5

The next day being a Monday, Mick had his regular job to attend to. After all, food didn’t get put in their pantry by pantry pixies, as Ma liked to say. He was employed by Mr. Leabrook, the manager of Coiner’s Way. This week, Mr. Leabrook wanted Mick to move all the junk from the back yard of the florist store that Wendy Stowthistle had recently vacated.

“This is gonna take all week, by the looks of it,” said Mick, staring at the frankly incredible hoard of trash bags, scrap metal, and even an old porcelain bathtub filled to the brim with rusted bolts. Mick had no idea how or why a florist would accrue all this junk. Wendy had certainly never mentioned her collection to him.

“I’ll be taking this up with Ms. Stowthistle, believe me,” said Mr. Leabrook. “The courts will see it my way, mark my words.”

“Taking it up how?”

“Well, I suppose finding her is the first step. I rather thought you might, as our town guard, you know…”

“What?” said Mick.

“Surely you have ways of locating people?”

Mick had no intention whatsoever of helping Mr. Leabrook pursue Wendy in court. He liked her. She used to make him free bouquets to give to his Ma sometimes. He and Wendy got along like pie and mash, mostly because they were the same age. They’d gone to Sunhampton school together, in fact, though they hadn’t been friends back then.

But it wasn’t personal interest that stopped him from helping Mr. Leabrook – it was his duty to uphold the law not to the letter, but in a way that made Sunhampton a better place. In this instance, Mr. Leabrook was on the wrong side of it. Knowing his boss well, he considered it part of his job to remind him of things from time to time.

“Folks pay a service charge along with their rent,” Mick said. “You’re supposed to take away their trash.”

“And I pay Miller and Sons Disposal to do so. They charge me by weight, Michael. Wendy was having a laugh, thinking I would remove all of this junk for her. Especially when it has nothing to do with being a florist.”

Mick had read Mr. Leabrook’s rental contracts. After all, if he was to keep his boss in line, it paid for his crossbow to be loaded with bolts of the finest knowledge.

“I reckon your contract says you’ll remove trash as part of the service fee. Doesn’t say what kind, or how much.”

“Yes, well. I suppose I ought to change that.”

“Too late to pursue Wendy for it, though. She’s got no obligation to clear it up.”

“Whose side are you on?” said Mr. Leabrook.

“The side of truth, Mr. Leabrook. Always on the side of truth.”

People were constantly telling Mick he ought to stop working for Mr. Leabrook. His ma, Lee Hunter, Spruce Wilkinson, Nell Kelly. They all said it. What they didn’t seem to understand was that if you didn’t have a class token, it was hard to find work in a small place like Sunhampton. Around here, most folks had to create their own work. Ma had been a solicitor, for example. Lee Hunter owned his hunting supply store and Spruce had his café. Nell was different in that she worked as a teacher at the Sunhampton school, but she’d had to earn her teaching class token for that.

Mick had never pursued earning a class. Most folks started their apprenticeships somewhere between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. He, however, had spent his teens having fun. He’d left school at sixteen, took all the gold he’d earned from his weekend job at Bumpkiss’s Butcher shop, and traveled the roads of Easterly. For five, glorious years he’d seen what he could of the country, crossing north to south, east to west. Then, when homesickness had hit, he’d come back home to Sunhampton, knowing deep in his heart he wouldn’t ever want to leave again.

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That meant he had a problem. What was an unclassed twenty one year old with little job experience supposed to do? For a while he’d thought about opening his own business. Maybe a food cart at the market, perhaps. Mick was a good cook, and he grilled a mean kebab. But there was a problem there. To start any kind of business, you needed gold. Mick didn’t have any, and he wouldn’t ask his poor ma for it. She had worked hard all her life, and she deserved to have fun with her savings.

That was why Mick had been glad to accept a job working for Mr. Leabrook, who he’d been employed by ever since. He and Douggie Fernglass shared duties on Coiner’s Way, doing all the little jobs that were needed to keep the mercantile heart of Sunhampton ticking over. Douggie did all of the everyday stuff, like lighting the streetlamps, whereas Mick got tasked with the random jobs that involved any muscle except his brain. Things like clearing out Wendy’s yard full of trash, for example. Mr. Leabrook didn’t seem to think Mick was capable of better jobs than that, so anything that required more than a little bit of wit went to Douggie.

What this ultimately meant was that Mick had to work around his day job if he was to find out what happened to Rohan the pig. So, over the course of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, he carved out every sliver of time he could to question folks in town.

At lunchtime on Tuesday, for instance, he went to the King’s Head and spoke to Alec. Tavern owners, bartenders, and serving staff were gold mines of information for a guard.

“Looking for a pig,” Mick told Alec. “Goes by the name of Rohan.”

“Goes by?”

“That’s his name.”

“Right, Mick, but saying ‘goes by’ makes it seem like that’s what the pig calls himself.”

Mick sighed. Interviewing potential witnesses was one of the tough parts of the job. People could be stubborn, and you had to watch what you said and how you said it.

“Just wondering if maybe someone tried to bring a pig into the pub, maybe you overheard anyone talking about selling one.”

“Sorry,” said Alec, shaking his head. “Now that you’re here, though, there’s a little matter I want to talk to you about. Someone’s been moving my-”

Mick must have spoken to all the regular faces on Coiner’s Way over the course of that week, and nobody had seen snout nor trotter of Rohan. Most folks didn’t much care, either, since they were lost in their own worlds. Paisley Porter and Lewis Cooper were as helpful as always and promised to keep an eye out, but he didn’t really learn anything useful. Lacking any of the abilities that fully-classed sleuths had on their skill trees, this left him with few options.

That night over dinner, Mick tried to put himself in the place of a pig, and then in the mind of a pig thief. Larceny seemed likely, though he couldn’t rule out that Rohan had let himself out. Pigs were clever, and a good sleuth never excluded an option until they were sure.

While Mick ate, Ma was doing squats in the living room, holding two bags of weighted sand in her hands. She’d started attending body fitness classes at Yulred Usgood’s back yard gym, determined to become fitter in her seventies than she had been in her fifties and sixties.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked her.

“Just…one…more…rep…” She dropped the bags of sand and straightened up straight. “There!”

Mick headed into the kitchen, dished up a bowl of three bean chilli, and placed it on the table in front of Ma.

“No garlic bread today?” she asked.

“You said you were giving it up.”

“Did I?”

Mick nodded. “Tuesday, eight-thirty-six. You said, and I quote, ‘Mick, I’m giving up bread. Even garlic bread.’”

“Well, maybe that’s what I said, but that doesn’t mean I was going to do it. Everyone says things, Mick. You’ll make a fine sleuth, believing what everyone tells you.”

Said by anyone else and that would have sounded mean, but Ma didn’t have a nasty bone in her body. He and Ma had always had a jokey relationship. They were very much alike, he and Ma, which was why they got on so well.

Mick sat down at the table opposite her and poured himself a glass of beer from the pitcher. “Ma, if you were to steal a pig, where’s the first place you’d go?”

Without hesitation or inquiry, she said, “Depends on the pig.”

“A prized pig. One that sniffs out truffles.”

“Well, if I was someone who knew about this kind of thing and had done my homework, I’d start with every farmer around here who keeps pigs like that. You know, someone I could make a quick sale to.”