The Ashford company building was visible from two streets away.
Noel leaned forward in the carriage and looked through the window.
"How bad is it?" he said.
"I don't know yet," Cedric said.
His voice was level. His hands were on his bag, both of them. He was looking at the building with the focused, assessing expression that meant he was already working through what he was going to find before he found it.
The carriage stopped.
They got out into the noise.
---
The entrance hall was worse than the outside had suggested.
A cluster of employees near the main staircase, talking over each other. A woman at the reception desk had her hand pressed to her mouth. Two men were coming down the stairs quickly, one of them still holding a sheaf of papers he had clearly forgotten to put down. The general sound of a building that had received bad news and had not yet organised itself around it.
Noel moved through it behind Cedric, with Bennett close on his other side.
