Mike Shevdon - The Road to Bedlam

"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?"

"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.

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.