Quicksand Read online

  "Seriously?" Hofford brightened. "Well, that's some consolation. Of course, you don't learn a language in a day, but if she's making the effort we may eventually get her side of the story. Oh, by the way, while I think of it! Have you found out what the language is that she can speak?"

  "If I get time today," Paul said with a meaning glare at Holinshed, "I shall try and make a tape of her talking, and send it to the philology department at the university with a sample of some peculiar writing she did for us. Someone's bound to recognise it."

  "Bound to?" Holinshed echoed. "And suppose she's fabricated an imaginary language?"

  Paul retained self-control with an effort. "According to a friend of mine who lectures in languages, it's next to impossible to invent a wholly new one. Something shows through -- sentence structure, or the roots of the words. Proof that she's talking an invented form of some natural language would be the evidence we need to show that she's mentally disturbed."

  -- Thought so; you'd missed that.

  Holinshed gave him a suspicious glance: are you having me on? But his tone was cordial as he gave his blessing to the idea.

  -- Tomorrow you'll be convinced it was your own suggestion in the first place.

  "If that's all, then, Inspector . . .?" the medical superintendent added.

  "Yes, thank you, sir."

  -- If I ever get good at hospital politics, I think I shall start to hate myself.

  Paul dropped into his chair and picked up the phone. He dialed.

  "Stores," a voice said.

  "Dr Fidler here. We have a tape-recorder, don't we?"

  "Yes, sir. But Dr Rudge has it at the moment. She's making up a programme of music for the Saturday dance."

  "Well, she's gone to Birmingham with Dr Roshman. So would you have it sent up here, please?"

  -- Saturday? Blazes: tomorrow. And my duty, too. The ghastly parody of a festive occasion. Still, it's at least a gesture towards normality.

  He dialed again, this time the office in Urchin's ward, and gave instructions for her to be brought up in ten minutes.

  During that time he made cursory preparations for the monthly meeting of the Operating Committee, due the next day. The committee was a half-arsed body including senior and junior medical staff, admin staff, and a representative from the committee in charge of the entire local hospital group. With the departure of Holinshed they would probably get around to rationalising the running of Chent and put it under a proper medical advisory committee. Until that time, however, Holinshed -- like all the medical superintendents Paul had ever come across -- preferred to retain his personal power despite being constrained to pay lip-service to modern organisational methods.

  -- I swear the reason he holds these meetings on Saturdays is to keep them short. Everybody's always eager to get away.

  Then the door was opening and there was the tape-recorder, but no tape, because they'd taken off the one on which Natalie was compiling music for the dance, so he had to send for one, and then Urchin was being brought in and another slab of work was destined to be held over for this evening.

  -- I shall never get my DPM at this rate.... Oh well: I shall just have to sit up late tomorrow night, cramming facts into my brain against the bell in the clock-tower.

  He forced a smile and waved Urchin to a chair.

  "All right, Nurse, no need for you to hang around," he told the girl who, had escorted Urchin up from the ward. And added with a trace of bitterness as the door closed, knowing the question would receive no answer, "I wish to God I could tell, Urchin -- are you crazy or not?"

  *15*

  She gave a hesitant sweet smile and murmured, "Pol!" He grinned back.

  -- Done something to herself since I saw her earlier. Looks even more attractive despite the baggy cotton dress. Oh yes: not so baggy. Got a belt from somewhere. That'll annoy Matron. Visions of strangulation and hanging herself in the toilet

  . . . Better start with a sample of her writing, I guess.

  Opening a notepad, he pantomimed the action with a ball-pen. She gave a curious little twitch of her head which, since it was different from the quasi-Balkan negative she had used before, presumably implied "yes."

  Taking the pen, she inscribed, rather than wrote, a series of symbols. He had meant to watch the movement of her hand, but somehow his gaze got delayed on the way and he found he was studying her face instead. She had the child's habit of putting her tongue-tip between her teeth when she was concentrating.

  She showed him the paper, and he realised with a start that she had written FEMALF WAAD.

  -- Not bad for a person wholly unused to our alphabet, I suppose. Indicates a good visual memory. But not what I wanted.

  He took the notepad, balled up the sheet she had used, and attempted to imitate the spiky symbols she had produced on the evening of her arrival. At first she looked bewildered; after a few seconds, though, she gave a peal of laughter and reached for the pen again.

  This time she worked more quickly. The result was a table of twenty-five symbols arranged in a square. She pulled her chair around so that she could sit up to the desk with him and point at each in turn with the pen.

  "Beh!" she said, naming the first. "Veh. Peh. Feh. Weh." The pen flicked along the top line.

  -- Hang on, young lady. You're not supposed to be teaching me your alphabet, which for all I know you made up in your spare time. But I ought to know what sounds attach to the letters, I guess.

  With a sigh, because this involved further expenditure of precious time, he wrote transliterations for each sound she uttered. Studying them, he frowned. There were two or three cases where he had had to approximate; the sound didn't occur in English. In particular there was a harsh aspirate akin to the Swedish "tj" which he couldn't even imitate. Yet . . .

  -- Odder than ever. No vowels. Nonetheless it's a more logical grouping than the ordinary alphabet: that series at the top, for instance, voiced and unvoiced plosives with their aspirated forms alongside . . . If you did invent this, you're certainly not stupid.

  He made to tear the sheet off so that he could send it to the university's philology department, but she checked him with a hurt expression.

  -- Damnation. You thought you were here for a language lesson, didn't you? How can I explain that I simply haven't the time?

  He pointed to all the papers stacked in his in-tray, and pantomimed removing them, dealing with them and sending them away. She watched with her usual triple reaction: incomprehension, understanding and amusement. Eventually she interrupted him by catching at his hand to save him repeating the whole routine, and for a moment her cool small fingers linked with his.

  With a sinking feeling Paul recognised the predicament he had drifted into.

  -- Oh hell. . . . You like me and you trust me. I owe it to you to help you more than this.

  So, resignedly, he invested more irreplaceable time in what could too easily prove to be pandering to a lunatic's fantasy. In exchange for the table of symbols she had given him he wrote out the alphabet and added where possible the values from hers, then pronounced the vowels for her.

  In return she demonstrated that her system was a syllabary, not an alphabet, provided with a series of dot-and-dash modifiers like Hebrew. To conclude, she wrote two brief words at the foot of the page: her own name, and his.

  -- Enough! Enough!

  Paul set aside the notepad, to her dismay, and started the tape-recorder. Picking up the microphone, he said, "I'm going to try and get a sample of her own language from a patient here at Chent whom we've nicknamed Urchin. There may be one or two false starts since she doesn't speak any English."

  He played back what he'd said. The sound of his voice emanating from the machine didn't appear to surprise her. Add one to the list of inconsistencies she displayed: she could have missed tape-recorders far more easily than cars in the modern world.

  He aimed the microphone at her.

  "Woh" she said, pointing at the wall. "Flaw-er. Wind-daw. Daw-e
r. Cil-ling . . .

  He withdrew the mike with a sigh. As well as a good visual memory she clearly had a keen facility for auditory learning, but while it was reassuring to know she was progressing with her study of English it didn't help much. Wiping the tape, he considered ways of explaining what he wanted.

  But he didn't have to. She figured it out almost at once and said something rapid in her own tongue. He smiled broadly and restarted the machine.

  This time he taped about two minutes of totally unrecognisable speech. It had a certain rhythmical quality, but he had no way of telling whether that was because she was reciting a bit of poetry, as anyone might do at a loss what else to say on a recording, or whether it was characteristic of the language generally. Anyhow, it should suffice for the experts to begin on. He shut the recorder off.

  She caught his hand and gave him a pleading look.

  -- Why can't I be as quick to work out your meaning as you are to deduce mine? Hmmm . . . I get it, I think. You want to hear a voice, even if it's your own, say something you understand.

  He replayed the brief passage and discovered he was right. She put both hands together between her knees and squeezed, lips trembling in echo of herself. At the end she blinked, and a tear ran down her cheek.

  -- Oh, lord. Why doesn't somebody come and rescue you from Chent? I don't care what you were doing out in the woods the other night; you don't look crazy.

  And yet . . .

  In imagination he heard the sound of a human arm-bone snapping. He winced and recovered his professional detachment. Mechanically, very conscious of her large dark eyes on him, he rang for a nurse to escort her back to the ward.

  When he put down the receiver she touched the notepad questioningly. He waved her to go ahead. Taking the pen, she started to sketch. He recognised the drawing before it was complete: a map of the world, with a triangle and a lozenge for the Americas, a sprawling Eurasian land-mass, a bulging-pear version of Africa and Australasia jammed into the bottom corner more to show she knew it belonged than in any attempt at accurate location.

  -- This girl is a hell of a lot brighter than I am. It just never occured to me to show her an atlas and get her to point out her homeland on it.

  He jumped up and crossed to the shelf of reference books at the far side of the office. Surely there must be a map of some sort among them. At random he selected a tome on Climatic and Other Environmental Factors in the Aetiology of Disease . The frontispiece obligingly proved to be a world map.

  He showed it to her, and she pushed aside her crude sketch with an exclamation of delight. Her finger stabbed down on the British Isles.

  -- So she knows where she is, at any rate. How about where she comes from?

  Convinced that scores of questions were about to be answered at a single blow, he tapped his own chest, then the map, hoping she would see the connection Paul-England. Then he pointed at her. She obediently imitated him, but her finger landed on the same spot as his: the west of England.

  Paul sighed. This girl's intelligence seemed to operate by fits and starts. He made wiping gestures to convey a wrong response and once more pointed at her.

  The same thing happened, accompanied this time by an expression of infinite sadness.

  He shrugged and gave up. But the recognition of her intelligence, even though it was patchy, reminded him that he wanted to give her some non-verbal tests. Waiting for the nurse to come and fetch her, he put through a call to Barrie Tumbelow as Mirza had recommended.

  Tumbelow was at his Friday afternoon clinic and couldn't be reached. Paul left a message for him to ring back, and cradled the phone just as the nurse arrived.

  Unwilling to leave, Urchin rose reluctantly to her feet. She seemed trying to make her mind up about something. Paul gestured for the nurse to stand back, wondering what was coming now.

  Abruptly Urchin touched the notepad with a questioning tilt of her head. Paul snapped his fingers, and exclaimed aloud, "Of course you can!"

  He handed her the pad and a pen, and she clasped his hand with gratitude before turning docilely to the nurse and following her away.

  *16*

  Half past nine clang-clinked from the clock-tower as Paul dumped his overnight bag on a spare chair at the side of the committee-room. Hollinshed's secretary, a stiff-mannered fortyish woman named Miss Laxham -- about whom Mirza had once posed the question of what it was she lacked and concluded that it was gonads -- was distributing duplicated copies of the minutes of the previous month's meeting; they exchanged a cool good morning.

  Paul leafed through the documents laid before his place. Relieved, he saw that the agenda was straightforward and the meeting would be a short one. He pushed it aside and unfolded his copy of the local weekly paper. Published on Fridays, it had been waiting for him when he got home yesterday, but he hadn't bothered to read it. Only this morning, gulping down a hasty breakfast, had he wondered whether the affair of Urchin and Faberdown was reported in it.

  -- Nothing on the front page. Good. But it might be on the middle spread. . . . Oh my God. Here it is by the shovelful.

  He flapped the paper over centre to fold it back and read with a sinking heart: MADWOMAN ATTACKS SALESMAN NEAR YEMBLE. About ten inches of it, with a blurred photo of the copse where it happened. a quote from Mrs Weddenhall in which she appealed irrelevantly to people to keep their children from talking to strange men, and a statement that Dr Holinshed of Chent Hospital had no comment to make.

  -- At least they left me out of it by name. I'm just "a psychiatrist from Chent."

  He glanced up as another committee-member entered: Dr Jewell, a local GP who served as medical consultant for the hospital.

  "Morning, Fidler," he grunted as he settled his portly body into a chair. "See you're reading up on our local sensation. What do you think of the editorial comment, hm?"

  Paul turned back to the preceding page, dismayed. What he found there was worse yet.

  "While no one can fail to sympathise with the plight of the mentally afflicted . . . The complexity of the human mind is such that its breakdown defeats the best efforts of psychologists. . . . Our primary duty is to society . . . We must act in full knowledge of the fact that the Beast in Man can and all too often does break loose. . . .

  -- So what do they want us to do? Keep the inmates in chains on dirty straw? Wait till it's a member of your family who goes crazy. Though maybe you'd just pretend it hadn't happened. After all, when I myself . . .

  "Morning!" And here was Holinshed, with Matron Thoroday, Ferdie Silva, Nurse Foden on behalf of the nursing staff, Mr Chapcheek from the Hospital Group -- about whom Mirza had a very Mirzan theory regarding which of his cheeks were chapped and why -- and finally the hospital secretary, Pratt-Rhys, a greying man who had clawed his way up the promotional ladder in lay admin posts through sheer determination and was never tired of reminding his colleagues that he had left school at sixteen and had no university degree.

  "Dr Roshman sends his apologies," Holinshed announced. "But everyone else appears to be here . . .? Yes! Let's get straight down to business, then. Ready, Miss Laxham?"

  She poised her pencil and Holinshed rattled his copy of the minutes.

  "Minutes of the meeting of Chent Hospital Operating Committee held on blah-blah, present the following blah-blah. Dr Bakshad deputising for Dr Silva indisposed, apologies from Mr Chapcheek unavoidably detained until after start of business, Item One the minutes of the previous meeting were read by the chairman and agreed by all present as a true and correct record . . ."