Medea's Curse by Anne Buist Page A

birth. Travis had derided her as a useless wife when his meal wasn’t ready
as he watched the six o’clock news and a pathetic mother when Bella-Kaye interrupted
his viewing by crying. The final straw had been Travis’s insistence that they go
to New Zealand for a rugby match when the baby was three weeks old. Neither recognised
that Amber was depressed.
    ‘Why would I be depressed?’ she wept. ‘Bella-Kaye was all I ever wanted. There was
nothing to be depressed about.’ Amber and Travis had believed that the difficulties
they were having were the same as those of any new parents.
    The death of her baby and the resulting guilt had exacerbated Amber’s depression.
The prison terrified her. Part of her felt she deserved it, but accepting blame didn’t
help her deal with the fear that left her sleepless and without appetite. Natalie
had prescribed antidepressants.
    Amber avoided discussing events leading up to her daughter’s death. Eventually, it
was talking about the trauma of imprisonment that opened her up, encouraged her to
talk about Travis’s abuse—and enabled Natalie to feel sympathy. Before her was a
vulnerable girl, barely more than a child herself, in manner if not age, who was
quite simply not capable of malicious intent.
    Amber had been weak perhaps, but not evil. When she described being taken to court
in the prison van, separated from the other women by a mesh but still in fear of
her life, her terror and bewilderment had been stark.
    The defence called Dianne Fisher, then Natalie’s boss, an expert on perinatal mental
illness.
    ‘In a US cohort convicted of infanticide,’ Dianne told the court, ‘Spinelli concluded
that most had a dissociative psychosis.’ She had gone on to explain, ‘These women’s
minds briefly cut themselves off from reality, an acute stress reaction as a way
of coping with something that, for them, has pushed them beyond their mental capacity.
Depression, sleep deprivation, crying child—they all contribute to overwhelming women
who have an underlying vulnerability.’
    Amber fitted the mould: her memory of the event was categorised by panic, anxiety
and a separation of emotion and thought. In the police interview she had been vague
and initially seemed intellectually impaired. Natalie had thought it a reasonable
defence, compatible with the forensic evidence. But it incensed her that the defence
barrister wouldn’t let her volunteer the information about Travis that had come out
in therapy.
    ‘Absolutely not. The prosecution will annihilate you,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Battered
Wife Syndrome isn’t a recognised psychiatric diagnosis. If it’s not in DSM, we can’t
use it. It’ll only muddy the waters.’
    Natalie had fumed: too junior, too green and idealistic to understand that the complexities
of motive and influence were almost irrelevant. She knew now that a successful trial
was a game well played, not a revelation of the truth. Because of the incident on
the courtroom steps she had never got the chance to raise it anyhow.
    The real issue had been with the judge. A few weeks previously Justice Tanner had
been the subject of criticism after he had accepted a sleepwalking defence in a domestic
violence case. Liam O’Shea had naturally been at pains to use it to advantage the
prosecution case, with repeated references to ‘delivery of justice demanded by the
community’.
    With the judge unprepared to accept dissociation as a mitigating factor and Natalie
barred from giving evidence at all, Amber was left without any real defence and had
crumbled under Liam’s cross-examination.
    Natalie turned it over in her mind again. Maybe not testifying hadn’t made any difference
to Amber’s case. Amber had admitted her guilt, and Liam had been certain she was
wholly responsible. But if the evidence now suggested something different, he had
shown he was prepared to revisit the case.
    Kay Long had said he did it. But what exactly had Travis confessed to? Maybe