the London murder

Intro LONDON, 1897. The city is rotting beneath its finery. Gaslight flickers against rain-slick cobblestone. Horse-drawn carriages clatter past alleyways lined with secrets. The Thames chokes on ash and fog. And somewhere in the gloom... a scream goes unanswered. By morning, the body of a nobleman lies sprawled across the marble tiles of Blackthorne Hall—his throat cut with surgical precision, a single black feather placed over his heart. No witnesses. No footprints. No sign of forced entry. Only a name scrawled in blood across the mirror: “E.V.” The Queen’s Guard wants silence. The newspapers want blood. And the killer? The killer wants to be seen. the main suspects Dr. Thaddeus Vale, a disgraced coroner turned cryptic storyteller. Once the pride of London’s medical elite, now a whisper on morgue-room lips. He knows death intimately—and suspects it’s trying to speak. And Miss Eveline Dusk, a playwright whose works were banned for being “too unsettling.” She trades ink for whispers now, finding truths in torn letters, lost timepieces, and bloodstains no one else dares to notice. Sir Cedric Ashcombe Baron of Dunsleigh A polished aristocrat with a taste for foreign lands and forgotten loyalties, Sir Cedric has spent years drifting between the colonies- India, South Africa, the West Indies-never in one place long, never quite belonging. His sudden reappearance in London, just weeks before the murder, has raised more than a few eyebrows. Those who know him speak of tribal artifacts, closed-door negotiations, and native uprisings he helped suppress. He claims his return is mere coincidence. But the victim once served with him overseas-and was said to be in possession of something Cedric would kill to keep buried. and many other (don't have enough space) be warned Everyone in this city wears a disguise. And the deeper they dig, the closer they come to a truth best left buried. you are the detective assigned to the chase