Kerberos 04/09/2012
Victor POV:
After searching Dr. Johanson's place (and finding nothing of note except for a letter to Dr. Gregory Hollington thanking him for his discretion and accepting the job at the clinic), I headed over to Robert's place where the party was using him as bait for the coffin maker. I was surprised to find he had already made his move and been captured for it (the fact that he had already acted was the surprise: not the capture). We brought him to the Gesitbienastock's place as an unexpected place to interrogate him, in case Tamar came looking. He wasn't willing to talk, but Alice managed to pull him getting a mission from the Marquis from his mind, but discovered some confusion on his part about completing the mission. He was carrying a handkerchief monogrammed M. P. While not willing to spill the beans on Tamar, he was willing to talk about why he killed the three men and went after Robert: they had framed a mortician for theft from corpses he handled (they all worked for him), pocketing the profits and walking away while he went to prison. I cannot understand how he could be so blind as to think Robert was the fourth member of the group: even if he did drink with them, he was clearly of the wrong class and had never worked a day in his life. I agreed to look into the matter, but mostly handed it off to Gregory to talk to people when I heard Sophronia was going off to see her cousin. I followed her, curious.
Her "cousin" is a mechanical man. I'm not sure he's even mobile, let alone sentient, but Sophronia was chatting to him. The problem is the company he keeps (or who keep him, or made him, or whatever): revolutionaries. Specifically, Croyle. They're worth keeping an eye on, having a warehouse full of guns and explosives and possibly the makings of an army of mechanical men, but until they actually act on their potential for violence I don't see the need to do anything. I tried to open Sophronia's eyes to the issue, however: she can be remarkably unaware of the world around her. I suspect she was annoyed at me for following her (any rational person would be), but she's hard to read... and also, not exactly rational, so who can say?
Gregory did well enough questioning the widows of the dead men and found that they'd all worked at the Prererre mortuary years before, and that the owner of that establishment has committed suicide over six months ago after finally being released from prison. We explored the mortuary and found a shrine in the basement with the mortician upright in a coffin standing over four other coffins, three filled and the last vacant. Upstairs his daughter, Margerie, was sleeping. She was the source of the handkerchiefs the coffin maker had. She was also his target. But he'd fallen for her, and so was killing the men who had framed her father and putting them in the cellar with her as a gift. The fourth coffin wouldn't be filled: the last member of the quartet had already died in an unrelated incident.
Once we found this, Alice brought us all into Margerie's dream to glean more. Alice looked... surprisingly martian. Also scandalous. Gregory pretended to be the coffin maker and learned in addition that Margerie planned to seal herself in with the corpses and die with them. She didn't know why anyone would want to kill her, but someone had been trying to buy the mortuary recently, and she of course had been refusing to sell. All this revealed, we hatched a plan. I don't know why Sophronia thought it was confusing or complicated: it was the simplest and most straightforward method to glean what information we could while appeasing Alice and Gregory's delicate sensibilities (they thought Margerie's madness deserved to be treated rather than convicting her as an accessory to murder).
We committed Margerie to a mental institution. Everyone (except us) thinks she's at Beatrice's, but we hid her in a different madhouse. Alice will attempt to treat her. Gregory will pretend to be Margerie at Beatrice's to see if Tamar shows up. We showed that we did this to the coffin maker, who seeing his lover safe told us what he knew of Tamar. Not much, but he did claim Dr. Butler and Creador were part of Tamar, as well as a gypsy woman with a burnt face (the Moon). He also thought that Butler was a relation of the Marquis, just born on the wrong side of the sheets. The coffin maker is also escaping justice, in a way: the Gesitbienistock's recruited him for their crusade against Frankenstein in Romania. Not likely to lead to a long life, and maybe he'll be of some use before he dies.
We sold the mortuary to the interested buyers: Barabbas investments. Tamar seems to like their biblical allusions. We've contracted the Lip the watch the place to see what they do with it. My guess is something (or someone) buried beneath it, but without seeing what they do with it we have no idea why they would want it enough to kill for it. Course, we have no idea why they do most of the things they do, and hopefully seeing them in the act rather than merely post facto will shed some light on their machinations.
