BOB BURKE
The Third Pig Detective Agency: The Complete Casebook
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This collected edition first published in Great Britain by The Friday Project in 2015
The Third Pig Detective Agency first published in 2009
The Ho Ho Ho Mystery first published in 2010
The Curds and Whey Mystery first published in 2012
Copyright © Bob Burke 2015
Bob Burke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007479405
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007532254
Version: 2015-01-15
To Gem, for believing
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Third Pig Detective Agency
The Ho Ho Ho Mystery
The Curds and Whey Mystery
About the Publisher
Contents
1. A New Client
2. Come Blow Your Horn
3. On the Case
4. It’s Off to Work We Go!
5. If You Go Down to the Woods Today
6. The Gift of the Gab
7. In the White Room
8. A Brief Interlude in which Harry Doesn’t Get Threatened or Beaten up by Anyone
9. Flushed with Success
10. Anyone for Pizza?
11. I Have a Cunning Plan!
12. A Gripping Finale
13. Exposition, Basili
Acknowledgements
It was another slow day in the office. Actually, it had been a slow week in the office. No, if the truth be known, it had been a lousy month for the Third Pig Detective Agency. That’s me by the way: Harry Pigg, the Third Pig.
Where did the name come from? Well, I was the pig that built the house out of bricks while my idiot brothers took the easy route and went for cowboy builders and cheap materials. Let me tell you, wood and straw ain’t much use when Mr Wolf comes calling. Those guys were pork-chops as soon as he drew in his first breath and filled those giant lungs of his. Blow your house down, indeed.
And while we’re on the subject, don’t believe what you read in those heavily edited stories you find in children’s books of fairy tales saying how the wolf fell down the chimney into the pot, scalded his tail, ran out of the house and was never seen again. When that wolf came down my chimney and into that boiling saucepan, I screwed the lid on and made sure it stayed on by weighing it down with a few spare bricks (never throw anything away, you never know when it could come in useful). He didn’t do too much huffing and puffing then.
‘Little pig, little pig, let me come out,’ he’d begged in a scared whimper.
‘Not by the hair on my …’ I began, but then gave up. I just couldn’t come up with something clever to rhyme with ‘I won’t let you out’ so I just left it. Hey, I can’t come up with a witty reply every time.
By the time the pot went quiet and I opened it again all that was left was some scummy hair floating on the surface and bones – lots of bones. The little dog sure laughed a lot that day. He hadn’t seen that many broken bones since the cow’s first attempt to jump over the moon, and they’d kept him in three square meals a day for over a week.
After that I was kind of a cult hero. Apart from that Red Riding Hood dame, no one else had ever come out on top in a skirmish with the Wolf family so I became a local celebrity. After the usual civic receptions and TV appearances, I decided to capitalise on my new-found fame and become a detective. Well, why not? Someone needs to do it and there’s always an opening for a good one.
At first business was booming. I was the one who not only found those two missing kids, Hansel and Gretel, but I also fingered them for the murder of that sweet old woman in the gingerbread house. Their story was too pat: wicked old lady plans to eat the kids, only way out was to kill her; you know the drill. In my book their story stank. Two kids, a house made of gingerbread and an old dear whose only crime was to get in the way. It was always going to end in tears – primarily hers.
As I said, I was on the pig’s back (excuse the pun) for a while but then things kind of dried up. No one seemed to want the services of a good detective agency and, with the exception of the kids in Hamelin (which wasn’t even one of my cases), there didn’t even seem to be too many missing persons any more. The bills were mounting up. Gloria, my bovine receptionist, hadn’t been paid in a month. Even her legendary patience was wearing thin. And no, before all you politically correct fairy tale readers get on my case, I’m not casting any aspersions on her looks; she really is a cow and the meanest typist in Grimmtown (even with the hoofs). Unless I got a big case – and soon – I was going be neck-deep in apple sauce and Gloria would be back to cheerleading for the Lunar Leapers Bovine Acrobatics Team. Things were most definitely not looking good.
But I digress (a little). On this particular slow day I was sitting in my office (cheap furniture, lousy décor, creaky wooden