With an apologetic smile at the guard he hefted his official briefcase, straightened his official tie, rearranged his expression into one of official rectitude and walked through the open doorway.
And only flinched a little bit as the guard locked the red door behind him.
It's a wizarding job, Gerald, and it's better than the alternative.
Hopefully, if he reminded himself often enough, he'd start to believe that soon.
The factory lay dead ahead, down the end of a short paved pathway. It was a tall, red brick building blinded by a lack of windows. Along its front wall were plastered a plethora of signs: Danger! Thaumaturgical Emissions! Keep Out! No Admittance Without Permission! All Visitors Report To Security Before Proceeding^.
As he stood there, reading, one of the building's four doors opened and a young woman wearing a singed lab coat and an expression of mild alarm came out.
He approached her, waving. 'Excuse me! Excuse me! Can I have a word?'
The young woman saw him, took in his briefcase and the crossed staffs on his tie and moaned. 'Oh, no. You're from the Department, aren't you?'
He tried to reassure her with a smile. 'Yes, as a matter of fact. Gerald Dunwoody. And you are?'
Looking hunted, she shrank into herself. 'Holly,' she muttered. 'Holly Devree.'
He'd been with the Department for a shade under six months and in all that time had been allowed into the field only four times, but he'd worked out by the end of his first site inspection that when it came to the poor sods just following company orders, sympathy earned him far more co-operation than threats. He sagged at the knees, let his shoulders droop and slid his voice into a more intimate, confiding tone.
'Well, Miss Devree — Holly — I can see you're feeling nervous. Please don't. All I need is for you to point me in the direction of your boss, Mr Harold Stuttley'
She cast a dark glance over her shoulder at the factory. 'He's in there. And before you see him I want it understood that it's not my fault. It's not Eric's fault, either. Or Bob's. Or Lucius's. It's not any of our faults. We worked hard to get our transmogrifer's licence, okay? And it's not like we're earning squillions, either. The pay's rotten, if you must know. But Stuttley's — they're the best, aren't they?' Without warning, her thin, pale face crumpled. 'At least, they used to be the best. When old Mr Horace was in charge. But now…'
Fat tears trembled on the ends of her sandy-coloured eyelashes. Gerald fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it over.'Yes? Now?'
Blotting her eyes she said, 'Everything's different, isn't it? Mr Harold's gone and implemented all these 'cost-cutting' initiatives. Laid off half the Transmogrify team. But the workload hasn't halved, has it? Oh, no. And it's not just us he's laid off, either. He's sacked people in Etheretics, Design, Purchasing, Research and Development — there's not one team hasn't lost folk. Except Sales.' Her snubby nose wrinkled in distaste. 'Seven new sales reps he's taken on, and they're promising the world, and we're expected to deliver it — except we can't! We're working round the clock and we're still three weeks behind on orders and now Mr Harold's threatening to dock us if we don't catch up!'
'Oh my,' he said, and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. 'I'm very sorry to hear this. But at least it explains why the last eight safety reports weren't completed.'
'But they were,' she whispered, busily strangling her borrowed handkerchief. 'Lucius is the most senior technician we've got left, and I know he's been doing them. And handing them over to Mr Harold. I've seen it. But what he's doing with them I don't know'
Filing them in the nearest waste paper bin, more than likely. 'I don't suppose your friend Lucius discussed the reports with you? Or showed them to you?'
Holly Devree's confiding manner shifted suddenly to a cagey caution. The handkerchief disappeared into her lab coat pocket. 'Safety reports are confidential.'
'Of course, of course,' Gerald soothed. 'I'm not implying any inappropriate behaviour. But Lucius didn't happen to leave one lying out on a table, did he, where any innocent passer-by might catch a glimpse?'
'I'm sorry,' she said, edging away. 'I'm on my tea break. We only get ten minutes. Mr Harold's inside if you want to see him. Please don't tell him we talked.'
He watched her scuttle like a spooked rabbit, and sighed. Clearly there was more amiss at Stuttley's than a bit of overlooked paperwork. He should get back to the office and tell Mr Scunthorpe. As a probationary compliance officer his duties lay within very strict guidelines. There were other, more senior inspectors for this kind of trouble.
On the other hand, his supervisor was allergic to incomplete reports. Unconfirmed tales out of school from disgruntled employees and nebulous sensations of misgiving from probationary compliance officers bore no resemblance to cold, hard facts. And Mr Scunthorpe was as married to cold, hard facts as he was to Mrs Scunthorpe. More, if Mr Scunthorpe's marital mutterings were anything to go by.
Turning, Gerald stared at the blank-faced factory. He could still feel his inexplicable unease simmering away beneath the surface of his mind. Whatever it was trying to tell him, the news wasn't good. But that wasn't enough. He had to find out exactly what had tickled his instincts. And he did have a legitimate place to start, after all: the noncompletion of mandatory safety statements. The infraction was enough to get his foot across the factory threshold. After that, well, it was just a case of following his intuition.
He resolutely ignored the whisper in the back of his mind that said, Remember what happened the last time you followed your intuition?
'Oh, bugger off!' he told it, and marched into the fray.
Another pallid employee answered his brisk banging on the nearest door. 'Good afternoon,' he said, flashing his identification and not giving the lab-coated man a chance to speak. 'Gerald Dunwoody, Department of Thaumaturgy, here to see Mr Harold Stuttley on a matter of noncompliance. I'm told he's inside? Excellent. Don't let me keep you from your duties, I'll find my own way around.'
The employee gave ground, helpless in the ruthlessly cheerful face of officialdom, and Gerald sailed in. Immediately his nose was clogged with the stink of partially discharged thaumaturgic energy. The air beneath the high factory ceiling was alive with it, crawling and spitting and sparking. The carefully caged lights hummed and buzzed, crackling as firefly filaments of power drifted against their heated bulbs to ignite in a brief, sunlike flare.
A dozen more lab-coated technicians scurried up and down the factory floor, focused on the task at hand. Directly opposite, running the full length of the wall, stood a five-deep row of benches, each one equipped with specially crafted staff cradles. Twenty-five per bench times five benches meant that, if the security guard was right, Stuttley's had one hundred and twenty-five new First Grade staffs ready for completion. The technicians, looking tense and preoccupied, fiddled and twiddled and realigned each uncharged staff in its cradle, assessing every minute adjustment with a hand-held thaumic register. All the muted ticking made the room sound like the demonstration area of a clockmakers' convention.
At either end of the benches towered the etheretic conductors, vast reservoirs of unprocessed thaumaturgic energy. Insulated cables connected them to each other and all the staff cradles, whose conductive surfaces waited patiently for the discharge of raw power that would transform one hundred and twenty-five gold-filigreed five- foot-long spindles of oak into the world's finest, most prestigious, expensive and potentially most dangerous First Grade staffs.
Despite his misgivings he heard himself whimper, just a little. Stuttley First Graders were works of art. Each wrapping of solid gold filigree was unique, its design template destroyed upon completion and never repeated. The rare wizards who could afford the extra astronomical cost had their filigrees designed specifically for them, taking into account personal strengths, family history and specific thaumaturgic signatures. Those staffs came with inbuilt security: it was immediate and spectacularly gruesome death for any wizard other than the rightful owner to attempt the use of them.
Once, a long long time ago, he'd dreamed of owning a First Grade staff. Even though he didn't come from a wizarding family. Even though he'd got his qualifications through a correspondence course. Wizardry cared nothing for family background or the name of the college where you were educated. Wizarding was of the blood and bone, indifferent to pedigrees and bank balances. Some of the world's finest wizards had come from humble origins.
Although… not lately. Lately, Ottosland's most powerful and influential wizards came from recognisable families whose names more often than not could also be heard whispered in the nation's corridors of power.
Still. Technically, anybody with sufficient aptitude and training could become a First Grade wizard. Social
