The boardroom’s three tall windows overlooked the lake, though there was little to see through the rain that day.
Matthew’s painting hung on the long wall opposite them, where the abstract used to be.
In it, the seven directors sat around this very table as animals in suits.
They had chosen their seats carefully.
The finance director, whom he’d painted as a fox, sat with his back to his portrait.
The sloth was asleep, and the peacock had taken the chair directly under his own portrait to show that he didn’t mind.
Matthew felt their reactions suited the animals he’d chosen for them.
His father sat at the head of the table with both hands flat on the wood.
He was the only member of the board Matthew hadn’t painted.
Julian was on his feet, addressing the meeting’s only item as patiently as he could.
“I understand the board’s concerns,” he was saying.
“I do.”
The director of food and beverage, who appeared in the painting as a pig, said he had never been so insulted in his life, then took another biscuit.
Julian wrote down the complaint and nodded as though it would be useful.
He thanked everyone for their patience, then proposed to politely ask the artist to paint something a little more encouraging in the boardroom.
“The artist is very busy,” Matthew said.
“Are you finished?” his father asked.
And Matthew immediately knew his father had reached the limit of his patience with him.
Julian drew a breath to offer the board something more acceptable, but the door opened without a knock.
Only one man in the city walked into his father’s boardroom like that.
Commissioner Conrad Ashby had been his father’s best friend for forty years and the best man at his wedding.
He was also Matthew’s godfather.
He came in with rain on the shoulders of his coat.
He was a big man, but his voice was always gentle and never grew loud.
Matthew found it reassuring to have him in the room.
“Don’t get up,” he said as a joke, since nobody had anyway.
“That’s all,” the chairman said, and the board got up after all.
The directors filed out without looking at their portraits, with the fox the last to leave.
Ashby walked slowly along the painting with his hands clasped behind his back, stopping at the fox to laugh out loud.
“That’s a very good fox.”
Matthew had thought so himself during the weekend he’d spent painting it, though this was the first favorable comment anyone in the building had made.
“And where’s your father?” Ashby asked, looking over the painting.
“I couldn’t decide which animal suited him best,” Matthew said.
Ashby laughed, though nobody else seemed to find it funny.
Matthew had meant it as a joke, though once again he’d been too honest about things, so he decided he’d better leave it at that.
Ashby pulled out the chair next to Julian’s and sat down as though it had been kept for him.
“I’ve just come from poor Emeric Vidal’s,” he said.
“Thirty years of coming here every Thursday, and they rob him the night before his own sale. Two thieves, no less, if you can believe it. Our Gentleman, with his chocolates, and somebody new.” He smiled.
“My young detective thinks one of them is a bird. He said so on the morning news.”
“A bird,” Julian said.
“A nightjar. I had to look it up. Apparently it only comes out at night, and nobody sees it until it moves.”
Matthew kept his expression politely bored.
The Commissioner of Police was clearly enjoying the story, but Matthew had committed the burglary himself eight hours earlier.
He couldn’t afford to show any interest.
“They went out of a window on a rope,” Ashby said.
“Not a sound.”
He was sure she would hate being called a nightjar, even when he had only known her for about four minutes most of which he had spent fighting her.
“And all they took was one ring.” Ashby shook his head, amused.
“There were gold cufflinks on the same shelf, other valuables too, yet they left them untouched. Now why would anyone do that?”
Matthew had wondered the same thing last night, while his wrist was in pain.
Ashby seemed to be asking everyone in the room, though he was looking at the head of the table in particular.
Matthew watched his father’s hands, which still hadn’t moved at all.
His father opened the file in front of him, took out a card, and slid it across the table.
It came to rest in front of Matthew, the right way up.
DR.
CONSTANCE PIKE, it said, with an address in the Old Town.
“You have been mocking the Voss name for too long. If you have something to say to me then say it to her,” his father said.
“You’re doing welve sessions with her at least.”
There was indeed something Matthew wanted to say to his father, but he had kept it to himself for twelve years.
“Or?” he asked.
“Or the Glasshouse is cleared.”
Ashby turned his attention to the rain on the window, giving room to a quarrel he was not meant to intrude on.
Matthew looked at the card.
The Glasshouse was the only room in the building where he truly found refuge, and everything he had was in it.
He had no intention of letting anyone take it away just like that because his father wanted to prove a point.
He picked up the card, and Julian immediately opened his calendar.
“She has Tuesdays available,” Julian said.
So Julian had arranged it.
Matthew looked at him, but his brother kept his attention on the calendar, blatantly avoiding him.
“One more thing,” the chairman said.
“You are the member of this board responsible for the staff.”
“Am I?”
“For three years, no less. Every request they make, from overtime to sick leave, needs your signature. You have never signed a single one.”
“Nobody ever asked me,” Matthew said.
Julian slid a folder containing three years’ worth of unsigned requests across the table.
Matthew left the folder closed, though he picked up the pen beside him and began drawing on the cover without thinking.
When he looked down, he recognized his own sketch had taken the form of the knot the nightjar woman had tied earlier that night.
He turned the folder over and took it with him when the meeting ended, still annoyed with both Julian and his father for having disrupted what his notion of a perfectly free existence was.
Ashby caught up with him in the hallway.
“He means well, you know,” Ashby said.
“Your father.”
Matthew wasn’t sure what he was expected to say to that.
His father had just threatened to clear out the Glasshouse, and he wasn’t ready to think too well about his intentions.
Ashby let the matter drop and clapped him on the shoulder.
“On a more cheerful note, stay off carousels, my boy.”
Matthew laughed, remembering the pajamas Conrad had been wearing under his coat the night he came to collect him from the police station.
Matthew had been nineteen at the time.
A patrol had found him in the park at three in the morning, sitting on one of the old carousel’s wooden horses with a sketchbook.
He had only wanted to draw the horses while there were no children climbing all over them, but the officers had arrested him anyway.
Conrad had kept the incident from his father for nine years.
There had been no further questions, only the occasional reminder to stay off carousels.
After the morning he’d had, Matthew was glad they could still laugh about it.