Raguel placed their fingertips elegantly on the file as it was slid across the table and gently lifted the cover, glancing at the first page without betraying too much interest. Akvin Div wasn't fooled, though, the momentary arch of Raguel's eyebrow enough to indicate that the game was afoot.
"Why this one?" said Raguel, "he seems terribly ordinary."
"Precisely why!" laughed Akvin Div, with the grinding sound of a million quern-stones, "the talk around the pit favoured someone neutral, to make it easy for you. Of course, we'll still win, and the soul will suffer, and all because you failed to defend the indefensible. Perhaps we will spend an eternity turning him inside out, atom by atom..."
Raguel sighed. They had suffered innumerable defeats, punctuated only rarely by victories, though the raging and the gnashing of teeth below at someone's self-sacrifice or incorruptibility always raised choruses of hallelujahs. But usually, Raguel was faced with Akvin Div's ubiquitous smugness as yet another soul fell: why were humans so weak? Yes, of course, free will. But they could be good, Raguel had seen it.
"So, bring your best," smiled Akvin Div, "perhaps Barratiel? He came so close last time."
Raguel knew that Akvin Div was mocking him, but then what else would he do?
"We will indeed bring our best, and you will bring your worst, and in the end the good will outweigh the bad."
"You say that every time," said Akvin Div with a snort, pushing his chair back and letting it fall, clattering off the nacre tiles. He didn't even glance at it, let alone attempt to pick it up, but he merely turned on his hoof and swaggered out between the black tapestries hanging along the walls of the neutral meeting room. Raguel sighed and got to their feet, walking around the black obsidian table and across the border. They had to physically right the chair, their powers not working on the wrong side of the line.
Then they gathered up the file, walked between the tapestries at their end of the room, and slowly climbed the spiral stairs. Barratiel was an interesting suggestion, even if it was made in disdain, and they remembered the old mantra: evil carries the seeds of its own destruction. Barratiel had something to prove and Akvin Div discounted such things but, Raguel knew, one day that would be to his cost. Yes, let it be Barratiel.
* * *
Luke Bailey eased his hated Astra off Harefield Road and into the car park, out of the drizzle. He hadn't beaten the morning park-and-ride rush, and he had to circle for nearly five minutes to find a space, waiting as a young mother loaded her little girl into the safety seat after dropping off the sibling in the pre-school down the street. Finally, he was able to get out and stretch, then reach in and grab his two laptop bags (one with laptop, the other filled with varied reading material, lunch, spare chargers and detritus).
He exhaled heavily and grimaced, blowing off the morning cobwebs as he looked at the silver Astra, with its creaky front suspension as not advertised. However much he didn't like it, he needed it, an accessory which confirmed who he was, just like the cheap suit and tie, and his hair, which he had been forced to grow from his usual shaved look into something that required shampoo instead of a razor. A month ago, he'd looked like a bad-ass, toned in the gym and even a touch younger than his thirty-three years. Now he looked like nothing more than a drone, a desk warrior, softened by inactivity.
With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Luke left the car park and crossed the road, walking past the charity shops and fast-food places, up to the entrance to Uxbridge Magistrates Court with an ill-disguised sense of his own incompetence. He passed a collection of the usual suspects, smoking a last fag before their appointment with the beak, the optimists in ill-fitting suits, the realists in their normal streetwear. Glancing at them surreptitiously he ensured that none of them were known to him, but his previous stomping ground was diagonally south-east, as far as it was possible to go and still be inside London. These were the same kind of scrotes he knew so well there, just a different clan.
Moving from the tense bustle in the corridors of the court, upstairs into the Probation Centre reception reminded Luke of those hectic nights when he'd help the paramedics get some bloodied six-lager pugilist into the emergency department and then slip out into the staff car park, watching his breath condense in the cold air as he gazed up at the few stars visible through the suburban light pollution. Downstairs the mood was that of uncertainty, a fear of the punishment to come (or perhaps not, fingers crossed the magistrate believed the bullshit excuses). In contrast, the subdued calm of the Probation Centre was most like a convalescent ward -- the sickness had been excised, and now the patient needed to be slowly returned whole to the real world.
Janice ruled the reception area, no nonsense with the clients but, rumour had it, no nonsense with any PO who didn't do his best for the clients either. She was somewhere in her forties, a single platinum blonde with a queue of admirers in her local who she encouraged with greater or lesser enthusiasm depending on their place in her pecking order: she knew her worth and a man had better know it, too.
"Mr Carver's running late," she said, passing Luke his files for the day, "but he called to say he'll still be in time for a quick run through of the clients before your first appointment."
"Five today..." said Luke, counting the files, "any particularly noteworthy cases?"
"Mr Carver will fill you in," said Janice, "we don't gossip in reception." She glanced pointedly at the couple of clients waiting, though Luke was sure they each told the others about the crimes that landed them there. Well, perhaps all but the sex cases, who no doubt invented convenient property crimes as a cover.
"But we do find out how Oscar's doing," said Luke, and here Janice immediately softened, both towards Luke for remembering and being interested, and at the thought of her beloved pooch.
"The vet says the cone can come off at the end of the week and the scars have healed up nicely," said Janice, now looking at the framed photo of Oscar the beagle.
"Well, I hope he's learnt not to play with barbed wire fences in future."
"Oh, it was awful, out in the field and him covered in blood," and Janice was temporarily forlorn before she snapped into professional mode to deal with a newly-arrived client. Luke left her to the uncomfortably big unit, all muscles and knitted eyebrows, who immediately sat and wagged his metaphorical tail at her merest glance, and went to the kitchen to get himself a cup of the instant shite that the Probation Service had the nerve to call coffee.
Mr Jeremy Carver, a tired man three years from retirement (actually it was two years, ten months and change, as he checked morning and evening on his calendar), popped his head around the kitchen door just as Luke was stirring in some milk. He grimaced an approximation of a smile and Luke followed him to his office, a joyless zone of wood veneer furniture and institutional cream-coloured walls. He took the files from Luke's hand and glanced at them.
