He was awoken by a loud voice calling his name. “Blue! Oi, Blue, get up!”
“Five more minutes…”
“Blueblood, get up, or I swear I’ll take you to the moon and leave you there,” the Doctor said.
The prince’s eyes blinked open. He sat up. “What happened? Where- why are we still at the races?”
“Because you decided to be smart and wander off,” the Doctor growled, “In the process, you discovered a dead body and then fainted. Well, either that, or you killed him, but that doesn’t seem like something you’re capable of.”
Blueblood sat up. “What?” His eyes fell once more on the dead body. “I— you— oh my,” he gasped.
“Yeah, pretty much,” the Doctor agreed.
“We need to call the police!”
The Doctor frowned. “Why should we let them ‘ave all the fun? Come on, let’s find some clues.”
“Doctor. There is a pony lying there, dead. We must call the police at once.”
“Nah, nah, ‘s fine, I got it. This is pretty much a normal day for me. Well, it usually isn’t this quiet, but…”
“So, you’re going to tell his family? You’re going to watch them break down, comfort them, see their world rip apart? You are going to do that?”
The Doctor paused. He looked at Blueblood, who turned pink. “You know an awful lot about this.”
“Look, are you going to call, or am I?” the prince demanded.
“All right, you’ve got a point, I s'pose. The proper authorities are gonna find out sooner or later, may as well tell ‘em ourselves,” the Doctor sighed. “You go ahead, I’ll mind the corpse.”
“What, is it going to wander off?” Blueblood scoffed.
The Doctor shrugged. “You never know.”
***
The police quickly arrived in the form of Inspector Battle and Sergeant Haddock of the CPD. “Good afternoon,” the Inspector said in a dolorous tone that implied anything but. “You are the gentlecolts who discovered the body?”
“Tha’s right. I’m Doctor Darkest Hour, and this is my associate, Duke Leon Noel.”
The Sergeant looked at the duo suspiciously from under thick black eyebrows, but said not a word. The Inspector motioned toward the body. “Do either of you… know this pony? According to his identification, he was a Lord Golden Ring.”
“‘Fraid not, no,” the Doctor said.
“And you, sir?”
Blueblood blinked once or twice. “Sorry? Oh. No, I’m afraid not. Although—” he squinted. “He looks oddly familiar. I think I may have met him before, at some manner of formal event, but I don’t recall anything more than that.”
“Tha’ so?” rumbled Haddock.
“Yes it is, and may I say sir—” Blueblood responded angrily,but was cut off when the Doctor set a firm, placating hoof on his shoulder.
“You’ll have to excuse him,” he said. “He had a bit of a shock, and he’s got no redeeming social values.”
“How dare you!” Blueblood blustered.
The Doctor shook his head. “You see what I mean?”
“Yes, quite,” the Inspector agreed lugubriously. “Is there anything else you saw? Anything else that might be useful to us?”
“He— it— he was leaned against the side of the box when I arrived,” Blueblood said. “I knocked him down by accident.”
“Could you show us how the body was positioned?” the Inspector requested.
Blueblood looked at the corpse in alarm. Carefully, he wrapped his hooves around the barrel of the corpse and heaved the body back to where it had been. The Doctor facehoofed. It was becoming something of a habit. “‘E meant for you to lean up where he was, not disturb the corpse more,” he growled.
“That will be fine, thank you,” the Inspector said hurriedly, cutting across Blueblood's acid retort. “Anything else?”
“There was one thing,” the Doctor said. “I found a paper on one of the seats.” He pointed. “I think this bloke was ‘ere for a bit of a rendez-vous, judging by the look of it.”
The inspector raised an eyebrow and picked up the sheet. The eyebrow raised still further as he read the message. “Rather steamy,” he said.
Blueblood peered over Battle’s shoulder. His face grew quite red. “Good heavens,” he gasped, stepping back. “A sonnet, as well, good grief. I don’t believe I knew there were so many rhymes for—”
“Come on,” the Doctor said shortly. “I trust you don’t need us any further?” he asked the Inspector.
“Give your contact information to the Sergeant before you leave, but yes, you’re free to go.”
The Doctor jotted down a quick fabrication on Haddock’s notepad and hurried Blueblood along. “Right. Police involved? Check. Against my better judgement, mind, but check, nonetheless.”
“His family will be able to know,” Blueblood said.
“You really feel strongly about that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Feel like expandin’ on tha’?”
“No.”
They trotted along in silence. A few ponies looked over and nodded to Blueblood in recognition. He noticed his old friend Fancy Pants among them. Blueblood might have approached him, but the stallion was accompanied by his wife, Fleur de Lis, who Blueblood had always found frightening.
Eventually, Blueblood spoke up once more. “So. Now what?”
“Now what, what?”
“What do we do now?”
The Doctor looked at him oddly. “I thought you wanted to leave?”
Blueblood sighed. “I do. Believe me, I do. Mostly I just want to be out of your company, but yes, I want to go home. Unfortunately, we've gotten involved in some sort of beastly crime. Obviously, we can't leave now. Particularly since your box is stuck in Jet Set's hedge maze.”
He realized the Doctor had stopped some ways behind him. “What?” he asked.
The Doctor grinned at him, not mockingly, not insultingly, but an honest-to-goodness real smile. “You know something, Blue? I think there’s hope for you yet.”
***
Blueblood stared at the imposing estate. “Are you… certain about this?” he asked nervously.
“Not particularly, no, but we don’t have anywhere else to start.”
The prince gritted his teeth. “Right. Let’s go.”
The duo started up the path, only to run into a portly grey unicorn in a tuxedo. “Pardon me, sirs, but who are you?”
The Doctor stared. Blueblood nudged him, hard. “Ah, right,” the Doctor said, producing his psychic paper, “Detectives Cricket Bat and Robin Banks, here on official business. Sorry, this might be a bit of a rude question, but have you got a brother?”
The butler looked at the paper, nodded once, and turned to lead them into Ring Manor. “Inspectors Bat and Banks,” he announced. A mare wearing a flowing, fluffy, pink dressing robe glanced up from her book.
“Good afternoon, gentlecolts,” she said, rising to her hooves. She glanced back and forth between the two. “What brings you here?” she asked Blueblood.
The unicorn opened his mouth, but all that came out was a sort of faint wheezing as the Doctor shoved him aside. “Lady Ring?” the Doctor replied, “I’m sorry to tell you, but your husband is dead.”
She blinked. “Sorry?”
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” the Doctor said. “If it helps at all, we believe his death was relatively quick and painless.”
The mare looked pale, her pink coat washed out. “I need to sit down,” she whispered, collapsing gracelessly back onto her sofa. “How?”
“We don’t know.”
“Where?”
“At the racetracks. There was a letter, suggested he might be meeting a companion there.”
“Who?”
The Doctor paused. “Are you asking who he was meeting or who killed him?”
Blueblood interjected, “Actually, it doesn’t matter, we don’t know the answers to either.”
The mare turned her attention back to Blueblood. “I think I may know. Who he was meeting, I mean.”
That got the Doctor’s attention. “Oh?” He shared a puzzled glance with Blueblood. In his experience, people generally didn’t both know about their spouse’s indiscretions and approve of them.
“Yes,” she continued, still addressing only Blueblood. “A business partner of his, a griffon named Gertrude— Gertrude P. Henn. They’ve been working on a venture together.”
“Ah, well,” the Doctor said, “I’m afraid—”
“That we don’t have her contact information,” Blueblood interjected smoothly. “Do you know it at all? It could be very helpful.”
“I believe so,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ll go and fetch it.”
After she had trotted out of the room, the Doctor glared at Blueblood. “Why didn’t you let me tell her?” he hissed. “The fact that he was cheating on her could be important!”
Blueblood didn’t meet the Doctor’s eyes. “Do you want to tell her that?” he asked. “Look her in the eyes, tell her the truth? That her husband was a lying pig?” He shook his head. “If you want to ruin her memories of him, if you really want to, go ahead.”
The Doctor looked at him a long moment. “The real police are going to tell her eventually,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She’ll know soon enough.”
“Yes. But not right now.” He looked at the Doctor. “Let her mourn.”
The Doctor looked back. Slowly, he nodded. “If you don’t mind my askin’—” he began.
“I do,” the unicorn replied shortly.
“I’ll find out eventually.”
“Yes,” Blueblood repeated. “But not right now.”
They stood in silence for a moment. “It wasn’t love,” the Doctor stated.
“Sorry?”
“Whatever motivated 'ooever sent that letter, it wasn’t love.”
“Well, obviously not. Whoever wrote it killed him.”
“Yeah, which doesn’t really make sense. If it was a mash note, and 'ooever wrote it really did love ‘im, they wouldn’t want to kill ‘im, and if they wanted to kill him, why leave behind a mash note?”
"A lovers quarrel, I suppose."
The Doctor shook his head. "I could buy that, if th' note had been taken away. While it's there, it's a huge lead, points everyone right to that conclusion-- scorned lover. Anyone with half an ounce of sense would've taken it an' destroyed it. But it was left right there, barely even hidden. Why?"
Blueblood considered this. “I— to distract us? Maybe to attract him?”
The Doctor nodded. “Might be, might be. But more than that, it was meant to be a trap. Th’ killer left the note at the crime scene. That leaves the police wi’ a lot of clues— hoofwriting, prints, maybe analysis of dialect if you want t’ get fancy. If they’d taken it away, we’d have nothing t’ go on. Plus, it was left right out in th’ open, where there’s no good explanation for it being, but they tried to make it look hidden.”
Blueblood’s mind clicked a couple of times before giving up. “So… it was left in the open by hiding it, when it should have been hidden for real?”
“More or less.”
“Why?”
The Doctor furrowed his brow. “Dunno,” he admitted. “Not yet, anyhow.”
The duo quickly shut up as Lady Golden Rings trotted back in through the doorway. The Doctor noticed that somewhere along her trek, she'd changed from a pink robe into a black one. “Here you are,” she said, levitating a slip of paper over to Blueblood. “Her address, contact information, and so forth— will there be anything else?”
The Doctor scratched behind his head. “Well, where were you in all this? Where’ve you been for the past hour or so?”
“Hm? Oh, right here,” she replied. “Mask can confirm that.”
“Mask?” Blueblood asked.
“The butler, Tuxedo Mask.”
The Doctor let out a faint snort. Blueblood looked at him oddly. “What—”
The Time Lord waved him off. “Nothing, just reminded me— never mind. Any rate, that’s all for now, Lady Rings, but there’ll be another couple of officers around later on with a few other questions as they arise.”
“Of course,” she nodded. “Mask? Would you show them to the door, please?”
“Yes, madam,” a voice intoned from directly behind the two. Blueblood jumped and even the Doctor turned in surprise.
“How long has he been there?” Blueblood whispered to the Doctor.
“Don’t know,” he muttered back. “That’s a bit worrying, I must be losing my touch.”
“If you will follow me, inspectors?” The butler trotted toward the door. As they stepped out into the sun, he glanced furtively over his shoulder. Then, leaning in next to Blueblood, he whispered, “She’s lying,” before hurriedly shutting the door with a resounding thud. He heard the lock click, and the butler's hooves echoed as they clicked away.