Laurie shook her head emphatically. Next to her, Jana bit down on her lip as if stifling a protest. My lips were suddenly dry and I took a quick sip of my Coke before pressing on.
‘But you must have been a little bit cross with her or you wouldn’t have tied her up.’
Again the shake of the head.
‘I wasn’t cross with Sandy. I like Sandy. She’s my friend.’
‘Then why did you tie her up?’
I could feel Ed’s eyes boring into me through the lenses of his glasses, but I kept my own gaze fixed on Laurie.
She shrugged once more.
‘I dunno. I think the other Laurie must have done it.’
Well. That made us all sit up. Dan leaned back in the booth as if to better assess the situation, while Ed’s response was to start combing his fingers through his hair in that nervous fluttering way he had.
‘Honey.’ Jana was looking down right into Laurie’s eyes. ‘What do you mean by the “other Laurie”?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Can you see her, this other Laurie?’ Ed’s voice was now slow and controlled.
Dan broke in, his voice too quick, too loud. Too eager. ‘Or can you hear her? Is she talking to you inside your head?’
Laurie stared at him blankly.
‘No. I can’t hear her in my head. That would be funny.’ She giggled. ‘Just sometimes she does things when I’m not looking.’
Ed caught my eye and I gave the faintest shake of my head. Laurie’s bombshell had caught us all by surprise.
‘Can you explain, sweetie,’ asked Jana, ‘what you mean when you say “when I’m not looking”?’
Laurie was already appearing bored with the conversation. Her ice cream finished, she was bouncing up and down impatiently in her seat.
‘Just sometimes it’s like I go like this.’ Laurie closed her eyes. ‘And then like this.’ She snapped them open again. ‘And something happened and it wasn’t me.’
‘You mean something bad has happened?’
‘Not really bad.’ Laurie frowned. ‘Just a little bit bad. But it wasn’t me.’
After Jana had taken Laurie home, the three of us stayed behind in the diner. Dan was the first to speak.
‘Wow,’ he said, a smile stretching out his long, thin face. ‘That was interesting. What do you think? Dissociation? Fugue? Psychosis?’
He sounded thrilled with the choices on offer, as if they were dishes on a menu, not acute psychiatric disorders he was wishing upon a four-year-old girl.
‘I’m not convinced we can read that much into this,’ said Ed eventually, stirring sugar into his second coffee. ‘Many young kids invent alter egos who act in ways they know they’re not really supposed to. My own kids have done it. Jon – he’s eight now, but when he was younger, he used to talk about himself in the third person a lot like he was a completely separate entity, especially when he was in a morally ambiguous situation. So if he was watching a movie with a bad guy, he’d say “Jon is going to beat that bad guy up.” It was dissociating, but not necessarily in an unhealthy way.’
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘given the context, given her background . . .’
‘I know we did a lot of work at the beginning of this process to contextualise Laurie,’ Ed responded. ‘But we have to be very careful, Anne, that we don’t allow the context to dictate our responses to her. We need to react first and foremost to what she presents to us, rather than our interpretation of how what she presents fits in with what we know about her context. That could be dangerously loaded.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Dan. ‘I mean, the incident in the Wendy house and this talk about “the other Laurie” – they’re actually only one part of the picture.’
Ed nodded.
‘As someone who’s coming fresh to this case, Dan,’ he said, ‘what’s your impression of Laurie? Putting those two factors aside for a minute.’
‘To be honest with you, sir . . .’
‘Enough of the formalities, Dan.’
‘Sure. Sorry. To be honest with you, Ed, I’m kinda amazed how even she is. You know, balanced. She seems very close with her foster mom and she has friends at school so she’s obviously capable of forming emotional bonds with other people, which is really fundamental. And she seemed genuinely sorry about the Wendy house thing, which means she’s capable of remorse. So I’d say those were pretty major tick points for me. In fact, I’d say I was pretty encouraged by what I’ve seen today.’
‘With all respect, Ed,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how we can set those two factors aside. I mean, they’re directly relevant to what we’ve been asked to assess, wouldn’t you say?’