Paint it Black, page 7
“Pippa, darling” she said to the receptionist, a young woman of Caribbean descent who always looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine. “Is Joel in?”
Office culture at the firm was surprisingly modern for an entity that had been in existence, as far as Gosha could tell, since the early sixteen-hundreds. Everyone was referred to by their first names, no matter how high up the ranks they were.
“Hi, Gosha. Is he expecting you?” Pippa smiled to see her. Gosha remembered well the cold shoulder pad turned her way for the first weeks that Gosha had been hired by the firm. It had taken a Christmas gift of Gosha’s special makeup to break the ice.
Gosha grimaced.
“Probably not, I’m afraid. We had a bit of a squabble last night and now I’m in hot water. I’m sure I’m the last person he wants to see this morning, but I need to apologize to him for being an absolute pratt.”
Pippa was the clearing house for all office gossip, and thanks to regular refills of foundation and concealer, Gosha was part of her inner circle. It always paid to be in with the support staff.
“Oh, dear!” Pippa put her phone to her ear and tapped her pen against the frame of her glasses, pondering. “Let me call Jasmine and see what she can do.”
She punched in a short sequence of buttons on her switchboard with the capped tip of her pen.
Gosha stepped back from the front desk to let her get on with it. Reception was a fishbowl. The open plan main floor spread out beyond the glass walls, dominated by a large reinforced glass spiral staircase leading up to the higher floors.
“Jasmine says he’s got a meeting with the partners in half an hour, but he’s going over accounts in his office right now. Good luck.”
She nodded toward the inner door as she buzzed Gosha through.
“Thanks, sweetie.” She gave Pippa a wink. “I’m working on a new batch of colors for you. I’ll bring them in next week.”
She made her way to the central staircase, smiling and waving at familiar faces as she passed, Tucked under her arm, she carried with her a portfolio containing all the closeups of La Davina’s blurred necklace. A deeply ingrained witch instinct always made her conceal her methods from Adair and the firm as much as possible, but now she had something concrete to show Adair after the incident at Bar de Bauche the night before, it might be time to give a little, though the telling card she carried in her pocket she should probably still keep to herself.
Jasmine, Adair’s assistant, was on the phone, but nodded Gosha through to his office. Gosha had no doubt she was on the line with Pippa speculating what might have happened between them. She realized she had no idea if Adair was out at the office. The vibe at the firm was always hip and progressive, but you never knew, and it wasn’t fair to assume.
Adair’s door was open. He sat at his desk, head down, taking notes on a stack of files, so she rapped on the door frame.
“Joel?”
He stiffened when he saw her and stood.
“Mrs. Armitage.”
He didn’t offer her a seat when she went in, leaving her standing awkwardly in front of his desk.
“I came to apologize.” She launched into the feeble speech she’d prepared in the car on the way over. “I’m so sorry for the things I said last night. Johnny had just told me about his intention, and then the whole thing with La Davina happened. I was on edge and overwhelmed. I spoke from a small and petty place. I do value the work we do together. I’m grateful for everything you and the firm have done for me. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the oblique ways the firm works. I hope you can forgive me.”
He let her apology hang in the air between them like a spell turned sour.
“What exactly did happen last night?” he asked eventually, giving no sign he’d forgiven her.
He was going to make her work for it.
“Dropnick’s corruption nearly took La Davina and one of her acolytes. I cleared it off them, but La Davina was acting very strangely. Delusional at first. Paranoid. Then, once I’d cleared her, she acted as if nothing had happened. I’ve seen similar behavior changes connected to Dropnick’s corruption in the past. During the incident with Vivien Drake and Pauline Sutton. I didn’t know about Dropnick at the time, but it’s clear he was indirectly involved.”
“With the Sphere of Shadow?” His eyes widened. He pulled a file from halfway down his stack, flipped it open and leaned down to scribble something on the top sheet. “You’ve never told me about this. All we knew is that there was a contretemps between the saint and her acolytes and you helped sort it out.”
“It was a long, involved mess. In the end, the saint of Shadow asked me to hide her from Euphemia Graham.”
At that, Adair sat back down and pulled another file from the stack to riffle through its pages. He gestured at her to sit without looking up.
Okay, she thought. Business it is. A step in the right direction, at least.
She laid her portfolio on the desk and unzipped it, taking out the prints of La Davina’s necklace.
“This is the only evidence I could find of Dropnick’s involvement other than the corruption.” She’d never told him about her ability to see a person’s aura, but he knew she was able to sense things he could only detect with the firm’s specialized equipment.
Adair took the pictures and spread them out.
“What am I looking at?”
“This is the necklace La Davina was wearing. She had it on, both in the illusion she projected while she wasn’t herself and after I cleared her. It must have some significance. See the blurring?”
He nodded and held one of the shots closer to get a better look.
“I’m sometimes able to capture impressions on film.”
This elicited a raised eyebrow from Adair. She had to get him into a poker game sometime. She’d make a fortune.
“All I was able to get was the blurring, but it’s a sign that something’s amiss with the necklace. Dropnick made a device for Bishop Worsley that looked like a crucifix. I think we have to consider the possibility that La Davina is involved with Dropnick somehow. And I have reason to believe Judge Griffiths is as well.”
Adair turned pale.
“Oh, god. Johnny.”
“How are you two doing?”
“Better. He’s determined, you know. I was like you at first. I tried to dissuade him completely, but when I realized he’d already made up his mind, I pushed for him to join the firm. You said you’d taken an oath?”
Oh, boy. My wall of secrecy is crumbling fast. How long before I’m inviting him to tea with the ladies?
“Yes. It nearly killed me.”
“Which sphere?”
“Mystery, but I’m no longer bound by it.”
“How—”
“Some things I can’t reveal. Suffice it to say it’s why my relationship with Euphemia Graham is so fraught.”
He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand across his scalp.
“In the firm we don’t have the same challenges as other spheres. Once you’ve signed your contract, you’re put through an acclimation protocol. It’s a little disorienting, but overall nowhere near as catastrophic as taking an oath. If you choose not to renew, they put you through the same protocol and you’re back to normal.”
She realized he was pitching the firm to her, to get her on his side with Johnny. This time it was she who let his words hang there. If Johnny was so determined, she could find other, safer ways to give him an advantage.
He breathed in deeply, the stiffness draining out of him.
“I haven’t been honest with you. You were right. The work we’ve been doing together has been trivial. The partners wanted to keep you close, but not give you access to the whole investigation. They see you as a lynchpin. The wheel turns around you, whether you realize it or not.”
Now it was Gosha’s turn to be stiff and offended.
“The wheel?”
He reached for his phone.
“The Wheel of Fortune. Everything’s wheels and cycles and loops in this place. It gets quite tedious.”
He punched in an extension.
“Galatea? Open a spoke to the hub for me, please. Grade seven. Rank three. Account one-seven-five-two. Priority one.”
He tapped out a brisk tattoo with his pen on the desk, waiting for an answer.
“Thank you. I’ll head up there now.” He pushed back from the desk and stood. “Come. We’re going to see the partners.”
9
In the year and a half of working for the firm, she’d only been allowed upstairs to meet the partners once, and then it wasn’t exactly a face-to-face meeting. Adair took her up to the top floor in a dedicated elevator that let them out into a room that could have been the size of a football field or barely larger than the ring of light from an overhead spot that was the only source of illumination, with no echoes to give away the truth. In the center of the room stood a tower of black mesh with a shifting array of lights behind it, a vast bank of electronic equipment that was somehow the interface between the supernatural realm of the Lords of Fate and Fortune Gosha had witnessed with Eleanor in the Between as a raging tempest and the real world. Four office workstations circled the pillar end on, like spokes on a wheel, each with two computer terminals on them staffed by the same four women Gosha had encountered the last time: a tall woman of African descent in her fifties, a young woman in her twenties, small and mousy, and two interchangeable fresh-faced blond women in their thirties. The women each stood at one of their two terminals ready to type.
“The lynchpin has breached the inner sanctum without authorization,” read the tall dark-skinned woman from her computer screen. “The probability curves have been altered. Recalculation of the predictive models is necessary.”
“You didn’t tell them I was coming,” said Gosha, and all four attendants typed noisily on their keyboards to transcribe her words.
Adair leaned in to speak to her in a low whisper so the attendants wouldn’t hear and transcribe what he said. “They can be very stubborn and single-minded. I find it’s best to act first and ask forgiveness later.”
“A philosophy I live by,” she whispered back. “Though usually without the forgiveness part.”
“My Lords.” Adair directed his words to the top of the tower and the attendants clacked away at their keyboards. “There have been new developments in the priority account. It’s essential that Mrs. Armitage be allowed to see the current results of our investigation.”
“Interference from the chaos agent,” read one of the two interchangeable blonde attendants from her screen, “will jeopardize the balance of outcomes. She must be removed immediately from our presence.”
“Chaos agent?” said Gosha, and the women tapped at their keyboards. She wasn’t sure if she should be offended or flattered.
“The data,” said Adair, “continues to be inconclusive as to the effect Mrs. Armitage has on the distribution matrices of the probability fields.”
To hear Adair chatter away in the firm’s impenetrable technobabble made Gosha’s headache even worse.
“She has proven incontrovertibly to be a stabilizing force on numerous occasions.”
“Joel, sweetie,” she whispered. “You say the nicest things.”
He shot her a vexed look.
“Our investigation,” read the other interchangeable blonde attendant, “has revealed complex interconnectivity between randomized and shielded elements. The results we have obtained are removed to the fifth degree and are in jeopardy of incremental subversion should integrity be disturbed.”
“They’re worried you’ll frighten their sources,” Adair whispered.
“Oh, good lord.” Gosha rolled her eyes and stepped up to the nearest attendant, the young mousy one. “Tell them—”
The young woman tapped away, transcribing. The sight of Gosha’s own words appearing across the computer screen threw her off.
“Just talk to them directly,” whispered the girl, nodding toward the tower.
Gosha looked up at the mesh cylinder, red and green lights winking on and off behind it, and took a deep breath in a vain attempt at soothing her throbbing head.
“Listen, whatever that little shit Dropnick’s been up to is beginning to play out. There are thousands of witches across the country working on the problem just like me.”
Working and coming up with nothing, she thought, but she wasn’t about to tell them that.
“That’s thousands of chaos agents just like me that could be working alongside you or at odds with you. If you let me know what you have, we can coordinate our efforts.”
The attendants fell silent, watching patiently for their lords’ response.
Silence spread out across one breath, and the next, and the next, the only sound in the room the soft hum of electricity and the occasional faint click as the lights in the tower shifted. Gosha began to wonder if something in the elaborate setup of equipment had broken.
To Gosha’s left, a vast wall of television screens burst into life, making her jump, the screens showing a grid of photographs drawn from a variety of sources of men all in their early thirties.
“Our investigation,” read the mousy young woman next to Gosha, “has indicated a syndicate of thirteen individuals working toward an unknown common interest.”
The grid of photos disappeared, replaced by a blow-up of the first. The image held for a few seconds to be replaced by the next in the grid, before cycling through the rest.
“Who are they?” said Gosha.
The cycle of images reset back to the first.
“Michael Hubbard,” said the mousy attendant, reading off the men’s names as the pictures changed. “John Crawford, known as Gino, James Simpson. David Simpson, brother of James. David Graves. Thomas Graves, brother of David. Thomas and David Graves are cousins to Michael Hubbard. Paul Jenkins, brother-in-law to James and David Simpson. Peter Crawford. Dennis Brewer—”
“Okay, okay.” Gosha couldn’t process so many names and relationships thrown at her at once. “How do they know each other? Are they all related?”
“All are graduates of Downforth School, a private Catholic secondary school in Dorset. All frequent St. Hedwig’s church on Wetherby Terrace.”
Gosha knew it, an old Victorian parish church a few streets away from the boys’ school.
The boys!
She glanced surreptitiously at her watch. They had a half day in preparation for the Halloween party this afternoon. She needed to get back to give them their lunch.
“All thirteen meet on a bi-monthly basis,” said the mousy attendant, “on Sunday afternoons at a public house named the Duck and Drake on Ryders Court.”
“It just sounds like an old boys’ network. You said they were working toward a common interest?”
The photographs were replaced by CCTV footage of the men drinking outside the pub, blown up so large it made it look like an abstract painting.
“Subtextual analysis,” said the dark-skinned woman, “indicates interactions seventeen increments deeper than basic social relationships. A collective Influence lattice has evolved displaying characteristics of a strange attractor.”
Gosha looked to Adair, desperate for translation.
“It means they’re up to something together, but it’s only at the planning stage.”
“But what? What are they up to?”
“Statistical prognostications,” read one of the interchangeable blondes, “are obscured by randomized background interference.”
“We don’t know,” said Adair.
“But they’re connected to Dropnick in some way?”
“Standard deviation and implementation bias,” read the other interchangeable blonde, “suggest involvement with the primary account.”
“We think so, but we don’t know how,” said Adair.
Gosha sighed with frustration.
“So, for all we know, they could be planning a surprise birthday party?”
The mousy attendant left her station and disappeared into the gloom beyond the ring of light.
“These men come up repeatedly in our statistical modeling,” said Adair, “even after we’ve isolated our analysis to account for random deviations. They’re connected somehow, we just don’t know how.”
The attendant returned with an enormous accordion file stuffed to burst with papers and placed it on her workstation in front of Gosha.
“The chaos agent,” she read from her screen, “will provide immediate independent analysis. This audience is now terminated.”
The giant wall of tv screens went dark, and the four attendants took their hands off their keyboards. All the lights on the tower blinked in unison three times and went dark.
“So it is written, so shall it be done,” said Gosha, but the attendants didn’t type in her words.
10
She rummaged through the box containing jars of Elsie’s loose-leaf tea blends in search of something to dull her headache. Papers from the partners’ file of supposed conspirators covered the kitchen table, swamping her little stack of prints of La Davina. A quick glance over them had sent her straight to the locked cabinet where she kept all the potentially dangerous components of Craft secure away from the boys. The endless pages of mundane biographical data labeled, footnoted, and cross-referenced according to a scheme that made no sense to her was going to require a considered approach. Perhaps a scrying spell adapted to seek out patterns of behavior could help her make sense of it.
With so much information buzzing through her head, going through the motions of making tea the mundane way, without any of the special tricks and equipment to brew a delicious pot almost instantaneously, became a blessed respite, but before long her wandering mind made its way back to the place it always returned to these days: the portent of destruction. Sitting at the table, stirring her tea, all she saw was frightened, injured people covered in dust and grime staggering away from a mountain of rubble where the Houses of Parliament should be.
