There's really nothing Peggy can do to help with the pain — unless she's got a stash of painkillers Stella doesn't know about, but they're rather short on those in the village, at least the kind that would do any good. Stella's alert and lucid at any rate, though she seems to be favoring her left side.
"Mm. There's a sort of machine that uses X-rays to take pictures of the brain, which was one of the first things the doctors tried after Spector woke up — to see if it was possible he had any obvious brain damage. Nothing appeared on the scan, but it was certainly possible the trauma of being shot in itself could have caused the memory loss." She's matter-of-fact, but it's clear even as she says it that she doesn't believe it. The doctors hadn't. Even Doctor Larsen had concluded in the end that Spector was malingering, absent any lasting physical damage to the brain from the blood loss.
"In any case, Spector had to be examined in a clinical setting to determine if he was fit to stand trial — which meant we needed to collect as much evidence as possible to support our case against him. One of the officers on my task force stumbled across a murder committed in London ten years prior, before the time period of Spector's alleged memory loss — a young woman, roughly matching Spector's victim type. The individual serving time for that murder was a man who had previously been in a children's home with Spector at the age of ten."
There's a visible pause. Stella won't talk about Gortnacul House, or the horrors she knows were committed there, and she certainly doesn't believe that anything that happened to Spector as a child excuses his behavior as an adult — but thinking about it still makes her stomach twist, and she has to take a moment before she can continue on.
"We'd had no idea of Spector's whereabouts during the time frame of the murder, but we had some proof he'd been with the victim and the alleged murderer on the night the crime took place. As it turned out, the man in prison, David Alvarez, took the blame in order to repay Spector for something he'd done for him as a child, and the real perpetrator had been Spector all along."
no subject
"Mm. There's a sort of machine that uses X-rays to take pictures of the brain, which was one of the first things the doctors tried after Spector woke up — to see if it was possible he had any obvious brain damage. Nothing appeared on the scan, but it was certainly possible the trauma of being shot in itself could have caused the memory loss." She's matter-of-fact, but it's clear even as she says it that she doesn't believe it. The doctors hadn't. Even Doctor Larsen had concluded in the end that Spector was malingering, absent any lasting physical damage to the brain from the blood loss.
"In any case, Spector had to be examined in a clinical setting to determine if he was fit to stand trial — which meant we needed to collect as much evidence as possible to support our case against him. One of the officers on my task force stumbled across a murder committed in London ten years prior, before the time period of Spector's alleged memory loss — a young woman, roughly matching Spector's victim type. The individual serving time for that murder was a man who had previously been in a children's home with Spector at the age of ten."
There's a visible pause. Stella won't talk about Gortnacul House, or the horrors she knows were committed there, and she certainly doesn't believe that anything that happened to Spector as a child excuses his behavior as an adult — but thinking about it still makes her stomach twist, and she has to take a moment before she can continue on.
"We'd had no idea of Spector's whereabouts during the time frame of the murder, but we had some proof he'd been with the victim and the alleged murderer on the night the crime took place. As it turned out, the man in prison, David Alvarez, took the blame in order to repay Spector for something he'd done for him as a child, and the real perpetrator had been Spector all along."