The package arrives by special delivery. It contains a video marked with the name of a private detective agency. Watching this stuff always makes me feel a little grubby, but they pay me well.
Opening shot: semi-detached house with a Vauxhall in the drive. Mr B steps out. Is it really Mr B? I pause the tape for a closer look. It is. "Puts something in bin," I note. "Waves to neighbour. Gets into car. Drives off." We follow down dreary streets: traffic lights; a parade of shops; more traffic lights. He parks the car. Where are we? It's a bleak, 1960s-style shopping centre. He goes into a coffee shop. We stay outside. We're sitting on a bench, I think. The camera zooms in and there's Mr B just visible in the window. He's smoking a cigarette, reading a newspaper. We wait. We must be getting cold. At last he emerges, and we track him, shakily, at waist height, into a betting shop. I stop the tape. That's enough for now. He's not doing himself any favours.
Three years ago a ladder slid from the roof of a builder's van, crashed through the windscreen of Mr B's car and fractured his skull. Now he's claiming compensation. He'll never work again, or drive a car. He can scarcely walk. The damage is irreparable. That's a good six-figure sum. But then the defendant, the builder, hires a private investigator, and here's a different story: Mr B off to the shops with a spring in his step, checking the form, having a flutter... doing a spot of thieving. It raises my spirits to see the shoplifting. This comes towards the end of the tape. He's in a corner shop buying cigarettes and pornography (nice touch). On the way out, without breaking stride, he grabs first a bottle of sherry, then a tin of beans. Excellent. Well done, Mr B.
I know the case well. I've been following Mr B for some time. Our first encounter was on the high dependency unit about a week after the accident. He told me he'd been to Australia for the weekend. Last weekend? Yes, he said, didn't I know about the hospital exchange visit? A group of our patients had swapped beds with their counterparts at a hospital in Sydney. I recorded the confabulation in my notes and we moved on. Then at the end of the session I asked if he'd ever visited Australia. "You haven't been paying attention," he snapped. In the following weeks there were many more flights of fancy. He used to run a club in Liverpool, he told me, and once had a fight with John Lennon. He got married in Las Vegas, he said, but it was Rotherham according to his wife. And the autobiographical embellishments were not the only signs of frontal lobe damage. "That looks nice," he said, helping himself to a sausage from another patient's plate. "Lovely tits," he told the new registrar.
At the case conference I sit alongside the orthopaedic surgeon and the urologist. Mr B has a bladder problem. Opposite, there's the solicitor and Mr B's counsel, tangerine tie reflecting in the deep polish of the table. We've been watching the video. The urologist has nothing to say. The orthopod shrugs, and they all look at me. "My thoughts?" I feel the barrister's gaze and the spirit of Mr B suddenly possesses me. "That's a shitty tie you're wearing," I feel inclined to say, but my frontal lobes intervene. Instead, I offer an explanation of Mr B's behaviour in terms of his brain damage. He fails to distinguish fact, fantasy and confabulation. "Not a clear case of malingering?" the lawyer interjects. "It's deliberate deception, surely." Deliberate, I agree, but the very transparency of the lie confirms his pathology. The man has a severe behavioural disorder. I remind them that, on at least one occasion, his impulsive and egocentric behaviour might have cost him his life. He was attending a brain injury day centre at the time and appeared to be doing well. Although he still habitually bent the truth, his fibs were now more in line with consensus reality. The disinhibition and social indiscretions had also largely subsided. He was gaining control. But, when they occurred, the lapses could be startling. One afternoon, as his transport pulled up at the kerb, he suddenly stepped into the road and held up a hand to stop the traffic. A lorry juddered to a halt and Mr B hobbled round to the driver's cab. "Got a light, mate?" he said. Momentarily disoriented by his slippage into the parallel universe of brain injury, the driver obligingly produced a lighter.
"So," says the barrister, "Mr B's guilt is a sign of his innocence." It's a recognisable syndrome, I conclude: lack of judgement, loss of insight, self-centredness and confabulation. The malingering should be seen as part of a wider constellation of symptoms, the shoplifting episode confirming the derangement of Mr B's personality. The conned orthopod is unimpressed - there are no bones in the brain and he does not care for abstractions - but the barrister has warmed to my theme. The mood lifts. Mr B is sent for and limps in like a war hero.
I call at the off-licence on the way home. I pay for my wine. The woman who wraps it for me has nice breasts but I don't remark on it. I don't steal anything on the way out. I don't stop the traffic to ask for a light. I don't smoke. I don't spin, dissemble or confabulate. Take my word for it - I do.
