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Borough market is a great place to shop, but not an easy place to find someone. It's crowded, noisy, and there are lots of ways in and out, so that you can't just watch the entrance and wait. You have to wander.
It's also smelly. Not in an odorous, noxious way, but it's filled with smells. The cloying scent of frying onions mixes with the ripe pong of French cheese. Sticks of broken celery stalks compete with the sickly sweet of overripe strawberries. There are spices and herbs, complex high-notes from the flower stalls overpowered by the meaty wafts from the butchers' stalls and the fishmongers. All of this is laid on the faint odour of river water and mud from the Thames, only a few hundred yards away.
The smell is distracting, and so is the noise, but I was here on business and tried to focus. This was the haunt of one of the escapees, Andrew Warner — Andy to his friends. He'd been picked up here originally and taken to Porton Down, and he'd been under surveillance for some time before that.
His file indicated that he was classified low-risk, high potential, and talked of fragmented personality disorder, and morphological instability, whatever that might mean. I was hoping it meant he wouldn't try to kill me.
It also said that he'd tried to bring together the inmates at Porton Down into some sort of community support group, to help them help each other. The idea hadn't been popular with the leadership and there was much discussion of crosscontamination and the introduction of combined effects into experimental data, plus concerns about collaboration from the security people where there was any kind of gathering.
The idea had been scrapped, but not before Andy had managed to pull together an initial meeting and put the idea before some of the other inmates. The doctor responsible for that meeting had been sacked, and the report roundly condemned his actions, but a first meeting had already taken place. If Andy had met some of the other inmates, there was a strong chance he would know more about them, and might even be able to communicate with some of them.
The chance to open up a dialogue and offer them sanctuary in the courts, while at the same time being able to negotiate with the courts as a group rather than on an individual case-by-case basis had brought me here. If I could pull people together, then maybe we could make this work. Otherwise there was a strong chance that Garvin would lose patience and send in the dogs, and then there would be blood.
Of course, I had Andy's photograph from the file, but I wasn't sure that would help me. Appearance is flexible among the fey, and if he really didn't want to be identified then he had every chance to change his appearance and disappear. At the same time I'd noticed that the fey had a habit of returning to certain ways of looking. It was as if changing your image too much, too often, left you looking like everyone and no one. I had felt this myself, and although I looked younger than I used to, most of the time I still looked like me.
Blackbird was one of the few fey I knew who could switch her appearance between multiple personalities without slipping back to her usual appearance after a while. She could stay an old lady, or a young girl, for an indefinite period. I'd asked her about this after the baby was born and she got her glamour back. I knew what she looked like without glamour, and I'd got used to it while she was pregnant, so I asked her why she switched her appearance as soon as her power returned.
"Habit," she told me.
It didn't seem like much of an answer, so I pressed her on it.
"When you've looked one way for long enough, you don't forget," she said. "Before I met you I was Veronica for what, forty years? Before that, I was someone else. And before that too. I can be any of those people if I want to."
"Why can't you be you?"
It was the wrong question to ask, I could see that from the crinkle at the edge of her lips, but having asked it, I couldn't let it drop.
"This is me," She gestured at herself. "When I lost my power, I would look in the mirror and see a face I didn't recognise. I was looking into the eyes of a stranger. It was one of the things I didn't like about being pregnant. It made me feel exposed — almost naked."
It was a moment of rare vulnerability, and I held her close for a long while after, switching the conversation to safer subjects, such as what she would wean the baby on and whether Garvin was going to get me killed.
On that subject, I'd let my mind drift from the task at hand while I wandered through the stalls, which was not a good way of ensuring survival.
My eyes drifted to a guy in a long coat. He was holding out a rounded jar of amber liquid to one of the stall-holders. It caught the light, somehow absorbing stray rays of sunshine and magnifying them so it looked like he held a pot of shining gold. The stall-holder was shaking his head and holding up his hands but the guy was persistent.
There was a brief exchange of words and the guy's shoulders dropped. He turned towards me, tucking the jar back into a rucksack, searching the stalls for new opportunities and our eyes met. It wasn't his face I recognised. He'd grown a stubbly beard and his hair was longer than it had been in the photo. It was the look in his eyes, the look of someone who's been hunted, imprisoned, and tortured.
He turned away and then casually walked back towards the stall he'd visited as if he'd just thought of another reason why the guy should take the jar from him, but when he reached it he kept going, accelerating along the aisle. I jolted myself into motion, hurrying after him, trying to keep track of the long brown coat in the crowd. If I lost sight of him he could change appearance and I would never find him. I had to keep him in view.
He swerved around a lady with a shopping trolley and diverted sideways down a passage between the stalls. I took a risk and dipped into the next row and managed to catch a glimpse of him as he crossed between stalls and carried on towards the edge of the market. I sprinted down a parallel aisle, half expecting to find no sign of him as I emerged, but he was there, running down the edge of the stalls, scanning behind for any sign of me.
I carried on, exiting onto the lane that ran alongside the edge of the market and then swerved back in to intercept him. As I did I caught sight of a brown coat as it billowed out and half-caught on a pillar as the owner ran out into the lane I'd just left.
The next gap was yards ahead and I sprinted, closing the gap while he couldn't see me, striving to keep my momentum as I veered out through the exit on the lane after him. As I did he was at the end of the lane, looking back. As he saw me he bolted down a side road towards the railway arches and I followed.
"Wait," I shouted after him, "I only want to talk."
I couldn't tell if he'd heard me. I ran after him anyway, coming out onto the side road and finding an empty street. It was too long for him to have reached the far end so quickly, so I slowed my pace, scanning alley's and arches for signs of life. If he was hiding he could have switched his appearance as soon as he was out of sight — he could look like anyone by now.
The entrances to the arches were dimly lit and boarded up, with most barred and bolted with substantial padlocks which, while they wouldn't be much of a barrier to someone with fey ability, would be difficult to lock again from inside, so I looked for a loose lock or an unbarred doorway. The alleys were more of a problem as they had side doors and big commercial bins — the rear access to commercial properties on the main street on the other side of this row.
It was at the opening to such an alley that I found the brown coat, stuffed between a drainpipe and a wall beside a large black bin. The alley was shaded by tall brick buildings on either side — the only obvious access into the buildings was a door that looked like no one had opened it in the last decade. Around the door, the mortar between the bricks was crumbing leaving the ground sandy underfoot.