The Road to Bedlam

by Mike Shevdon

  "What am I, fucking Wikipedia?"

  "Either you have it or you don't, Sam."

  "Stop saying my name. Bloody GCHQ will be monitoring this. I'll lose my job and then no one will have anything."

  "Then tell me what I need."

  "Tate Britain. One hour. Can you do it?"

  "Yes. Why there?"

  "Because it's not far and there's something I want to bloody show you, all right?"

  "If you're setting me up, Sam, I'm going to leave you up to your neck in grass."

  "There's no set-up. Meet me. I'll show you." I could hear the truth in his voice. He was not setting me up, but I would still be cautious.

  "One hour. Wait for me." I took my hand from the mirror and dropped the call.

  I put on my jacket and checked the pockets, making sure I had the codex, a torch, my wallet and anything else I might need. I unsheathed, wiped and resheathed the sword and then held it until it was a black umbrella. I left the window ajar to air the room; if Raffmir wanted to get in, a window wouldn't stop him, and there was nothing valuable in the room to steal.

  Leaving quietly, I found the downstairs rooms silent and empty. Making myself unremarkable, I exited the guest house and turned towards the harbour. Yesterday's rain had been swept away, leaving the sky looking scrubbed. I looked out beyond the harbour where the gulls perched on the bastion watching the tide ebb from the walls to the horizon where the sea melted into the sky. It was a beautiful day, and I had slept through most of it.

  I marched across the harbour front and up the hill, past the church and into the narrow streets. Mounting the bank, I climbed up through the tussocks to where the Way-point nestled in the dip near the hill-top. Turning around I saw the town laid out below me, the roofs washed clean and shining in the afternoon light, the distant sound of children playing mixing with the mewling cry of the gulls. In this light, on this day, you could see why people stayed here.

  I stepped on to the Way-point and felt it rise beneath me. I launched myself into the flow, letting it sweep me away inland. As I approached the next node, I twisted slightly, letting it slingshot me around to the next point. My heartbeat accelerated as I came to the next node and veered around it south, using the nodes to slalom southwards, reversing the route I had used the previous night to traverse the darkness with the minimum of effort. It was still draining, but it was less tiring than traversing the nodes point by point, one by one. I had Raffmir to thank for that, at least.

  As I approached the Way-points around London I began taking them wide, shedding momentum and letting them slow me. Aiming to show some style after Raffmir's remarks the day before. I was shedding momentum as I shimmered into being in the crypt of the Church of St Clement Danes on the Strand in London, and I only stumbled forward slightly. I glanced around, finding no one there to witness my attempt at a graceful landing and grateful at least for that. I gently eased the misdirection around myself, leaving just enough to make me unremarkable so that I could climb the curving stairway to the entry hall and slip out into the evening air. London was noticeably warmer than Yorkshire and I found the jacket suddenly heavy across my shoulders. It held too much to carry it, though.

  As I walked past Australia House, I noticed the iron gates barring the door, and found myself rubbing my palm where I had touched them the previous year. Simply touching them had thrown me backwards, leaving a livid burn mark on my hand that had faded slowly, teaching me a valuable lesson about iron and the Feyre. I steered around them, setting a steady pace along the Strand to Trafalgar Square.

  Checking my watch, I realised I had enough time for a small diversion, so I strode up the rise past the white portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields and stopped at the coffee shop where Blackbird had taken me and where she first told me about the Feyre and my magical heritage. Thinking about it, somehow it felt like two lives, one ordinary, punctuated by dull commutes and arguments, and one unreal, where at any moment I might lose my home, my daughter or my life. I shook my head and then had to apologise to the young man who served me coffee, while I paid for the drink and for a sandwich I had picked up.

  "Are you sure you're OK, Sir?" The young man looked concerned.

  "It's fine, thanks. I was just thinking of someone I was with the last time I was in this coffee shop."

  He took my money. "I hope it worked out well for you," he said with a smile.

  "I'm not sure," I said. "I'll have to let you know."

  I took my coffee outside to the seats overlooking the square, choosing the same seat I had taken when Blackbird was there. Things had seemed simpler then. It had been run or die, fight or flee. Blackbird had been open and inviting. The memory of her suggesting an afternoon of sex and seduction made me smile, until I remembered that she also thought I wouldn't last the night. Now I knew her better, I realised that she had her own reasons for everything, even that.

  The coffee was very hot, so I ate the sandwich, realising only as I licked mayonnaise and crumbs from my fingers how hungry I had been. Then I had to wait until the coffee cooled to drink it.

  Last year when I was in the same spot I had been hunted. Blackbird told me that I would have to fight to survive the dawn. Well, I had fought and mostly I'd won. The victory, though, had its bitterness, and its losses. I wondered where Blackbird was. I was aware that she was smart and quick and knew things that I had yet to learn, but I also knew she was alone, pregnant and had no magic to protect her. I wondered where my daughter was and what had been done to her to make her turn on the three girls in the changing room. I wondered how that had changed her. It made me consider again whether this life was truly worth the price.

  I blew on my coffee to cool it, having dawdled long enough, and drank as much as I could before dropping my cup and sandwich wrapper into the bin. Then I walked across the road, down across Trafalgar Square, past the bronze lions and over into Whitehall.

  The walk took me down past Downing Street, where I wondered if the iron gates at either end of the Prime Minister's and the Chancellor's residence were entirely coincidental. I walked on past Big Ben and the grand East window of Westminster Abbey. The pedestrians thinned and changed from tourists to civil servants as I passed beyond the Palace of Westminster and into Pimlico.

  The grand facade of the Tate Gallery was in front of me. I had fifteen minutes to spare. I diverted for a few moments into Victoria Gardens and used the shelter there to re-establish the concealment I would need and adjust my glamour so that no one would recognise me, even if they saw me. Then I crossed the road and climbed the steps to the entrance, slipping inside to the cool interior, passing the helpful gentleman directing visitors and avoiding the gaze of the security guards. I worked my way around the gallery, moving from room to room, checking the location of cameras, watching for additional security guards, looking for people who had ear-pieces or seemed out of place. If there were people there watching, they were doing it remotely. My glamour would deal with that.

  When I saw Sam had arrived early too, I should not have been surprised. He was walking around the gallery much as I was, watching the people, not the pictures. He passed within a couple of feet of me and even glanced at me as he passed. He did not recognise me, though he did look twice. Something about my demeanour made him do so. I let him take a good look, and then move on.

  Moving slowly after him, I made my way around until I was sitting on the benches behind him where he waited. I watched him as the meeting time came and went, looking for any sign that he was communicating with anyone. He looked impatient and edgy, but he made no sign and gave no signal that I could discern.

  Slowly I increased the concealment around me, allowing it to seep into the room. Gradually people turned away, glanced into the room and decided to turn back. They wandered slowly into other rooms. Eventually we were alone. The camera in the corner was still active, but it would record nothing useful. The warder standing at the doorway watched with decreasing interest until her head nodded and she fell asleep. I watched Sa
m become aware that almost everyone had gone.

  "You wanted to meet me, Sam Veldon. Did you tell anyone else we were meeting?"

  He glanced at the warder and then at me. "Do you always creep around like this?"

  "I am not creeping. I am sitting. Did you tell anyone, Sam? Is there anyone listening to our conversation?"

  He came across and sat on the bench beside me. "I could lose more than my job for this."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "No." He shook his head and smiled, wryly. "Who am I gonna tell? Oh. I'm just going out to meet a guy from my dreams." He looked at me, carefully. "It is you, isn't it?"

  "Have you managed to get the taste of grass out of your mouth?"

  He looked away. Then he wiped the back of his hand across his lips. "Not really. Kinda sticks with you, doesn't it?"

  "You would do well to remember that."

  "If I'm being followed, I don't know about it, but it's a risk in my business. We all know that we could be subject to surveillance at any time."

  "What did you bring me here for, Sam? What did you want to tell me that couldn't be said over the phone?"

  "Yeah, you need to watch that. They're coming in tomorrow to check the electromagnetic shielding. You're not supposed to be able to phone in or out of that building. Only the desk phones, that's how it is."

  "You will have to make an excuse."

  "Just don't call me there again. It's not supposed to work, right?"

  "Don't tell me what to do, Sam. You owe me."

  "I don't owe you anything!" His voice was raised and the warder at the door startled slightly, but then nodded again. "This is crazy, I shouldn't even be here."

  "Just tell me what I need to know and I'll go. You can get back to whatever it is that you do."

  He stood up and for a second I though he was leaving, but then he walked over to the wall opposite, where two small paintings hung.

  "Take a look at this. What do you think."

  I followed him over. "I'm not here for art appreciation, Sam. I want to know where my daughter is."

  He continued as if I hadn't spoken. "The picture is called The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. Ring any bells?"

  The mention of "fairy" made me look afresh at the painting. It was a small dark square painted in exquisite detail. It depicted a small man in a long coat, not unlike Raffmir's. His back was turned and he held a hatchet high, ready to strike down at a cob nut. The scale was all wrong, with tiny figures peering between the strands of grass, watching. When you looked closer you could see that some of the figures had wings, but they weren't butterfly wings. They were somewhere between a leaf and a bat. Each time you looked closer it showed even more detail. In places the faces looked distorted, as if seen through a crooked glass or under water.

  I looked up at Sam. "No bells with me, Sam. Should it?"

  "It was painted by Richard Dadd. Name mean anything?"

  "Not really. I didn't do art school."

  "How about this one?"

  The painting next to it was of two faces, but they weren't human faces. Something about them reminded me of people I had met in the High Court of the Feyre. The eyes were intense and watchful and they had an aura about them that somehow reminded me of fey glamour.

  "This isn't familiar either, though it is striking. What's the relevance of this?"

  "When you were at the hospital last year, there was a grey woman in the room. I thought it was an illusion, but she was there, wasn't she?"

  "She was."

  "And then she'd gone. She just faded away. And last night, I woke up covered in scratches. I had red marks all over me where the grass bit into my skin."

  "Dreams can sometimes spill over into your life, Sam. It depends whose dreams they are."

  He looked at me and then back at the painting. "One of the files is on him, the guy who painted these."

  "One of what files?"

  "The B files. He's one of them."

  "An artist? Why would an artist have a government file on him?"

  "Did you know he was mad? He claimed to see things that weren't there? Yet he painted these incredible pictures. Look at the detail. Look at the way it's almost three-dimensional. What do you think he saw?"

  "Who knows? You said he was mad?"

  "He spent a good deal of his life in mental hospitals, and one hospital in particular. St Mary's Bethlehem."

  "I don't know it."

  "Oh, but you do. At least you know of it. It's infamous. St Mary's Bethlehem, also called Bethlem Hospital… also called Bedlam."

  "The Victorian freak show?"

  "So you do know it?"

  "I've heard of it.

  "That's where the B files lead. That's where they all went, eventually. They all ended up in Bedlam."

  "Didn't the Victorians used to run tours round it, so you could go and laugh at the mad people?"

  "That's one way of funding the health service. I told you, the files go way back. I talked to Cruella."

  "Who's Cruella?"

  "Camilla de Veirs. She's the posh totty in the archives. Loves to bang on about the value of contextual knowledge. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – that kind of thing. She told me some of them are thirteenth-century. They go back to the Stone House; used to be out near Charing Cross when it was still fields and farms. Then it moved up to Bishopsgate where it became St Mary's Bethlehem, or just plain Bethlem. That's where they put all the oddballs, the bag ladies and the tramps, until it got bad. Disease, overcrowding – they had it all. When it got worse, they moved it to St George's Fields, where the Imperial War Museum is now. This poor bugger painted these pictures while he was there."

  "So where is it now?"

  "Bromley."

  "You're joking."

  "Straight up. It's part of South London and Maudsley Health Trust. They don't do tours any more though."

  "Is that where Alex is?"

  "No. I checked. She's not in Broadmoor either, which is where this poor bugger ended up. Twenty years in a hospital for the criminally insane. What a way to treat an artist."

  "Then where is she?"

  He turned away, walked back to the bench and sat down. "I don't know."

  I followed him and stood over him, looking down into his grizzled face.

  "I need to find her, Sam. I need to know where they've taken her."

  "I told you, I don't know. When they abandoned St George's Fields they broke it up. The easy cases went to Monk's Orchard at Maudsley. The dangerously psychotic ones ended up in Broadmoor, or at Rampton up in Nottinghamshire. Some went to other institutions where they could be nearer family or just where they had room. She's not in any of those, I can tell you that much. When St George's Fields closed, the references for the B files changed. They have a suffix. B/BWPD."

  "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?"