WRATHCHILD INVESTIGATIONS: The Curious Case of Clara Chase.

[Keeper]

The Curious Case of Clara Chase

Chapter One

I'd only been on Asher for two days when I found myself sitting outside St Bartholomew's Hospital with responsibility for a fourteen-year-old girl.

It wasn't quite what I'd expected when I'd taken the case.

Then again, I'd learned a long time ago that expectations were generally the first things to go wrong.

We'd come to St Bartholomew's because our investigation had led us there. That was about as far as we'd got. We didn't know what we were looking for, only that whatever we were looking for appeared to have something to do with the hospital. Grace, Tom, Marlowe and I had been working on the problem together, while Nathaniel and Clara had arrived separately and met us there.

Nathaniel had shown us around the hospital, which was doing its best to function while the Navy used it for military casualties. It was a busy place, and there were enough uniforms and stretchers moving through the corridors to make me feel as though I'd wandered into somebody else's war.

I hadn't expected Nathaniel to be called away.

A messenger found him while we were still talking, and after a brief conversation Nathaniel came over to me. He looked towards Clara before speaking.

"Arthur, would you mind staying with Clara while I deal with this?"

"Of course."

He seemed relieved.

There wasn't much more to it. He went over to Clara and explained that he had to leave for a while. She listened carefully, nodded and gave him a small smile. She didn't look frightened, and she certainly didn't make a fuss. She simply accepted that her father had something he needed to deal with.

When Nathaniel turned away, Clara looked at me.

"Mr Wrathchild?"

I smiled.

"Arthur will do."

She hesitated for a moment before nodding.

"Very well, Arthur."

It was a small thing, but I remember it. She was polite without being timid, and there was already something about her manner that told me she wasn't quite the ordinary fourteen-year-old girl I'd expected.

Nathaniel disappeared back into the hospital with the messenger, leaving Clara and me standing there.

I glanced towards the doors, then back at her.

"Well, I suppose we'd better get out of everyone's way."

She followed me without complaint.

My car was parked a short distance away, and I opened the passenger door for her before walking around to the driver's side. She climbed in, settled herself comfortably and waited while I started the engine.

I pulled away from the hospital without having the slightest idea where I was going.

That was the first problem.

The second was that I'd been asked to keep Clara company, which was a considerably less specific instruction than "take her somewhere".

For a while I drove without saying anything. London passed around us in the usual mixture of traffic, uniforms and wartime inconvenience. Clara watched the streets through the window, apparently content to let me decide where we were going.

Eventually I glanced across at her.

"So, what would you like to do?"

She looked at me.

"What?"

"I've been asked to keep you company while your father is busy. I thought we might as well do something with the time."

She considered the question.

"I don't know."

I waited for her to add something.

She didn't.

I wasn't exactly an expert in what a fourteen-year-old girl liked to do in wartime Britain, but I had a rough idea. The pictures were an obvious possibility. Shopping for a new dress, assuming we could find one and she had the coupons for it. The zoo might have been worth a visit. There were probably a dozen other things that a girl her age would have considered far more interesting than sitting in the passenger seat of a stranger's car.

Clara seemed to have nothing in particular in mind.

I didn't rush her.

I'd only known the girl for two days, but I'd already noticed that she was bright. Very bright, in fact. She watched people carefully, listened when adults were talking and seemed to understand rather more than she let on. There was a maturity about her that was difficult to miss.

But she was still fourteen.

Nearly fifteen, although I hadn't yet learned quite how important that distinction was.

Her circumstances had put more restrictions on her life than most girls her age had to deal with. That didn't mean her father had made every decision for her. From what I'd seen, Nathaniel did his best to give her as normal a life as he could whenever circumstances allowed it.

This just wasn't a particularly normal set of circumstances.

I looked across at her again.

"Nothing comes to mind?"

She shook her head.

"Not really."

I nodded and kept driving.

After a little while she looked at me.

"What would you do?"

I laughed.

"That's a dangerous question."

"Why?"

"Because my idea of a good afternoon probably isn't the same as yours."

"What would your idea be?"

I thought about it.

"A decent meal, a drink and somewhere I could sit without somebody asking me questions."

She smiled.

"I don't think that's very exciting."

"I didn't say it was."

That made her laugh quietly.

It was the first time I'd heard her laugh properly, and I remember thinking that it suited her better than the serious expression she'd worn most of the morning.

I turned onto another street and glanced across at her.

"All right. Your turn."

"My turn?"

"You're the one I'm supposed to be looking after. If we're going to spend the afternoon together, you might as well have some say in what we do."

She thought about that.

This time, when she looked out of the window, there was a little more interest in her expression.

"I'd like to see more of London."

"That's easy enough."

She looked back at me.

"Would it be all right?"

There was the politeness again.

I realised then that Clara wasn't asking because she needed permission to have an opinion. She was asking because she'd been handed over to someone she'd only known for two days and wanted to know what the rules were.

I smiled.

"I think we can manage that."

"Thank you, Arthur."

"You're welcome."

And that was how the afternoon began.

At the time, I thought we'd simply spend a few hours seeing London and then return to St Bartholomew's when Nathaniel was finished.

I was wrong about the afternoon.

I was also wrong about how much I was going to learn about Clara Chase before the day was over.

[Keeper]

Chapter Two


London was an impressive city, even when you had to keep reminding yourself that somebody had spent a considerable amount of time trying to destroy it.

I decided that if I was going to keep Clara occupied for the afternoon, I might as well show her some of the sights. I knew enough of London from previous visits to other worldlines to recognise the obvious places, although I was beginning to suspect that knowing a city on one world didn't necessarily make you an expert on the next.

We started with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Clara seemed pleased with the choice and spent some time pointing out things I hadn't noticed, which was mildly embarrassing considering I was supposed to be the one showing her around.

From there we went towards St Paul's.

The dome was impressive enough, but it was the things around it that caught my attention. London had been bombed, and the damage wasn't something you could politely ignore. There were buildings with their fronts missing, exposing rooms that had once been private and ordinary. In one place a staircase climbed three floors before ending in open air. Somewhere else, a bedroom was still furnished despite the rest of the house being little more than rubble.

Clara became quieter as we drove through those streets.

I did too.

There wasn't much to say about that sort of thing. I'd seen what war did to cities before, although usually from a different angle and, in some cases, on a different world entirely. It never became something you got used to seeing.

Eventually we made our way towards Horse Guards, and Clara began talking again. She had questions about some of the buildings we'd passed, and I answered the ones I could. When I couldn't, she seemed perfectly happy to tell me what she knew instead.

It was during that part of the afternoon that I made my first navigational mistake.

I'd seen the road before, or at least something close enough to it that my memory insisted it was the same road. I followed it with the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea where he was going.

It took Clara a few minutes to notice.

"You know we're going the wrong way, don't you?"

"I was beginning to suspect it."

She looked across at me with a smile that was becoming increasingly difficult to suppress.

"You said you knew where you were going."

"I said nothing of the sort."

"You did."

"I said I knew the general direction."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," I admitted. "It isn't."

She laughed, and I found myself laughing with her. I eventually found the road I wanted, although Clara made a point of reminding me that we'd already passed the turning once.

I told her that navigation was considerably more complicated than it looked.

She suggested that perhaps I should buy a map.

I told her that I had one.

She asked why I hadn't used it.

I had no particularly good answer for that.

The second time I got lost, she was waiting for it.

By then she'd become comfortable enough to tease me about it, although she still did it with the sort of restraint that reminded me she was fourteen and I was an adult she'd only known for two days. There was no disrespect in it. She simply seemed to have decided that getting lost twice was enough evidence to make my navigation a legitimate subject for criticism.

I couldn't really argue with her.

Eventually she announced that she was hungry.

That seemed reasonable, so I started looking for somewhere we could stop. We ended up in Greenwich, where we found a small café and managed to get ourselves a table.

Tea and cake seemed like the appropriate answer to the afternoon.

The tea was considerably better than I'd expected.

I'd never understood why British people were so particular about the stuff until I'd spent enough time drinking it elsewhere. Whatever they did differently, they did it properly. I took a sip and decided that I could understand why the country had chosen to fight a world war rather than surrender its tea supply.

Clara noticed my expression.

"Is it good?"

"It's very good."

She smiled. "You sound surprised."

"I am. I've had tea in a lot of places. Most of it wasn't worth drinking."

"British tea is different."

"I've noticed."

We sat there for a while, and for the first time that day neither of us seemed to have anywhere else we needed to be.

The conversation wandered naturally. Clara told me about some of the places she'd visited with Nathaniel and the things she'd enjoyed doing when they had the opportunity. She talked about books, about London and about some of the things she'd seen during her father's investigations. I answered a few questions about myself without going into too much detail.

There were certain things about my life that weren't particularly suitable for a conversation with a fourteen-year-old girl, especially one whose father was already dealing with more strange things than either of us needed to add to the list.

I listened more than I talked.

That was something I'd learned to do over the years.

People tended to tell you a lot when you gave them the chance.

By the time we'd finished our tea and cake, I realised that the afternoon had turned out rather differently from what I'd expected.

I'd thought I was taking Clara out to keep her occupied while Nathaniel dealt with whatever had called him away.

Instead, we'd spent several hours looking at London, getting lost twice, laughing about it and discovering that British tea was considerably better than anything I'd been served in America.

It wasn't much.

But for an afternoon in wartime London, it was a pretty good start.

[Keeper]

Chapter Three

We stayed in the café for a while after we'd finished the cake. I was enjoying the tea, and Clara seemed happy enough to sit quietly and watch the people outside. She had been unusually contemplative for the last few minutes, turning her cup slowly between her hands while apparently giving something a good deal of thought.

Eventually she looked up at me.

"Arthur, are you from another world?"

I very nearly spat my tea across the table.

I managed to swallow it, although it wasn't particularly dignified, and put the cup down before I made an even bigger mess of myself. The question had caught me completely off guard, and not because it was particularly strange. By then, Clara knew that there were other worlds. She'd seen enough of Infinity's technology and had been taken to New York under cover of darkness, so she already knew that the world was considerably stranger than most people in 1943 believed.

What caught me was that she'd asked me **here**.

I glanced around the café. It wasn't crowded, but there were still other people around us, and I'd already learned enough about Infinity to know just how seriously they took keeping their secrets.

Clara was watching me closely.

She hadn't asked the question casually, either. There was no mischievous grin or hint that she was trying to catch me out. She simply wanted an answer, and I had the distinct impression that she already had a pretty good idea what that answer was going to be.

I considered lying.

It wouldn't have been difficult. I could have laughed it off, told her she'd misunderstood something or simply said that she was mistaken. The problem was that Clara was a very bright young lady, and I had no doubt she'd know I was lying.

Besides, she'd asked me directly.

"Yes," I said.

Her eyes widened slightly, although she didn't look particularly surprised.

"Really?"

I nodded and took another sip of my tea, mostly because I needed a moment to decide what I was going to say next.

"Really."

She looked as though she was about to start asking questions, so I stopped her before she could.

"Not here."

She looked around the café.

"Why not?"

"Because this is a public place."

She glanced around again. There were only a handful of customers, most of them minding their own business, but that didn't change my answer.

"Even if nobody is listening?"

"Especially then. People who aren't listening are usually the ones who hear things."

She considered that and seemed to accept it.

I finished my tea and reached for my coat. "If you want to talk about it, I'll tell you what I can. But we'll find somewhere private first."

Clara sat quietly for a moment before she suggested her father's house. She had a key, she explained, and it wasn't very far away.

That sounded considerably better than discussing other worlds in the middle of a café, so I settled the bill and we headed back outside.

Once we were in the car, Clara gave me directions. I followed them, which was considerably easier than trying to navigate London from memory.

I'd already managed to get lost twice that afternoon. I didn't particularly want to make it three.

As we drove, Clara was quiet again. I suspected she was trying to work out what she was going to ask me when we arrived.

I couldn't blame her.

If I'd been fourteen and somebody had casually confirmed that he'd come from another world, I'd probably have had a few questions myself.