14
The desk sergeant directed Mick to go outside from the reception area and back onto the street, loop clockwise around the station, and then head through an entrance in the back yard, just past the guard dog kennels. The city guards used Striding Shepherd dogs, if Mick remembered correctly, which he reckoned he did. Bred for obedience, intelligence, and for their legendary sniffing ability. The mutts were all out somewhere this morning, their kennels lying empty, their doggy beds crumpled. He wondered where they were. Maybe their handlers took them on walks before they started their guard duties.
Mick would have loved to have a dog, if only he wasn’t so allergic. Dairy, dogs, cats, peanuts. The four horsemen of Mick’s allergy apocalypse. Nature had really decided to stick it to him when he was a kid. These things wouldn’t kill him, his allergies weren’t that bad, but spending too much time stroking a pooch would make his skin feel itchy and puff up his eyes. Milk, though? Different story. A thimble of the stuff would see him booking a daylong stay in his bathroom. He would sometimes risk prodding his allergies for the simple pleasure of stroking a pooch, but he’d never tested fate with a sip of anything from an udder.
Across the yard, three mechanics were working on one of the huge wagons that were used to transport people from the station and to Striding jail. They’d taken off the wheels and they had the vehicle propped up on stone blocks, while they messed around underneath it with their spanners and their wrenches. From somewhere outside of the yard, a shrill whistle blew. Start-of-the-day whistle for the tinkerer factory? He wondered. Or is there a school nearby, maybe? A seasoned sleuth would have been able to pinpoint the source without much trouble, if the stuff that was written about their skill trees could be believed. Mick listened carefully, but the whistle didn’t blow again.
“Oi, you!” called a voice. It was one of the wagon mechanics. She was pointing a wrench at him. “This ain’t Regent’s plaza. You need something?”
Heading into the station’s rear entrance, Mick had to duck so he didn’t bang his head on the doorway. Inside, he found his way to a meeting room which had twenty or so fold-out chairs all pointed in the direction of a chalk board at one end of the room. Lining the east wall was a table with coffee, orange juice, and a range of sweet rolls, doughnuts, and other sugary treats on it.
Lot of people here, thought Mick, sweeping his gaze over the other candidates. Some sleuths, they’d be able to take one look at all those faces and commit them to memory. Maybe even draw out a deduction or two while they were at it.
Chief Inspector Glass was already about to begin proceedings, standing at the front of the room and facing a much bigger group of recruits than Mick had expected. He located an empty chair on the third from the back row, and bore the stares of the other would-be sleuths as he shuffled along, giving hurried apologies as he took his seat.
“Good morning, everyone,” said Chief Inspector Glass.
She was roughly Mick’s age, he guessed, which just went to show what happened when you made the right choices early in your life. If Mick had known he wanted to be a sleuth back when he was thirteen or fourteen, where would he be right now? Standing right where Glass was?
Then again, that whole line of thinking was something he was trying to get away from. The idea that you had to choose an apprenticeship when you were a kid, when you didn’t even know what life was like. How were you supposed to direct your future without a nick of life experience? It was like blindfolding someone and then telling them to draw a map of Full Moon forest, and then making them actually use the map to find their way home. Ludicrous.
Mick had someone he admired in this whole area. Flo Anderson, who worked for Jack and Lewis Cooper, was older than him, and she was an apprentice artificer. A gnat’s breath away from getting her class token, too, by all accounts. If she could do that, then there was no reason in Easterly why Mick couldn’t become a sleuth.
That knowledge was enough to make him feel a little more comfortable in a room filled with people who looked younger than his moustache. He purposefully let a smile form on his lips now, acting as a barrier to his nerves.
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“So, welcome then, all of you,” said Glass. “Half of you will leave here with your blank sleuth tokens, an assignment with a mentor inspector, and a training schedule to see you through to your class earning day. The other half will be invited to reapply in two years’ time if you so wish. Not a second sooner.”
Mick gulped at this and resisted the urge to fidget in his seat.
Glass continued, “I’m sure you will all know how the test is structured. If not, then maybe you ought to question your suitability for the program, no? This is a standardized test. We’re all here on equal footing, and we judge this whole thing fairer than a Larking dog show.”
Immediately after saying this, Glass gave a slight nod to one of the would-be sleuths sitting two rows in front of Mick. It was directed at a young lady, who gave an almost imperceptible nod in return. Mick could only see the back of her head, but he noticed that her neck was red. Only part of it, though. A strange, thin strip of stark purple. He tried to deduce what it might mean. An allergy to silver, maybe? Or had she worn a coat that was a little rough around the collar and had rubbed her skin?
He added it to his list of mysteries in his head, committing it to his memory palace with the intention of writing it down later.
Mysteries to take a look at:
1) Tim Ritson’s Missing Moggy
Help the old man find his missing cat
2) The Lady with the Red Neck
Why’s the sleuth recruit’s neck so purple? Find out…without being weird about it.
He wasn’t going to go asking her about it, of course. It was just a mental exercise. This was one of the main ways a sleuth earned experience – by solving mysteries. The skill trees and abilities that you used in order to do so leveled up depending on how you employed them in a case, but cracking the overall mystery gave an experience bonus to all your trees. Not that Mick had any of his skill trees yet, but still, any sleuth worth their wits would build up a backlog of riddles to solve.
Barely a second after Inspector Glass was done addressing them, a uniformed guard ducked her head into the room and asked, in a hushed voice, if Glass could come and look at something. This left the other would-be sleuths and Mick to their own devices. They quickly formed groups and started chatting with each other, most of them with a familiarity that suggested they knew each other from before today.
Mick stood there, feeling all too aware he was older than everyone else, and knowing that as Sunhampton-born, small-town guy, he stood out like a pigeon at a dove’s birthday party. One thing he’d always been good at, though, was making friends. His amiability compass was so strong he could find common ground with almost anyone, even people like Jack Cooper.
Sizing up the other sleuths, Mick approached a group of them and listened to them joking and bantering. This group wasn’t for him. He loved a good joke, but not today. This wasn’t happy hour at the King’s Head, after all. Today was important. So he ducked out and drifted towards a different gathering. One that looked just a touch more serious. This one, four ladies and two fellas, were talking about the upcoming tests. Perfect.
Mick readied his memory palace to receive some useful tidbits, then waited for an opening to insert himself into the conversation. When it came, he gave his new friends a big smile.
“…and I’ve stayed up late for three weeks straight revising,” said a young guy with a shaved head. “I’m so damned tired, and I messed my sleeping pattern up now.”
“Here’s a tip for you,” said Mick. “Running. Go for a nice, long run, and I guarantee that you’ll soon be sleeping the second your head hits the pillow. There’s nothing like it.”
“Running?”
“That thing you do with your legs. It’ll get you sleeping better than a shut-eye potion, I’m telling you.”
After a while, Mick felt like he’d extracted all the useful information he could from these folks who were not much older than half his age. Feeling a slight rumble in his stomach, he felt he’d better check the buffet situation. The last thing he wanted was to be sitting in a silent examination room and have his stomach making gurgles.
There was a long table set against the wall, with a range of pastries on it, as well as two huge urns for tea and coffee. Mick’s ma would have blown a vein in her temple if she’d seen the urns – they were a century overdue a good descaling. As Mick had suspected, the milk they provided was of the cow kind, which meant his poor stomach couldn’t take it. Similarly, all of the sweet rolls and doughnuts they’d dished out most likely had dairy in ‘em. Mick was used to it, but it still made him wish he was in ‘hampton right now. Mrs. Grant always made sure Rolls and Dough catered for just about every dietary preference you could think of.
Mick caught a curious stare from a recruit or two as he poured coffee into a cup, then took his vial of oat milk out of his pocket and transformed the coffee into a more pleasing, light brown hue.
Not content to stop there, he opened his bag and took out an empty container that, until recently, had held cookies inside. He picked two sweet rolls and a jam twist from the buffet table and put them in the container to take home for Ma. Even if he couldn’t eat them, he reasoned, he might as well get his money’s worth. Then, brew in hand, he took it over to his chair and sat there, practicing his observational skills by watching the others.