‘She’s definitely lost her memory,’ Dr Paddy Sands said. ‘Big time.’
He put his pipe in his mouth and fumbled in the pocket of his thick tweed jacket for the tobacco.
‘Damn it, Paddy,’ Liam Maginnis said. ‘I can’t let you do that in here.’
Sands raised his eyebrows and feigned disappointment. He put the pipe away and looked at his watch. ‘Then the least you could do is take me round to the pub so that we can talk about this over a drink. It’s ten past five, you know.’
Maginnis looked at his own watch and drummed his fingers on his desk while he thought about it. He had been in London at a conference for a week and he had just got back. There were two in-trays, both full.
‘Come on, Liam,’ Sands said. ‘The place doesn’t own you.’ He made a face and waved his hands in the air. ‘Do something mad for a change.’
Maginnis went to the closet where he had hung his jacket.
The King’s Head was just around the corner, right across the road from the King’s Hall, the big exhibition centre and concert venue, hence the name. They pulled out of the evening traffic into a car park that was almost empty. Outside the pub there were rows of damp tables and benches. Sparrows hopped around the table legs, looking for crumbs.
Inside the bar there was the smell of old beer long soaked in, as if the place were marinaded in it. Surfaces were sticky and ashtrays sour with cigarette stubs. They found a table in an alcove which had an extinct cast-iron fireplace and shelves of old books, including a set of encyclopaedias and a complete collection of Nevil Shute in some sort of binding like linen. Sands’s eyes roamed over the titles while he worked on his pipe.
Maginnis got the drinks. ‘God, I haven’t done this for years,’ he said, delivering a pint of Caffrey’s.
‘You’re not doing it now, either,’ Sands said, nodding towards Maginnis’s glass. It was sparkling mineral water with ice and lemon, all the trimmings.
‘I have to go back after this. Can’t smell like a brewery.’
Sands’s tobacco was both robust and sweet. The smoke curled in an aromatic ribbon round the bar. He was a mousy man, ageless, with cropped hair doing its own thing, like the bristles on an old toothbrush. Maginnis had known him for years and couldn’t put a figure on his age. He had to be sixty, anyway. The boyish personality was deceptive.
He had pulled a book from the shelf. ‘Wait till you hear this’ he said. Maginnis looked at the cover. A Complete System of Nursing, by A Millicent Ashdown.
‘When was that published?’
Sands checked. ‘Nineteen seventeen. This edition nineteen twenty-five. Listen – “To those who are not fitted for it, many of the duties are revolting and therefore difficult to accomplish satisfactorily.” ’ He chuckled. ‘And that’s only the introduction. Maybe you’d better bring this with you in case one of your nurses comes in here, reads it and decides to give up.’
‘Maybe one or two of them should,’ Maginnis suggested drily. He sipped his drink and got to the point. ‘So what’s next? You’ve had – what – three sessions with her now?’
‘Four,’ Sands corrected. He drew on his pipe. The banter was over. ‘It’s psychogenic amnesia, in my view. Do you know what that is?’
Maginnis nodded. ‘Often associated with war. Sometimes soldiers who witness terrible things on the battlefield simply blot their experiences out.’
‘That’s the one. But with her it’s more than just the events of one night. She’s alarmed both by what she now knows and by what she doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. There’s the murder. She’s horrified by that, of course – but she has no earthly idea who this American guy was, this Paul Everett, or what she was doing with him. Not a clue.’
‘You believe her? It’s not just a convenient act?’
‘Oh, I believe her absolutely. I’m convinced she’s not faking anything. And this business about cocaine . . .’ he shook his head, ‘. . . she knows nothing about that either. Then to cap it all, not only has her memory of anything relating to the accident gone but a huge tract of previous experience, stretching back goodness knows how long, has disappeared with it.’
‘So what does she remember – anything?’
‘Oh yes, lots. She can give you a run-down on most of her life: childhood, parents, growing up, university. She knows she was a doctor, too, that she worked in the accident and emergency department at the old Central Hospital. The trouble is, she knows that bit only because people have told her. She hasn’t any recollection of it herself, of her work there, any of the staff. Nothing.’
He blew a mouthful of smoke into the air. It was like a little cloud.
‘I’ve told her what we know about that night: that she rang this friend of hers, Elizabeth what’s-her-name, and arranged to meet her at some place called the Clarendon Dock where they have rock concerts and so forth. But she has no memory of that. Says she’s never been there. Knows nothing about it.’
‘And her friend didn’t go anyway, of course. We know that.’
‘True. Or so she told the police four years ago.’
‘What else?’
‘Interesting – Miss Winter – sorry, Doctor Winter – doesn’t seem to have forgotten her medical training. She tells me she’s been talking to the staff about cases and treatments in a way that’s taken everyone by surprise, herself included.’
‘Nobody told me that.’
‘You’ve been away.’
‘So explain to me how that works.’
‘There are different kinds of memory. What I’ve just described is her semantic memory. That’s a kind of general knowledge base, the foundation of what we know of the world around us. She knows how to treat a gunshot wound, for example, and what the capital of France is, all that stuff. So her semantic memory seems unimpaired. Then there’s what’s called the procedural memory, which is simply a matter of knowing how to do things. Like using a knife and fork. Playing the piano, maybe, which takes in both the procedural and the semantic. All the physio she’s been getting has established that that part of her memory’s in good shape too.’
He took a drink and wiped the froth from his lip.
‘So now we come to her episodic memory, which is where the problems lie. It’s as if a chasm has opened and swallowed part of her life. That’s the way she describes it to me. She says she feels like she’s drowning sometimes. That she’s reaching out for something to hold on to but it keeps drifting away from her. Poor woman. She’s trying very hard. She’s desperate to get her memory back.’
‘And is she likely to?’
‘Maybe. In time. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is her response to some deep psychological trauma. There’s the crash and the murder, of course. But what happened before that? Why is so much of her more immediate past a blank page? Something else may have happened that was profoundly scarring – maybe even a whole combination of things – an overload, and her mind simply couldn’t cope. The crash dropped her into a well and she’s been falling down it for four years. Now she’s hit the bottom and she doesn’t know how to climb back up.’
He tapped the contents of his pipe into an ashtray and sat back. They were silent for a few moments, thinking. Behind them the pub was beginning to fill up with regulars. There was laughter and the clink of glasses.
‘How will her parents respond when they hear all this?’ Sands asked.
‘The mother’ll think it’s a sign from God.’
‘Good sign or a bad sign?’
Maginnis shrugged. ‘Whichever she wants it to be.’