his voice. ‘But there was no match, and of course there wasn’t going to be!’
‘Why not?’ John sipped some coffee and politely waved away the biscuit pack that the linguist again pushed towards him.
‘Well, you do hear of children born with the ability to speak other languages – people talk about it as evidence of past lives, that sort of stuff,’ he said with a rather dismissive tone. ‘But I’ve never heard a small child speak a foreign language convincingly. Sometimes, as with you and your wife, when the child comes from parents of mixed races, they will pick up smatterings of each of the parents’ languages.’
‘Is there some Swedish in this? My wife and I want-’
The linguist interrupted him with a vehement shake of his head. ‘Not Swedish. There’s no Swedish there.’ He helped himself to another biscuit and suspended it over his coffee cup. ‘Of course, you do get the phenomenon with twins, more usually with identical twins, where they create their own language as a means of excluding their parents – and the outside world in general. This seems to be what’s happening in your case.’
‘Their own language?’
Chetwynde-Cunningham nodded.
‘Can you make any sense of what they’re saying?’ John asked.
‘Oh yes, once you know the key, it’s a doddle – same with any code.’
‘ Code? ’
The linguist turned to his computer. ‘Print original on screen!’ he commanded.
Moments later the words appeared.
Obm dekcarh cidaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.
Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.
Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.
John peered at them closely, trying to see if he could spot what the linguist evidently had already. But after a couple of minutes he was forced to concede defeat. ‘I can’t spot the key.’
‘No, well, I’m not surprised. Take a look at the first line.’
John stared at it.
Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.
Then the linguist gave another command. ‘Reverse and sort into English!’
Moments later a second line appeared:
You ave o deide f yo wan to hve a andich r cke, Dmbo.
It was starting to become clearer to John but he still wasn’t quite there. The linguist gave a third command. ‘Insert missing letter through line!’
Now a third line appeared:
You have to decide if you want to have a sandwich or a cake, Dumbo.
John frowned. ‘Jesus!’ he said, after some moments. ‘It – it was during a tea party – they-’
Chetwynde-Cunningham commanded the translation of the next two lines. John read them as they came up on the screen.
Dumbo’s greedy, he’s already had one piece of cake.
Elephants are big, they have to eat a lot.
‘You’re saying this was spontaneous?’ he asked. ‘Not something they’d worked out in advance, somehow, John?’
‘They’re not yet two years old,’ John said. ‘I don’t think they’d have been capable of working this out in advance – I mean-’ He shrugged, unsure quite what he was thinking about this. He felt totally thrown.
‘The calculations to do this in their heads, in some kind of simultaneous translation, would be quite phenomenal. If it was just one child, one could think perhaps it was suffering from some brain disorder, some form of autism or temporal-lobe epilepsy, perhaps causing some glitch in the neural pathways. But the laws of probability rule it out for both children to have this.’
There was a long silence. John continued to stare at the words, thinking to himself, wondering how on earth they could be doing this. The linguist interrupted him.
‘If they are doing this spontaneously, John, then I think you’ve got some pretty remarkable children. They have a skill that I would think is quite unique. I’ve never heard of it before, ever.’ He gave John a look that should have filled him with pride.
But instead, John found himself feeling very uneasy.
58
‘I think we should take them back to see the psychiatrist, Dr Talbot, again, don’t you, John?’
John sat at the kitchen table, cradling his martini. He was unsettled and baffled by what the linguist, Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham, had told him, and he was fretting about the email he had received from Kalle Almtorp.
Three couples who had been to the Dettore Clinic had been murdered.
Christ.
Three couples who had been to the clinic had all had twins. The murders had happened in America; that was one small blessing – the distance.
So far.
‘Did your linguist chap at work have any explanation for – for how they could be speaking like this? Talking perfect English backwards with every fourth letter missing?’ Naomi asked.
John shook his head. ‘He didn’t.’
‘We’ve been waiting for them to speak their first words to us, for them to say Dada or Mama, and they’ve said nothing and yet they’re speaking perfect English to each other in code. Doesn’t that spook you? It sure as hell spooks me.’
He stared ahead, pensively. ‘It does. It’s just so strange.’
‘Do you think that Dettore did something? That maybe he messed up some important gene and their brains are wired up wrong?’
‘I think that’s too early to speculate. I guess if they keep speaking like this we should take them to a neurologist.’
‘Don’t you think we should take them to one now?’
John walked over to the wall where the baby-monitor speaker was mounted and listened. ‘Are they awake?’
‘Yes, I was waiting for you to get back so we could bathe them together.’
She sat down looking pale. John watched her. He felt terrible. She buried her face in her hands. ‘After all we’ve been through. God, why is life so bloody unfair?’
‘We have two beautiful children, hon.’
‘Two beautiful freaks.’
John walked back over to her, rested his hands on her shoulders and kissed her neck. ‘Don’t ever think that. Luke and Phoebe are what we wanted. They’re smart. They’re much smarter than other kids their age. We just have to learn to adjust.’
‘Why are they speaking in this code? People talk in code when they have secrets. Why are they doing this? Are they wired wrong – or are they much smarter than we realize?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said helplessly.
Naomi looked up at him. ‘We’ve made a mistake, haven’t we?’
‘No.’
‘I just wish – that we – had – you know – a normal life. Normal kids.’
‘Normal kids like Halley?’
There was a long silence. John looked again at the silent baby monitor, then picked up his glass again.
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ she said. ‘And you know that.’
John twiddled the olives on their stick, studying them pensively as if trying to read them like runes.
