The Mysteries (26 page)

I wondered how Laura would explain this away, how deep in denial she'd have to go, and I imagined her comatose with shock, and shuddered. Well, I certainly wasn't going to be the one to tell her that she'd spent several weeks entertaining a dead woman in her flat; a dead woman who continued to send her e-mails.

I closed the Internet connection, closed the program, and shut down my computer. Sometimes I left it on all night, but I didn't feel like doing so that night. Then I got up and made sure the doors were locked and bolted shut, and set the burglar alarm, too, even though such things are well-known to make no difference to the dead.

In my dream, I was going to meet Jenny. I was on foot in a city that was both familiar and strange to me, and the journey was taking much longer than I had expected as I made one slow, circuitous wrong turn after another. The city was a puzzling jumble, bits of Milwaukee and Dallas mixed up with London, and nothing that I recognized was quite right. Eventually I arrived at a park with a high wall around it. The tall, square gateposts were topped with pale grey stone statues of hooded figures. It looked more like a cemetery than a public park, yet I knew this was where Jenny had asked me to meet her, so I hurried through the open gate.

As I approached the small hill at the center of the park I could see Jenny was already there, waiting for me, standing there like a beacon. She had on the dark red suit she used to wear when she wanted to impress, as it made her look both businesslike and sexy, with its short skirt and the high heels she wore to flaunt her shapely legs and add height. My heart leaped at the sight of her, and I hurried forward, my arms going out to hug her.

She turned and she wasn't Jenny, she was Fred.

I stopped in confusion, but she caught my hands and nodded encouragingly, inclining her head. I saw a door in the side of the soft, green slope. Although she didn't say anything, I knew from the nod of her head that Jenny waited for me inside the hill.

I stepped forward confidently, and as soon as I was inside, the door slammed shut and I was trapped in a small, pitch-black, suffocatingly close space. In a panic, I flailed my arms, struck the wall, and woke up.

The room was filled with light that seemed searingly bright after the darkness of the dream. My hand throbbed. I shook it and flexed my fingers: bruised, maybe, but no serious harm done. I peered blearily at the clock and groaned when I saw it was only just after five-thirty. My reaction to the dream had pumped so much adrenaline into my system, I knew there was no way I'd be going back to sleep.

I got up and stumbled downstairs, but as soon as I walked into my bare, chilly little kitchen, with its permanent scent of damp never quite covered by the ghosts of cooking past, I remembered that I'd forgotten to buy more coffee, or indeed anything to eat, and had to make do with a glass of water before going back up to shave, shower, and dress.

I didn't think any of the local shops or cafés would be open so early, so I decided to head into central London and get breakfast there. I had no plans for what I was going to do after that; but the residue of that dream, plus what I'd learned about Polly Fruell, made me unwilling to spend the day cooped up all by myself in my office. Until Hugh got in touch I had the frustrating feeling that there was nothing more I could do.

There wasn't much traffic on the road, and there were few people about as I walked down to the underground station. I wasn't even sure it would be running yet, but it was, and I had the rare, almost unique, experience of riding in a carriage that remained empty almost all the way to Leicester Square.

That's where I got out to walk through the quiet, waking streets, past the shut-up shops in an eerie blaze of daylight. There were other people about, most of them probably heading for work, although some of them looked both bright and confused and were probably tourists, and there were also a few staggering shufflers who seemed left over from the night before, caught out by the morning's sudden arrival. I saw one coffee shop open for business, but it had a queue of customers spilling out the door, so I passed. The next early-morning café also looked overcrowded, and another one, although still shut, had attracted a huddle of sleepy-looking potential customers.

I kept on walking, even though I was starting to feel definite signs of caffeine withdrawal, but the thought of Golden Square guided my steps. I didn't know why I should go there, but maybe I'd pick up some clue, see something I hadn't noticed before that might tie in that particular little corner of London with an ancient Irish myth. If not, well, the square had benches, and I could rest until I decided where to go next.

Only a scattering of people were using the benches at that early hour, and some had probably been there all night. They were all men. I didn't look directly at any of them—this was the city; we allowed each other our privacy—but made straight for an unoccupied spot, head down, purposeful, projecting, I hoped, the image of someone who should not be bothered with requests for spare change or cigarettes.

“Ian.”

The sound of my name, spoken quietly, lifted the hairs on my neck.

“Over here.”

I turned and saw Hugh Bell-Rivers sitting on a bench. As I approached, he held up a large styrofoam cup with a lid. “Want a coffee?”

I stared. He had two cups with him. A little hesitantly, I sat beside him and took the cup he offered. “Waiting for someone?”

“I thought you might turn up.”

“And this was easier than calling?” I gave him a hard look. “How long have you been waiting?”

“I just got here.”

The coffee, steaming hot, seemed to confirm that. But it made no sense. “What made you think I'd come here? Hey, did you get my message?”

He nodded.

“I didn't say ‘Meet you in Golden Square,' did I? I didn't know I was coming here myself until ten minutes ago.”

He shrugged. “That's OK.”

“No, it's not OK. I asked you to phone me.”

“I would've if you didn't turn up. It's still early.”

“Who'd you get this coffee for?”

“You.”

“Just in case I turned up.” I was getting irritated. “This is stupid. I didn't come here to play games. In fact, I don't know
why
I came here. But you do, it seems.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“I do. But I don't normally expect just to bump into the people I want to talk to at opportune moments. That's why God gave us telephones. What am I supposed to think, that you planted a posthypnotic suggestion that I'd come here this morning and be spooked out that you
knew
?”

“I didn't make you come here.”

I laughed harshly, not amused. “As if!”

He sighed. “I'm not trying to prove anything. There's nothing to prove. OK? Why don't you just drink your coffee and say what you wanted to say to me.”

I frowned. “First I want to know what made you think I'd be here.”

“OK.” He stared at me with those big, blue eyes. It was not a guileless, faux-naive stare, but a weary, open gaze. “I saw us here together. I mean ‘saw' us.” Still holding his cup, he managed to make quotation-mark hooks of his fingers. “It happens to me sometimes, I have these sort of visions. I don't mean hallucinations, and I know they aren't happening now; they're more like really vivid memories, but of things that haven't happened yet.”

“And do they always come true?”

“I don't know yet.”

“It sounds like the Second Sight,” I said. The Second Sight was a gift, or curse, of the Highland Scots, and it was connected to the ability to see fairies. “Were you born with it?”

“Definitely not.”

“How long, then?” But as I asked, I knew what he was going to say.

“Since Peri disappeared.”

“A gift from Mider,” I guessed, thinking of the strange wine. “Maybe a gift he didn't want to make, but he had to trade you
something
for Peri.”

“Oh, he gave me a lot more than that. There was the money.”

I peeled off the lid of my cup and took a cautious sip of the hot liquid. It was delicious, a strong, rich roast, uncontaminated by milk or sugar, as if Hugh's Second Sight extended even to the details of how I liked my coffee. “That check for five hundred thousand pounds? I thought you gave it back?”

“I did. At least, I thought I did, but he didn't take it.”

“What happened, he slip it back into your pocket?” I brightened. “If you had a check, we might be able to trace him through the bank.”

“It wasn't a check. It was a lottery ticket. My share of the winnings turned out to be five hundred thousand pounds.”

I whistled admiringly. “Some coincidence.”

He shook his head. “I never bought that ticket. My mother found it in my jacket pocket about a week later; she's the one who thought to check the numbers. It came from a local newsagent's, where I used to buy my copy of
Time Out
. The guy who worked there even identified me, said he remembered me buying it. Well, he remembered
me,
no doubt, I was in there every week, but I never bought a lottery ticket. I just didn't. But there it was, I won the money.”

Half a million pounds and the ability to see into the future. Good deal, I thought.

“So what about these visions?” I asked. “Are they always as exciting as knowing when and where you're going to run into somebody like me?”

He smiled reluctantly. “Go on, mock. Some of them are like that. Sometimes I don't even know what they're about—they're that inconsequential. I ‘see' something, out of context, then a week or two later I realize that it's happening. It's kind of like
déjà vu
. Other things—well, some are to do with other people.” He grimaced. “I knew one of my sisters was pregnant before she'd done the test, and I knew when she miscarried, before she'd told anyone. And some of them are still ahead in the future.” He shrugged. “Whether they're going to come true or not, there's bugger-all I can do about it.”

I frowned. “What do you mean? You didn't have to come here this morning.”

He looked surprised, as if staying away never occurred to him. “But you wanted to talk to me.”

“So?”

“I guess I wanted to talk to you, too.”

I sighed. “Well, what if I hadn't turned up?”

“But you did.”

“But how long would you have waited? Would you have come back again tomorrow? I thought you didn't know exactly when something was going to happen. How long would you have kept coming here with your two cups of coffee, trying to make your vision come true?”

“It's not like that. It's just a feeling . . . it was easy for me to come here today, I woke up early anyway, and it's near my work. If you didn't show up, I would have phoned you.”

“Well, thank you for returning my call,” I said, drinking. “And thanks for this—I was about ready to kill for a cup of coffee.”

“So what did you want to talk to me about?”

I wondered if his visions included sound. “What do you think?”

“You want me to rescue Peri.”

“I want your help to bring her back.”

He didn't respond to this distinction. “Do you know where she is?”

There was no reason to pull my punches with someone who'd just confessed to Second Sight. “I think she's in the Otherworld—whatever
that
means—with Mider.”

“But do you have any idea how to find her?”

“I have some ideas. There are certain places, and certain times, when there are ways through, and these places usually have stories attached to them, local traditions. I'm guessing there's some kind of link, or doorway, not far from where she was last seen. If we go up and scout around about, oh, say, a twenty-mile radius of that phone box, I think we could find it.”

“I think I'd know something like that if I was near it.” He put his empty cup down and toyed with his earrings for a moment, frowning. “In the story, it's not clear that Etain wanted to go back.”

“If she gave her husband a sign, she did.”

“But if she didn't? If she stood by and said nothing and let him take his own daughter to be his wife—how sick is that?”

“Maybe she couldn't speak. She was under a spell.”

He winced as he tugged at his earlobe. “Exactly. So she couldn't speak. She couldn't even choose to go away with Mider in the first place—he had to trick her husband into giving her up. She never had any say in what happened to her. It had nothing to do with what
she
wanted. It's all about the contest between the two men, or rather the god and the man, each a king in a different realm. Etain isn't a woman, she's a
thing
. It's not just that her desires don't count; they don't exist. She might as well be a magic box, or a prize cow that the men are fighting over.”

“Give that man an A-plus in feminist criticism,” I said.

“Peri is not an object. I won't treat her like one.”

“I'm not asking you to. Etain is obviously a symbol. But Peri's real, even if she's caught up in some ancient story.”

“She's not my property. I didn't give her away and I can't take her back. Only if she wants to come back with me. I don't want to bargain with Mider over who gets the girl; I won't play that game. If Peri needs my help, she only has to ask. I'd do anything she asked.” Raw emotion was naked in those last words, and I knew then that he'd never stopped loving her.

“What if she can't ask?”

He frowned and shook his head, fiddling again with the ear-rings, pulling them in a way that had to hurt. “He'll have to let her talk; if I see him again, he'll have to. It's her decision.”

“What if she thinks she doesn't need rescuing, but she really does?”

“According to who?”

“People can be deluded, deranged . . . you wouldn't let her destroy herself?”

“Take her away and lock her up for her own good, is that what you mean?”

I bristled at the contempt in his eyes. “Who said anything about locking up?”

“Drag her back here, then. Force her to live the way somebody else says is right. No. If she wants to stay, that's it. We don't have to understand her choice, just respect it.”

I'd finished my coffee. I stared across the square at some strutting pigeons. The sun was warm on my face, the top of my head, my hands. Hugh was with me, whatever his supposed moral reservations, and we had a mission; I should have felt great. Instead, I felt weary, and a little frightened. I was aware of an aching, hollow emptiness in my chest, which seemed to have been with me for most of my life, and I thought of the dark, tomblike space in my dream where I'd found myself imprisoned, having lost both Jenny and Fred.