G. Timothy Blackwood – Brass & Bone Investigations

G. TIMOTHY BLACKWOOD Licensed Civil Inquiry Agent · GH-CI-117 · Structural Inquiry Endorsement · Brass & Bone Investigations, Suite 201, 124 Fogmire Street · Old Quarter of Fogmire

There are two of them. This is not incidental to how the work gets done. It is the work.

G. Timothy Blackwood holds a Category One Civil Inquiry licence — the broadest category available — and operates Brass & Bone Investigations from Suite 201 on the first floor of 124 Fogmire Street, in the Old Quarter of Fogmire, in the fog basin of a city that conceals considerably more than it reveals. He takes the cases that conventional authorities have abandoned, deemed impossible, or quietly decided not to look at too closely. He takes them seriously. He concludes at his desk, not at the scene. He gives clients exactly what they need to know, in the order they need to know it, and nothing more. The structure of the telling is part of the respect.

He is in his mid-fifties, average height, with grey-white hair that is often slightly dishevelled from the habit of running his hands through it when thinking. Round glasses. A goatee, grey-white. Earth-toned practical clothing, well-worn and maintained. One coat, worn on all outdoor work regardless of weather or district. The coat has been below the Northward Crown Ridge and to the upper reaches of the Fogline Terraces and a considerable number of places in between, and it shows this in the correct ways.

He spent nineteen years as an Inspector in the Gearhaven Public Watch. He was good at it in the way that made certain things eventually impossible — pattern recognition, moral consistency, and a belief that accuracy matters more than convenience will serve a man well in an institution right up until the institution decides otherwise. He handed in his insignia rather than become something he didn’t recognise. Four months later, on a Thursday in late autumn, a dachshund appeared at the bottom of his front steps and declined to leave.

He did not choose the partnership. The partnership chose him, which is the more reliable kind.

Nala is his investigative partner in the full sense of the word — not a companion, not an assistant, not a device the plot occasionally makes use of. She reads the room before he does. She reaches conclusions faster. She assesses situations with a speed and accuracy that Tim has learned, across years of working together, to trust before he has finished forming his own opinion. The cases they take are solved by both of them or by neither. The door of Suite 201 reads: Built on loyalty. Neither of them has ever said it aloud. Neither of them has needed to.

Tim believes that kindness which isn’t accurate isn’t much use to anyone. He demonstrates this in how he works, how he closes a case with a client, and how he carries the human weight of what the work sometimes reveals. He is slow to anger and slow to trust, quick to shoulder responsibility, and possessed of the particular stubbornness of a man who decided what he stood for a long time ago and has not since found sufficient reason to revise the answer.

Gearhaven is his city. He knows its districts by elevation and by fog density and by what can and cannot be seen from each one. He knows which institutions can be trusted up to which point, and he knows the distance between those two points better than most. He lives and works in the Old Quarter, in the fog basin, at a desk that faces the door, in a building that talks constantly if you are still enough to listen.

He is, by any reasonable measure, exactly where he is supposed to be.