“Before we go too far down either road, a moment ago I found something on his body that might better direct our inquiries.” Gareth touched Gwen’s shoulder, and she followed him back to the table where the body lay.
Gareth had recovered the man with the sheet while he’d inspected the clothing Gwen had brought inside the chapel; now, he pulled the cloth away again and tipped the man’s chin to one side, exposing his neck. Within and underneath his bushy beard, he bore a series of long scratches.
Gwen gazed at them and then looked up at her husband. “Those look to me like they could have come from fingernails.”
“That was my thought,” Gareth said. “Remember the way the woman’s nails were broken and chipped?”
“This man killed the woman found in the graveyard?” Morgan had trailed after them to the table and was now staring down at the wounds on the man’s neck.
“We have no evidence he murdered her, only that they may have fought,” Gareth said.
“But then—” Morgan began.
Gareth tipped his head in acknowledgement of Morgan’s puzzlement. “It does raise the possibility that he was responsible for her death. That then leads to a conclusion that someone else would have had to have murdered him, changing our scenario and making it less likely that anyone could have murdered him because he mistook him for me.”
“I have not only two murders but two murderers in Cilcain?” Morgan said. “How can that be? In all the years my family has ruled these lands, we’ve never had even one.”
Gwen was just as unhappy as Morgan appeared to be at the idea of one killer murdering another. She had felt vulnerable many times in her life. Bad things had happened to her, from the death of her mother at her brother’s birth, to the loss of Gareth when she was sixteen, to her abduction by Prince Cadwaladr before she married Gareth. Tonight’s threat, however, had a newness to it—and peril—that she’d never felt before.
It wasn’t that finding a dead couple impersonating her and Gareth was worse than when her mother had died—how could it be?—but it was a threat that was all potential, to an end which she was having trouble envisioning or speculating upon. Gwen had felt something like this in the first throes of Tangwen’s birth—waiting for what was to come and knowing it could be death—and not being able to do a thing about it.
When Gwen had first seen the woman’s face, she’d felt anger at whoever had killed her before they could meet. Now, however, she had to accept that this unknown woman had felt nothing for her, or at least not enough to change her course.
Since the woman had lost her life to this ruse, Gwen couldn’t sustain her anger, but as a result, all she was left with were feelings of helplessness and fear. Who knew what this couple had done while they were pretending to be Gareth and Gwen?
“I haven’t ever encountered an investigation quite like this either,” Gareth said.
“I should hope not!” Morgan said. “Did you discover anything about the woman that can help us identify her?”
Gwen almost laughed at the ‘us’. Almost.
Gareth suppressed a smile too. “I can’t say for certain how close in age she is to Gwen. It is almost impossible to determine the age of a woman who is between sixteen and twenty-five. There wasn’t anything more in her clothing, was there, Gwen?”
“Whoever killed her took her purse,” Gwen said, “or she didn’t have one on her.”
“This man here didn’t either,” Morgan said.
“The one who killed him could have taken them both with him.” Gareth flipped the sheet back over the man’s face. “Tomorrow I’d like to visit the site where he died to see if the killer left anything for us to find. Tonight I would like to speak to the husbandman who found him.”
Morgan made a noncommittal motion with his head.
“No?” Gareth said.
“At this hour of the evening, you might not get much out of him that makes sense,” Morgan said. “I keep an eye on him, for his son’s sake, but he lost his wife last winter and hasn’t been the same since.”
Gwen understood that all too well. After the loss of her mother, her father had drowned his sorrows in drink for a time, before gradually coming to his senses. Now, with the birth of Tangwen, Meilyr seemed a different man entirely, more like he’d been when Gwen herself was a child.
“Are we done here for now, Gareth?” she said.
At Gareth’s assent, the three of them returned to the hall, where they found Father Alun just arriving. He’d decided to do more than pray and had ridden his mule to the fort, leading Gwen’s horse.
“I am pleased to find you well,” Father Alun said as he took Gwen’s hand.
Gwen smiled to see the priest, some of her anxiety dissipating in the warmth of the hall. “It was a misunderstanding that has been resolved. No more need be said about it than that.”
Gwen had been very angry when Morgan first accused Gareth—so angry she had been nearly shaking with it. But allowing it to consume her for more than a short while gave the man who’d arranged all this too much power over her.
Morgan invited Gareth, Gwen, and Father Alun to sit at the high table with him, and when food was placed in front of her, Gwen suddenly discovered she was hungry. The sickness in the pit of her stomach that had nagged her since she’d learned of the woman’s death fell away, and their visit to Morgan’s hall, which had begun in suspicion and fear, began to turn into a friendly party—or as friendly as it could be given that they had two dead bodies on their hands.
Under the influence of food and drink, Father Alun turned talkative. “Could I ask what you’ve discovered about the death of the woman in my chapel?”
“You can ask,” Gareth said. “Neither our latest findings, nor the conclusions we have drawn from them, are at all comforting.” Then Gareth related what they’d learned since they’d last spoken to the priest. “It is possible that the dead man in Lord Morgan’s chapel had a hand in the death of the woman in yours. Who killed him, however, remains a mystery.”
Father Alun leaned in, his expression grave. “I see an odd combination of ruthlessness and blunder in the way this pair were murdered and buried.”
“What do you mean by that?” Morgan said.
Father Alun tapped a finger to his chin. “It seems to me that in regards to the actual murders, both deaths were brutally—and ruthlessly—accomplished, but when it came time to dispose of the bodies, it’s as if the killer stumbled in his mind, or was suddenly afraid of being found out, where before he’d been single-minded in his resolve. It’s almost as if he was thinking too hard about the problem, instead of applying the same ruthlessness to their burials as he did to their deaths.”
Gareth took Gwen’s hand and sat back in his chair, indicating to Gwen that they should let Alun and Morgan talk. If Hywel were here, he would have stopped the speculation and the assumptions, but this wasn’t Gwen and Gareth letting their imaginations run wild. In some instances, fresh eyes on the investigation could be a good thing.
Morgan pushed back his chair and moved to pace in front of the fire. “It’s clear to me that if the girl was murdered at the second killer’s behest, than the death of her killer was a matter of tying up loose ends.” Lord Morgan turned to query Gareth. “Is this how you see it too?”
“You both have far too devious minds,” Gareth said.
Gwen heard a touch of admiration in his voice, and she agreed with Gareth that both of them had taken on the problem with an unseemly eagerness. But that wasn’t to say they were wrong.
Morgan canted his head. “I’ll take that as a compliment, coming from you.”
Gareth straightened in his chair. “As to your analysis of the murders, your guesses are as good as mine. We won’t know the truth until we learn far more than we have yet discovered. It would be most helpful to put a name to either victim.”
“I’m sorry these people chose Cilcain for their foul deeds.” Father Alun gave a shiver of distaste.
“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Morgan said. “As Gwen said earlier, we should be glad the murders happened here, because that meant Gareth and Gwen were only a short ride away. Without their expertise, how would we even have begun to go about this investigation? Certainly our chances of discovering who murdered the dead couple would have been much diminished, and we would have been further hampered by the mistaken idea that Gareth and Gwen themselves were the victims.”
Gwen just managed not to shake her head at Morgan’s complete reversal of his earlier position. Not that she didn’t appreciate it. “It’s—” She broke off with a glance at her husband, who ended up finishing her sentence for her.
“It’s what we do,” Gareth said.
“Sir Gareth, we must consider why someone would want to ruin your reputation,” Morgan said.
“I have angered many men in my life—more so in the last few years,” Gareth said.
“Creating a false Gareth and Gwen can’t be for such a simple reason, Lord Morgan. My husband is a remarkable man, but the man who did this put an enormous effort into the endeavor, and I can’t see how anyone could hate Gareth so much for something so intangible. At the very least, the killer risked having the results easily refuted with proof that Gareth was somewhere else when whatever heinous deed he was supposed to have perpetrated was occurring.”
While she and Gareth had made enemies over the years, most of those they’d mightily offended had received justice at the hands of a lord or the king. And many were dead. The only possibility she could think of was that, as had been the case with the attempted murder of King Owain several years ago, the person coming after them was a child or relative of one of these people, who had taught him to hate.
Father Alun nodded. “I find it more likely that ruining Gareth’s reputation was an ancillary goal for the killer instead of the main one. It could even be that impersonating Gareth and Gwen was a means to an end only.”
“What end?” Lord Morgan said.
“What if tarnishing Gareth’s reputation is in the service of creating distrust between him and his lord and ensuring Gareth’s removal from Prince Hywel’s side?” Father Alun said.
Gareth’s jaw turned rigid, and it looked like he was finding it impossible to speak around it. Gwen wanted to deny Father Alun’s conclusions, but she had no grounds to do so.
Morgan nodded as he thought. “Thus leaving room for another, who does not have your lord’s best interests at heart. I don’t like the sound of that.”
Gareth finally managed to unstick his jaw. “Nor do I.”