The Power and the Glory

Bonus Chapter: Proof Positive

Author's Note: I realised Irímé gets far too little characterisation in the main story. The last thing I want is another Kilan situation, where I don't develop a character enough then find it nearly impossible to write them, so I wrote this to fix it. Result: a murder mystery set several centuries before the main story, featuring an Irímé who isn't much like the one we've met. Er... put it down to him wearing another mask while he's working with Abi?

Warning for abusive parenting of the emotional/psychological kind and extremely vague references to attempted sexual assault (in the past, not in the story itself).

Proof Positive

Do you not realise, Hastings, that each and everyone of us is a complete mystery with layers? We each try to judge each other, but nine times out of ten, we are wrong. -- Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies

Like so many headaches for the Neleth Ancalen family, all the trouble was caused by Kumolnea-anfalen's blasted collection. If she hadn't wanted to buy a female basilisk she wouldn't have invited the owner of the Rothilion zoo to dinner. If she hadn't been running short of money she wouldn't have invited a motley assortment of millionaires as well. If she had never held that damn dinner there would never have been a murder. And if she hadn't invited twenty people there wouldn't have been nineteen suspects.

Twenty-six, if you counted Kumolnea and her children. Irímé didn't. He knew neither he nor his siblings had committed the murder. And he was sure his mother hadn't.

She's too stupid for anything that requires planning, he thought with more viciousness than his family believed him capable of.

All his life his mother expected only two things of him. To look pretty, and to marry well. He was less her son than a valuable commodity that would help her get into higher society than she was part of now. She never made any attempt to hide her view of him. Any ambitions, any wishes, any thoughts of his own were completely ignored. That was not the sort of attitude that would inspire much familial harmony. Irímé kept his mouth shut, locked all his thoughts up inside, and played the pretty empty-headed doll she wanted him to be.

Well, not this time. Irímé was not an idiot, he'd read many detective novels, and he was above all mad as hell. This sorry mess was entirely his mother's fault. He was strongly tempted to leave well enough alone and let her sort it out herself. But his name would inevitably be dragged into the papers along with the rest of his family's. The last thing he wanted was the slightest chance Abihira's parents might call off the marriage. After everything his betrothal to a princess had subjected him to, it would be intolerable if the marriage never even happened and all his misery was for nothing.

So he straightened his headpiece, made sure he looked suitably upset, and went out to talk to the guests.

Kumolnea's unique style of parenting had never given Irímé a chance to be a normal child or young man. It had however taught him how to make and put on a mask for every conceivable occasion. There were times when he feared he no longer knew where the masks ended and he himself began. It was a very unpleasant way to live most of the time. Yet it proved very useful for events like this.

The first guest he encountered was a man wearing coat in an eye-watering shade of brilliant orange. That abomination immediately put him on Irímé's list of suspects. Anyone with such dreadful fashion sense could not be trusted.

"It's outrageous," the man shouted at the top of his lungs. "People don't die at parties! Such a shocking breach of decorum."

Irímé said nothing and stayed close to the wall, where few people would pay any attention to him. Suspect one was either an imbecile, or he thought that acting like one would divert suspicion. Now for suspect two.