It had all started off as a stupid joke. Somebody at the bar had asked him what he did for a living, and he had replied “private detective”.
What a private detective did took some explaining, but he had, over the course of many drinks, blagged his way into a qualification in "hunting and tracking difficult-to-find suspects through densely populated urban environments."
Or something along those lines, anyway, he had been /quite/ drunk at the time.
He had quite enjoyed the process, the whole bar gradually getting in on it, and by the time it was kicking out time, he was half-convinced himself.
Then the next thing he knew, it was mid-morning, and he was semi-sober and standing in front of a whole line of very serious-looking people. They had smart blue uniforms on with little metal badges pinned to their lapels, and as he glanced blearily around, everything looked worryingly official.
“We’ve heard from multiple sources that you are a well-regarded people-tracker,” the woman on the far left started, and Greensleeves winced internally. Was that the story he had spun last night? He only remembered the night before in spits and spurts.
The whole situation was not helped by his absolutely banging hangover.
She was quite attractive, he thought, squinting through the pain, and ignoring whatever she was saying. Her skin was a deep green and scaled like the lizards he sometimes spotted sunning themselves on the walls of warmer towns. Magic of that calibre was unusual here, so he assumed she’d travelled in from elsewhere.
“We have…” She paused to think about how to word the next part of her sentence, licking her lips in thought, “we have lost somebody, and we need to find them again.”
Next to her, another figure in a similar blue suit nodded. In contrast to the woman, who reminded him of bright days in dockside bars, this one's skin was dark like old leather, wrinkled and worn. Still reminiscent of the sun, but it spoke more of labour than sangrias. Greensleeves wondered if it was their real look, or if they had chosen it. It was quite striking, especially in contrast to lizard-lady, but not his kinda thing.
He nodded in affirmation, and then tried not to flinch as pain spiked through his forehead.
“We last heard word of them,” Leather followed up, “somewhere south of the city, in the area of...”
Greensleeves stopped listening for a moment. None of this mattered, he was just a day worker! Gods his head was killing him. Was there a drink around here somewhere?
When he refocused, the whole line of people was staring at him.
Oh, there had probably been a question for him in there. Whoops!
“So…” He screwed up his face, wincing internally. Blagging had always been an unfortunate habit of his, but this was way beyond the mess he normally got into. “Your guy…”
Leatherface provided the name and gender, frowning as if he'd already said this.
“Ok." He resisted the urge to hold his head up with his hands, "so your guy has gone missing somewhere in the city, and you need me, the best private detective in the all of the eastern territory, to find them. Of course I can do it, I could track a single ant all the way back to the hive! Did, once!"
This was a terrible idea, Greensleeves thought, his mouth carrying on without requiring any input from his brain. The stiffs in front of him looked quite impressed though. A woman near the right end of the row, an older lady with no visible Changes, but pale skin and eyes the colour of magic, put her hand up, “do you have any references for these claims?”
Greensleeves had done two years in the army, before being dismissed for what were, on paper, health and vision problems, but what was, in actuality, incompetence and an inability to keep his mouth shut. “Oh yes, my sergeant, back in boot camp, she…”
He elaborated bullshit for a good thirty seconds, giving himself a glowing, rock-solid resume, that would crumble under the first strong look from anyone with an iota of sense. Luckily, the people he was talking to all seemed to be blind idiots, because they were falling for it, hook line and sinker.
Somewhere along the way, he accepted a glass of water and a chair, and gradually, as his stories got wilder and wilder, the headache started to ease. As Greensleeves became more sober, the panic started to set in, lurking in the back of his mind like a badger.
But, like any good blagger, he didn’t let that stop him. First, they questioned his background and familial connections. Oh yes, he had grown up in an orphanage across the sea, on a small island, where he had learnt his trade from an old man with a long beard and a big staff.
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The old man, he elaborated, had sadly gone back to earth years before, prompting him to leave the island, ready to show his skills to the world. Having spent his life tracking birds and stags back to their dens, he had discovered a heretofore unknown talent for tracking humans.
Previous jobs? Oh many! He had once tracked down the child of a distant noble, stolen by a terrible monster, all silver scales and teeth like swords. He hadn’t fought the monster himself, of course, but he’d found the child and returned them safely home, once the knights had done their job.
He’d once uh… He’d once tracked down a puppy, stolen by pirates, using only the scent of its fur, damp with the tears of the child it had been cruelly ripped from the arms of!
He had once... As his mouth continued to move and words continued to fall out, the bigwigs in front of him all now glowing with admiration, he considered adding that he had once gotten himself into Deep Shit.
It was mid-afternoon by the time he left wherever he had been. It might’ve been something military? The uniforms would imply so, but it wasn't often that he left the docks and ventured into the city proper, and he tried to avoid authority as much as possible, so he wasn't all that sure.
Either way, he was a bought and paid for private detective now, and he had a person to track down, a crime to solve!
Probably. Best take a trip to the pub first, listen out for clues, you know.
-
From what he’d gathered, some kid had gone missing from the local school, the big cuboid place up on the hill. Nobody had seen her leave, but she was most definitely gone. Strangely, nobody could say when she’d gone missing, it may have been days ago, it may have been weeks, but that was why they were hiring him!
There was no point in him checking out the school, they said, it had already been scoured clean, scrubbed down, all the crevices and corners checked for children and chitterlings. All the turrets and towers had been traversed for trotters. All the beds bugged for bacon.
Ah. He was walking through the food district, it was past lunchtime, and he had missed breakfast.
-
After a lunch of pork, Greensleeves was much happier and was forming a game plan. The headache had faded into an unpleasant memory, the money the toffs had given him was burning a hole in his pocket, and the assistant they had assigned him had, at some point, lost his trail.
Ha, if only they were a master tracker! They wouldn't lose him then for sure!
As he rolled a two-penny coin between his fingers, he considered where he should go from here. He could always head up along the North road and hope that he blended in for long enough to get away. He could head west along the coast, towards the fisheries and clay-towns that he knew to be out there, but there was nothing more boring than a small town, and somebody there was bound to recognise him at some point and hand him in.
He could get on a boat and go chill on the chain of islands off the coast, he’d done sailing work before and he had contacts from his regular job down the docks, but it seemed a miserable life.
Small island life looked idyllic on the surface, but in actuality, it was horrendously boring. It was the same as small-town life, except you were surrounded on all sides by water, nothing to do except shag and shuck in the sand, staring out to sea, waiting for a ship to stop by, to take you away to somewhere more interesting.
He wasn’t a fan of oysters, or of a diet that consisted mostly of fish. So that was out too.
Hmm, what else. The coal mines were always hiring. There’d been some weird supply shortages lately, but that was work for the poor and the desperate, and Greensleeves, right now, was neither.
He could only think of one more viable option, and it was the stupidest of the lot.
Actually become a private detective and look for the kid.
It sounded horribly unrealistic when said out loud like that, but he just couldn’t see any other options.
-
After an hour of hanging about on the docks and chatting to his friends, he had determined that running away to live a life on the islands was out. Most ships wanted to hire for a six-month tour at the minimum, and to book on as a passenger would take most of what he had in his pockets. What was the point of running away to live a beautiful island life if you had no money to fund it and nowhere to spend it! May as well head out into the woods and become a farmer at that point.
Oh gods, he was going to have to do this, wasn’t he?
Greensleeves cast a glance up to the school on the hill. You could see it no matter where you were in the city, and from where he was resting on the roof of a pub, it rose high above everything else. It was a grim-looking place, all vines and towers, tall and strangely designed and always firmly barred and bolted. Students rarely left, except for at the end of the school year, and the teachers all seemed dour and miserable when he’d seen them in the dockside pubs, drinking themselves into oblivion.
They didn’t even teach the local kids there, as far as he was aware, not as day students anyway. No wonder she’d run away, poor little mite.
Well. He thought, getting to his feet and heading down for another drink, nobody here seemed to have seen her. Maybe he could try at some of the other pubs along the docks, work his way up Tavern Street and maybe even check out over by the canals.
Yeah, that seemed like a good idea. The beer here tasted like piss, it was sure to be better up there.
-
She had not been on the docks, or hanging out on Tavern Street. She hadn’t been in any of the pubs by the canals or the ones on the edges of town where the guards hung out. She hadn’t stopped by the bakery down Broadside, or looked for work near the breweries, where the sky stank of malt and sulphur, sometimes so strong your nose seized up and your eyes watered just walking past.
One person had been to all those places though, and that person was Greensleeves, now well and truly smashed. Sloshed. Splattered and singing for his supper.
He was drunk, was the long and short of it. Very, very, very, drunk.
At some point, the assistant had found him, and he had roped them into helping with his information gathering excursion. It hadn’t taken long for them to open up and tell him everything they knew!
Wait, weren’t they supposed to be helping him? Greensleeves considered this, as they staggered down the street together. Oh wait, they were! Without them, he probably would have fallen over quite a way back, but between the two of them… They would go far. The perfect team! An a-frame, standing up against the weight of the world.
A few streets of singing later and they came to the door of a dosshouse he knew well, where, for a few pennies each, they both got a very good night's sleep.