51
There was no more satisfying a moment in his career – short as it had been so far – than when Mick was able to take the Food Safety Board letter that Lena had sent Spruce, and rip it up in front of him.
Over a free burger and fried potatoes, Mick told Spruce everything. About how Lena had been sending these official-looking letters to eateries, then waiting for a week or so to let the owners worry and fret, before approaching them in person. Telling them that she worked for the Food Safety Board, and that she could arrange to have their ratings changed…for a price.
“And to top it all off,” said Mick, “She spent a while scouting out a bunch of houses in the city, where she knew the owners would regularly be away for a while. Found them all listed in an address book she stuffed under a mattress. She goes from house to house, breaking in and living there for a while, then leaving before the owners get home.”
“So all this worry I’ve had…”
Mick put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I know. But at least there’s no problem with the café.”
“Can’t thank you enough, mate. How much do I owe you?”
Mick couldn’t believe what he was about to say. The Mick Mulroon from even a few months ago couldn’t have thought these words, let alone utter them. “No charge. You’re a friend! Doesn’t feel right getting paid for your misery.”
“You must have spent ages on this.”
“Put your coins away. I’m not walking out of this empty-handed. The Lena case, and all the stuff with the six Connors…along with my other jobs… well, it’s been enough to get me my last two skill trees. Simple Deduction and Simple Interrogation. Now I’ve got them all.”
Spruce smiled. You couldn’t have described him as a relaxed person right then, even with all this business over with. He was still too flushed with adrenaline and the remnants of worry. But he looked better than before.
“So that’s it? You’re a fully classed sleuth?” he asked.
Mick took a big bite of his burger, chewed, and swallowed. “Not quite yet. There’s something I need to do, and then there’s the graduation ceremony. But almost.”
The commuter cart to Full Striding gave Mick ample opportunity to review his skill trees for maybe the tenth time. He just never tired of looking at them. He had all five of them now. Technically, there wasn’t a collective noun to describe five trees specifically, but Mick liked to think of them as a copse. A nice copse of sleuth skill trees, their leaves nice and green from the sunlight of experience.
Pushing up his right sleeve, he set his Simple Interrogation and Simple Deduction skill trees in the slots of his token bracelet, and then gave them a quick tap. Token text filled the air in front of him. Percy Tattersall was sitting on the seat opposite Mick, and he wouldn’t be able to see the token text. It would look as if Mick was just staring intently at him.
“I’m not looking at you,” he said, preempting an awkward situation. “My token text.”
“Ah. Right.”
With that dealt with, Mick studied the text again, savoring the feeling of pride it never ceased to give him each time he read the words.
Skill Tree: Simple Deduction
Level: 1
Abilities:
Mental Corkboard
You can keep all your evidence, notes, and observations on a corkboard inside your mind, meaning you always have all the intricate details of a case to hand. With more experience, more cases can be held.
Pattern Recognition
Enhances your ability to pinpoint patterns in evidence that a cursory glance might miss, teasing out clues from obscurity.
Skill Tree: Simple Interrogation
Level: 1
Abilities:
Detect Lie [Passive]
The more experienced you become in questioning people, the more obvious lies become to you, even from practiced truth jugglers.
Effective Questioning
When formulating questions, you can compare different ways of wording them, and Effective Questioning will tell you which is likely to be most effective in each situation.
Sleuth Bonus: Sense Emotion
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
You pick up on signs of particularly strong emotions that may hint at a possible line of questioning.
There they were, then. His last two skill trees. He had all he needed to be a sleuth now, and it was just a matter of watering his trees over the course of a career by using his abilities and closing cases. Of course, he was joining a race that some people had already started years ago. There were sleuths out there who were already master ranked at his age. Still, better late than never.
All that remained was one last thing to do, the first part of which saw him leave the commuter cart station and head through Full Striding to an old scrapyard. It wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing of places, with its walls made of tin sheets capped with barbed wire, and the ever-present smell of grease in the air.
When he tried the gates of Sammy Lee’s scrapyard, however, he found them locked. He headed across the road, to a small warehouse where a Striding Gazette vendor stored their stock. The vendor was sitting outside sorting newspapers into stacks and then tying them with twine.
“Any idea where Sammy Lee is?” Mick asked.
The vendor was tying twine around a stack of newspapers. He didn’t look up from his work. “Sammy who?”
“Lady from the scrapyard across the road. Loves carriages.”
“Never heard of her.”
Mick activated his Effective Questioning ability from his Interrogation skill tree. Using the same base query – Have you seen Sammy Lee? – he had the ability manipulate it this way and that to see which would be most effective with the vendor. According to the ability, a friendlier approach would work better with this man.
“Let me grab one of those stacks for you,” he said, helping the vendor load his papers onto a wagon. “Woo, these are heavy.”
“Thank you kindly.”
“Worked here long?” asked Mick.
“Oh, twenty, thirty, forty years. Who gives a damn? Ever look back and think, ‘Just what the heck have I done with my life?’”
“Don’t say that. How are folks going to get their news, if not for you?”
The vendor waved his hand dismissively. His palm was smudged with ink from the newspapers. “Yer talking bull manure. But I appreciate it.” He put his hands on his hips and glanced at the scrapyard. “Haven’t seen Sammy in days. Aside from that, though, couldn’t say where she is.”
“No problem. Thank you.”
Mick realized that he didn’t know the slightest thing about Sammy Lee. Not where she lived, which taverns she frequented – if any – nor anything about her life that didn’t involve tinkering with old wagons and carriages. Then again, he’d never stopped to ask, either. He’d turned up with Lill one day, got her to be his official mentor, and then showed up periodically to get her to sign a form or two.
He stood there for a moment and tried to think of everything he knew about Sammy Lee. He gathered all the observational odds and ends and pinned them to a corkboard in his mind. He tried to recall anything of significance she’d ever told him and tease any kind of meaning out of them, tried to find patterns in the things she’d said.
I know she drinks hazelnut coffee. That’s her favorite. And she spends so much time in the yard that odds are she buys coffee and other groceries from a store nearby, rather than walking far for them.
With some diligent searching, he soon learned that there was only one place near Sammy Lee’s scrapyard that sold hazelnut coffee; a store named Three Cheeses which sold general groceries in one half of the building, and had a long cheese counter taking up the other. Three Cheeses turned out to be a modest name for the place. The owner was a hassled-looking guy with thinning hair and wobbly jowls, who had to divide his time between manning the grocery counter and dashing across the store and slicing and bagging cheese, depending on the needs of his customers.
“Please tell me you don’t need cheese,” he said, seeing Mick enter.
“Afraid so. Need some nice, strong cheese, and then I got a bunch of groceries to buy from the other side of the store.”
The owner looked between the two counters positioned at opposite sides of the store.
Mick couldn’t keep it up. He grinned. “All I need is an answer or two, if you don’t mind.”
The store owner didn’t know where Sammy Lee lived, nor would he have given up the ex-detective’s address if he did. There was such a thing as customer-cheese monger confidentiality, didn’t he know? Mick said he didn’t. In any case, the grocery store owner was comfortable telling Mick that Sammy liked to drink at a tavern on the western edge of town, called the Horse and Carriage.
“The Horse and Carriage? Of course she does. Thanks, matey.”
The Horse and Carriage wasn’t much of a place. A generous person might call it cozy and quaint, while someone of a meaner disposition might liken its layout to that of a public toilet. Sure, you had to duck your head as you walked in, but the place wasn’t small for the heck of it. This was a drinking hole for carriage drivers, retired or otherwise, and it was almost as old as the city itself. If you threw the stone of time behind you far enough it might land a few hundred years in the past, when carriage driving was only open to a race of folk called the Kin, who’d left Easterly a while ago now. The Kin were small, by all accounts. The tallest of them was lucky to get to four feet. This tavern had been built for their liking, and now that it was a building of historical importance with a green plaque outside, they couldn’t change its layout to suit its newer, taller patrons.
Mick found Sammy Lee enjoying a pint of Bishop’s Regret over in a snug in the corner. He bought himself a bottle of cherry beer. He didn’t want a full glass; he needed to get the commuter carriage later, and didn’t want his bladder filled with beer. Carriage drivers absolutely hated it when customers asked for a loo break.
“Isn’t this a coincidence?” said Mick.
Sammy Lee looked up. “Can’t a lady enjoy a beer in peace?”
“Just need you to sign off on skill tokens. I’ll even buy you a drink to ease the pain of having to do mentor duties.”
While Sammy looked over Mick’s skill tokens, he went to the bar to buy her another glass of Bishop’s Regret. Handing over his coins for a glass, he felt the last vestiges of his old skinflint self leave him. Just how many drinks had he bought people lately? How many meals had he treated folks to? Then again, he had found that when you were generous, people often reciprocated. Not that that was a reason to do it, but it was nice either way. A coin spent on a friend was better than having it sit in a jar collecting dust – notwithstanding the very real need for pension provisions and rainy day funds.
He and Sammy had a drink and a chat, after which Sammy was a little drunk. Not falling over, but you wouldn’t have trusted her to drive a carriage. She insisted that Mick accompany her to the scrapyard, where she showed him a wagon she’d recently finished restoring. In big, white letters she’d dabbed, ‘Sammy Lee Deliveries.’
“Deliveries?” said Mick.
Sammy rapped the side of the wagon with her knuckles. “All this wagon restoring, it’s got me in the mind that I’d like to actually use them. This beaut was a plague wagon, you know. From the Striding outbreak a couple of hundred years ago.”
“Three hundred and six,” said Mick. The outbreak of the Striding Coughing Plague was one of the many things he’d read up on and stored in his memory palace.
“All the same. They used to collect unfortunates and store them on this very wagon.”
Mick edged away from the wagon, causing Sammy to laugh.
“We’re talking centuries ago, for saints’ sakes. You just said so yourself.”
“Still. They used to pile corpses on this thing, huh?”
Sammy nodded. “And now I’m going to deliver groceries to people who live in the city outskirts. Oldies like me, sick people, you know the type. Pathetic sorts. Anyone who can’t get to a store.”
“You’re a vision of empathy.”
“I’m taking ‘em their groceries, aren’t I?” said Sammy.
“Thought detective pensions were pretty decent?” asked Mick, wondering why someone like Sammy would want to start working an exhausting job at her age. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but she’d earned her retirement.
“I’m not charging a single coin! Like I said, all this work I do fixing things up just to let ‘em sit there. Why grow flowers if you never stop to smell their petals?”