The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (26 page)

“They’re going to kill him,” Chris said finally.

William looked back over his shoulder. His eyes caught the dim light flooding down from above. “Probably,” he admitted.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Chris pleaded. The good doctor had a family. He had people who needed him. He was a
good man
. Why did good men have to just―die? “You’re police.”

“I’m
barely
police,” Will retorted, “which you know very well. And the last time I did something about this, letting you in to talk to him, Hannah had her eye on me for weeks. I still think she knows it was me who stole her credentials.” He sighed, pushing aside a stained length of plywood and slipping through. “I still can’t believe I did that.”

“It was good of you,” Chris said dully. He surveyed the opening Will had just slipped through. The gap was all very well and good for his friend’s slender frame, but Chris was made of broader stuff. He gave the wood a shove before moving through. His coat caught on something behind him as he moved along the wall and winced. He hoped it hadn’t torn.

“I was your bleeding hero,” Will corrected. He’d stopped to wait and was surveying Chris very judiciously, as if trying to decide something. He sighed, scuffing at a spot of dead grass on the ground. “The thing is, at the time, I thought he was guilty.”

Chris stopped feeling behind himself to check on the status of his coat. “You… did?”

Will shrugged helplessly, avoiding Chris’s gaze. “I’m shocked you didn’t,” he said, his voice barely about a mumble, not his usual crisp, snapping tones. “Livingstone being brought in that day was what I’d waited six years for. Someone to blame.”

Chris went to respond, but then lapsed into silence, nodding dully. He thought he understood. That’s how it was for most everyone, wasn’t it? That’s why no one would stand for the doctor, why all attempts to really investigate the claims against him were stalled and stonewalled until someone gave up. Everyone in Tarland had been affected by the Floating Castle. One thousand, five hundred, seventeen people dead, and thousands more injured. An event that large had reach, and a senseless tragedy was the most frustrating thing in the world. Anger needed a target. And anger boiling under pressure for six years needed a hell of a big one.

“Your father was a Lowry man?” Chris asked. A lot of his memories from the night before were blurry, but he remembered the strangely familiar portrait of Graham Cartwright hanging above the hearth.

Will snorted, and the coughed. “Ah, gods,” he spat out. “The smell. Come on, let’s move. The heat is not doing this place any favours.” He turned and started away, and Chris followed after him.

After a long moment, Will sighed. “Calling my father a Lowry man is technically the truth,” he said. “The good doctor was a Lowry man, too, before they revoked his degree last month.”

“Your father was a reformist?” Chris furrowed his brow. The party being thrown at the Floating Castle that night had been a traditionalist matter. More than anything, it had been two fingers raised in a pointed salute to the young reformist movement, a toast to the puissance of categorization and the sustained capacity for development that the old ways still had.

“Not exactly,” William said. “Actually, no, not at all. He didn’t believe in alternative technologies or any of Livingstone’s causes. But he didn’t have any respect for Richard Lowry as anything but a scientist. He had… ideas.” He turned to look over his shoulder at Chris, his dark eyes like bruises in the dark. “You don’t remember any of this.”

“No,” Chris admitted. Will hadn’t asked the question directly since the day outside the police station when Chris had spoken to Livingstone, and he didn’t acknowledge Chris’s response now. He merely turned and kept moving. Chris saw the slump of his shoulders and had to say something further. “I thought I recognized him, though,” he admitted. “For just a moment. His eyes―in the portrait. I thought…”

Will said nothing.

Finally, they emerged out of the grubby, fetid alley into the dying light of the evening. A man with a long stick was walking up the footway, tapping the alp-lights that lined the roads so that the little spirits inside awoke and their flickering, uneven white light came to life. Chris recognized where they were immediately.

“The manor is just a jump that way!” He indicated, and furrowed his brow. “How did you know that?”

Will gave him an arch sort of smile. “A misspent youth,” he said simply, and they set out in the direction of Chris’s manor. After the stench of the alley, the heat of the road didn’t seem nearly as bad, despite the fact that there was a bead of sweat crawling down between Chris’s shoulder blades.

“Do you think Olivia will bring me in on this one?” William asked casually.

Chris laughed. “No. I told you. There’s no―” He dropped his voice, suddenly aware of the two gentlemen walking on the other side of the road, eying he and Will curiously. “There’s no murder weapon. It’s a spiritbinder.”

“Oh,” William said, brow furrowing. “That sounds… mildly familiar.”

“Gods.” Chris shook his head and laughed quietly. “You and I were completely arseholed last night, weren’t we?”

“Cwenraed’s bollocks, Chris, I
never
drink like that,” Will said, ducking his head with a sheepish smile.

“Neither do I,” Chris admitted. He could see the manor now, and his gaze automatically went to the bench across from it. The watchers’ perch was still empty. He chewed at his lip.
Should
he allow Rosemary to visit for a day? Godsday was just before the trial. That would be best. Ah, but then there was the ball. Of course, Rosemary was fourteen in a month. She could be alone for several hours in the evening, so long as the salamander alarm was armed. Chris had practically raised a child when he was younger than she was now.

“You know,” Will said, “you’ve changed quite a bit, Chris.”

Chris blinked and looked down at Will. His face was impossible to read. “I have?”

“A serial murderer, a spiritbinder, is picking off Maidens and Youths. Impressionable, young folks, killed in the worst ways. And I think I recall you telling me you even knew one of the victims? Yet, you’re remarkably cavalier about it all.”

Chris looked away. “I…” He sighed. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Will. I… I suppose you’re right, and there have been times when this has been hard.” So much grief. And so many memories. “But…”

“But you’ve been with Olivia for… how many investigations now? Twelve? No, this is the twelfth.” Gods. That was getting disconcerting. How did he have that number off the top of his head like that? “All with their own bodies and killers. You can only see things for so long before they start to become commonplace.”

“I don’t want them to become commonplace,” Chris murmured. “And I really don’t love what you’re telling me right now.”

Will shrugged one shoulder, his usual petty self. “As if I care, honestly. It’s just a fact.” He shrugged again, this time with both shoulders. “It makes you better at your job. You’ll never be as cold as Olivia is. You don’t have that in you. But objectivity is a good thing.”

Well, how lovely. He was good at a job he’d never wanted. Hadn’t he feared this exact thing, when he’d agreed to take it? That he’d come to see death and pain the way Olivia did, as something mildly amusing to be witnessed from a distance and never affected by?

And yet…

And yet. Olivia did good. Not because that was her goal, but she brought peace to families of victims and put killers away. Did it matter that she did it because she found it entertaining? He didn’t think so, not once he’d seen her work. And he thought that, in a way, he was having an effect of his own on her. That she was becoming a softer, better person.

“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. Maybe he had to take on a bit of Olivia’s hardness to work with her. If he traded it for the new softness she occasionally exhibited, that might be for the best. “But I’m more affected by all of this than you might think. Just today―” They passed the soundshield of the estate on their way up the walk. Will’s hair had come half-loose of its tail during their alleyway adventure, and it fluttered around his face. “I was at the home of that childhood friend I told you about. And then, there was this… this woman. She was half-mad with grief. And I…” He trailed off, not sure he could continue.

Will gave him a long look. He reached out and placed a hand on his forearm. “I am sorry,” he said. “About Mister Spencer. I know that he was… that is, he was important to you. The reason Olivia and Maris and I did what we did was for you.”

“I know,” Chris said. “You don’t have to be sorry.” He patted Will’s hand affectionately and then rubbed at the back of his own neck. His hand came away sweating. He groaned. This close to the door, the heat from the salamander alarm radiated back like a furnace. “Come in,” he said. “I left the fiaran running, against my best judgement. We can talk about this more, and―”

Will drew his hand back. Chris glanced down. A curtain drew over Will’s face, and his friend stepped back. “No,” he said. “No, I should really go.”

Chris blinked. “… your mother?” he asked.

“No,” Will said. “I just… it’s not a good idea. I should go home. I don’t mind walking. The heat doesn’t…” He shook his head. He turned away. “I need to go. I’m sorry.”

Chris watched him walk away. Should he call after him?

He closed his eyes and he turned back to the door and he whistled the sequence to disarm the salamander alarm. Best not poke a sleeping bear. It would wake on its own in time. Will walked away into the deepening evening as Chris slipped into the dark, silent Buckley estate.

rue to his word, Chris arrived at the office early Eadday morning. The dark mist Olivia had spun around her place of work was unpleasantly damp but pleasantly cool against his skin. The day was already stiflingly hot and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The heat would not break today. Chris pushed open the front door, eager to get out of the blazing sun.

He walked into the lair of a crazy person.

There were papers stacked as tall as a man on every surface. Chris picked up the nearest one as he hung his hat, scanning the page and furrowing his brow. He was holding yet another publication of The Arrow, dated two months ago.
GARRETT ALBANY CONDEMNS DR. LIVINGSTONE’S HEINOUS CRIMES,
the headline sang. Beneath lay another Arrow paper, dated the day before. The next? Another day back.

Chris scanned the whole office. There had to be twenty different stacks. His desk alone had five. Both velvet upholstered chairs supported leaning towers. The mirror was hidden behind another stack, resting on the chime table. There were even stacks on the floor, presumably because there weren’t enough elevated surfaces.

Christopher Buckley was not a truthsniffer, but he jumped to a conclusion regardless. Did Olivia have every single paper that had been published this summer in this office?

“Olivia?” he called hesitantly. He felt as if she might burst through one of the stacks juggling severed heads at any moment. Had she finally tumbled off the precipice?

Instead, she erupted from the door that led back to her personal office. Her hair streamed behind her, long and straight and loose, contrasting with the black, lace-trimmed pork pie hat tilted cockily atop her head. She was wearing a man’s tie, an arrow collar, an ice-blue waistcoat the same shade as her eyes, and wide flowing skirts. Daring and scandalous and of course, she somehow pulled it off perfectly.