Читать книгу Don’t Trust Me: The best psychological thriller debut you will read in 2018 - Joss Stirling - Страница 16

To: chaslam@wellmindassociates.org

August 8

From: dr.michael.harrison@expeditedmail.co.uk

Subject: Jessica again

Dear Charles,

I apologise for interrupting your long weekend in Edinburgh but Jessica’s behaviour is causing me deep concern. After a relatively quiet few months during which she occupied herself with a range of new hobbies, she appears to have gone wildly off track. The new crisis centres on her claim to have a job as a ‘psychological profiler’. I did wonder, as I told you at the time when she announced she had got this position, whether this was a shot at me and my career? I thought then that she was disguising some office temp job, but I increasingly have begun to suspect that she is inventing the whole thing. This has been worrying me, so I followed her to her place of work the week before we went away and discovered she spent most of her time in a local cafe, drinking coffee and scribbling in one of her many notebooks. The writing in these is still as you will remember: obsessional, full of lists, underlinings and highlightings, writing from various points of view as if she is that person. It’s very hard to decipher but I can see that I don’t come out very well in any of her entries.

I tested her on a number of occasions as to the nature of her work but her attempts to introduce me to her employer all conveniently failed. You warned me that her fantasies are real to her and there will always be a good excuse for her inability to make them concrete. Just in case, I searched for evidence of her boss’s existence and found no trace of the man and just the barest front door of a website that Jessica admitted while we were on holiday that she had constructed herself. That caused a particularly spectacular row between us. Now she claims to have lost said job, and mislaid her employer, marking the start of a second paranoid phase to the job fantasy.

We’ve seen this pattern before over the Eastfields debacle. She barely escaped prosecution then and I’m not clear where this current fantasy is leading her. To give me peace of mind, I would be eternally grateful if you would persuade Jessica to come in for another inpatient stay at your clinic. I know we’ve discussed this before but it’s far more than adult ADHD with her; there is something profoundly out of kilter in her psyche and I think she needs rest and a controlled environment if there’s any hope of her recovering. At least this time there doesn’t appear to be a sexual element to her fantasy, not like when she turned on me and that poor student at Eastfields – you can see that I’m reduced to being grateful for small mercies.

I would also be most appreciative if you would reconsider her medication. As before, I’m happy to pay for this and any other costs of treatment. I will suggest she contacts you when I return from my Berlin conference. I’m due in Washington in two weeks and I really don’t feel safe leaving her on her own again. Her only friend appears to be drawn from the shadier fringes of society, picked up at a bar, no less. Her talent for charming people on first acquaintance hasn’t faded and she’s extremely engaging to begin with, knowing how to deploy her good looks and vulnerable air. She claims her new friend is an undertaker, which again shows how rampant her imagination has become. I’ve met him and he is far more likely to be living on benefits with a pitbull named Spike, but you can’t stop Jessica once she gets inventing.

On a happier note, I send greetings from Miles and Tariq. We are all sorry you were unable to make the symposium this year and just about forgive you for putting your daughter’s wedding first.

Many thanks in advance.

Michael