The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (21 page)

He took off his eyeglasses, trying to clean them on his necktie, but her excitement was a disease and he’d lost any immunity he might once have had to it. His fingers shook and he kept smudging his specs, so he just slid them back on his nose and waited.

“Alfred Pritchard,” Olivia said, carefully rubbing the signature back and forth on one of the reports. The ink was starting to smudge.

Chris peered at the copy she’d thrust into his hand. He could make out something that might be an A and an F, and the letter that started the surname was most certainly a P. He supposed, if he stared closely, he could make the scrawl form something like Alfred Pritchard. “He’s a categorizer?”

“Mm-hmm,” Olivia hummed happily.

How would Olivia recognize the name of a categorization doctor? Ever since a few incumbent Maidens and Youths had gone mad and attacked their categorization specialist over a hundred years ago, they had become notoriously hard to find reliable information on, acting as simple Lowry scholars, hidden among those other men. Most people only ever met… “Is he
your
categorizer?” Chris hazarded.

Olivia tinkled a laugh. “Gods, no!” she exclaimed. “That was fifteen years ago! I think the man who tortured
me
has retired comfortably by now. Or,” she considered, “more likely, he was at the Castle and died in the most spectacularly horrifying manner possi…” She seemed to sense him looking at her. Her lips tightened, as if sour that she had to abort the jest, but she inclined her head most graciously. “Apologies,” she said. Too sweet, she might be teasing, but he would take it. “In
any
case,” she continued, “I didn’t even know that he was a categorizer. It’s a name that’s come up more than a few times in some… recent independent investigations. How
fun
that it would show up in my
actual
investigation!”

Chris raised an eyebrow. Olivia raised one, too. They sat like that until Chris sighed and leaned back. This was very silly.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I’ll hear it all once we start talking to him.”

“Oh, no! Christopher, no. We’re not going to see Pritchard. We’re going to see the man I learned about Pritchard
from
.”

Chris blinked. And then he whirled in his seat to stare out the window. They were passing old homes, converted to offices when their owners had fled for better neighbourhoods. He knew where they were, and he knew who they were going to see.
Oh no
, was right.

Olivia laughed delightedly. “You look so crestfallen!”

“He is a snake,” Chris pronounced.

Olivia shrugged one shoulder and gave him a wickedly innocent little grin. “Snakes are lovely,” she simpered. “They catch vermin like rats and, personally, I find their appearance quite appealing! Like limbless salamanders!”

“I don’t know what it is that man wants from you,” Chris griped, “but I don’t like it!”

Olivia fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Oh,” she said. “But I know
exactly
what he wants from me, and I
quite
like it.”

Chris flushed to the tips of his ears and bodily turned in the seat so he was facing the window, avoiding Olivia’s gaze while she giggled delightedly at his distress. The carriage pulled through the office streets, and then jangled to a halt before one that he recognized. A poorly embossed brass plate hung over the rickety old porch.
OFFICES OF R. KOLSTON ESQ.,
the letters read, painted over in white to mitigate the bad embossing. The Os were all entirely filled in, as well as the Q, which made the sign look more comical than was strictly professional.

Olivia flicked open the door of the carriage and alighted like a tiny queen. She tossed a roll of notes to the taxi driver as Chris climbed out after her, commanding him to stay and hold the horses and he’d been a perfectly lovely driver so far. The cabbie’s eyes opened wider and wider as he counted the bills, and he tapped the brim of his bowler to Olivia in a way that was more sincere than the most flowery of thank-you notes.

Olivia swept up the stone walkway, Chris at her heels. Grass and moss grew between the stones, which R. Kolston Esq. never made any attempt to remove. Both were yellow-brown in the oppressive heat.

“Why do we keep coming here?” Chris demanded. “We should have been done with Mister Kolston after the val Daren case concluded.”

“Because he is a reliably fantastic source of information that isn’t entirely…” Olivia wiggled her long fingers. “
On the books.”

“Isn’t entirely
legal
, you mean.”

“I work for the police, Christopher. Any method I use to acquire information is by definition legal, because I am acting while imbued with the power of the law!”

Chris shook his head as he scurried ahead to open the door for Olivia, holding it open for her as she nodded primly to him and swept in. “I’m fairly sure that not only is that completely untrue, Maris would faint if she heard it.”

“As if anything could make Maris faint. Good day!” Olivia sang to Kolston’s perpetually silent secretary, a pinch-faced, no nonsense middle-aged woman, whose sour disposition and dislike for Miss Olivia Faraday was matched only by her impressive girth. The secretary glared. “Are you going to make me ask, again? Missus Clutterbuck,
please
, you know I’m here to see Rayner.”

At the use of her employer’s given name, Missus Clutterbuck’s pinched faced pinched a little bit more. She sighed, standing up from behind the desk, and shuffled off down the hallway toward Kolston’s office, sending the floorboards to their customary groaning.

“Gods, Christopher.” Olivia sighed dreamily, turning to grin up at him. “Does it ever feel good to have
some
sort of lead! There was never a
moment
at the Edison estate where I
really
thought they were involved, just that something wasn’t quite right, but this? This has
potential
.”

“Where did you hear the name?” Chris asked. Despite himself, he was curious. Were Kolston and Olivia working on something together? Something that was familiarizing Olivia with the names of categorization specialists?

But Olivia waved him off. “Just a little side project,” she said. She studied him and then opened her mouth as if to say something more when Kolston’s secretary appeared again.

“Mr. Kolston will see you now,” she mumbled, the only phrase Christopher had ever heard from her. They followed her down a dim, creaking hallway, one that Chris had never become entirely comfortable with. The dark nimbuses that glowed around the alp-lights were fuzzy with age, and some had started raining sparks, the sure sign of an incipient binding burst. Perhaps it was
because
he was a sumfinder, but Rayner Kolston was notoriously thrifty. He’d rather an alp burst than pay to replace it a moment early. The worst an alp could do was blind a man, after all. Perhaps give him a seizure. Surely that was worth a hundred royals.

Missus Clutterbuck opened the door of Kolston’s office and let them file in before shutting it behind her. Every step groaned as she retreated back down the hall.

Rayner Kolston, esquire, was reading a paper. His feet were propped up on the desk, the soles of his shoes dropping flakes of mud onto his papers. Chris knew by now that he’d probably assumed that position when his secretary had announced them. As always, the spacious room made Kolston look even smaller than he actually was. When trying to puzzle out why a perfectly attractive, intelligent, self-possessed woman like Olivia Faraday would ever so much as humour a slick, furtive little mongoose like Kolston, Chris had occasionally wondered if it was just because Olivia had finally found a man she didn’t have to crane her neck to look at. Kolston was a good head shorter than most men, and a head and a half shorter than Chris. He had a smart little goatee that was oiled and styled, and his hair was slicked back under the brim of his scuffed brown bowler cap, which he wore at a jaunty angle. Chris had given up deciphering whether his hair was actually black, or if all the pomade he wore just made it look that way. A small red feather protruded from his cap, which made him look patently ridiculous, yet matched Olivia’s equally ridiculous rosettes, ribbons, and red feathered hat as if they’d somehow planned it.

The paper Kolston held was screaming a headline at them:
BINDING RELATED DEATH OF LOCAL PRIEST GALVANIZES GARRETT ALBANY AND THE NEW REFORM
. Without looking at the printer, Chris recognized the Arrow, pro-Albany and anti-Livingstone. Only Albany’s fiercest supporters referred to the following he’d gathered as “The New Reform.” In a smaller corner of the page, some bold print had eagerly reminded its readers that it was
SIX DAYS TIL LIVINGSTONE TRIAL,
and that
Witnesses yet to step forward in Doctor’s defense.
Chris clenched his fists.

Olivia was a much more patient person than Kolston. He always waited until she spoke first, and she never did. He sighed, folding the paper and setting it aside. He threw his hands back behind his head, stretching and putting a lazy half-grin on his face. “Liv!” He exclaimed. He’d recently had one of his teeth replaced with a steel model that made Chris cringe to look at. “Fancy seeing my favourite lass here!” He indicated the paper. “This about the good doctor? Six days!”

The good doctor? Did he mean… Livingstone? Was Olivia coming to Kolston for help investigating
Livingstone
? It had to be. Why else would he make the assumption? Chris was stuck dumb by the realization, and Olivia sighed.

“Rayner, really. Look at my assistant’s face. You’ll spoil how deeply he disapproves of you if he knows you’re helping me try and clear his favourite doctor’s name. Then I won’t have any interest in you at all anymore.”

“Anything to avoid
that
!” Kolston chuckled, finally swinging his feet down onto the floor and letting his chair fall forward. “What brings you here, then, Liv?” he asked, putting on a smile that he probably thought was charming.

“A chap named Alfred Pritchard,” Olivia pronounced.

Kolston’s eyebrows climbed. “Well,” he said. Chris could see his tongue moving behind his teeth. How could any one person be so unpleasant? “I thought you just said you
weren’t
here about the good doctor, Liv.”

“I’m not,” Olivia replied, tapping suggestively at her pointed nose.

“Huh,” Kolston said slowly. “Well. What are the odds of that?”

“Extremely low,” Olivia said, but she walked up to the desk and dropped all four categorization reports. “Look at the signatures on these.”

Kolston flipped through. He took his time, Chris noted, scanning the whole body of the documents. He could practically see the little rat filing away the knowledge. Rayner Kolston was a successful and merciless creditor who specialized in squeezing money out of impoverished Old Blood nobles… but Chris had come to realize that he was also a broker in information. He only offered this other service as a trade, but even while he was working his first job, he was filling out his collection.

There were five different newspapers printed today on his desk, from the respectable Daily Herald to rags like The Arrow. Kolston was definitely making careful note of the names of the four dead priests, drawing conclusions, realizing what Mother Greta had taken months to piece together in minutes. To whom would he barter this information? Hard to say.

“Pritchard signed all four of these,” Kolston said eventually, slow and considering.

“He did indeed,” Olivia confirmed. “The only link I can track down between all four of them.” She walked her fingers along his desk, stopping when she’d pinned the report he was looking at beneath her index finger. “All categorization doctors are spiritbinders, aren’t they?”

Kolston’s hand moved quicker than a striking snake. He had Olivia’s hand clasped in both of his, held against his heart. His ink-stained and calloused thumb caressed the back of her hand. “Every single one,” he purred. “With a truthsniffer as an assistant.” He brought her hand to his mouth and gently kissed the gloved back.

Olivia carefully extricated her hand with the ease of an escape artist, and shook her finger in Kolston’s smug face. “I’m particularly interested in spiritbinders on this one.”

Kolston’s steel tooth gleamed. “Specifically, a waterbinder, windbinder, and icebinder, if I’m right,” he mused.

“I can’t confirm or deny anything,” Olivia said, stepping back elegantly and avoiding Kolston’s attempt to take her hand again. “And if you
barter
that information to, say, a reporter, I will be very sour with you.”

“Aw, Liv,” Kolston protested, almost pouting.

Olivia folded her arms. “You might find I am very standoffish when I’m sour,” she said. How could she make the words sound like both threat and invitation? “Tell him how icy cold I am when I’m sour, Christopher.”

Chris looked back and forth between them as their eyes turned to him. He opened and closed his mouth, fishlike, and then sighed. “Positively frigid,” he droned, unable to find any way out of it. All his skill at navigating complex social situations fled when faced with the two of them.

Olivia grinned and turned back to Kolston. “See?” she asked innocently, fluttering her eyelashes. “I think you would be a bit heartbroken, were I to become
frigid
with you, Rayner.”

Kolston threw up his hands. “Alrighty, Liv, have it your way.” He sighed. “But I don’t see why you’re waving this wee tidbit in my mug if you’re not going to let me snack at it.”

“Because I need dirt on Pritchard.” Olivia smiled. “And you are a
savant
when it comes to dirt.”

Kolston laughed. He clasped his hands together, drumming his fingers on his own knuckles. “Well,” he said. “We had Pritchard on the list, anyway.”

“I want you to bump him up,” Olivia said. “
Way
up. To the top, if you don’t mind, love.”
Love
? A term of endearment Chris had heard Kolston use for Olivia since the first time they’d come in here. But from Olivia? That was new. And uncomfortable. “I still don’t think he’s very much involved, but if I march into his office saying that he was part of a conspiracy to put Livingstone in the cage, he might become very… forthcoming.” She tittered a laugh. “Even if it’s just unintentionally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned since Evelyn val Daren, it’s that
none
of these people think they’re in any danger of being caught.”