Podge was from a long line of private detectives. His mother was a private detective, and her mother before that, stretching back across the centuries, before the telegram, before newspapers, before monks and their chronicles.

They didn’t do it for the glory, or the hope of some scrawled oblique reference in the annal of the age. They detected because it was all they knew. 

Podge’s mum used to joke it was the oldest profession. 

The Spencer house was dusty. Crime was more pressing than housekeeping, and as a child Podge would lead sneezing clients into the back room so that PI Agnes might hear their tales of misfortune.

After her death, Podge took up the family business, heading to the Detective Guild’s headquarters in his best trilby to take the oath and be handed his unique seal of crime. 

In truth, he found the ceremony a little corny, but like all good detectives, he kept his thoughts to himself, to the grave if necessary.

Home hid too many memories, so he set up shop in a new office block, and gently eased himself down into the role society expected of him.

Haven had no police, and by tradition preferred to keep the solving of local difficulties as informal as possible. Back when he had clients, Podge was more mediator than anything. 

His job was to glean what truths people were willing to concede, then come to an arrangement least embarrassing to all concerned. 

In a town where shame was like gum in the innards of an old clock, much could be forgiven if forgetting kept things ticking over.

On quieter days, Podge looked back fondly on his silliest cases. 

The orange spotted cat, held hostage by a commune of separatists, causing a hyper-local diplomatic incident.

The divorcing couple battling for custody over their contacts book, which listed people on an axis of sarcasm.

That time half the townsfolk turned up on his door the same day, pitchforks at hand, to complain about the missing trees on Sunset Lane and the suspicious new pitchfork factory.

In a town build on order and silt, pitchforks and sarcasm were treasured anomalies to Podge. Time felt like it scrolled from left to right, with the unusual ebbing away every day. 

He started to keep a diary of unusual happenstances, to remind himself that they happened and he wasn’t imagining them. And as his cases became drier than a prohibition town, he dedicated more and more of his cork board to the dearth of the unusual.

And on the full moon before he stumbled on Mani’s bar for the first time, he pieced together the thrum and rattle of the impending horizon.