The Road to Bedlam: Courts of the Feyre, Book 2 (39 page)

    "What does it mean?"

    "I don't know. The archive bunnies only know it as a reference and the ownership of the files shifted to military. We only get summary data now, unless we request it." He looked up at me. "No, I won't request it. This is bad enough already. Do your damnedest."

    "You don't know how bad my damnedest really is, Sam."

    "I'm not much use to you if I'm inside for offences relating to the Official Secrets Act, am I?"

    "You're not much use to me now."

    "Oh, come on. You'd never have known any of this stuff if I hadn't told you. If I request access to a military file I'm going to be asked why I want it. I have no plausible reason to be in there. Military don't take kindly to people poking around in their stuff."

    "I need to find her, Sam."

    "Then find her. I've given you all I have."

    "There's more."

    "Not from me. If I ask for the file, I will have to explain why I want it. Before you know it I'll be on leave for stress pending an investigation. No." He looked up at me. "No. They wouldn't give it to me anyway. Not without a valid reason."

    "Create one."

    "You're joking, aren't you? This isn't my field. I'm out on a limb as it is."

    I went back to the paintings. "Monk's Orchard, Broadmoor, Rampton. Where else?"

    He shook his head. "Somewhere else. Somewhere military. Scotland, maybe. They have stuff up there no one talks about."

    I turned back to him. "How do I find her, Sam? How?"

    "Maybe there are records at Maudsley? No, they only got the ones that were no danger to anyone else. Broadmoor and Rampton got the psychotics. The military reference may be a mothballed facility, an old camp or a disused barracks. It could be a nuclear bunker for all I know."

    "How do you find out?"

    "I don't. I've gone as far as I can."

    "I could make you."

    "You could try, but I have nothing else for you." He stood up. "Don't call me again. I don't want to hear from you."

    "I saved you, Sam. I could have left you there."

    "If anyone else finds out we've had this conversation, what you'll do to me is pigeon shit compared to what they'll do to me."

    He walked towards the arch leading to the exit, then paused and looked back. "And they'll leave me there."

    When he'd gone, I went back to the paintings. Strange angular faces looked out at me through knowing eyes. The more I looked at The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, the more faces I saw. Tiny figures peered through the long strands and around stones, but like the Feyre they were only there if you looked for them. It was a perspective on a world I knew, but I could see why they questioned his sanity.

    Sometimes I wondered about my own.

NINETEEN

The afternoon sunlight was bright after the muted light of the gallery, but the day's sunny disposition did not match my mood. Sam was right, he had given me something, but not enough. I knew that there were government files on my daughter and on me. I knew that files like that had existed since the thirteenth century. It tied into what I already knew about the Feyre.

    When I was first presented to the High Court, Kimlesh had told me that the Feyre had taken a risk and mixed their bloodlines with those of humanity. She hadn't said when that happened, but I knew that the Quit Rents Ceremony, which was part of the barrier that kept the Seventh Court from visiting our world whenever they wanted, was almost eight hundred years old. That meant the barrier against Raffmir and his kindred dated from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, shortly before the Stone House, which Sam had mentioned, was moved to Bishopsgate and renamed Bethlem.

    That humanity would treat its mad and vulnerable as freaks was not news to me. I had lived and worked in London for years and the sight of homeless, helpless individuals living in cardboard boxes and begging was so much part of the wallpaper that most of the time I just didn't see it. When occasionally something or someone got past the social blindness, the best I could offer was the price of a meal or a hot drink. Even then, I was never quite sure whether I was actually supporting a drug habit or an alcoholic binge. Some people were hard to help, but that had always been the case.

    Blackbird had once told me that the genes of the Feyre were mixed with humanity and could manifest unpredictably in the population. She'd told me that some of those people were like her and became part of fey society, and some managed the way they were, rationalising their abilities as an uncanny talent or a psychic ability. I was reminded of Greg, who lived and worked in the community, using his fey sense to follow his vocation, knowing he was different but not knowing why. If he chose to regard that as a gift from God, who was I to argue with him?

    Others, though, did not cope with the discovery of their fey nature. Fey gifts could be very strange, and if you woke one day to find your reflection was no longer a face you recognised, or that items in your possession took on odd and perverse properties, then I could see how that might tip the balance of your mind. It was hard enough to accept it for yourself, but then to try and tell friends and loved ones that weird things were happening to you, that your perception of the world had shifted radically, that inanimate objects held strange messages or that you could see the fragmented futures of other people? It was no surprise that people like that ended up in institutions for the delusional.

    What happened, though, when it turned out that you
could
see the future? What happened when the mad people turned out to be right? There had been witch-trials in the seventeenth century. Were those women simply people who had inherited an ability they could neither understand nor control? Wasn't it better to treat those people as mad rather than hang them or burn them at the stake? Or was the treatment worse than the cure?

    Mankind knew about the Feyre. The helicopter over our burning cottage, the strange markings on the truck outside the hospital where Alex was being treated, the men waiting outside my ex-wife's house – all these pointed to an organised response. Somewhere, someone knew what was going on and had for a long while. As Garvin said, they were prepared and every time they encountered the Feyre they learned a little more. Now they had my daughter and they were looking for me.

    As I walked slowly back up through Whitehall it occurred to me that somewhere behind the blank exterior were civil servants making decisions about people's lives. Somewhere buried in a department – Health, maybe, or perhaps Defence – was a small office that dealt with the incarceration and treatment of people for whom there was no place in society: not criminals, not enemies, just people that didn't fit.

    In a democratic country it should be impossible for people simply to disappear. That method of dealing with dissent ought to be confined to banana republics and despots, but I knew it happened, either through choice or through intervention, as in my daughter's case. They had tried to do it to me. A passing thought occurred to me that I could give myself up and thereby discover what happened to people like me, but I did not think I would enjoy their concept of care.

    They must know that she had not intended to harm anyone. They must know that she was innocent, mustn't they? How could they blame a fifteen year-old girl who had been bullied – tortured even? The girls that had persecuted her had used methods that would be illegal in most decent countries – water-boarding, they called it, didn't they? A form of torture banned under international law. How could they blame someone for retaliating, if they had the opportunity?

    Yet three girls had died. It might not be murder, but they were still dead. The state would treat her as a murderer. It brought home to me that even if I managed to find her, Alex would not be able to go back to her life. It made me regret telling Kayleigh, since they would never be able to resume their friendship. Their lives would diverge rapidly. Alex couldn't go back to school. She would not be able to live a normal life. The moment she appeared in normal society, she would be arrested, the same as me. More final than that, Kayleigh would grow up and get older. Alex would grow up, but once she reached her adult size, she was going to age far more slowly. Kayleigh would be dead before Alex looked middle-aged.

    It meant she would no longer be able to live with her mother either. It left the issue of whether to tell Katherine that her daughter was alive unresolved. If it was me, I would want to know. I would need to know. If I had found out that she was alive and that someone close to me knew that, I would be incredibly angry. It made withholding the information from Katherine feel like treachery. I would hold back, though, until I had Alex back. I would not tell her now, only to have myself proved wrong later. We weren't out of the woods yet. Instead, I promised myself that as soon as I knew that Alex was safe, I would find a way to tell Katherine. She was her mother. It was not in me to let her continue what was left of her life believing that her daughter was dead, when she was alive.

    I had turned across the lower end of Trafalgar Square down the Strand to the church of St Clement Danes, where I knew I could get access to the Way through the crypt, but then I stopped. I had become used to being fey, following their ways, adopting their methods, but there were other ways to find things.

    I went north towards Drury Lane and the theatre district, looking for something that always popped up in the tourist areas: an Internet café.

    The one I found can't have been there long, but even so it had the odour of stale sweat and the yellow stain of nicotine on the keyboards. A couple of youths were smoking outside as I entered and one of them followed me in to relieve me of the money for an hour's worth of Internet. I sat down and opened the screen on Google, typing in the letters B/BWPD. The full reference came up with nothing, but BWPD apparently stood for a number of things: Barrels of Water Per Day, a Boston PC support company, Black and White Polka Dot – none of it made any sense in the context of mental asylums. I branched out, trawling through the official websites for South London and Maudsley Health Trust, the sites for Broadmoor and Rampton secure hospitals, the Wikipedia pages for St Mary's Bethlehem and numerous sites on Bedlam at St George's Fields, where the Imperial War Museum was now housed.

    I knew something had changed. When St George's Fields was handed over to the Imperial War Museum, the file references had altered. Sam said it was military and restricted access, but that in itself marked a shift in approach.

    Perhaps originally the mongrel fey were treated as undesirables and misfits, then later as freaks and even as entertainment. Why then a change in 1930? I tried to remember from documentaries and the distant memory of school what had been significant about 1930. Further searching brought up information about the Great Depression, the slide into Fascism and numerous other events, but not about what had happened to trigger a change in policy with regard to the Feyre. The Feyre themselves weren't mentioned at all and I wondered whether that was by design.

    What had prompted someone in authority to say that these files were no longer a civil matter and would thereafter be a military concern?

    The initials, BWPD, appended to the B file reference marked the change, but did not explain it, while the initials themselves were obscure.

    My hour had expired some time ago, but no one seemed to care. I stood, stretching my neck and easing knotted muscles in my shoulders, then made my way out, nodding to the youth, and headed back to the crypt of St Clement Danes.

    Avoiding the door to the main body of the church, I took the spiral stairway to the side and made my way down. The whitewashed walls with the commemorative plaques and the rows of simple seating gave this place a dignity and simplicity that the larger church above didn't have. The traffic rumbled past outside but did not disturb the peace that existed there.

    I stood for a moment, trying to borrow some of that peace, then I stepped forward and whirled away, veering around Way-nodes so that I was thrown far from London. Within moments I was standing on the hill looking down on Ravensby. The graded streets were ranked bands of shadow, but the harbour still looked bright and colourful, at least until you got close enough to see the grime.

    Slipping back into the town, I headed for the guest house. The room was as depressingly bare as I had left it. I stowed my sword and hung my jacket on the back of the door. Sitting on the end of the bed, I tried to clear my head. I felt as if I had the fragments of a picture but no clear idea of what I was looking at.

    Sam had failed to find Alex for me. I could push him harder, but I didn't think that would get me anywhere. Sam had helped me, not because I had threatened him, but because I turned back and saved him when I could have left him in the glade. He had gone as far as he was prepared to go and pushing him further would only result in him digging in his heels. I consoled myself that I knew more than I did before.

    Blackbird was a different problem. I stood and went to the mirror. Laying my hand upon it, I whispered her name into the glass.

    "Blackbird?"

    The mirror clouded, a sickly glow coming from within. There was a growing buzz, then a stuttering clatter erupted from it and I snatched my hand away before the mirror broke. The glow faded slowly. I could not find her that way.

    A different idea occurred to me and I replaced my hand. "Claire?" The mirror glowed with a more hopeful milky white. "Claire Raddison?" I could hear vague snatches of words, cut off and jumbled, like a conversation that had been taped, shredded and reassembled in random order. She also had protection against eavesdropping, though not as aggressive as Blackbird's. Were they together? If they were, wouldn't the same protection apply to both of them?