From above, everything about the city of Haven looked as it should. A passing seagull would not have thought anything amiss, should it ever think beyond pastry theft.

The trams arrived as expected, and left with an appropriate number of people on board. Bakeries lining the high street down to the sea eminated sweet smells from reasonably priced tarts and buns.

And the people, without whom no metropolis can claim to be, seemed happy, if a little clockwork.

If only there could be more crime. Not a murderous rampage or a spate of arson attacks, heavens no. Even Podge Spencer’s subconscious didn’t lower itself to these kind of violent imaginings – though they would be professionally helpful.

Podge, you see, was a private detective.

He had named his agency Podge & Sons, with the kind of prosaic optimism that so defined his character. No offspring had emerged, but he had a desk in a nondescript office block, a mug with a novelty slogan, and a kitchenette down the corridor that he shared with a small architecture firm.

Their mugs, he couldn’t help but notice, were much better designed. And their sons would be better planned than his, and built to survive the winter.

“Any cases, Podge?” they’d ask, between designing apartments too shiny to be lived in by any but the wearers of the most expensive wire-framed glasses.

“Oh, one or two,” he’d smile, keeping up the charade. They knew better than to challenge him with specifics, as that would put Podge in the professionally awkward position of making up some crimes. And he seemed a nice chap, all in all, though his choice in mugs left a little to be desired.

In between arranging and rearranging his empty filing cabinets, Podge kept himself busy with a niche hobby, which was in danger of igniting into a full-blown obsession. Podge worried it was getting in the way of his cases, until he remembered, with a mixture of relief and panic, that he didn’t have any.

The hobby was difficult to explain succinctly, so he rarely tried. The friends Podge had made absent-mindedly down the years wouldn’t have understood in any case. They were from different backgrounds to his own – potters and other artisans, mainly, though he was also pally with the old man who played the bagpipes down by the harbour wall.

Haven, as a city state, provided a generous daily stipend to its citizens, so Bagpipe Bill wasn’t a busker, as such. He just felt it was his civic duty to annoy people.

Podge had only one confidant, way over on the other side of town. Haven wasn’t huge, like Hanville down by the estuary, but it was big enough to have tracks. and, it so follows, the wrong side of them.

And just by the crossroads, in a creaking old shack, which shook with each passing goods train, Mani Grundy ran the least reputable bar in town.

She had a sign advertising this fact, and everything.

And it was there, early on a Monday evening, that Mani would expect the arrival of Podge, for precisely two whisky sours and update on what he had discovered about the wrinkle in the fabric of imaginary time.