She hesitated and, horrified, I shrank back away from her.
‘I told a lie in my statement to the GMC,’ she confessed. ‘When I woke up next to Jonathan in the hotel room, I realised then who he was and I did remember treating him in June. Partly because of the note he left me on the car. No, Rob, Wait!’ She raised her voice as I exclaimed aloud in disbelief. ‘At Pacha, I was blind drunk. I wouldn’t have known my own name. I didn’t sleep with Jonathan because I knew him,’ she changed position again to look at me, ‘I did it because I was pissed. I swear to you, I DID NOT KNOW who he was when I went to bed with him.’ She paused and took a breath, before continuing. ‘But how could I tell the truth about realising who he was when I woke up? It would have muddied the waters. The second I admitted to it, they’d have concluded that everything Jonathan said in his version of events is the truth, and it isn’t. I did not message him on his phone – no doctor would ever be that stupid. I categorically did not have a three-month relationship with him. I didn’t plan to be in Ibiza at the same time as him – it was just coincidence – and that whole sexual fantasy thing he said I constructed about us being “strangers” was utter fabrication. I need everything to stay completely black and white. You can see that, surely?’
I exhaled and leant my head back on the rest behind me. So she hadn’t been entirely truthful with me.
‘Everything else I have told you and the GMC is one hundred per cent true. It was a tiny lie, Rob. It doesn’t change the fundamental elements of what actually happened, but it does illustrate why I also need David to cover for me now, and why I need you to say that you said hi to me when you got back from your parents and that I was reading in bed when you came home with the food. As far as anyone else is concerned, there has to be no mention of sleeping pills. I’ve just agreed that with David too.’ She paused. ‘You have to decide what you’re going to say when the police come to the door – if you’re going to support me like David is – because, while I know you think this is crazy, they are going to come. I can promise you that.’
* * *
I lay in bed that night in the spare room, the door open, listening to the sound of my daughters breathing in their bedrooms. Alex had taken the last sleeping pill. I was the only one awake.
We had ended up staying at Mum and Dad’s for the day. Neither of us wanted to come home, plus Mum had taken one look at Alex and insisted on settling her on the sofa with a blanket and a cup of tea. All of Al’s earlier resolutions seemed to have crumbled already and she meekly did as she was told. The girls ran around happily gathering fallen leaves from the garden to make an autumn picture, and I constructed a smouldery bonfire that Dad just about managed to get going. We sat down to bangers and mash, followed by the promised apple pie, then drove the long way home to avoid the girls seeing anything disturbing in the woods and asking questions.
I waited all evening for the knock that Alex said we should expect, but it never came. In the end it was less stressful just to go to bed. I stared up at the ceiling and wondered if they were all still up the road, scurrying around under floodlights, gathering information. Perhaps this really was nothing to do with Jonathan after all. Alex had become pretty obsessive. Wouldn’t this just transpire to be nothing to do with us at all, bar being distressingly close to our house?
But she had seemed so sure that she recognised the car.
If only I had gone and checked on Alex, like I was going to when I came back with the curry and panicked that the BMW was missing
Suppose she was right, and questions were going to be asked, what was I going to say? Was I going to lie for my wife? Obviously, I couldn’t believe for a second that she would hurt someone. Not Alex. She is committed to preserving life, not taking it. You know a person when you’ve been married as long as we have. You understand what they could and couldn’t do; what the bare bones of that other person are when the daily stresses and strains have been stripped away. Yes, Day was single-handedly destroying her life with his lies, and campaigns like that can change people, and yes, she’d said she could kill him, but saying it is not the same as doing it. Not for a moment.
Feeling panicked, I got out my phone and scanned the news headlines, but there was nothing. I wanted very badly to do a search through Jonathan’s social media: check the last time he had posted, but I was too scared, in case I might be asked to explain why I’d looked through the accounts the night after he died, in addition to why I had visited his school earlier that same day. If Alex was right and it was Jonathan lying in that tent, I was going to have questions of my own to answer. Instead, I did a search on Alex’s name, and a new Saturday paper ‘comment’ piece popped up.
You must make sure that your conduct justifies your patient’s trust in you and the public’s trust in the profession. This is one of the fundamental tenets of medical practice. Yes of course there are rare cases where a doctor falls in love with a patient; it’s mutual, consensual – they marry, have a family and contribute to society. Dr Alex Inglis herself demonstrated this is possible when she married Robert Inglis eight years ago – still her husband and the first patient she admitted to having a relationship with. But the fresh allegations Dr Inglis now faces are very different. Dr Inglis maintains she was unaware that a man with whom she had sexual relations in Ibiza on a ‘girls’ weekend’ was in fact seventeen and a current patient of hers. The teenager in question, however, paints a rather different picture, alleging that they had an affair conducted over a three-month period beginning after Dr Inglis treated him for an injury to his leg. He admits he initiated their relationship and that it was consensual. He’s young, but above the age of consent, nothing illegal has happened – in spite of the Weinstein allegations stunning both sides of the Atlantic, sexual harassment remains legal, if not acceptable – so why has this small-town case attracted quite so much attention given the size of the Hollywood fish currently on the slab?
It’s rare for a female doctor to face allegations of this nature, that’s true – but this isn’t just because Dr Inglis is a woman and a mother. We’ve moved beyond that argument – a male doctor would be quite rightly facing the same backlash for having a relationship with a female seventeen-year-old patient. It is because the doctor and patient relationship can only be based on trust. By definition, one party is vulnerable and requiring care. No doubt Dr Inglis does not regard herself as exploitative, but the fact remains that power in the doctor-patient relationship is always inherently unequal and abuse of this position of trust is always unethical. It’s well known that doctors are more likely to cross boundaries while facing problems in their personal life, and Dr Inglis has admitted to experiencing marital difficulties immediately prior to when the alleged affair began. Yes, doctors are human – but it’s simply unacceptable to use your patient roster as some kind of dating service, as demonstrated by the warning she received after her relationship with her now husband came to light.
And while the judgement of some doctors may well become impaired under such circumstances, there is of course also another type of doctor altogether who commits sexual abuse of patients simply because they are rapacious.
My god.
I realised immediately she was right. If Jonathan was dead, Alex was unquestionably going to need an alibi from David, and from me, when they came looking for her.
* * *