Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2023 19:05:43 GMT -5
Thom, in a rare show of open surprise, lifted an eyebrow at Berengar as the young soldier interrupted what had, for a moment, seemed to be completed conversation, but aside from that, he simply sat back in his chair to listen to the back-and-forth between the others in the room. Slowly, more and more information was being drip-fed here. And while some of it might make sense, some of it only added to the mystery that was... for lack of a better word, brewing here. So he leaned back, looked up through the clear roof of the greenhouse at the sky above, and let his mind work. Two people writing, one of them somewhat legible, the other a hackneyed scribble that could hardly even be judged as letters in its own right. But both on the same page. And two men that recognized each other, but one had killed the other days later, then, for some reason, decided to remain in the area long enough for the lieutenant to show up to the scene of the crime. There were a few people he could talk to, but while the crime had clearly been planned at least some time in advance, there were certain aspects that didn't exactly shout 'professional' to him.
For one, no professional assassin worth hiring would ever stick around after the job was done, and most of the ones he was (tangentially) aware of vastly preferred to not even stick around during the job. Poison was a quick way to get rid of someone that didn't require sawing through several walls and getting your own hands bloody. Still, the preparation of the body, hidden in a chest with absorbent materials to hide the blood, meant that at least something had been planned in advance. None of that really answered the question of who had wanted Long dead, or why they had chosen an intermediary like Whitby. Possibly, they wanted to stay away from the professional circles, or didn't have a means of getting in touch with them. But that would mean that the whole thing had been rather poorly planned from the beginning.
With a quiet sigh, he glanced back down at the tin of tea and the parchment. "There's still nothing to tell us how Whitby and his employer met, or if they met at all, or how any manner of payment was reached. It's a possibility that one or more of these papers was meant to be a way for Whitby to find his payment, or a dead-drop somewhere. It's also possible that Whitby stuck around because he was trying to find something that Long had hidden, and that it was Long's code with his supplier, that Whitby was also trying to crack. Whatever the truth of the matter is, the one path I see going forward is that we have to figure out what these parchments say. At the very least, it might give us some clue as to who wrote it, and why."
For one, no professional assassin worth hiring would ever stick around after the job was done, and most of the ones he was (tangentially) aware of vastly preferred to not even stick around during the job. Poison was a quick way to get rid of someone that didn't require sawing through several walls and getting your own hands bloody. Still, the preparation of the body, hidden in a chest with absorbent materials to hide the blood, meant that at least something had been planned in advance. None of that really answered the question of who had wanted Long dead, or why they had chosen an intermediary like Whitby. Possibly, they wanted to stay away from the professional circles, or didn't have a means of getting in touch with them. But that would mean that the whole thing had been rather poorly planned from the beginning.
With a quiet sigh, he glanced back down at the tin of tea and the parchment. "There's still nothing to tell us how Whitby and his employer met, or if they met at all, or how any manner of payment was reached. It's a possibility that one or more of these papers was meant to be a way for Whitby to find his payment, or a dead-drop somewhere. It's also possible that Whitby stuck around because he was trying to find something that Long had hidden, and that it was Long's code with his supplier, that Whitby was also trying to crack. Whatever the truth of the matter is, the one path I see going forward is that we have to figure out what these parchments say. At the very least, it might give us some clue as to who wrote it, and why."