Part I: Bristol

Chapter 7: Not at Home

May 2012

"Dr Weller?" Nurse Wyatt poked her head through the door of his office. "We have a problem here."

Through the open door sounds wafted in from the corridor, a clanging and thumping that Dr Simon Weller, head of the Brain Injury Unit at London's Maudsley Hospital, had no problems identifying as the clash of cutlery on crockery accompanied by rhythmic foot stomping. It was a sound he'd manfully been ignoring every noon the past six or so weeks, ever since a certain patient had recovered sufficiently to partake of common meals in the dining room.

"Don't we have a problem here every day?" he asked rhetorically, pushing his reading glasses up his nose.

"We've got a different problem today," Wyatt said grimly, but with a hint of amusement in her voice. "This week, the patients want to eat their dinner."

"Well, that's wonderful, isn't it?" Weller said with a hint of impatience, his eyes sliding back to his journal.

Wyatt stood there silently, not budging.

Giving up, Weller threw his hands into the air. "All right, if they want to eat their dinner, then why ... Oh, no, don't tell me the kitchen has burned the food again! Can't Rupert fix this?" he asked querulously. "It's his job, not mine."

"Wait a sec," Wyatt said, scooting off and leaving the door ajar behind her.

The racket outside grew louder - she must have opened the door to the dining hall - and now Weller could hear the patients chorusing something that sounded like, "Meat A-larms! Meat A-larms!" He sincerely hoped that there wasn't a movement afoot to turn the unit into a vegan zone. It was a sad and unfortunate truth that it was cheaper to feed the hungry masses with meat than with fibrous, vitamin-rich vegetables. Just as he got up to close the door, Nurse Wyatt reappeared bearing a tray in her hands.

She placed it on his desk. On it was a plate with a few scattered items of food on it and cutlery. "Try this, please," she said.

Scratching the side of his nose with his forefinger, Weller eyed the plate uneasily. There was A Reason why he eschewed the food served at the hospital, preferring to bring a packed lunch to work.

"So, what's on the menu today?" he asked with forced joviality.

"It's got some fancy name I can't remember," Wyatt answered, "but don't worry, you'll like it."

She stood in front of his desk, twelve stone of unmoving matronly bulk versus his eight stone of cowed academic. It was a convincing argument. He sat down, picked up the fork and knife, gave Wyatt a morituri te salutantlook and set to it. After two forkfuls he paused.

"Hmmm," he murmured. "That's quite good, actually."

"Quite good?" Nurse Wyatt asked with emphasis.

"It's terrific, to be honest," he admitted. "Perhaps the patients' protests about the quality of the food weren't such a bad idea after all, if they made our kitchen staff buckle up."

"This wasn't cooked by our kitchen staff, I'm afraid. Mr Barnes cooked this, assisted by a few of the other patients."

Dr Weller paused with his fork half-way to his mouth. "Peter Barnes?" he repeated, sure he'd misheard.

"That's ri-ight," Wyatt sang, her eyebrows wagging merrily.

Weller stared thoughtfully at his plate. "Hmmm." He was due to see Barnes this afternoon anyway. Why not see him now? "Nurse Wyatt, will you ask him to step in here for a moment, please? And see whether you can find Deepak, will you?"

As he waited, chewing on meditative mouthfuls of food, he searched his memory for information on Barnes, Peter: male, mid-fifties, admitted ten weeks earlier with symptoms of severe amnesia. He'd been dumped on the doorstep of the Maudsley like an orphan on the threshold of a church: he'd been accompanied by the skimpiest of medical records, and by the time the admitting doctors had realised that there was something very wrong with his paper work, the ambulance crew that had brought him in had disappeared. Whoever their patient was, he was definitely not the Peter Barnes who had disappeared off the coast of Norfolk while sailing some six years ago, no matter what his paperwork might claim. A short research into the medical history of the real Peter Barnes, as documented by his GP and his dentist, had provided resounding clarity on that (and incidentally squashed the budding hopes of his family, but that was neither here nor there.)

Those, however, were issues that bothered the bureaucrats over in administration; the members of the Brain Injury Unit would, of course, have been grateful for a complete medical history to help them assess what exactly they were dealing with, but even without a patient history, the person who held papers issued to Peter Barnes was providing enough fodder for a fair number of publications. Anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories, was a fairly common condition, a staple of Alzheimer patients. The pseudo Peter Barnes, however, was blessed with retrograde amnesia, and that of the kind only affecting his episodic memory, the remembrances of his personal life; all factual memories were intact, as were those practical skills and abilities that they'd tested for. Cases like that were exceedingly rare; the longer the unit had access to Barnes, the better for the scientific world in general and for the Brain Injury Unit's standing in said world in particular.

Unfortunately, the NHS only paid for in-patient treatment for a maximum of ten weeks. After that patients had to be released into out-patient treatment or transferred to other facilities. Barnes's ten weeks were exhausted - the potential that his amazing condition offered for the department wasn't. If Barnes were to take over the kitchen, then his presence would be doubly beneficial to all.

Deepak Sengupta, Barnes's neuropsychiatrist, came in a few moments later clutching a thick file. Weller, indicating his full mouth, waved him into one of the visitor chairs. Spying the plate on the desk, Deepak's face fell.

"Ah - I'm very sorry about that," he said, his head waggling in apology.

"Sorry?" Weller queried. "It's great!"

"I meant the kitchen staff's strike, sir."

"The kitchen staff are on strike?" Weller asked with a sense of foreboding. "Is that why Barnes has been cooking?"

"No, not quite," Deepak said, wriggling uncomfortably in his chair. "Mr Barnes made a bet with the chef that he could cook edible food for the whole unit without exceeding the weekly budget. The chef took him up on it, so Mr Barnes has been cooking the whole week, today being the last day. Today an independent jury, consisting of the cleaning staff, deemed him the winner of the bet."

"Oh. What did he win?"

"He won't say, but the rumour mill has it that it was a substantial sum of money."

"Well, heaven knows he can use it - he's pretty strapped for cash," Weller said tolerantly. "And it serves the chef right - but please don't quote me on that! But what's the connection to the strike?"

Deepak twirled a lock of his hair. "The patients are threatening to go on a hunger strike if the quality of the food doesn't improve, saying that if Mr Barnes can cook like that, there's no reason why our cooks can't. The kitchen staff, in turn, says that they can't work if every Tom, Dick and Harry gets to vote on the quality of their food."

Dr Weller pushed his errant spectacles back up his nose once more. "Odd. I'd always understood that free-market economy was all about consumer demand determining what is supplied."

Deepak grinned. "Unfortunately, sir, the food supply at this hospital is a monopoly."

"Don't we have a moral duty to break monopolies?" Weller mused.

Just then the door opened without any previous warning. Deepak vacated the visitor's chair and came over to Weller's side of the desk as a tall, wiry man strolled in and pointedly ignored the hand Dr Weller extended towards him, choosing instead to ramble around the room.

"Good afternoon, Mr Barnes," Weller said.

Barnes grunted.

"A cup of tea, perhaps? No? Well, I'll have one." Weller switched on the water boiler that perched awkwardly on the window sill and placed a bag of PG Tips in a mug commemorating the 2012 Olympic Games.

Barnes stopped for a moment in front of a Miro print before moving on to the bookshelf at the far wall, idly flicking a finger at the butterfly mobile suspended from the ceiling as he passed under it. He set off the Newton's cradle on the shelf before coming over to Weller's desk, the clacking of the metal balls a rhythmic accompaniment to his slightly uneven gait.

The water boiler bubbled and rumbled. Weller went over to it and poured water into his mug before returning to his desk. "Mr Barnes, it seems you like working in the kitchen ..."

Barnes snorted derisively. "What the fuck gave you that idea?"

Weller looked down at the plate in front of him. Its polished emptiness stared back at him accusingly. "You're an excellent cook. Your food is truly amazing. It seems reasonably safe to assume that you worked as a cook ...,"

"Ass - you - me," Barnes mouthed, while Deepak shifted uncomfortably in Weller's peripheral vision.

"What is it, Deepak?" Dr Weller asked.

"Mr Barnes excels at a lot of things," Deepak said apologetically. "We haven't talked about the results of his skills tests yet, sir, but they're in the file."

Barnes smirked. "Looks like your Bright Young Thing here is trying to get his publication on the patient Peter B. completed before the rest of the department has access to the results."

Supressing his irritation as best he could, Dr Weller opened the file. A set of photographs depicting Barnes's contributions to the creative arts group, a compulsory part of therapy, caught his eye. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly at Deepak.

"Last week's theme was three-dimensional objects, I believe. It entailed working with metal and soldering," Deepak explained, blushing slightly.

"I hope you aren't exhibiting these in our vitrines," Weller said drily, "else we'll have the vice squad closing our unit down." He made a mental note to have a talk with Deepak about Barnes's sexual issues.

Barnes leaned back in his chair, crossing his ankles and folding his hands behind his head. "So maybe I earned a living as ... a plumber." His voice dripped with sarcasm, which wasn't surprising when one considered the next entry, the results of IQ tests performed on him after his arrival. He'd scored well above 130 during his first week.

"Or in the IT industry," Weller suggested. A lot of science geeks populated the world of electronics and computer science. He turned another page. Or as translator for the UN - the man was fluent in six languages. "Mr, ah, Barnes, you have an impressive list of skills and accomplishments. In fact, I'm at a loss to understand why no one has turned up here to claim you."

"Can we get back to what I want?" Barnes interrupted his musings. "I want to be released."

"I'm not sure that would be wise," Dr Weller said cautiously. "You have a rare condition whose cause and origin we have not yet discovered. As long as that's not the case it would be wise to keep you under observation.

"Ten weeks ago you presented here with severe retrograde amnesia - the inability to recall events from the past - and an amputation that our surgeons date as having taken place between six months and a year ago. We assumed at the time that your amnesia resulted from the same traumatic event - possibly a motoring accident - that caused the leg injury, especially since there was evidence of massive head trauma dating back further than ten weeks. We also assumed that the evidence of a recent invasive procedure on your brain was part of a very amateurish attempt to treat your amnesia."

If any of this interested Barnes, he didn't show it. Instead, his fingers beat a complicated tattoo on the armrests of his visitor's chair.

Weller hid his irritation as best he could. "All this could be correct. But we also assumed that you were suffering from anterograde amnesia as well as retrograde amnesia, because you had no memory of events between the trauma and the surgery. Within a few weeks, however, it was clear that this wasn't the case; you are perfectly capable of forming and assimilating new memories. Which is odd, very odd." He scratched his head before continuing, "In short, either the brain surgery cured your pre-existing anterograde amnesia, or - you never had that to start with. In that case your retrograde amnesia is not a result of the trauma that caused your amputation, but of the recent brain surgery, and there is no connection between the two events."

Barnes leaned forward and drew his file out from under Weller's nose, opening it to the section that harboured the brain scans made right after his admission. He pulled his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Then he riffled through the scans with a practiced air, finally drawing one out and holding it up against the window. "We know the cause of my amnesia. Here: two holes bored into my skull. Think two electrodes, one inserted till here," he pointed to a slightly darker spot on the scan, "and the other one till there. The shocks would target the hippocampus and nothing else, causing no damage to any other area of the brain. What are the functions of the hippocampus?" he asked, turning to Deepak.

"Forming new memories, accessing old ones and navigation," Deepak shot out.

Barnes nodded in approval. "Good boy," he said condescendingly, giving Weller a challenging stare.

"The shocks would also cause anterograde amnesia," Deepak objected. "There's practically no way of targeting the hippocampus so exactly that you ...,"

"Silovsky and Chen, 2010," Barnes replied. He got up, walked over to the journals and pulled one out. "Here, you've got the article in your own office. They re-examined all known cases of retrograde amnesia caused by trauma or EST and came to the conclusion that if the damage was restricted to certain parts of the hippocampus, then the effect on other memory forming or retaining processes would be minimal."

Weller picked the abandoned scan and considered what Barnes had said. "Hmm, yes, but EST, even the invasive type with electrodes where you posit them, would damage some of the surrounding area. You can't restrict the electric field to the area you need to target - it spreads radially, to some extent." He suddenly remembered his tea. Throwing the scan down again, he extracted the tea bag from the mug, added two teaspoons of sugar and a generous dollop of milk from the small fridge jammed into the corner of the room behind his desk.

Barnes had picked up a pencil from Weller's desk which he now twirled around in a most annoying fashion. "You could," he said slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought, "if you used flat electrodes that faced each other, like this - and this." He used the pencil to indicate the location and the extent of the electrodes. "Then you'd have a homogeneous field between the electrodes like that of a capacitance, and the damage would be limited to the area between the two electrodes."

Deepak was peering at the scans, fascinated. "Sir, that's totally possible," he practically squeaked with excitement.

"Totally," Weller agreed drily, his tone mocking, "except that by inserting flat, wide electrodes one would be risking wide-scale surgical damage in order to limit the electric damage."

Barnes was examining the other scans. "You can't deny, though, that I do have holes in my skull, and not just the two I just pointed out. I'm assuming that they weren't made just for fun. Normally, EST for depressions isn't an invasive surgery."

Weller shrugged. "A brain biopsy is another possibility, with subsequent surgery for the tumour that may have caused your amnesia."

"Not enough scarring for that," Barnes shot him down, pushing one of the scans over to Weller.

"And you're an expert on scarring in brain tissue after surgery," Weller remarked mildly.

Barnes threw him a half-questioning, half-irritated glance. "Looks like it," was all he said.

"Very well," Weller said. "If such a procedure did take place, then why? It doesn't make sense, any more than invasive EST does. Why would anyone do that? No sane neurologist would deliberately and viciously target the hippocampus risking such severe side effects as the procedure that you describe would entail."

Barnes pursed his lips, deep in thought, his fingers busy again on Weller's desk fingering the objects there, pushing them around, re-arranging them. "You're assuming my amnesia was a side effect. Suppose it was the aimof the whole procedure."

"You're saying someone deliberately induced your amnesia," Weller said doubtfully. "Why?"

"No idea," Barnes admitted.

"You mean, like Jason Bourne?" Deepak interjected. "You knew too much, so your memory had to be erased." His excitement was palpable.

"That's very romantic, to be sure," Weller, who had no idea who Jason Bourne was, said with a marked lack of enthusiasm, "but if someone wanted his memory erased it would have been a lot easier to erase the whole person rather than to perform a complicated and risky surgery whose outcome was exceedingly uncertain. Such things happen in films. In real life, you get threatened at the best; at the worst your corpse lands at the bottom of the Thames weighed down by a convenient millstone."

"So you think it's a coincidence that I have amnesia, and turn up on your doorstep with bogus papers and no clue as to my true identity."

"No, I think that the surgeons who damaged your brain would prefer not to be sued. You have memories of cognitive tests being performed on you in the days before you arrived here heavily sedated. My theory is that when your attending surgeons discovered that they had caused wide-spread brain damage with whatever madcap surgery they performed, they decided to take advantage of your amnesia to rid themselves of what could prove to be a major professional and financial embarrassment. Here," he said, tossing the admissions form over to Barnes, "look at the names of the ambulance crew that signed you in."

Barnes looked at the admissions form, and then frowned at Weller. "The idiots at your admissions desk didn't think it odd that the crew were named Watson and Lestrange?"

Weller had the grace to look apologetic. "The admissions desk is usually busy with the patient. They tend to ignore any larks the ambulance crew indulge in as long as patient care isn't affected. And do remember, when you were admitted we had no notion that you might not be Peter Barnes."

"Fine," Barnes said, "but this supports my theory as well as yours."

"True, but how many neurosurgeons do you think there are who would consider performing a procedure as dangerous as that, and why would you have consented to anything of the sort? And if you didn't consent, then why bother with such niggling considerations as whether you'd end up a human vegetable? Restricting the damage to that particular area of your hippocampus only makes sense if one is trying to avoid other impairments at all costs. Why do that if they didn't care about the state of your mental health?" He leaned forward. "If I were asked to erase your memory, I'd go the Full Monty and shock everything in its vicinity just to make sure you didn't remember a thing, even if you ended up not knowing about the French Revolution or what you'd had for breakfast. Your theory is based on the assumption that whoever didn't like that you knew whatever it was, cared enough about you to want to preserve the quality of your life. What kind of person fits that bill?"

"Someone who ...," Barnes began, but then trailed off, deep in thought again, fiddling around with more objects on the desk. "What happened to Holmes?" he suddenly asked.

"Sorry?" Deepak said, startled at this non sequitur.

But Weller knew at once what Barnes was talking about, mainly because he'd asked that question himself when he'd examined Barnes's papers at leisure. "Here," he said, flicking the file open to the medical documents that had accompanied Barnes on his admission, "the scant medical history that came with you. Interestingly, it is yourmedical history, not that of the real Peter Barnes; the scans show your brain and leg, not his. And everything is signed by Dr S. Holmes."

Barnes bent over the file frowning, his tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth. He was a quick reader - his eyes moved almost diagonally across the page instead of to and fro. Then he picked up a pen from the desk and scribbled something on a post-it that he tore from Weller's pad. Whatever it was that he scribbled, it seemed to answer some question of his, because after staring at it for some seconds he scrunched it up and threw it at the waste paper basket, missing it by about half a foot.

"Could I have been a doctor?" he asked no one in particular.

"It's - very likely," Weller said cautiously, "given the extensive medical knowledge and skills that you display."

"'Very likely' won't get me my licence back."

"Mr Barnes, nothing will get your licence back, if you ever had one. You can't remember your medical training."

"My procedural memory is intact, as is my semantic memory!"

Weller sighed. "There's no verifiable proof for that, and you're medically well-informed enough to know it. Mr Barnes, you need to think about job placement, accommodation, and so on. I believe you have no financial resources worth mentioning. I could arrange for you to work in the kitchens of the hospital and continue to get treatment as an out-patient. We have limited staff accommodation, but I'm sure something can be arranged."

"No, thanks."

"Mr Barnes, you have no certificates proving a higher education, training or job experience. You have no assets and you have no friends. What were you thinking of doing when you get released? ... Ah, please don't break that!"

Barnes had turned his attention to a puzzle consisting of a string circle looped around the bases of seven intersecting hoops.

"It's a model of a puzzle I saw at the Science Museum," Weller remarked casually. "The challenge is to get the string out through the hoops without having to unknot it. The fastest I've ever seen anyone solve the puzzle is just over seven minutes."

That got Barnes's attention. Tipping his head expectantly, he narrowed his eyes. "I can undercut that mark," he stated.

"You can try," Weller said, allowing a hint of condescension to enter his voice.

Barnes gave him a calculating look. "Are you a sportsman, Weller?"

Weller knew when he was being manipulated, but an appeal to his honour as a gentleman was hard to resist. "I'm as game as the next man," he said.

"All right. If I take more than seven minutes to get the string off the loops, I work in the kitchens for four weeks, during which time I get paid a full salary plus accommodation." When Weller opened his mouth to protest, Barnes brushed him off with a sweep of his arm. "You can examine me one hour per day, making a total of thirty hours in that month: scans, tests, but no therapy sessions. If I take less than seven minutes, I win 250 pounds off each of you," here he looked at Deepak, "and you get me a job placement in forensic pathology."

"I have no idea whether ...," Weller prevaricated.

"Fine, I'm out of here," Barnes said, rising.

"It's a deal," Weller said quickly. The only forensic pathology that he had connections to was in Bristol. But then, the only person he'd ever seen solve the puzzle in less than half an hour had been a very bright physics student who was now the incumbent of a prestigious chair at Cambridge University.

"Sir, I wouldn't ...," Deepak interjected, but Weller, ignoring him, pushed the puzzle towards Barnes.

Deepak got out his mobile phone, switched it to stopwatch mode and placed it on the desk. Barnes sat down again, but instead of setting to work at the puzzle he picked up a paper clip from Weller's desk and twisted it between his fingers. For two minutes he twisted and teased the clip, his eyes trained on the puzzle. Then he turned in his chair to stare out of the window, one hand straightening the clip while the other tapped out a rhythm on his prosthetic.

"Three minutes, sir," Deepak said.

Weller's tensed gut slowly unclenched as he envisioned another month of in-depth physical examinations coupled with refined memory tests. Barnes ignored Deepak. But ten seconds later he turned to the puzzle, the abandoned clip dropping on the ground. His fingers, long and elegant, hovered for a moment, and then he took hold of the string and started threading it in and out of loops, pausing every now and then to contemplate his progress, his lips alternately tightening and expelling air in explosive pops. After what seemed a long time he gave the string a last tug, extracting it from the topmost loop, and placed it in a neat heap next to the puzzle.

"Five minutes, fifty-three seconds," Deepak announced. Barnes whooped like a little boy, jumped off the chair and did a somewhat shaky Dance of Victory routine ending in a Saturday Night Fever pose. (That one, at least, Weller recognised.) Dropping the pose, he held out his hand to Weller and Deepak expectantly.

"I should have mentioned, sir, that recently Mr Barnes's scores in IQ tests have exceeded the range within which we can test accurately," Deepak murmured. "His relatively low score on admission was probably a result of impaired brain function due to the recent procedure."

Weller would have to have a serious talk with Deepak about withholding findings in order to spruce up his own career at the expense of the rest of the department. A very serious talk. A two hundred and fifty pound talk.

"Deepak, do you have five hundred pounds on you?" Weller asked rhetorically. "No? Then go to the next cash point and get the money, please."

Deepak slunk out, probably happy to have his set-down postponed.

"I have contacts to forensic pathology in Bristol," Weller said to Barnes. "And I'll give you a referral to a psychiatrist who ..."

"Don't need it," Barnes growled. He nodded at his medical file. "Just a copy of that."

"Very well, you'll get your full medical records when you're released."

"Which will be?"

Weller sighed. A quick run through his mental check list told him that he hadn't realised a single aim of this session: Barnes would leave the Maudsley, he'd be outside the Brain Injury Unit's catchment area, he probably wouldn't participate in a follow-up programme, and he had just cost him 250 pounds. This wasn't a lost battle; it was a complete rout.

"On Monday," he said resignedly, ignoring Barnes's victorious smirk.

Barnes sauntered out, a superior expression on his face.

Getting up to get another cup of tea, Weller spotted the post-it that Barnes had scribbled on lying on the ground. He automatically bent to pick it up and smoothed it on his desk, curious to see what a savant like Barnes had noted down on reading his own medical record.

'Sherlock Holmes', the post-it said. A whole file full of medically relevant information, and all he'd found noteworthy was that the physician who had signed his medical records had chosen to mask his identity behind that of a fictive nineteenth century detective?

Weller opened the file that had arrived with Barnes and stared at the top entry, a medication plan set up by said 'Sherlock Holmes'. And then he saw it too: the signature at the bottom of the medication plan - the loop at the base of the capital 'S', the slant of the 'H', the way the 's' was tagged onto the 'e' - was identical with the writing on the post-it. Weller leafed through the rest of the file; it was always the same signature.

Either the man currently known as Peter Barnes was a top-notch forger or he was responsible for crippling one of the most outstanding brains of his generation - his own.

A few days later he runs into Ellie in a second-hand bookstore in Clifton. That isn't all that surprising, really, since his favourite haunts are chosen for their proximity to locations that he knows the way to, and this bookstore happens to be within viewing distance of their regular pub. Still, he'd rather not be discovered by her while browsing a travel guide on America's East Coast. He replaces it hurriedly and takes out another at random: 'Hiking in America's National Parks'.

Ellie raises an eyebrow. "Getting a new hobby to go with your new girlfriend?"

He twirls the book around. "She isn't my girlfriend."

"But you're thinking of going to America."

Is he? "It's an interesting place," he evades.

Ellie nods. He turns back to the bookshelf and replaces the book on hiking. He's just taking one out about California when Ellie asks, "Where'd you live when you were in America?"

He's so surprised that he drops the book.

She picks it up and hands it to him. "You did live in America, didn't you?"

"I don't remember ever mentioning it," he says carefully.

She flushes and holds both hands out, palms up, placatingly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry."

He steps closer, looming over her, narrowing his eyes. "What makes you think I've lived there?"

Her eyes widen in alarm. "Look, I'm really sorry. Forget it. Please."

Another customer stiffens, obviously aware of them but still pretending to be absorbed in the books. Pete takes hold of Ellie's elbow and guides her out of the shop. She doesn't resist him, but it's the acquiescence of fear. There's a small café close by into which he steers her, not really listening to her breathless apologies (or possibly prayers).

"Tea or coffee?" he asks.

"Sorry?"

"Treat's on me. Tea or coffee?"

"Coffee, please," she says faintly.

"Anything to eat?"

She shakes her head.

By the time he returns with two cups of coffee and a bacon butty, she has regained some colour. He takes a hearty bite before returning to his original question, talking with a full mouth. It's his experience that the more you act like a pig, the less threatening you are, especially when your opposite is a primary school teacher. "What makes you think that I have lived in America when I've never talked about it? That makes it somewhat unlikely, doesn't it?"

"You never talk about anything that's personal, do you, so that's hardly a logical argument. You never talk about your family, what happened to your leg, what you did before you came to Bristol, nothing. You're pretty reserved." She shreds a paper napkin. "You can do a perfect American accent; you know all there is to know about American culture, history, geography, trivia, you-name-it."

"I know all there is to know about a lot of things."

"Very well, let me give you an example," Ellie says, leaning forward. "Remember that time we watched baseball together at Annabelle's place? You were the only one who could explain what was going on, and you knew the kind of trivia that people usually know about football or cricket."

"I also know football and cricket trivia," he counters weakly, but he knows what she means.

"No. You know everything about the past few years, but when the talk at the table goes back to what happened in the national league, say, ten years ago, you're mostly silent. If you had been living here, you, of all people, would know."

"That doesn't mean I was living in America. It could have been anywhere else in the world."

"True," Ellie says tiredly, tugging a hand through her short blonde hair, "and this conversation is ridiculous. I made a surmise based on some observations I made. If you say I'm wrong or that it's none of my business, that's perfectly alright. I won't mention it again."

He's tearing open packets of sugar and spilling them on the table to make a sugar hill. He moulds it into a cone and flattens the top. When the sugar refuses to stay up, trickling down into a flat heap, he wets it with a spoonful of coffee and moulds it once more.

"Will you stop doing that please, Pete? You'll get us thrown out of here."

"Where in America?" he asks her, "Where in America do you think I may have lived?"

Ellie shoots him a look of pure irritation. "How would I know? Is this some sort of test?"

He smashes his spoon onto his sugar sculpture, flattening it. Then he leans back and closes his eyes.

She peers at him. "Pete, are you alright?"

"I don't know," he says. "I - don't know."

It's there somewhere in his head, the information he's looking for, but he can't get at it. When he wants to get at everyday information - facts, bits of trivia or the like - he tosses whatever he has to go on around in his head, waiting for random associations to wash what he needs from a deeper layer to the surface of his brain. To assist the process he'll visualise whatever he's got, keep his hands occupied with different objects and textures, move around, toss his ideas at other people. The image in his mind for this process is that of assembling a complicated puzzle. There are pieces that don't seem to belong at all; others seem to be missing; and when one starts constructing the picture from one corner, the other areas are formless and void. But even as one begins the gargantuan labour with a blank surface, one knows that given time, the last insignificant bits will fall into place, revealing a completed picture that cannot even remotely be guessed at by studying the individual pieces.

There's no such certainty with his personal memories. He knows the pieces are there somewhere in the remoter nooks and crannies of his brain, but the logistics needed to access them have been destroyed. He's got his past stored in his brain, but he can't get at it. He needs a ruddy Mirror of Erised, not to find his parents, but to find his past.

And here's Ellie who, instead of helping him, is in a funk because he's coming across a tad creepy. She's the sharpest of their set; if she put her mind to it she might be able to help him decipher a few clues about his past. It would help if he were looking in the right country for a change ...

Ellie musters him with a puzzled frown. "Are you trying to tell me that you don't know whether you've been to America?"

And suddenly it's easy. "Yes."

"You don't remember?"

"No."

"Pete, have you thought of seeing a doctor?"

He gives a hollow laugh, and then he tells her about his stay in Maudsley Hospital - the censored, abridged and bowdlerised version that can be crammed into roughly three sentences - but when she has absorbed the gist of his tale, she gapes. And then she applies herself to the problem.

"Why don't you post your picture on the internet? There's probably a Missing Persons website for the US; chances are that there a people out there looking for you who'd recognise you."

He's thought of that; in fact, he browses all the Missing Persons forums regularly hoping that someone who's looking for him has posted his picture there, but so far he's drawn a blank. "Thing is, I have a sneaky suspicion that I may not want to be found," he says, not looking up from the table where he is now drawing patterns into the sugar mess. "According to my medical files I'm an opiate addict; I have a number of interesting injuries - remind me to show you the scars someday," he says with a suggestive leer, but then he quickly sobers again. "One injury is a gunshot wound, another a burn from an electric shock, someone smashed my hand with a blunt, heavy object."

"So you're saying ...?"

"That I may have been in organised crime - a drug syndicate, smuggling, the Mob, who knows? - and if I advertise my whereabouts, I'll be extradited, tried and sentenced." Ellie doesn't look convinced. "Look, there are certain clues that I - that I was involved in the procedure that caused my amnesia. It looks as though the amnesia bit was carefully planned. I may be a much-sought criminal in a mob version of the witness protection plan."

Ellie doesn't brush the idea off immediately. She is, however, sceptical. "Why would you do that even if you were a hunted man? There's a greater likelihood of getting caught despite having built up a new existence if you didn't know that you had to hide, than if you knew and acted accordingly," she points out.

He puffs air from one cheek to the other; it's an objection that has occurred to him, too. "It's well possible that I assumed I'd figure out fairly soon that I may be in hiding - and I did, before I was released from the Maudsley."

"But why would you choose to inflict amnesia on yourself?"

"Perhaps ... because I wanted to forget?" he asks himself as much as her.

Ellie knows someone at the university who knows a linguist who in turn knows the incumbent of the chair for American Studies. They spend a 'delightful afternoon', as the linguist puts it, cross-examining him, and generally having a fun time at his expense with very little in the way of results to show for it, but both of them do agree in the end that he probably is an American and that in all likelihood he spent a number of years on the East Coast. His accent (when he does his American one) is undefinable, the linguist says. He may have travelled a lot as a child.

"You should go there," Ellie says, as they leave the university together.

He has thought so himself, but he hasn't dared to admit it, not even to himself. "Where? America is big."

"You have to start somewhere. I'd say, go and visit that doctor of yours. It'll save you the money for accommodation, and it's on the East Coast."

He'd thought too, that he should start off with Philadelphia, but it's always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by neutral observers.

A/N: Part I ends here. I may need one or two days to get Part II shipshape, but then I'll continue uploading.