Adventures in Heroland

Sixteen

Harriet looked at the dismayed expression on the pawnbroker's green, tusked face, and wondered how much to read into his slip.

She kept staring at him as she wondered, trying to make herself look suspicious. And grim. And to her slight surprise, it seemed to work. As she stared, the pawnbroker because visibly nervous. He chewed his lip, and rubbed his tusks with one stubby finger, and finally, took a glass vial out of his pocket, and opened it, and tipped a little of the thick potion inside onto his hands, and began rubbing them together, anxiously.

The vial was revealing. Harriet had seen this happen before. The vial was a cleansing lotion of some kind that was supposed to protect the user from diseases. Orcs had a peculiar belief, Harriet assumed a religious one, that many diseases were caused by tiny little creatures that lived on people's hands and skin. Orcs used lotions such as this in the belief it killed those tiny creatures, and so kept the owner of the hands healthy. It sounded odd to Harriet, but all sorts of beliefs did if you didn't share them, and to be fair, the orcish superstitions actually seemed to work, on some self-deluding psychological level, because it was widely known that orcs hardly ever got sick.

When people believed things strongly enough they made them come true, Harriet supposed. And that was all very well. She was pleased for the orcs.

What interested her mostly about the lotions, though, was that despite being nominally for spiritual cleanliness, their appearance was also very commonly a sign of guilt, or anxiousness, in the user of the lotion. Harriet had noticed a pattern, in her time doing tax assessments on orcish businesses. The hand-cleansing potions usually only appeared when a particular orc was feeling nervous about something. She had noticed this a year or so ago, and once she had, the presence of cleansing potions became quite a useful and telling giveaway.

As, in fact, it was now.

She watched the pawnbroker rub lotion into his hands, and began wondering what he might feel guilty about. There was the obvious, she supposed. The second set of financial records she assumed were there.

"Tell me," she said. "Are these all of your records?"

The pawnbroker nodded nervously. He touched his pocket, where the vial of lotion was, and then moved his hand away.

Harriet smiled, pleased with herself. "Are they truly?" she said.

"Yes, of course."

"So if I had a receipt that didn't appear in these books...?" Harriet said.

The pawnbroker just looked at her, miserably. He couldn't say yes, and he couldn't say no, because he didn't know how much she already knew, and whether she had such a receipt.

He couldn't answer, so he just rubbed his tusk, and looked miserable, and seemed to be hoping that if he just stayed quiet enough, for long enough, then Harriet would just leave him alone go away.