In the rear storeroom of Bell & Bell Pest Management on St. Jude’s Lane in Harrowby, the electric clock above the desk clicked to twelve-twenty-two. The air smelled of corrugated shipping boxes, dry pine packing shavings, and the lingering peppermint scent of commercial spray concentrate.
Imran Bell checked the brass turnbuckles on his canvas shoulder harness. He wasn’t dressed for heroism. He was dressed in his standard heavy blue cotton boiler suit, heavy at the knees with split cowhide and dusted across the sleeves with pale gray diatomaceous earth. In his right hand he held his clockwork draft indicator. A tuned brass tube containing five goose feathers suspended on horsehairs, designed to detect subtle air currents without spark power.
Across the packing counter, his cousin Sal looked up from the domestic service ledger, her reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. Her fingers were stained with blue duplicating ink, and beside her ledger sat a chipped mug of cold tea and a half-eaten dry biscuit.
‘You have two commercial calls in North Harrowby at quarter past one, Imran,’ Sal said, her voice dry, level. Then she entirely unimpressed by inter-realm diplomacy. ‘The flour mill has meal-moth larvae in the third elevator boot, and Mrs. Crabtree says she heard scratching in her back kitchen ceiling again. If you come back smelling of foreign canal mud, you’re changing your boots in the yard before you sit in the Morris van.’
