“So have you tried to trace your natural parents?” Oliver asked Jenny as they walked around Battersea Park.
“You’ve remembered I said I’m adopted?” Jenny was surprised at the question.
“Of course, with Mary being adopted, we had talked before about tracing her parents.”
“Has she?”
“Not yet, she feels conflicted by it.” Oliver sat down on a bench in front of the lake with fountains which sprayed water high into the air.
“Tell me about it,” Jenny said sitting with him and leaning into Oliver. He placed an arm around her.
“And?” pressed Oliver.
“And I feel mixed about it too. I know my natural mother died and my father couldn’t cope with me, he had some sort of breakdown and ended up detained in hospital. That much my adopted mum and dad have told me, that’s all I’ve chosen to know so far.”
Oliver knew this to be true. In Dyer’s journals he had recorded how he became severely depressed after Julianne’s death. Dyer was detained under the Mental Health Act for nearly a year. He suspected the College conspired to have his daughter taken from him, along with the police and possibly even journalists who saw him as a murderer. Unable to cope with his loss and his anger at the state who removed his child from him, he had turned his back on the UK and moved to Vietnam.
“If you could know, would you want to?” Oliver pressed again.
“I had planned to ask Dyer when we met.”
Oliver was surprised at this, had Jenny made a link he wondered.
“Ask him what?” he asked.
“Well I have always wondered where the regression has come from, was I exposed to something as a baby, did my mum take drugs, I don’t know, I thought if Dyer had studied people, maybe one of them was my father. So I thought I would ask him if any of his subjects ever had a child removed. I have no memory of my parents, none at all.”
Jenny sighed and kissed Oliver, hugged him tight and then fell quiet. Oliver felt as if his tongue was paralysed and his brain had set in concrete. He would tell her tomorrow he thought, his plan for tonight was a significant step forward in his research and it needed no sideshows.