//------------------------------//
// The Blackmailer 
// Story: Mini Mysteries 
// by Acologic 
//------------------------------//

Crimson Quill, the Canterlot Journal’s long-suffering editor-in-chief, pulled up a chair and sat down. 

‘Let’s hear it again,’ he said to Miss Ivory. 

‘At around ten o’clock yesterday morning,’ began the excitable Miss Ivory, ‘I walked to the kiosk in West Badham Street to purchase my tabloids. On the way, I passed a mare and a stallion, both of whom were whispering urgently. I paid them no mind at first, but then I heard the girl say, “I know you were with her that night. Pay me the money before April thirty-first, or I’ll tell your wife!” Then it clicked. The stallion was Colt Bolt!’

Quill raised an eyebrow. 

‘The model?’

‘The very same! I don’t suppose you read the tabloids, Mister Quill, but Colt Bolt and his wife are going through a bit of a bad patch. I think the girl must have caught Colt Bolt with another mare! I think she was blackmailing him!’

‘I think,’ growled Quill, ‘it’s time I showed you the door.’

‘And quite right, too!’ remarked Slipstar when he heard of his friend’s latest ordeal. 

Why?

Quill knew that Miss Ivory, a notorious gossip, was trying to bag a headline. She claimed that the girl had demanded the money be paid before April thirty-first, thereby proving her account false. April has only thirty days.