The Green Pip
Finn has dire suspicions about his new roommate. Also featured: a sick chicken and the war on drugs.
Author’s note: This is Episode 2 of a brand-new Thorfinn Grimm ongoing story. Here’s a link to the full index so you can catch up on previous adventures. Enjoy!
My new roommate smokes marijuana. His name is Pippin Morstan, and he’s a 24-year-old medical student. We met on Facebook. Nothing on his profile indicated a drug habit. Then again, I suppose you can never know everything about someone. But I was still going to try.
The signs were obvious once he moved in. Pippin would go into his room for hours on end and come out with bloodshot eyes. He also kept a large stash of candy bars, which he would demolish a half-dozen at a time. Yet, despite his enhanced appetite, he was as skinny as a rake. The conclusion was obvious. I suppose I could have just asked him but it never came up in conversation.
Our landlady, Mrs Kruger, didn’t think much of my findings.
“Come on, Finn,” she said. “It’s legal now. I have it in this oil for my back. It’s wonderful stuff! And anyway, Pip’s a darling, what do you care?”
“It’s about the principle,” I insisted. “If he’s smoking drugs in there, I have a right to know.”
“You know what I think, I think you just need a new case. Something weird. You’ve been awfully bored ever since Phil died.”
Phil was her husband, the late Mr Kruger. He was shot by a sniper a few weeks before. At the time, he was trying to tell me something about a dead body illegally smuggled into the country. The police couldn’t find the assassin, which was to be expected. What was unexpected was that I’d hit a dead end as well. Me! It was most infuriating. But that had nothing to do with my investigation into Pippin and his drugs.
I decided to drop the subject for a while and take Mrs Kruger’s suggestion to find some work. After hours of trawling through newspaper classifieds and online message boards, I finally found… well, I wasn’t sure if it was a case but it was something.
The next day when Pippin came home from the grocery store, I was waiting for him in the drawing room, leaning back in my armchair with a lit pipe.
“Hiya, Finn,” Pip said as he closed the front door. “Mrs Kruger wants to know if we’ll be dropping by for dinner.”
He stopped short when he set eyes on the man sitting on our sofa, a large specimen with a bushy brown beard. More than his appearance, I think it was the dying chicken in the man’s hands that gave Pippin pause.
“Sorry, I didn’t know you had a client,” he said. “I’ll just drop these in the kitchen and go to my room.”
“No, no, there’s no need,” I said, getting to my feet and taking the grocery bags from him. “I’ll take care of them. Why don’t you pull up a chair, Pip? I’d love to hear what you think.”
It was the perfect opportunity to observe the subject up close. I had an unobstructed view from the kitchen area and I watched Pippin out of the corner of my eye as I put the groceries away.
I returned to my chair, a notebook and pen at the ready. “I see you’ve met Mr Weathercombe,” I said. “What are your first impressions of him?”
“Oh, err.”
I wrote Difficulty thinking on the spot. Not a good start.
“He’s middle-aged,” Pippin decided. “A butcher or farmer, maybe?”
“You deduce that from the chicken, obviously.” I was disappointed. “Yes, he’s a middle-aged farmer. Is that all?”
“I think so.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong. However, he’d completely missed almost all the important details about Mr Francis Weathercombe of Sunny Weather Free-Range Farm.
“Why don’t you get some snacks?” I asked Pippin. “Mr Weathercombe’s had a very long drive and the hand pie he ate this morning must be completely digested by now.”
“I am a bit peckish,” said the startled Mr Weathercombe, almost dropping his bird. “How the hell did you know that?”
“Crumbs in your beard,” I told him. “And I know you drove here because they wouldn’t let a chicken on the train.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“I also know you’re an ex-soldier, your father beat you as a child, and for a brief period in the ‘90s, you performed at a male strip club in Berlin.”
Pippin stared at me, his pupils dilated. Another clear sign of marijuana use.
“That… was amazing,” he said.
I shrugged it off. “It’s just a parlour trick.”
Unfortunately, Mr Weathercombe was much less amused.
“Look, I don’t care if you’re Sherlock Holmes,” he said, shaking his chicken. “Who’s going to fix the pip in my poultry?”
“The pip?” asked Pippin. “That’s a pretty common poultry disease, isn’t it? Causes facial swelling, diarrhoea, and blackening of the tongue, if I remember correctly.”
“Aye, that’s the pip,” Mr Weathercombe nodded. “And many a bird we’ve lost to it before. But poor Baby Spice here, her tongue’s not black, it’s gone green.”
He carefully pried open the chicken’s mouth. Sure enough, it was green.
“It could be drugs,” I said, with a sideways look at Pippin. “I hear marijuana makes your tongue turn green.”
Pippin laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.
“Finn, stop joking around,” he said. “Weed doesn’t make your tongue green, that’s just a myth.”
“You seem to know a lot about marijuana,” I noted.
“Well, I have been studying medicine for two years. I know about a lot of psychotropics. LSD, marijuana, cocaine, psilocybin...”
I nodded along and made a note: This is worse than I thought.
I sent Mr Weathercombe on his way with the promise that I would find what was causing the green pip and fix it. It wasn’t the sort of case I thought I’d be investigating when I chose to become a detective, but Mrs Kruger is a regular extortionist with the rent, and I needed the money. However, neither my client’s interests nor my bank account were at the top of my mind at that moment.
As soon as Mr Weathercombe left, I marched straight into Pippin’s room and asked him, “Do you smoke marijuana?”
He was sitting on his bed, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, with a lit joint in his hand. He had some pretty lights on the walls and some cool framed posters.
“Did you want some?” Pippin asked me, looking thoroughly confused.
“Yes, actually,” I admitted, my shoulders slumping in defeat. “I’ve been under a lot of stress.”
I know what you’re thinking, but it’s legal, alright? Besides, Pip really is an excellent roommate, and I didn’t want to lose him over old-fashioned prejudices. That said, there’s a reason why I don’t smoke weed. It makes me a little, shall we say, loopy.
Five minutes later, I was stretched out face down on the floor of Pippin’s room. I couldn’t move a muscle. I suspect I must have looked like a tub of ice cream that had been dumped on a hot street. It certainly felt that way.
Pippin and Mrs Kruger were standing just outside the door. They must have assumed I was unconscious because they were talking quite animatedly about me.
“Is he always like this?” Pippin asked. “So… weird?”
“Yes, and no,” said Mrs Kruger. “He’s always weird, but this is new.”
I don’t know what they said after that, I lost interest. They must have left at some point because I eventually found myself all alone in the flat. Still dazed, I wandered into the drawing room and sat down on the sofa. Suddenly, I realized I was sitting in the exact same spot where Mr Kruger had been murdered. Looking out the window, I imagined what his final moments must have been like. Did he see his killer in that split second before his death? Was there anything I could have done to save him? These questions haunted me. Then I was thirsty.
One of the unfortunate side effects of marijuana use is memory loss. I woke up in the drunk tank the next day with no idea how I got there. Pippin bailed me out and told me what happened. Apparently, at some point in the night, I got out of the flat and tried to steal a city bus, yelling incoherently about chicken feet and green dice.
Now that I’d sobered up, I had completely forgotten what I was so upset about. I also had an intense sense of clarity that made me feel terrible.
As we boarded the train home, I apologised profusely to Pip. I told him about the curse, and about how I’d never had anyone enter my life without bringing an entourage of dead bodies with them.
“Maybe I was just trying to find something wrong with you because that’s what I’m used to,” I said. “But that’s no excuse. I promise I’ll try to do better.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pippin said with a smile. “It’s all water under the bridge. Besides, I got rid of the weed already. It seems to have a bad effect on you.”
That was fair enough. A few seconds later, something connected and I felt a familiar spark. I replayed Pippin’s words in my head: Don’t worry about it. It’s all water under the bridge.
And that’s when it all came back to me. The water, of course!
As soon as we got home, I asked Mrs Kruger to grab her husband’s laptop and meet us upstairs. When he was alive, Mr Kruger had been a corrupt customs officer. Since his death, I’d started borrowing his laptop every once in a while to go over all his records, hoping to find something about his killers.
Pippin asked me what was going on and I told him everything, how Mr Kruger had been working for some dangerous people; how he’d seen something he shouldn’t have, a woman’s corpse in a shipping container; and how he was shot sitting on our sofa, in our drawing room.
“You did not mention any of this on Facebook,” he said.
Mrs Kruger arrived with the laptop and questions of her own. Pippin told her about Mr Weathercombe and the Green Pip while I tore through spreadsheets looking for the final piece of the puzzle. Well, a piece of the puzzle.
“We didn’t notice the feet,” I said. “We were so focused on Baby Spice’s tongue that we didn’t see that her feet were green as well.”
“What does that mean?” Pippin asked. “It wasn’t the pip?”
“No, it wasn’t, Pip,” I said with a laugh. “It’s all here, in these records. You see Mrs Kruger, even though I said I’d run into a dead end with your husband’s-”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected me.
“-Your ex-husband’s death, right. Even though there were no leads, I still kept looking. I’ve been through every shipment he approved in the last month, tracking each of them from source to final destination.”
“What did you find?” she asked. “Do you know who killed him? I’d like to send them a gift basket.”
“I have no clue,” I admitted. “But, I remembered this shipment: natural dyes, the kind used for clothes and wallpapering. The trail ended at a sweatshop in Bangladesh but it started at a plant that’s right next door to Mr Weathercombe’s farm.”
“But natural dyes wouldn’t make the chickens sick,” Pippin argued. “Even if they did, how did the chickens get exposed to them?”
“Sunny Weather is a free-range chicken farm,” I explained. “They have a nice bit of land for the birds to run around in, and there’s even an artificial lake on the property. The dye got into the groundwater and ended up in the lake, from where it went to Baby Spice’s gullet. As for why it’s making them sick, that’s because they aren’t natural dyes. It’s a cheap synthetic product, either Scheele's Green or Paris Green. They used to be quite popular in the 19th century until they were banned.”
“Why?” Mrs Kruger asked. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Aside from the lethal amounts of arsenic.”
Enjoying the story so far? I’d just like to take a moment to thank
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The lakewater was duly tested and I was proven right. Mr Weathercombe’s birds were saved, and he was so happy he offered me one. I think it was Ginger Spice.
The manufacturer promised a full recall, then mysteriously vanished. The police could find no trace of them, but now that the toxic chemicals were gone, the case was considered closed. I was sure there was more to it though.
Someone put this whole thing together, someone whose influence we were only just starting to feel. They were still out there, as were the products tainted with their toxic dye. Who knows, maybe right now, somewhere in the world, a cheap man is buying his girlfriend a dress that’s going to kill her.
It was a long road that stretched between me and the final solution. But at least I knew it wouldn’t be a lonely one.
To Be Continued.
Remus, I love this story and I love Thorfinn Grimm. What a great character in the style (he even smokes a pipe!) of Sherlock, but completely his own character with a distinctly individual personality. I loved when he finally tried the marijuana and wound up flat on the floorl BRAVO! and thank you. I remembered briefly smoking a pipe as a young man all because of Sherlock Holmes, and now there is Thorfinn Grimm. Yay!
As always, Thorfinn never ceases to excite me and I am loving his growth and journey. I wonder if Pippin will be his new comrade.