, then hurries on.
‘We had enough to apply for a warrant to search Felicity Lloyd’s house.’ Delilah has the air of someone wanting to get a difficult task over with. ‘She’d cleaned it well, but there was enough DNA left to give us a further match to Shane. And significantly, we found the distinctive hoody that Shane was seen wearing.’
She holds up a photograph of the sweatshirt. ‘That’s it, sir,’ she says. ‘I’m done.’
‘The isolated location of South Georgia presents us with some difficulties.’ Downey takes over again. ‘The nearest police force is on the Falkland Islands, some three to four days distant by boat, and even they aren’t well resourced for apprehending and extraditing violent criminals. My plan is to put in a request to the RAF and the governor of the Falkland Islands for a joint police–RAF operation that arrests Lloyd on South Georgia and flies her home under military escort.’
‘That would be the very worst thing you could do,’ Joe says.
He feels the people around him knuckling down. They are ready for him. They have expected him to argue.
‘The floor’s yours, Dr Grant,’ Downey tells him.
‘Felicity Lloyd is seriously mentally ill,’ Joe begins. ‘She isn’t responsible for her actions and she isn’t fit to stand trial. If you have her arrested by the military, the consequences could be disastrous.’
‘On what are you forming that judgment?’ Downey asks.
Joe can sense Torquil, silent but supportive, by his side. ‘Felicity came to see me in late June last year,’ he begins. ‘She was suffering from fugue states – periods of time when her recollection of events was entirely lost. She was unusually anxious and afraid, torn between the belief that someone was entering her house and rearranging her possessions, and believing she was doing it herself and then wiping it from her memory. She was a very confused and unhappy young woman.’
Faces stare back at him, impassive, but not hostile. One woman makes a note on her pad. They are being polite, possibly for his mother’s sake.
‘She also reported hearing voices, which led both me and Dr Bane to suspect schizophrenia as a possible diagnosis. Under hypnosis I discovered she believed she was being stalked. I think she was right to think that.’
‘Stalked by who?’ someone asks.
‘A man called Freddie, whom she believed to be her husband. Towards the end of her therapy with me, Felicity was starting to open up about Freddie. She told me about serious abuse that she’d suffered at his hands. In any event, there can be no doubt that someone broke into her house shortly before she left and attacked her. If her neighbour hadn’t heard the disturbance and called the police she could have been seriously hurt.’
‘She claimed she’d been mistaken about that,’ someone says.
‘Someone went for her with a knife,’ Joe says.
‘I saw the lass the next morning,’ Delilah adds. ‘For what it’s worth, I do believe she was attacked. And we found a lot of fingerprints in the house that we haven’t been able to identify. Including on a knife that was lying on the kitchen floor.’
‘But even if Dr Lloyd was being stalked by a man who may or may not have been her husband, it doesn’t alter the fact that we can link her to Shane and the two murders,’ Downey says. ‘Or do you doubt that conclusion?’
Joe cannot doubt it. He has tried and failed.
‘I think Felicity is suffering from a serious psychiatric condition,’ he says. ‘I’m furious with myself for not diagnosing it while she was still my patient. If I had, she could have been helped.’
‘In Joe’s defence, the condition he’s talking about is extremely rare and very difficult to spot,’ Torquil interrupts. ‘I doubt anyone would have diagnosed it on the basis of what little evidence he had.’
‘What condition?’ the assistant chief constable asks.
‘Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID,’ Joe says. ‘Previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder.’
Around the table, people are frowning, faces screwed in concentration or puzzlement.
‘And what is it, exactly?’ the assistant chief constable asks.
Joe glances at his supervisor. They have agreed that Torquil will take the technical questions.
‘It’s a rare and complex condition,’ Torquil says. ‘Case studies are few and far between and, to be perfectly candid, a lot of psychiatrists doubt its existence.’
‘It’s believed to be caused by severe trauma,’ Joe steps in. ‘Extreme physical, sexual or emotional abuse, nearly always in early childhood. We know that something very disturbing happened to Felicity when she was three years old, although I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of it yet. What I do know is that her mother was killed and her father sentenced to life imprisonment.’
Joe sees his mother making a note.
‘When she was in her teens, she got a letter from her father that, I think, triggered the onset of the Dissociative Identity Disorder,’ he goes on. ‘She ran away from home and lived on the streets for a while. We learned this from a former social worker. Felicity herself has no memory of it but her time on the streets could explain Shane’s interest in the homeless.’
‘She appears to have lived normally for quite some time,’ Torquil says. ‘She went to university and built a successful career. But Joe and I think something happened a few months before she left Cambridge – probably some reminder of what happened to her as a child – that triggered the onset of DID again.’
‘People who have DID develop an ability to take themselves away from difficult situations,’ Joe says. ‘They step outside the room if you like. The body remains but the person inside goes to another place entirely. It’s a coping mechanism.’
‘And this is key,’ Torquil says. ‘Another personality steps in.’
Faces around the table register surprise, interest, doubt.
‘The new personality, known as an alter, is more able to deal with the difficult situation,’ Joe says. ‘When things are reverting to normal, he or she leaves and the original personality, the host, resumes control. Significantly, the host has no knowledge of what has happened in the interim. It’s disorientating and extremely frightening. I’m now sure that that’s what was happening to Felicity while I was treating her.’