Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk Read Online Free Page B

the footballer with a couple of dozen England caps to his name? Snapped by paparazzi leaving a Mayfair hotel in the company of a girl reputedly several months shy of the age of consent? I obtained a High Court injunction on all reporting of the case and ensured that it never came to trial. Beyond the paparazzi photos, there was no proof of any sexual liaison between the two. Demonstrably my client had adopted an avuncular role towards the child, as evidenced by the arm he placed fondly round her shoulders in several of the pictures and the chaste kiss he gave her on the forehead. I maintained that he and she had enjoyed an innocent breakfast together at the hotel, where the topics of conversation had been his career and her education. Furthermore, the meeting might be regarded as being in the nature of an interview, for the girl had her eye on a media career and could well have been intending to contribute an article about the footballer to her school magazine as a first step on the road to becoming a journalist. Far from being her lover, he was merely her scoop.
    The judge swallowed it. The press were more sceptical but, gagged by the injunction, could do little but mutter obliquely and darkly.
    Anansi, inside me, simply squirmed with glee. Pulling the wool over other people’s eyes – there was nothing that delighted him more.
     
     
    P LEASE DON’T GET me wrong, I didn’t represent only unscrupulous rogues. There were plenty of cases during this time in which the innocent were exonerated and justice was done. None, however, demanded much in the way of ingenuity or subterfuge; nor was any of them especially dramatic or memorable. It’s a sad truth about being a barrister that one gains greater satisfaction from reversing the course of the law than from merely seeing its natural status quo preserved. It is when one is the law’s master, not its servant, that one feels one has genuinely achieved something. It is like being in a daily battle of wits with the ponderous, imposing bulk of jurisprudence, and sometimes, if one is clever, one wrestles it to the mat.
    Anansi is a trickster god, a creature of intrigue and stratagems, weaving artful ploys like he weaves webs.
    Perhaps we lawyers are the same, in our way. If we brethren of the law were to worship a god, by rights it would be Anansi.
     
     
    I T WAS A terrific joyride, those months of one spectacular victory after another.
    But like all joyrides, it couldn’t last. It had to come to a screeching, crashing halt.
    I was out jogging when Anansi announced that our partnership would be entering a new phase. It was not long after sunrise on an autumn morning, and there was a misty haze in the air that you could taste as well as see. While I huffed and puffed along the Regent’s Canal towpath, Anansi and I chatted, as we often did, about an upcoming trial, the various tacks the prosecution might take and how best to deal with them.
    Then Anansi dropped the bombshell.
    You realise, of course, Dion, that there’s a price for all this, don’t you?
    “What? What do you mean?”
    You don’t get the services of a god for free. No one does .
    “What are you talking about?”
    I’d fallen into the habit of speaking aloud during my conversations with Anansi, even in public. It was easier than keeping them confined to my head. At first I’d received some strange looks when doing this, but I’d got around the problem by the simple expedient of wearing a Bluetooth headset whenever I was out and about. It wasn’t switched on or even connected to a mobile, but people didn’t know that. All they saw was a man taking a phone call on the hoof. I didn’t appear to be different from any number of businesspeople you see on the street, working as they walk. The only distinction was that whereas they were talking to a colleague or a stranger, I was talking to a god.
    “Explain yourself,” I said. “Is this some sort of joke?”
    No joke, Dion. We’ve been working well