| Esmeralda Tusspells |
| He has become quite a celebrity in London, being the winner of no less than three policing awards last year. I simply had to make a model of the man. |
John Clay was a Scotland Yard police sergeant working in London during Ryunosuke Naruhodo's time in England.
Recognized with awards & in wax[]
Although a relatively young man, he proved himself to be a highly-capable officer, causing him to receive triple accolades during the policing awards. Clay subsequently became quite a celebrity in London, leading to Esmeralda Tusspells desiring to make a waxwork of him, with the finished statue being displayed in the "House of Horrors" section of her Museum of Waxworks.
A vandalized waxwork[]
- Main article: The Return of the Great Departed Soul
One year after Clay's triumph at the policing awards, a visitor to Madame Tusspells Museum of Waxworks removed the Clay waxwork's left arm in an attempt to take it home as a souvenir. However, Tusspells caught him in the act and used said wax arm to knock the vandal unconscious.
Shortly afterwards, Ryunosuke Naruhodo's investigation into the murder of Odie Asman led him to the museum. During a subsequent dance of deduction with Herlock Sholmes, the great detective mistook a yellow neckerchief around neck of the Clay waxwork as the secret sign to other members of force that a crime was being perpetrated at the museum, meaning that the waxwork was the real officer performing an undercover investigation. However, Naruhodo was able to correct said misconception, revealing that it was indeed a waxwork, which had been vandalized by a visitor. The defense attorney was also able to deduce that a policeman sleeping in a chair beside the Clay waxwork, mistaken for a waxwork by Sholmes, was a real officer investigating the scene at Tusspells request after the kidnapping of a one-of-a-kind waxwork of a mass murderer from her special exhibit.
Name[]
- John Clay, also known by the alias "Vincent Spaulding", is a character from the Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League", by Arthur Conan Doyle. In said tale, Clay plots to dig a tunnel between a pawn shop and a nearby bank in order to steal a hoard of gold Napoléons, only to be caught red-handed by Holmes.
Note[]
- In The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story, Sholmes (incorrectly) deduces that Ashley Graydon was planning on digging a tunnel between Pop Windibank's pawnbrokery and a nearby bank, referencing the original Clay's scheme in "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League". Two other notable references in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles to the original "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League" story are "Duncan Ross" (the alias of Clay's accomplice William Morris in the original story) in The Memoirs of the Clouded Kokoro (where he is an entirely different character) and the "Red-Headed League" (a con by Clay and Morris in the original story) in Twisted Karma and His Last Bow (where it is a con by Fabien de Rousseau and Peppino de Rossi).