Clockmaker Avenue was occupied by a unique strata of society. In the past it had been a reputable, if somewhat dull, street filled with cafes, market stalls and workshops servicing the cities burgeoning new middle class of merchants and skilled tradesmen. Its ideal position just off of Merchant Road saw an ever present flood of bodies and coin wash through it. Over time it had grown into a sprawling, cramped little street where the language of commerce and the fires of industry could be heard wherever one turned their gaze.
After the last great fire - an affair that seemed to repeat itself at least once every five years in the capital, and which was urged on by those previously mentioned fires of industry - ravaged the city, the avenue had been rebuilt with the help of some of those now wealthy middle class patrons, who were eager to dispose of any riffraff or unsavoury sorts. In their hubris, they had gone through with the addition of the Mildenhall Playhouse, expecting the magnificent building to stand as a testament to their wealth and to cultivate the most distinguished of crowds and directors. Instead the theatre had attracted a class of people stranger than the most secluded of hermit mages; artists, poets and those most scornworthy individuals, actors.
The street was now often clogged with performers reading poetry that rode just along the edge of sedition, plucking at ill-tuned lutes and juggling knives and cleavers in displays of utmost agility. The rich merchants had ended up attracting a lesser amount of true theatrical talent and a larger amount of spoiled rich heirs who could talk at length about the artistic merits of smoking mistreed but who seemed to be incapable of finishing a single sonnet, script or draft of sheet music.
Despite this, the playhouse itself had managed to generate a number of smash hits that the common folk adored; “Three is a Crowd”, “Road to Khamavant”, and especially popular was “The Wolf, The Viper and The Wyrm”, a scathing political satire that mocked the three eponymous nations of the southern Commonwealth, the Viperlands and the fractured city states of Chandthira, but was far more popular thanks to the copious amounts of violence, nationalist rhetoric and sex included in the narrative than for any deeper thematic reasons. Suffice to say, the rich merchants had at first seethed to see their prestige project fail, but became quite pleased once they saw the financial returns of a sold out show.
Vespia couldn’t help but hope that the next great fire came quickly, and burned twice as hot, as she dodged the third mime doing a mediocre impression of riding a horse. At least, she thought he was riding a horse. He might have also been doing a terrible impression of piloting a rowboat. The dispatch she’d received earlier that morning had directed her to the loft above 14 Clockmaker Avenue, where she was to meet with Doctor Alexander Tyghul - the Merchant Watch’s resident medical consultant - and discuss his findings.
14 Clockmaker Avenue was part of a row of tall, thin apartments that had been built in the modern fashion - that is to say, they had been built hastily and with subpar materials to the cheapest bidder - with three levels, the upper two of which had iron balconies that faced onto the street.
Vespia turned into the frosted alleyway just beside number 14, and was greeted by the sight of Sergeant Ulbert Green. The squat, hairy guardsman was leaning on a halberd a head taller than he was and squinting out at the street performers with the derision of a man who considered a night at a theatre primarily as an opportunity to see how hard he could throw rotten fruit at painted actors. He stood to attention when she arrived, his gut thrust out before him like a seal on parade. “Lieutenant.”
“At ease, Sergeant. Have things been quiet here?” Vespia removed her cap, tucking it under her arm. “Nothing to report?”
“Oh aye ma’am. As quiet as Clockmaker’s gets.” Ulbert made a dismissive motion in the general direction of the avenue. “A buncha bloody jugglers almost ran a coach off the road earlier. Artists! Worse than mages!” He spat on the street at that.
“You might be right there. At least Mages don’t act like they’re Undine’s gift to society. As I understand it, the victim was an actress was she not?” Vespia questioned, nodding a head up the crooked wooden stairs behind Ulbert.
“If she was, I’d never heard of her. I keep up to date with actresses.” He jerked a thumb toward the theatre down the street. “Ya’ ever seen Tabitha Sotheim perform? She’s got some real, ahem, talent.”
“I can’t say I have. What happened to artists being worse than mages though? More importantly, the Captain’s dispatch said I should get here quickly. How serious is it, Ulbert?”
The Sergeant frowned at that, shaking his head. “This one is a bad one, Vespia. It isn’t right, what happened to that girl. Tyghul told me to give you fair warning, it’s a grisly sight. Even worse than the Richter affair.”
He stepped aside, and Vespia made her way up the rickety wooden staircase - noting a plaque with ‘Meetings by appointment only.’ bolted onto the wall - before passing into the upper loft proper. She slipped through a modestly appointed lobby, with a green velvet rug, a high backed waiting chair propped up against the wall and signed portrait after signed portrait lined the walls, and made her way into the apartment’s living room, where Doctor Tyghul awaited her.
The Doctor was a slender reed of a man, with a natural stance that could only be described as ‘looming’, and bags under his eyes deeper and darker than an ocean. His features were contorted into a look of worry as Vespia arrived, fingers running through his carefully trimmed goatee. “Ah. Lieutenant, good to see you - even if the circumstances are like this. I had been meaning to commend you, on the work with the wizard. I have to admit, I was a tad confused when you’d asked me to bring you a tongue.”
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“Thank you, Doctor.” Living Room might have been too generous a description for the place, it lacked any proper furniture or coffee tables and was instead cluttered with paint pots, brushes, and all other manner of artistic refuse. In the centre of the panelled wooden floor a white sheet had been covered over a slender form, but the piece that dominated the room was a massive painting hanging haphazardly on the wall. Vespia could tell from the golden frame - engraved with a shimmering mass of vines and leaves that evoked a feeling of dying autumn trees and which was so realistic that the Lieutenant swore that just for a moment she saw one twitch in the air - that it had been an expensive bit of art. However now it was marred and ruined with dried blue paint that had dripped down onto the floor, and eventually intermixed with a pool of dried blood to create a putrid purple colouring. The flashes of it that remained almost seemed to cast a red glow around the room, and filled her with the sense that something indescribably tragic was about to occur. “So, do you want to explain what happened here? Ulbert told me it’s a nasty one.”
“The victim was discovered late last night by her husband. He found her on the floor like this and immediately called the watch.” The Doctor led her closer to the body, but didn’t remove the cloth sheet yet and he wrung his hands as he spoke. “Apparently she was visiting her father - Leorik von Leyn - here, and the husband decided to check in when she hadn’t returned home by midnight.”
This close to the sheet, Vespia could see the dark red streaks of blood that had stained through it, most of the mess was focused above the neck of the figure beneath it. “The victim was alone when he found her then, the father wasn’t here?”
Tyghul shook his head, “No, we’ve no idea where he is actually. The constable who first attended the call thought it might have been a burglary gone wrong, but there were no signs of a break in. No forced locks, nothing valuable missing, no sign of much of a struggle. The husband said that the father had been acting off these past few weeks.”
“Acting off how? Did he give examples?”
“Apparently he had stopped attending social gatherings, eating, drinking. He shut himself up here, working on art. At first the daughter had been happy about it, Leorik had previously been suffering from some form of artistic block.” He explained, “But after some time she started to grow concerned. All of it seemed to focus on the painting.”
Vespia couldn’t help but shiver at the tickle of terror that went up her spine at the mention of the painting. Without quite realising it she had made an effort not to look upon the now ruined canvas, “Yes. I was meaning to ask, do we have any idea what happened to it? Who threw the paint?”
“Well, apparently the father was obsessed with it, he credited it with ending his artistic block. No idea where he got the thing, or what it actually depicted. It seems like the daughter threw the paint over it. When I had a look at her, I noticed splashes of paint on the bottom of her skirt.”
“Did the husband tell you when this all started?” Vespia had taken a notepad from her belt and flipped it open, scribbling everything down with a thin stick of charcoal. “Did the father ever get violent?”
“A few weeks ago, apparently. It sounds to me like the man was having some sort of breakdown. He was irritable apparently, argued a great deal with his daughter, but no violence.” The Doctor motioned to the sheet on the floor. “What I can tell you is that the victim was strangled to death, her windpipe was crushed. Afterwards…”
Vespia offered one of those distinctive arches of her brow. “Afterwards?”
“Steady yourself for this one, Vespia.” The Doctor kneeled down and pulled the sheet that covered the slender form off to the side.
The victim had been a young woman in the bloom of her youth, somewhere in her early to mid twenties, with the tanned skin of someone who spent plenty of time in the sun and the hands of a worker. She wore a simple white blouse, and from the neck down seemed almost like the resting subject of some awfully pale portrait. Vespia couldn’t quite connect the form with the bloodied, dripping mass of red flesh and sheared, jutting bone above the victim’s neck.
“Merovik’s bones.” She exclaimed, the back of her hand coming up to cover her mouth in disgust. “Doctor, what is this?”
Tyghul’s features were tight and serious, “Whoever killed her, Lieutenant, afterwards they cut open her face and removed the front of her skull. There’s no way this could have been an accident, it was a task that would have taken around an hour.” Given the Doctor’s previous propensity for handling corpses fresh from the graveyard - his conviction for grave robbing was the reason he helped the watch so frequently, in penance - he had a knowledge of these sorts of morbid things. “If it’s any consolation, it seems she was already dead when it happened.”
“Some consolation, Doctor.” Vespia forced herself to look back at the corpse, removing the hand from her lips. “What did they use for it? A knife? Some sort of hacksaw? Does it look like someone who’s done it before? You can cover her back up.”
“We found the father’s sculpting tools, they were bloodied and chipped. From what I could tell of the bone that remains, this was not the work of someone experienced in this sort of thing.” Tyghul pulled the cloth sheet back over the victim’s body, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, whoever did this is a very disturbed individual. I think it goes without saying that I believe our primary suspect should be her father, unless we learn something new.”
“Neither have I, Tyghul. Neither have I. And you’re right, we need to find her father, no matter what it takes. It’s only a matter of time before this leaks out into the city. A libertine dying in his mansion is one thing, but a local girl murdered by her own father and then mutilated like this? It could cause unrest. The last thing we need is some mob out for blood.” Vespia made her way toward a painting easel set up in a corner of the room, inspecting one of the paint pots resting beside it. “I’m going to have Ulbert send a runner to the Captain, see if we can’t get some of the boys on the lookout for him. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of them will pick him up. And I’m going to see if I can’t find out a little bit more about the father’s habits.”
“Some of the watch’s men already had a look around the rest of the apartment. It’s somewhat sparse, as you can see.” Tyghul motioned around the room, half spinning like some grandiose, classical danseur. “The husband told us he used to attend the opening of art exhibitions, visit noble houses to discuss the details of commissions, and he frequented the Mildenhall Theatre outside quite often before the change in his personality.”
She held up one of the pots of paint, “Rijmen Paint Makers. It looks like all of his pots are from there. He was an accomplished artist, I’m sure he’ll have had friends that bought from the same supplier. And if not, maybe I can learn a bit more about him from whoever runs the place. No matter how focused he was on his work up here, he must have still been going to and fro to pick up supplies.”
Tyghul grimaced at that, “Let us hope, Lieutenant Vespia, that a paint supplier is the only thing he has in common with his friends.”