I headed up to the third floor, where an unmarked door stood closed. I knocked, and a cracked voice told me to come in. Thomas Eldritch rose from behind his desk as I entered, a pale, wrinkled hand extended in greeting. He was dressed, as usual, in a black jacket and pinstripe trousers with a matching vest. The gold chain of a watch extended from a buttonhole on his vest to one of the pockets. The bottom button of the vest remained undone. Eldritch adhered to tradition in his modes of attire as in so many other matters.
‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘It is a pleasure, as always.’
I shook his hand, expecting it to crumble to pieces in mine. Shaking hands with him was like grasping quail bones wrapped in rice paper.
His office was less tidy than before, and some of those piles of documents from his secretary’s lair below had begun to colonize it. Names and case numbers were handwritten on the front of every file in glorious copperplate, the quality of the lettering consistent throughout, even as some of the writing itself had faded over time.
‘You seem to accumulate a lot of paper for someone with such a limited client base,’ I said.
Eldritch looked around his office as if seeing it for the first time, or perhaps he was just trying to view it as a stranger might.
‘A slow, consistent trickle that has grown to form a lake of legalese,’ he said. ‘It is the lawyer’s burden. We throw away nothing, and some of our cases drag on for many, many years. Lifetimes, it often seems to me.’
He shook his head sadly, clearly regarding the propensity of individuals to lead long lives as a deliberate attempt to complicate his existence.
‘I suppose a lot of these people are dead by now,’ I said, in an effort to provide some consolation.
Eldritch minutely adjusted the neatly ordered stack of files on his desk, flicking the little finger of his left hand along their spines. The finger was missing a nail. I had not noticed its absence before. I wondered if it had simply fallen out, a further manifestation of Eldritch’s disintegration.
‘Oh yes, very much so,’ said Eldritch. ‘Very dead indeed, and those that are not dead are dying. They are the dead who have not been named, you might say. We are all walking in their ranks, and in time each of us will have a closed file with our name written upon it. There is great pleasure to be had in closing a file, I find. Please, take a seat.’
The visitor’s chair in front of his desk had recently been cleared of paperwork, leaving a clean, rectangular patch in the center of the dust on the leather cushion. It had obviously been some time since anyone had been offered a seat in Eldritch’s office.
‘So,’ said Eldritch, ‘what brings you here, Mr Parker? Do you require me to prepare your will? Do you feel the imminence of your mortality?’
He chuckled at his joke. It was the sound of old coals being raked on a cold, ash-laden fire. I didn’t join in.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I have a lawyer.’
‘Yes: Ms Price up in South Freeport. You must prove quite a handful for her. After all, you do get up to all sorts of mischief.’
He wrinkled his nose, and blew the last word at me as if it were a kiss. In the right light, and the right mood, he might have resembled an indulgent, avuncular figure, except that it was all a pose. Throughout our exchange, not once had an unsettling steeliness left his eyes, and, for all of his obvious ongoing decrepitude, those eyes remained remarkably clear, and bright, and hostile.
‘Mischief,’ I echoed. ‘The same observation might equally be made about your own client.’
I chose the singular carefully. Whatever impression Eldritch’s practice gave of even the slightest interest in conventional legalities, I believed that it existed for only one true purpose: as a front for the work of the man who occasionally went by the name of Kushiel, but was more commonly known as the Collector. The law firm of Eldritch & Associates targeted putative victims for a serial killer. It was engaged in an ongoing discourse with the damned.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Parker,’ said Eldritch. ‘I do hope that you’re not implying some knowledge of wrongdoing on our part.’