●
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. Fiona had been called out to a humble home on the outskirts of Friedland. This wasn’t a personal visit; it was a request to the deputy mayor from the community watch, which was charged with preserving public safety.
“I’m sorry to bother you when you’re so busy, Deputy Mayor,” said a middle-aged man, a manager in the community watch. He had a square face framed by his hair and a full beard. Combined with his large frame, he looked a bit like a bear standing on its hind legs. His name was Hans Cutel. His family had been leaders of the community watch for three generations.
“Not at all,” Fiona replied. “You said something about a strange happening...?”
“Yes. Let’s talk inside.” Hans nodded and gestured into the house.
As she walked along behind him, Fiona said, “I believe I heard someone died in this incident...”
“Yes, ma’am. If it were any normal death, we wouldn’t have to bother the deputy mayor with it. But in this case...”
As noted, Hans’s family had been part of the community watch since his grandfather’s time and had been involved in many of the goings-on in Friedland. They had encountered more than a few dead bodies and several murders in their work. They knew perfectly well how to deal with these cases, and a simple murder wouldn’t have required Fiona’s attention. The community watch could simply have dealt with everything itself. They would have submitted a report, and that would have been that.
“Ugh...”
No sooner had she entered the building than Fiona put a hand to her mouth. The air inside was thick, and—
“I’m sorry. We tried to get the air moving, but the smell won’t go away.” Hans didn’t seem especially bothered by it; perhaps he was already used to it.
“No, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it.” Fiona steeled herself and headed farther inside.
It was unmistakably the smell of death that pervaded the house—the smell of rotting flesh.
This was a fairly standard Friedlandian private dwelling. It contained all the things one would have seen in any house in the town, and nothing one wouldn’t. It was normalcy itself. Perhaps the furniture was on the new side. From what Fiona had heard on her way over, the house had belonged to a young married couple.
“Over here.”
She followed Hans’s guidance to a bedroom. On the bed in the center of the room lay a single corpse. The stench of rot was practically visible now; Fiona squinted. She had seen many things as the deputy mayor, and this was not her first corpse, but she had never seen one so thoroughly decomposed.
Decomposition was to be expected when someone died in the mountains or drowned in a river—someplace where it might take time for the body to be discovered. But right here in town, in the person’s own house—it was very strange.
Fiona found it difficult to want to get close enough to examine the particulars of the corpse. From what she could see, though, the chest area was especially dark. The color didn’t suggest decomposition so much as a large amount of dried blood.
Had the person vomited blood? Or...
“Did they die of illness? Or was it murder...?”
It was hard to imagine someone dying accidentally while lying in bed. Friedland was a comparatively peaceful town, but anywhere there were large gatherings of humans, it would be impossible to avoid serious arguments. And unfortunately, it would be impossible to go without the sort of fighting that sometimes led to killing.
“Murder,” Hans confirmed. “There’s an external wound—looks like a bladed weapon. On the left side of the chest. One thrust, straight through the heart.” He pointed at his own chest.
Hans must have brought Fiona to this room because he wanted her to see the body for herself. Seeing that it might be too hard for her to stay any longer, he ushered her back out of the bedroom.
“The body is that of the man who lived in this house.”
“So he was killed in his own home.”
“That’s still under investigation, ma’am. There are some traces of blood in the hallway, so it’s possible he was killed somewhere else and then moved here.” Hans sounded calm, practically dispassionate. So he and his people had already examined not just the corpse, but the inside of the house. “He was recently married. And speaking of his wife—”
“Let me guess. Missing?”
“As you surmise,” Hans nodded.
If his wife had been around, the body might have been noticed sooner.
“Meaning there’s some chance she was abducted?” Fiona said.
“No, ma’am. That would certainly make things simpler.” Hans frowned with his bearded face. “As it happens, this man was working on the development of one of our new fields outside town. Apparently, he failed to show up for work several days in a row.”
The other people working on the same project had become concerned about the man’s absence, and had gone to his house to check on him. As Hans told it, this had been seven days earlier.
“When they showed up, his wife came to the door and said her husband was indisposed, had a cold.”
Fiona had a bad feeling as she listened to Hans’s story. Seven days ago. Not ten or even twelve.
“I’m no specialist,” Fiona said, trying not to vomit at the stench even as she spoke. “But I would have sworn that body had been there at least ten days...”
“We thought the very same, Deputy Mayor. And it so happens that the man’s unexplained absences from work began exactly ten days ago.”
Fiona didn’t say anything. In other words, if this man had died ten days earlier, and seven days earlier his wife had met the visiting villagers, then she knew of the man’s death and lied to them. Or, wait. If the man had been killed somewhere else and brought to his house only later, it was possible the woman didn’t know about her husband’s death when she spoke to his coworkers. But if so, he would still have been missing for three days at that point. And yet she told them he had a cold.
The lie had been enough to get the man’s colleagues to go on their way. But when he still hadn’t shown up for work four days later, they began to get suspicious. If his cold wasn’t getting any better, he might at least send word. They worried that perhaps the illness had spread to his wife and that both of them were indisposed, so the colleagues went back to the man’s house.
This time, however, neither the man nor his wife came to the door. It was locked soundly, but a neighbor said they had seen the man’s wife leaving the house that morning.
Still not knowing what had happened, the man’s colleagues left again.
“It was another three days after that,” Hans said as he led Fiona out of the house. “In other words, today. The men came back one more time. They said they could smell the stench of death the moment they got to the door.”
In other words, the stink of the decaying corpse had well and truly permeated the entire house. The door was still firmly locked, but the smell leaked out even through the door and windows. Now sure that something was amiss, the fellow workers enlisted a neighbor’s help to break the door open, and when they got inside, they had discovered the body.
“The most obvious theory is that there was some kind of trouble between the two of them, and the wife ended up killing her husband. After that, she tried to throw off his coworkers by saying he was ill.”
“Yes, that makes sense.”
“That means that in the most obvious theory, the wife is the murderer. But the strange thing about that would be that she then lived with the body for several days.”
“Hmm...”
True, that behavior didn’t make a lot of sense. Had she wanted to hide the fact that she’d killed her husband? But it would have been obvious that she would be charged with murder, so why wouldn’t she leave as quickly as possible? Friedland may have been a frontier town, but there were still plenty of places for a determined fugitive to hide. She could have bided her time and joined up with a merchant caravan heading to another town when the opportunity arose.
There was an eerie quality to all this that Fiona couldn’t quite put her finger on. Had the wife gone mad after she killed her husband?
“We don’t know what something like this might lead to,” Hans said in a subdued tone. “The community watch will go on the alert, but... perhaps, as the deputy mayor, you could make sure that Friedland as a whole is closely guarded?”
“Right.”
It still wasn’t certain that the woman was the killer, so it wouldn’t do to carelessly make the incident public. But there were people and organizations besides the community watch that contributed to public safety. It would, she supposed, be possible to at least consult with them. Yukinari in particular—he didn’t just have immense power, but was pretty intelligent. He might be able not only to come up with a good way of keeping the town safe; he might even be able to solve the case—notice something that Fiona and the others had missed, perhaps.
“All right. I’ll talk to some people I think can help us.”
“Good. Thank you,” Hans said with a bow.
Fiona offered some encouraging words to members of the community watch waiting outside, then began walking back to her mansion.