84: Doppelganger

So, mum, the verdict came in, and it was guilty. I was a bit surprised, to be honest. I thought something would come up that we hadn’t considered, or the graf would have just taken a dislike to us, or something like that. But Hoflich was found guilty.

Bruegel hit his chime, and Wasmeier stood up and said that in the name of the law lords, and the graf, and the city of Middenheim, they would take Hoflich into custody and investigate his crimes and formally try him.

And so the guards led him away, and he did a good job of appearing stoical through the whole thing. Meanwhile, we got to mingle with the great and the good. I thought everyone would congratulate us on doing a good job and saving the city, but they really didn’t.

Blume tried to sidle up to the princess, but she wasn’t interested in talking to her, despite our success. I would have thought they would have immediately made her a lady of the court and carried Willow down the street on their shoulders, cheering, but it was nothing like that. Willow asked Ehrlich what we should do now, and he said we could rest easy in the knowledge that we had helped Middenheim. Thanks, then.

Blume said that it didn’t work like that and now we owed some of the nobs for speaking up for us in the hearing. So Willow went up to Prunkvoll and said thanks to him for speaking at the hearing. And then she said, ‘I don’t say this lightly, but you’re a proper dickhead.’

And Blume was hanging out around the princess and she told everyone that this was the most animated she had ever seen Prunkvoll, and the enemies of Middenheim must be quaking in their boots. The ladies of the court agreed and liked her joke, except Petra Liebkosen said that she had heard that Blume had been visiting Prunkvoll’s house a lot, and that maybe she had been quaking in her boots. And then Blume said that Petra was short for pertrified of the truth. And then they spent a lot of time trading insults, which is not very nice, but I was quite impressed at how many they could think of.

Meanwhile Friederik and Guido were talking, and Friederik said that he was surprised at how smoothly that had gone, and they went to talk to Ehrlich about searching Hoflich’s apartment at the palace. And on their way they recruited me to go with them.

We walked up the corridor towards the stairs and spotted two bodies lying on the floor. They had been knifed and Friederik recognised them as the guards who had escorted Hoflich away. He shouted, ‘Murder’ and ‘Escaped prisoner,’ and then ran up the stairs, to make sure the graf was safe. Guido followed, and I paused to drink the fey-eyes tonic that Willow had made me. I hadn’t slept for ages, and the hearing had been really boring and I was dying for a nap. So that perked me up, a bit.

Blume heard Friederik’s shout, I think she was the only one who did, and told everyone in the hall. And Guido went back and caught Willow’s eye and beckoned for her to follow us, too. Friederik found another guard at the top of the stairs, who had been stabbed in the neck, and he went as quickly as he could to the graf’s apartment.

He went through the graf’s trophy room, and then into his personal chamber. He was going to tell the graf that the prisoner had escaped when he was greeted with the bizarre sight of a naked graf wrestling with a fully clothed graf. The naked one was having the better of it, and strangling the other with a garotte.

Seeing Friederik arrive, the naked graf used the other graf as a shield and backed towards the door while Friederik made his way sideways around the room, to outflank the grafs. The naked graf told Friederik to wait, and that it was not what it looked like, but he was already exposed.

Guido arrived and made his way along the wall in the other direction. He played along with naked graf and asked him to hand the other graf over so he could be taken to the dungeons and questioned. But naked graf didn’t fall for the ruse.

The naked graf backed towards the next apartment and said that if anyone moved he would cut the graf’s throat and gave the garotte a twist. It was at about that time I arrived, mum, and I charged straight at the grafs. If I had time to think about it, I’m not sure what I would have done. Got confused, probably. But I just charged in and it turned out for the best.

I slashed at naked graf, but he dodged out the way and pushed the clothed graf towards me, and I dodged out the way of him. The naked graf countered with his dagger and he just nicked me. And now I could see a load of small wounds down the naked graf’s side, like he had been shot, or something, so he was already injured. And the wounds were sort of bleeding, but the blood didn’t look like proper blood.

The real graf (we assumed he was the real one because he wasn’t naked) was bleeding heavily on the floor, so Guido rushed to him to stem the bleeding, and did a good job of it. Then Friederik charged in to help me. He managed to hit the naked graf but he still kept fighting. And I had another go and missed hopelessly again. I was beginning to wonder about my new shiny sword because it wasn’t hitting anything like Frau Kenner had made it hit things.

Then Willow and Blume arrived. Willow went to see the graf and applied some of her herbs to his wounds. It was stuff to stop bleeding, but I think Guido had already stopped most of it.

Now Guido was able to attack the graf thing but he missed and so did Friederik. But that had distracted him, and I plunged the shiny sword into his heart and he fell to the floor. And then we saw its features disappear before our eyes and it no longer looked like the graf. And it became increasingly formless and soon it just resembled a sort of featureless, flayed, vaguely human body.

And a few moments later some Knights Panther arrived and started pushing us around, but luckily Friederik was there to vouch for us and tell them some of what had happened.

Willow was left to deal with the graf and she tried to heal him, but I think he must have been more seriously injured than we thought, and her job was a lot more tricky than she was expecting, because she was getting a bit flummoxed. In the end I heard her pray to Isaac Graksk (No I didn’t. I simply said ‘I say graf,’ to get his attention – Willow).

And although she denied it later I’m pretty sure that’s who she was calling on for help. Probably because it had worked for me so often (But I didn’t – Willow). Anyway, whatever it was, she saved the graf’s life. And it looked like her hat changed colour again. It had been red when we set out from the Mootland. But in Altdorf it had turned blue, and now she had called to Uncle Isaac, it had turned purple. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

We wondered what had been up with the naked graf and Guido called the thing a doppelganger. And we thought it had taken the form of Hoflich in order to scheme against Middenheim, and after being arrested it had been desperate enough to try to kill the graf.

And if the doppelganger can take any form, I wonder, mum, if those little wounds in its side were caused when I had shot the blunderbuss at Frau Kenner, and the doppelganger had been her, too. We’ll never know, but if it was Frau Kenner, too, then I think it was fitting that she died by her own sword.

And I was feeling quite good, now, and not tired at all, because of the fey eyes tonic. And I told Willow, and she gave me another potion which she called a vitality draught, and she said when I felt the fey eyes wearing off I should take that, too.

The Knights Panther told us not to go anywhere, and after a while the graf’s chamber was visited by a whole load of nobs and martials and people like that. Schutzmann was there, too, and they were interested in what we had to say, but mostly they preferred to hear it coming from Friederik.

Then after a bit, Schutzmann got a message and he asked us to come with him to Hoflich’s apartment. They had found a large trunk with the real Hoflich’s decaying body in.

And Schutzmann showed us some papers. One of the notes was the address of the house in Schwarzmauer Weg. Another was a strange diagram with a spider’s web and lots of elements of the conspiracy that we had uncovered. And the third was in a different hand writing, but it said to copy the other two in your own hand writing and leave them with Hoflich’s body (which is obviously what someone had done) and to destroy the original instructions (which they obviously had not).

And Ehrlich said the original instructions were in Wasmeier’s hand writing. This was all a bit confusing because Wasmeier had been the only one to vote against the taxes. But Friederik suggested that it would be a good ruse to get the other two to vote for something, even though they were both against it, and vote against it yourself to avoid any suspicion falling on you.

So we rushed to Wasmeier’s apartment in the palace. He was not there, but we found some ashes of what looked like some burned papers, and an empty vial. Willow took a lick and said it tasted like the potion she had drunk in Castle Wittgenstein that had made her fly. And there was an open window, so it looked like Wasmeier had flown the coop.

They said that Wasmeier has a town house in Middenheim, so that is where we plan to head, straight away, mum. And I’ll let you know if we catch up with Wasmeier in my next letter.