Seymour Tapes Read online

  How do you know she’s lying?

  Because I knew Alex. Her version of events – it just doesn’t make sense. Alex wouldn’t have done anything like that – with either her or the Somali woman. I know because he told me everything about both situations. He told me when he didn’t need to. Simply because the truth was weighing too heavily on him. I don’t see why he should have gone to the trouble of lying to me when he could have kept quiet about the whole thing.

  Can you tell me, then, as best you can remember, Alex’s version of events? I understand, for instance, that worries about Mrs Madoowbe might have contributed to his decision to go to Cyclops Surveillance.

  It’s true he was worried about work, but I don’t think he thought of putting cameras into the surgery until a good while after he’d started taping us. At least, that was what he told me and, as I say, I can’t think why he would lie about it at that stage when he was making a clean breast.

  Why was he worried about work?

  His vulnerability to allegations of one sort or another.

  And this all came to a head with Mrs Madoowbe.

  It’s a permanent risk for doctors – we live in sensitive times. They can be accused of sexual abuse, paedophilia, homophobia, racism, you name it. Doctors are in a powerful position, and some patients resent that – or that GPs are not always able to make them better or are unwilling to prescribe the drugs they want so they can dope themselves.

  Are you saying Mrs Madoowbe –

  No, no. Not at all. As far as I can make out she was – is – a perfectly nice, somewhat frightened woman, who has made no allegations against my husband.

  No one has succeeded in locating her yet.

  I believe the reason he put cameras into the surgery was largely as a result of what Pamela Geale was threatening him with.

  Pamela Geale, of course, alleged that she herself had a full-blown, if brief, affair with your husband.

  Have you met her?

  I approached her about co-operating with the book. She declined. She’s writing her own, of course, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

  What did you make of her?

  I didn’t find her especially likeable.

  Did you think she was attractive?

  Not particularly.

  Quite. If he was going to stray, I can’t imagine him risking everything for Pamela Geale.

  What people find attractive in other people is mysterious. And what they will risk is incomprehensible. Anyway, even in your own version of events…

  Yes – he kissed her. No big deal, really. He told me about it the same night. As I say, Alex always tried to be honest.

  This was the night in March last year. The surgery’s twentieth-anniversary celebration.

  It wasn’t much of a celebration. Just a drink at the pub round the corner for everyone who worked at the practice. Anyway, Pamela. She’d been flirting with Alex ever since she started work at the surgery. His brother Toby had often joked about it with me. And Alex told me several times, long before all this blew up. Anyway, he came home that night and told me he’d done something stupid – that he’d got drunk and kissed her, and he didn’t know why he’d done it and he was very, very sorry.

  How did you react?

  I was furious. I hit the roof. I slapped his face.

  So it was a big deal.

  It wasn’t, really. I was just too… too ungenerous. For the first time in our marriage he’d committed some trivial infraction and he’d told me about it immediately. I reacted like a virago. Maybe that was why he got so secretive afterwards. Decided he couldn’t afford to be honest with me. Maybe if I had…

  [Samantha Seymour begins crying. The tape is switched off. Recording resumes several minutes later.]

  Don’t be too hard on yourself.

  Oh, Alex. What did I do to you?

  Do you want to stop?

  No. I need to talk this through. Ask me another question.

  All right. What was the aftermath of the whole thing?

  The kiss? Well, I didn’t speak to him for a few days. And I asked him to sack Pamela Geale. But he refused. He said it wasn’t her fault – or, at least, it was as much his as hers. Typically fair-minded. I said he was putting his principles before me. But he wouldn’t budge.

  He did sack her in the end, though, didn’t he? A week or so later.

  He didn’t have any choice.

  Because of pressure from you?

  No. It was her. She started to get sloppy. Over-familiar. Like there was something between them when there wasn’t, and he’d made that clear to her on several occasions.

  How did this sloppiness manifest itself ?

  According to Alex, she continued to flirt with him. She turned up late in the mornings, or left early in the evenings. She pestered him to go out for a drink, and when he refused, she turned nasty. Nothing specific – just in her tone and general demeanour. Alex didn’t want to sack her, even then. But the thing happened with the Somali woman.

  Incidentally, Miss Geale said that your husband was racially prejudiced.

  Yes, he was. That’s true.

  Are you saying –

  He was mainly prejudiced against white people. The ‘trailer trash’, as he had started to call them. Said they were stupid, incapable of taking responsibility for themselves. Overfed, overweight, docile, dim. He had a lot more respect for East Africans, particularly the Somalis. Some held down two, three jobs to keep going. They were refugees, displaced people with nothing, but they were proud. Also, they held themselves together through the Church, which I think he identified with, being… what shall we say?… borderline religious himself. He was not a racist. I defy anyone to produce a shred of evidence to back up Pamela Geale’s allegations. Any of them.

  Can you reiterate them?

  I don’t want to. The point is that they were one of the things that sent him down this road.

  They weren’t made public until after his death.

  But he feared them. Pamela Geale had threatened to ‘expose’ him over Mrs Madoowbe – though she never dared say anything in public while Alex was alive. Apart from his professional standing, he must have thought I’d go ballistic – because of the way I’d reacted to that kiss.

  Author’s Note: As is a matter of record Pamela Geale alleged, in several newspapers in the aftermath of Dr Seymour’s death, that apart from conducting an affair with herself, Dr Seymour behaved with sexual impropriety towards Mrs Madoowbe at his surgery on 2 April of that year. She claimed that she accidentally witnessed this incident, which resulted in her sacking by Dr Seymour on the same day and the immediate termination of their affair.

  Mrs Madoowbe made no such allegations at the time, and at the time of this book going to press, she could not be found. However, the surveillance tape of Dr Seymour and Mrs Madoowbe that he made later in an attempt to protect himself from such allegations seems to back his claim that no impropriety took place. It is described on pages 129–33, below.

  So what, to the best of your knowledge, happened on the second of April of last year?

  I know exactly what happened because he told me.

  What was his version of the events of that day?

  It’s hard for me to imagine it as merely a version of events. It’s what happened. I’m sure he wouldn’t have lied to me.

  With respect… he kept the truth from you on a number of occasions subsequently.

  That was different. It was because he didn’t think I’d understand. And he was right. Also, I’d given him such a hard time over that stupid kiss. It shook his trust in me. Anyway, I think if he’d been guilty of having sex with Pamela Geale – or, for that matter, ‘interfering’ with the Somali woman – I’d have known it without him saying a word. Also, it would have been utterly out of character.

  But people do act out of character – he spied on you all.

  There’s an odd way in which that was consistent with who he was. Although to some people it might seem much more outrageou
s than an affair, it was less of a surprise to me than a mistress would have been.

  What was your reaction to him sacking Pamela Geale?

  Relief and gratitude. I’d wanted him to sack her from the moment I found out about the kiss, but his notions of fairness didn’t allow it. As for the allegations about the Madoowbe woman, I simply didn’t believe them.

  So what did he tell you about that day?

  He told me he’d had a row with Pamela shortly before he attended to Mrs Madoowbe in the surgery.

  What about?

  Her attitude. Her timekeeping. Her demeanour since the kiss. On that day he’d buzzed repeatedly for a new patient to be sent through and no one had come. When he had looked out into the surgery, Pamela was gossiping on the phone with a friend. He remonstrated with her. She told him it wasn’t a friend but a patient, and that Alex was spying on her. He took her to one side and told her that this behaviour had to stop, that there was nothing between them. She was offended. Angry. Anyway, there was certainly tension between them.

  So do you think Pamela Geale made up the whole story about Mrs Madoowbe?

  Not entirely. In fact, Alex told me that Mrs Madoo – God, I can never pronounce it – the Somali woman had ended up naked on the examination table. It was just his bad luck that Pamela Geale walked in at that moment.

  Why was she naked?

  I can only tell you what Alex told me. That she spoke hardly any English. That she asked to see a woman doctor, but there was no woman doctor on duty that day, and Alex judged that she needed examining because she had fainted earlier on, and there was risk of an ectopic pregnancy.

  If she couldn’t speak English, how did she tell Alex this?

  She brought a note from her sister with her symptoms written on it in English.

  What did Alex do?

  He told me that he was reluctant to examine her. Apart from anything else, she was his last appointment and he was late for dinner. I had just started on one of my hobby-horses – as Alex called them. I wanted the family to share a meal together every night, instead of peeling off and eating in front of the television. Alex was doubtful that it could be made to work, but he was prepared to give it a go. That day – the second of April – he was running late and it would have been easy for him to tell her to come back the next day. But he was a good doctor. And ectopic pregnancy can be life-threatening, so he decided to examine her.

  This would have been an internal examination?

  That’s right.

  Which involved the patient being naked?

  Of course not. She misunderstood him. He asked her to remove her pants and lie down on the table. Then he went to get a speculum and some swabs, and made some notes. When he returned to her, she was naked.

  And at that point Pamela Geale walked in without announcing herself ?

  That was one of the ways in which she had become sloppy. Anyway, Alex was furious – partly out of embarrassment, but partly because he’d talked to her about her attitude just a few minutes earlier. And here she was barging in without so much as a by-your-leave. It’s an infringement of patient privacy.

  So Alex sacked her.

  There and then.

  She was an attractive woman, wasn’t she?

  Pamela Geale?

  Mrs Madoowbe.

  What are you implying?

  The surveillance tape that was produced after Alex installed a camera in the surgery shows that she was rather beautiful.

  It’s hard to tell from the tape. The light isn’t good. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. As I’ve said, he didn’t do anything improper.

  Was he a sexual sort of man?

  With me he was – at least, before Polly was born. Things went a little quiet after that. Which is normal, I think. A wife smelling of posset and nappies isn’t the most attractive prospect in the world. I didn’t feel attractive anyway. But I’m sure he didn’t have any sexual feelings for anyone else. Although he was far more worried about the lack of sex than I was.

  At this point – in early April – did he suspect you were having an affair with Mark Pengelly?

  Do we have to talk about this?

  I think you must to address some of the concerns that –

  [Sighs.] All right, all right. I just hate the idea of the tabloids setting the agenda. No. I’m sure he didn’t. That didn’t come until after the first camera was installed in the front room, when he got the wrong impression.

  Then there was no sense in which his… concerns about you and Mark Pengelly gave him a sort of… I mean, in his own mind… a justification for…

  If you’re suggesting that because he thought I was having an affair with Mark Pengelly he also thought it was OK for him to have sex with his receptionist and molest a patient, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

  I didn’t mean to imply –

  Yes, you did. If you keep pursuing this line of inquiry, we can forget the whole thing.

  I’m sorry. I’m just trying to do the job you asked me to do. Tell me more about what he said happened the day Pamela Geale was sacked.

  Whose side are you on?

  I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m just trying to look at it from all angles.

  And that’s your idea of truth, is it? Looking at it from all angles?

  I suppose it is, yes.

  So you give as much weight to a lie as to the truth?

  That’s not what I meant.

  It is. That’s what ‘neutrality’ adds up to. Well, you know what? You can stick it.

  Author’s Note: Here, Samantha Seymour switched off my tape-recorder so the interview was suspended. It resumed several hours later, after a break for lunch.

  Are you OK now?

  To be frank, I’m beginning to regret this whole thing. You’re not who I thought you were.

  No one is. Surely that’s the lesson of this whole thing. The question is, are you prepared to continue?

  Possibly. But you should be aware that there are lines you shouldn’t cross without being prepared for the consequences.

  I understand. Can we move on, then?

  Slowly. Gradually. And tactfully.

  OK. After Pamela Geale was sacked, what happened?

  She started threatening him.

  In person?

  She tried to meet Alex, but he wouldn’t. That enraged her. She began pestering him with telephone calls.

  This is according to Alex?

  Obviously.

  And what did he tell you?

  That at first she pleaded with him to meet her, hoping that even though they no longer worked together they could be friends. Alex told her that it was out of the question, but he would give her good references so that she could get another good job. He bore no malice in that respect.

  But she was not placated?

  Not at all. She felt humiliated and wanted revenge.

  So how did she go about getting it?

  She threatened to go to the practice manager at the Greenside and tell him what she’d ‘seen’ in the surgery with Mrs Madoowbe. And that Alex had tried to sexually harass her.

  Do you think she’d have gone through with it?

  I don’t know. But Alex was extremely worried. Even without proof a doctor can be suspended for months after any allegation. There are armies of politically correct bureaucrats out there trying to get a GP’s scalp for their belts. It would have appealed to a certain element at the General Medical Council – it had racism, sexism, molestation, the lot. It would have tarnished Alex’s name horribly, even if he was found innocent of all charges, which he knew he would be.

  How could he be so sure?

  Apart from anything else there wasn’t any evidence. But he was a little worried about Mrs Madoowbe. She had been frightened, clearly, at the time of the examination, and Alex said there was some evidence that she had been a victim of violence by her husband – bruises on the thighs and so forth. Pamela might have seen the notes. He got this idea that she might be able to talk Mrs Madoowbe into mak
ing an allegation against him.

  Why would Mrs Madoowbe do that?

  Alex had heard of something similar happening to one of his colleagues, a few years back. A young Muslim woman – little more than a girl – came to him complaining of a gynaecological problem. He examined her and found evidence of abuse. He took advice, then informed the appropriate authorities, who visited her home. However, the woman was so terrified of her husband that she ended up alleging the doctor had abused her to protect herself from her husband’s wrath. In the end he was found not guilty of all charges, but it haunted the rest of his career. Alex was worried that something similar might happen to him.

  And that was when he decided to install cameras at the surgery?

  He didn’t make that decision on his own.

  Sherry Thomas talked him into it?

  That’s a matter of record. It’s on one of the tapes. She was very clever in building up a bond of trust between them, always appearing to be looking out for him, to have some special intuitive knowledge.

  While in fact she’d put a bug in his phone on that first day when she was doing the demonstration in the shop.

  That was how she kept abreast of the situation. It gave her a weird kick. It gave her power.

  Can you help me with the time frame here?

  Alex put in the cameras at the surgery about two weeks after he first put one into our front room. Some time in early May, I think.

  I understand you believe that initially he didn’t mean to spy on you and the family at home.

  I know he didn’t. Just before I saw him for the last time – after he had decided to end it with Ms Thomas, whatever ‘it’ was – he told me everything. He said he had simply wanted to surprise me with the nanny-cam, that he had been going to make a short secret tape to give us all a laugh. After that, if I approved, we would use the equipment together to find out if Miranda was up to no good. If I didn’t approve he would return it. But the images he captured on that first tape captured him. He became hooked.

  What did he see that ‘captured’ him?

  You know that already.