Squirrel & Swan Precious Things

by M. D. Archer

  S & S INVESTIGATIONS

  SQUIRREL & SWAN

  - PRECIOUS THINGS -

  M. D. ARCHER

  First published by M. D. Archer April 2018

  Version 2 published July 2020 by SWARM Publishing

  Auckland, New Zealand

  Copyright M. D. Archer © All Rights Reserved.

  Squirrel & Swan Precious Things is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents, except those clearly in the public domain, are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, names, places or incidents is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  Other Titles

  1

  On the twelfth floor of the newly renovated social sciences building, Professor Richard Thinton halted the lazy swivel of his chair and looked up in surprise.

  “You’re doing what?”

  Paige adjusted herself in her seat. The chair was right next to Richard’s desk but positioned so that in order to face him properly, she had to perch awkwardly on the edge. Knowing his almost pathological need for the upper hand, she suspected this was intentional.

  “Opening a detective agency,” she repeated. “With Sophie.”

  Richard’s face contorted. “But that’s ridiculous. You, you? And Sophie? Are going to, what, solve crimes?” A snort escaped.

  “Well, it’s more of a broad-spectrum agency offering psychological services that include investigations, but yes. We are.”

  Paige narrowed her eyes as Richard continued to chortle, his shoulders jumping up and down with mirth. The snuffling sounds he was making, coupled with his reddening face and watering eyes, were giving him a definite pig-like quality. Had Richard known this he would have stopped laughing immediately. His capped and professionally whitened teeth, his blow-dried and boyishly tousled hair, and the expensive bronzer—perfectly matched to his skin tone and imported from London—were all carefully selected vanities Richard liked to think gave him the air of effortless handsomeness.

  Richard was wrong.

  “Honestly,” he scoffed, turning to answer his now ringing phone, thus giving Paige some respite from his ridicule. “Ethan, you wanker!” he roared down the line as he reclined his chair and placed both feet on his desk.

  Paige groaned. For the next few minutes she endured a loud account of his weekend—embellished for her sake, she thought—and resisted the desire to put on her headphones. Instead she looked around his office, wondering how he’d been able to acquire so much non-standard university furniture. The numerous plaques and awards framed and fixed to the walls answered that question, she realised.

  Professor Thinton was somebody in this department.

  Finally, Richard ended the call with a further bout of jovial cursing and turned back to Paige with a patronizing smile. “But seriously, come on, you’re a...” Richard paused, eyes glinting.

  Paige’s nose twitched with irritation. “I’m what? A girl?”

  How had Paige never noticed what an absolute tool Richard was? She’d heard the stories of course. That he was a bully, and if you got on the wrong side of him he could make your life difficult. But Paige’s own relationship with Richard—her doctoral supervisor—had been smooth and untroubled during their four years together. She’d never paid much attention to what the others had said but now, with a bit of distance and without a common goal, it was all too clear the rumours were true.

  Richard was a Grade A Git.

  “Look, Paige. You’re a smart one, you’ve done well here,” he murmured, waving his hand as if the department was his own personal empire. “Why don’t you stay and get involved in one of my projects? I have a Marsden grant,” he added. “I need to spend that money on something. You could have your pick.”

  Paige knew what getting involved with his projects meant. She’d design, implement and write up the research studies; she’d look after his students and any other random task he decided to set her; and in return, she’d get to watch as he accepted the accolades.

  “Are you listening to me?” Richard leaned forward. “I don’t seem to have your full attention,” he complained.

  Was Richard pouting at Paige?

  “Thank you but no,” she said evenly.

  “I guess you’re dumber than I thought,” Richard said, his eyes turning cold. “Come back and see me in six months when this ludicrous endeavour blows up in your face.”

  Paige had seen Richard in action before, huffing and puffing around the office as he dished out insults, but never before had they been directed at her. She gathered up her bag and stood up, her shoulders bunched in tension.

  “We still need to deal with the remaining data from the final study,” Richard said, watching her prepare to leave.

  “I know, I know.” Paige moved toward the door.

  “Oh, Paige?” Richard waited until she’d turned back to him. “How is the lovely Sophie... is she single at the moment?”

  Paige pulled a face. That he thought it was appropriate to ask after her friend and colleague in such a lewd way was incredible. As Paige looked into his small, glittering eyes, she understood very clearly why Sophie avoided departmental functions.

  “No need to be like that. Don’t get all sensitive on me, for God’s sake,” Richard tsked.

  “It’s fine,” Paige uttered, teeth clenched.

  “You women... falling about, hysterical over every imagined slight.” Richard shook his head. Paige stared at him, disbelief creeping over her face. “Or is it that time of the m—” Richard began.

  “Does anyone ever call you Dick?” Paige interrupted.

  Richard’s eyes turned to saucers. “Excuse me?”

  “As a nickname for Richard?”

  “No. They do not.” Richard’s face was like thunder.

  “Really, huh. Okay. See you.”

  Well, Paige thought as she calmly opened his office door. That’s that. If she’d wanted to make sure there was no going back, there was no changing her mind and returning to the familiarity and (relative) comfort of academia, mission accomplished.

  Paige marched down the corridor, taking clipped angry steps. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead in case there were other faculty members lurking nearby who might attempt to engage her in halted conversation about their research. Small talk was bad enough with normal people, but when you added awkward academics to the equation, it had the potential to become painful.

  Outside the elevator bay, she punched the button and paced up and down along the silent silver doors, her mouth set in a determined grimace. Richard was wrong. S & S Investigations would not be failing.

  Not if she had anything to do with it.

  SOPHIE JIGGLED THE lock, bit her lip, pulled the door handle toward her and turned the key.

  “Yes,” she breathed as it opened. Going downstairs to ask the man in the dry cleaners to help her open the door yesterday had been embarrassi
ng enough the first time. He’d smiled indulgently at her as he opened the door without difficulty, and she’d felt like an idiot.

  Sophie paused to run her hand over the S & S Investigations sign stencilled onto the glass window of the door, noticing too late that she was leaving a streak of lip balm across the glass.

  “Oh, crap.”

  They had no cleaner on the payroll and only a very limited supply of DIY cleaning products. She licked her thumb and tried to get rid of the smear, but she only managed to add a streak of marmite which must have been clinging to her lip since breakfast. What a professional, Sophie thought, shaking her head as she entered the office.

  The building was a “retro treat”, and had “good bones”, which just meant the owner hadn’t felt the need to refurbish it in years. The seventies lived here, and classic competed with crappy for the overall décor theme. But, it was just the right amount of dingy and it was kind of perfect. Blinds cut up the light teeming into one corner of the office; dark brown wooden floors contrasted the hideous light brown-coloured wallpaper; the sound of traffic filtered in from Symonds Street; and there was even a neon light across the road that lit up the office at night. Paige was the one with the Film Noir fetish, but Sophie could not deny she loved the classic detective agency vibe in here too.

  Inside it was chilly, the late September sun not yet high enough in the sky to warm an office with lofty ceilings and a window that didn’t shut properly. Sophie pulled out the bar heater and plugged it in. She hated being too warm, but Paige—part reptile, Sophie suspected—could not function without heat and would complain when she arrived.

  After an optimistic check of voicemail—no messages—Sophie took a seat at her desk. Hers was the one that faced the door so that she was the first thing people saw when they arrived. She’d protested this arrangement, not to mention Paige’s reasoning—Paige had drawn an air circle around Sophie’s face and said, “We aren’t wasting this on a wall,”—which made Sophie uncomfortable. But she’d let it go because arguing with Paige was not often a productive endeavour.

  She’d talked Sophie into this hadn’t she?

  A business venture born from the nebulous premise of their grad school nicknames: Squirrel and Swan.

  It had all started under the haze of cheap red wine at a postgraduate function. A colleague—at that fleeting stage of drunkenness when one’s pre-frontal cortex is still functioning but uninhibited, when one can have moments of brilliance unfettered by the normal constraints of logical and polite conversation—had dubbed Paige Garnet and Sophie Swanephol The Squirrel and The Swan.

  Paige, with her small frame, light brown hair and large bright eyes that were almond shaped and chestnut coloured, resembled to a delightful degree, a squirrel. Even better, she was inquisitive, moved around quickly and, after her second espresso, could be rather twitchy. The group had laughed, instantly charmed by this so fitting moniker. Sophie’s nickname, even with Swan in her surname, was not quite so on the nose because if you spent five minutes with her you’d discover she was anything but graceful. But she did have a relatively long neck, and she was beautiful, with long dark hair and tawny skin, but unexpectedly blue eyes.

  And so, with the two rarely seen without each other, the name had stuck. And when, at the end of their doctoral studies, a colleague had wished Squirrel and Swan all the best for the future, Sophie had jokingly remarked, “we sound like a detective duo”. Paige’s eyes had lit up.

  It was two months ago now that Paige had finally presented the idea to Sophie.

  They’d met at a Symonds Street café, and as they’d shared a pot of peppermint tea, Sophie had waited for Paige to explain why she’d summoned her to this particular café.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Sophie had finally asked.

  “I had an idea,” Paige said.

  Sophie waited. That she had to wait at all was a sign that Paige “no filter” Garnet was about to propose something for which she’d need convincing.

  Paige raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure you want to hear? You have that look on your face.”

  “What look?”

  “I call it your constipated look, but I’m pretty sure it just means you’re thinking.”

  “When I’m thinking I look like I have bowel problems? Awesome.”

  “It’s fine, I’m kidding.”

  Sophie blinked.

  “C’mon, you know I’m just kidding. Whatever, listen... here it is.” Paige took a breath. “I think we should open a private investigations agency,” she said, exhaling. “There’s an office for rent a couple of doors down.”

  “Are you kidding?” Sophie replied.

  “Nope.”

  They had no training, no police contacts, and no idea how to be private investigators; but they were smart and they did know something about human behaviour and how the mind worked. And more than these obvious, relevant skills, Paige thought they had something else to set them apart. Something Paige liked to think of as their secret weapon.

  No one noticed Paige and everyone noticed Sophie.

  Sophie was a major distraction factor and Paige appeared so innocuous she could often fly completely under the radar. Together, Paige thought, they made the perfect detective duo, just as Sophie had jokingly said.

  “Come on, Soph, how hard could it be?” Paige had said.

  “Uh, it could be hard, Paige. It could be really, really, hard.”

  Sophie was a realist.

  “And shouldn’t we know how to... you know... detect?”

  Paige had dismissed her concerns. “You’re a body language expert and I know all about cognitive processes. Think about it. And we’re not going to be, like, detectives. We’ll be investigators.”

  Paige then changed the subject before Sophie could ask what the difference was, exactly.

  But in the end Sophie had agreed because she didn’t have anything else to do. She couldn’t bear the thought of more academic work or embarking on a brand-new endeavour on her own. And if she was honest with herself, she’d been relying on Paige to come up with a plan, just biding her time until Paige approached her with some scheme or another. Because that’s what Paige did, and with her anything seemed possible. When Sophie was alone with her thoughts, uncertainty and anxiety would start their familiar and unpleasant journey through her nervous system, culminating in her stomach.

  Sophie rose from her desk and moved through to the second, outer office to turn on the coffee machine.

  Now, with their new agency, her feeling of being a fraud—she’d only just shaken the Imposter Syndrome she’d had during her PhD—was creeping back. So what if you knew how things worked in the lab, in controlled experiments? That didn’t mean you could transfer this knowledge to the complexity of real life. Paige’s confidence in them was staggering, but was it enough for both of them?

  Sophie hoped so. Because they had an office with a one-year lease; furniture (two desks, two chairs, a small couch, a coffee table, three pot plants, and two armchairs for guests); office equipment (two laptops, one printer and photocopier combo); a functional internet connection; and a sign on the door. They were all set up and raring to go.

  With no clients.

  2

  As soon as Paige arrived in the office she made a beeline for the heater.

  “How’d it go with Richard?” Sophie said.

  “Oh,” Paige replied, going to stand with her back to the heater. “I called him a dick.”

  Sophie froze. “What?”

  “Only sort of,” Paige assured her as she gave a summary of the meeting. Sophie shook her head in amazement (and admiration) as she listened.

  “Why’d you go meet with him again?”

  “I thought it was a general catch up but it turns out he has a grant and wants me to do research.”

  Sophie’s stomach flipped. Was Paige abandoning her?

  “Don’t worry,” Paige said, registering the look of panic on Sophie’s face. “I called him a dick, remember? I wi
ll not be taking on his research project.”

  Paige had zero intention of quitting on S & S and she was surprised Sophie had even entertained this possibility. As far as Paige was concerned, this was happening—they were going to become successful investigators—and that was the end of the matter.

  “That’s good, but Paige?” Sophie bit her thumbnail. “What are we going to do about the no client situation?”

  “Umm.” Paige leaned back and twirled in her soft and (relatively) expensive office chair. When deciding on the office furniture they had agreed to get quality chairs. They refused to spend any more time sitting on the kind of cheap, synthetic bum-holders they had endured for the last five years. “Uh...” Paige continued to stall as picked up one of their new business cards, sitting on her desk. They had gone with the pricier option in the end, hoping to convey to their future clients they were a quality and professional operation, but now the invoice was due for payment, she had regrets. Mostly about the tagline.

  S & S

  Psychological Investigations

  No case too big or small!

  They had known it was clichéd, of course, but had agreed clichés existed for a reason. People felt reassured by them, and familiarity was attractive. This had been demonstrated in several experiments—Paige and Sophie had both read a convincing meta-analysis on this prior to making their decision. But now that it was in front of Paige, in black and white (ebony and eggshell), the words screamed amateur, and this was a little too close to home. Their Yellow Pages online ad boasted a wide range of services from psychological testing to detecting, none of which either of them were trained for (that’s what the internet was for, Paige had assured Sophie).

  But for all Paige’s assurances, she was starting to feel the pressure. They had a small business loan and repayments due each month. It was not a lot but they still had something to lose.

  Not to mention their pride.

  Paige’s phone rang, saving her from having to answer Sophie’s question. “It’s Tim,” she said, taking her phone and scurrying into the other room.