Jack tried to make himself focus. He was shivering, he realised, even though the interview room was warm.
‘If you know that she’s dead, then you know that Miriam couldn’t have told me about this Robert Walker guy.’
‘Did it make you angry?’ Jansen asked.
‘Did what make me angry?’
‘That she left the baby in his cot all alone.’
‘Angry with Miriam?’
‘Angry with Miriam. Angry with Walker.’
‘No. No. I never blamed Miriam. It was my fault.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Jack shook his head. He was screwing this up. He had to pull himself together before it was too late.
Jansen repeated himself, his voice steely. ‘What do you mean by that, Jack?’
‘I... look, I was twenty. So was she. We were in uni. Miriam got pregnant when we’d been dating for three months and she wanted to keep the baby. We barely knew each other.’
‘So you left her?’
‘No, I didn’t leave her.’
There was silence. For once Jansen kept his mouth shut. Jack was still shivering. It really wasn’t cold in the room. He must be in shock. He took a deep breath. Hehadto get his shit together.
‘Miriam was my first girlfriend. I loved her, okay? We were crazy about each other. We both came from messy backgrounds, and then we found each other and that was it. I was sure that I’d found everything that I’d been missing in her. I think she felt the same way. But then she got pregnant. I thought we were way too young to have a baby, but there was no way she was going to have an abortion or give the baby up, so we told each other we could make it work. We were both in college. She was on a scholarship, and I just had my HECS loan and a part-time job. I mean, I was already living on fumes.’
‘You said it was your fault. What did you mean by that?’ Jansen asked.
‘Look, we had no support,’ Jack said. ‘My parents are... not available. Miriam’s parents died in a car accident when she was just a kid. We only had each other. Then we had Cam and then we were back in the flat together and everything started to go wrong. She couldn’t sleep, at all. She worried about Cam all the time, and he was crying a lot, and then she was crying a lot. I guess she had postnatal depression, but I didn’t know anything about that at the time. Which probably seems pretty stupid to you.’
Lucy Phillips nodded in agreement. Jack couldn’t even argue with that judgement. He’d been twenty years old, but he hadn’t been an idiot. How could he have moved through the world, even at twenty, and not known about something like postnatal depression? How could you not figure out that, when your girlfriend couldn’t stop crying, there might be something more serious going on than a touch of the blues?
‘I tried talking to her. I tried cheering her up, you know, bringing her stuff. Flowers or chocolate or whatever. Stupid shit like that.’
‘It didn’t work?’
Jack shook his head. He was slumped now, in his chair. ‘We had no money. I’d stopped going to college. I was working at a café and a service station and I took on more shifts. They offered me a manager job at the service station, and I took it. I told myself it was because we needed the money, but really I just didn’t want to go home.’
‘You gave up on her, so she went somewhere else for help.’
It took Jack a moment to process what Jansen had said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m saying that Miriam went for help to the college. She went to the health centre, and she saw a counsellor.’
‘Did she?’ Jack asked.
‘She did. But I think you know that, Jack. Because Robert Walker was a counsellor, and Miriam went to see him, three days before she died.’
For Jack, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. He opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out.
‘Miriam went to see Robert Walker three days before she died,’ Jansen said again, gentle, insistent. ‘She had postnatal depression, she was suicidal, you couldn’t help her, so she went to an expert. She went to Robert Walker because she desperately needed help, but he failed her too, didn’t he, Jack? Three days after she saw him, she was dead. And that fact has been festering inside you all of these years. All of these years while you’ve been raising your child on your own. A college dropout. A dead-end job. No love life. No fun. No future. All Robert Walker’s fault. If he’d been a better counsellor, if he’d helped Miriam, she’d be alive today, right? You’d have figured out your problems, and you’d be happy now.’
