Final Runway
Cases unlock in order, like levels. This is case 28 of 100.
Backstage at Maison Delaunay, Paris Fashion Week, 7:20 pm. Gaspard Delaunay, 58, the house designer, collapsed beside his own makeup table, forty minutes before the show.
He died before the ambulance arrived. The doctor speaks of something that stopped his heart, swallowed less than an hour earlier. At 6:55 pm he had drunk his ginger and honey tea, as he does before every show.
The hair and makeup team spent the last hour shut in the room next door, on camera. Three people moved freely along the dressing room corridor, and none of them is telling the truth about where they were.
The atelier fitting room, tall mirrors and mannequins covered with white sheets.
Suspects
Anouk VerbeekLead model, 24
Bastien MoreauDesigner's assistant, 29
Odile FaureFashion critic, 61
The real case
The poisoning doctor of Paris and digitalin
Paris, France, 1863
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In 1863, the physician Edmond de la Pommerais had his mistress, a widow, sign life insurance policies in his favor, and weeks later she died of a sudden illness. Her family grew suspicious. The toxicologist Ambroise Tardieu, unable to detect the poison through chemical analysis, applied extracts from the victim's stomach to laboratory animals and observed the effects on their hearts.
It was the first time a court accepted proof of poisoning by digitalin, the extract of foxglove, based on a biological experiment. The doctor was convicted and executed in 1864.
The game borrows the poison (foxglove, which acts on the heart and is hard to detect) and nineteenth-century Paris. Characters, motive and outcome are fiction.
Sources
Case glossary
Words from this case you might not know.
- atelier
- The workshop or studio of a fashion house or artist, where clothes and works are designed and made.