17

The next morning, Mick got to Elmshore East guard station twenty minutes before he and the other would-be sleuths had been told to arrive. He’d always been like this. Not just punctual, but maybe overly so. The way he saw it, he’d rather be thirty minutes early than a minute late. There was just something about running behind schedule that stressed him out. Other people, like Lee Hunter, could turn up to something an hour behind schedule and not even sweat it. Sometimes, he wished he could be so carefree.

He didn’t bother going into the waiting area this morning, knowing he needed to head through the back yard of the station. No point having a repeat of the previous morning, after all. As he passed the open doorway, a fella came dashing out.

“Mr. Mulroon?”

Sergeant Nichols was standing there, a lot shorter when he wasn’t behind his desk. Barely over five feet tall. He must have had to stand on a crate when he was working on reception. Just ten or so years earlier, this would have been unthinkable, but the guards had relaxed their old height restrictions. These days, if you were fit enough and had a few wits about you, then you had a chance regardless of how tall you stood.

“Just you, is it?” said Mick. “Thought you’d have Inspector Longwaite with you. Or maybe Constable Holdonaminute.”

Nichols smirked. “Came to say sorry about yesterday. I don’t normally haze greeners,” he said. Mick had heard the term a few times in the station, and had already pieced together that he, Lill and the others were ‘greeners’.

Thinking back to Lill’s advice, Mick said, “Don’t worry about it. I once sent little Billy Sharp to the store for some checkered paint.”

“That’s a good one. You ever tried the old left handed screwdriver trick?”

“Billy’s too old to get tricked by that now. I think. But don’t worry about it, anyhow. I was just nervous yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, just wanted to say, like. It’s not me, playing those jokes. S’pose I was just trying to fit in. New to this station, y’see. Got posted here because-” he waved his hand dismissively now. “Well, not important. Just if you’d accept my apologies, that’d be grand.”

“Consider ‘em accepted.”

“Great. Best get back to it, I’ve got a stack of paperwork bigger than an ogre’s…well, it’s a big stack. Good luck today.”

Mick joined the other recruits in the same room as they’d met in the previous morning. Since he’d used up his oat milk, he took his coffee black. The selection of pastries all looked like they had butter or cream in them again, but that was okay. He put two sweet rolls and a jam twist in his artificed food container for Ma. He caught a look or two from the other recruits, but he didn’t pay them any mind.

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“Mick,” said Lill.

She was sitting right in the middle of the rows of chairs. She patted the chair next to hers. Mick would have preferred a seat at the back, like yesterday, but didn’t want to be rude.

“You know pastry theft is still theft, don’t you?” she said as he sat down.

“They’re for my Ma. I can’t eat dairy, but I figured I’m still owed a sweet roll or two.”

“Dairy, huh? If I eat walnuts, my throat swells up like a bullfrog’s. Put it there, my new intolerance and allergy pal.”

Mick laughed as she high-fived his palm. Leaning back into his seat, he realized he was a lot more relaxed today. He guessed that with the exam over, he’d done all he could. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

This didn’t take long. Soon, the door opened and Inspector Glass walked in. She looked like she’d had a late night – you could have put a week’s worth of groceries in the bags under her eyes. Maybe a late evening working on a case, Mick guessed. In the city, you probably got asked to go look into a crime at any hour of the day. Yet another way in which Sunhampton beat Full Striding – and beat Lundy, for that matter. The only things awake in ‘hampton after midnight were the bats.

“Morning, ladies and gents,” said Inspector Glass. “First of all, I’d like to congratulate you all on-”

She began a little speech that none of the recruits were really listening to. They all wanted to get to the part where they learned who’d made the program and was going to start studying towards their sleuth tokens. A handful of the greeners looked relaxed, like the forthcoming news was novel as telling them the sky was blue. Mick figured his earlier guess was right; some of the ladies and gents here knew they were on the program before they’d walked through the door.

“Without further ado, the following have been accepted onto the program. If your name isn’t called out, thank you for your time, and please feel free to reapply in two years.” She cleared her throat. “Abrahams, Leeroy. Andale, Claire.”

Mick felt himself slowly sit up straighter in his seat as Glass worked through the As, Bs, and all the way to ‘Luton, Phillip.’ Lill’s name had already been called, but rather than enjoy it, she seemed to only get tenser as they waited for Mick’s.

“Magway, Nick,” said Glass. “Nathans, Helen.”

It took a moment for the fact to sink in. When it did, he tried to think what had happened, and how this was a mistake. Maybe Glass had misread the list, perhaps. Maybe there was some kind of screw up and someone had forgotten to add Mick’s name.

“It’s okay,” said Lill. “Two years will fly by.”

“I don’t get it. The physical, I’d bet my last copper I was in the top third. And on the written paper, almost everything I studied came up. There just ain’t no how.”

‘Ain’t no how’ was the kind of lapse into slang he made when he got flustered. ‘Old ‘Hampton’, they called it. He hadn’t wanted to talk that way in Full Striding, where it’d mark him out as a country guy in a kingdom of city dwellers. Never speak Old ‘Hampton in the city, that was the rule. Getting heard speaking Old ‘Hampton, which was actually a catch all term for the country slang used in a maybe twenty mile radius of his town, was a sure way to getting marked as a potential mugging target in a city like this.

Lill leaned closer and whispered, “You know what this place is like. It’s a joke. Some of us, we knew we were getting in no matter what.”

“You did?” said Mick.

Lill bit her lip. “I’m sorry. My Ma works here. She’s fairly high up. Don’t hate me.”

It wasn’t Lill’s fault who her family was, and he had only met her yesterday, so she didn’t owe him squat. This was why he was surprised at the sense of betrayal he felt. Maybe it was because she was from Lundy. He had kind of felt like they had a small-town, us-against-the-city kinship. Well, he supposed you couldn’t trust your first impressions. That was the lesson.