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Day Three
Catrin
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Murder had a way of complicating pretty much everything. By the time Catrin had escorted Emma home, explained the situation to her father (accompanied by a renewed flood of tears from Emma), and made her way back to the abandoned barn, Rhys and Simon had arranged for a wagon to remove Hugh’s body to the castle.
She had just missed crossing paths with Stephen himself. Catrin wished him well. The sooner he threw himself at Osborn’s feet, the better.
While two of the king’s servants prepared the body for transport, Rhys, Catrin, and Simon retired to wait outside the barn doorway. It was refreshing to be in the breeze, without the scent of blood.
Simon looked at Rhys. “I should head to the castle now. This is going to be a nasty surprise for Owen, and I want to arrive well before the wagon.”
“It will be a surprise only if Owen himself isn’t the killer,” Rhys said. “Sadly, I doubt this is his doing. We’ve had hints he’s short of money. If nothing else, he would not have left a pile of coins on top of Hugh.”
“That is a curious issue,” Catrin said. “Who leaves that amount of money behind—or any amount of money, for that matter?”
Simon, who had already started to walk away, said over his shoulder, “Someone who is very angry, very offended, or both.”
Catrin watched him go and then Rhys put an arm around her shoulders to hug her to him. “A barn, a dead man, you, and me.”
He was referring again to their first investigation in Caernarfon, where they’d been searching for the killer of a man found dead in a barn. It wasn’t entirely true that they’d fallen in love over a dead body, but it wasn’t far off.
“I don’t see anyone spending the night in this barn, no matter the reason. Which then begs the question as to why Hugh was here.” She pushed on the broken door with one hand. “He had to have been meeting someone, but there are so many tracks already, some of which are ours, it’s impossible to distinguish one from another.”
“Shall we make a start on the rest then, like before?” Without waiting for her assent, Rhys set off around the outside of the barn, walking slowly, his eyes on the ground.
Catrin followed, making a circle a bit wider than his. The main door of the barn faced the field they’d crossed to reach it, but the woods had started encroaching on the rest of the building. By the time they reached the back side, they were hacking through some waist high brush to keep to their intended trajectories.
Catrin was detaching her cloak from a clinging blackberry bramble when Rhys said, “I see a footprint. There’s two more.” He pointed deeper into the woods.
Having successfully extricated herself, Catrin crouched to the ground, squinting a bit as a sudden ray of sunlight pierced the leaves above her head to reach the forest floor. Then she was able to trace the progress of the tracks with her eyes. “It looks like he came from the north.”
She might have been proud of herself for being able to see the footprints at all, except several were clearly evident in the mud at the far corner of the barn. In other places, grass and dead leaves obscured them, but it looked as if water draining off the barn’s roof had been funneled to this one spot, into which someone had stepped.
Making sure he didn’t mar any of the footprints himself, Rhys took his own foot and hovered it above the print. “I’m not the murderer, but he wears boots similar in size to mine.”
“Too bad he doesn’t have either huge feet or small ones,” Catrin said, now comparing the prints to her own smaller feet. “I’m going to be looking at everyone’s boots now as well as their fingers!”
Rhys crouched to study the marks more closely. “He walks on the outside of his feet, judging by the pattern of wear on the heel.”
“Like I do,” Catrin said. “You walk much more straight and put holes right in the center of the ball of your foot.”
The barn was falling down a bit more at this corner, with big chunks taken out of the wattle and daub construction. Peering through one of these gaps, she could see the spot where Hugh had died. Much of his blood had soaked into the ground, but little pools remained that glistened in the sunshine coming through the roof and the barn’s open door, which was almost directly opposite from where she was standing. Occasional wisps of straw or hay moved in the air, but otherwise the barn had been cleaned out years ago.
Meanwhile, the men were finally maneuvering Hugh’s body onto the bed of the cart. Catrin and Rhys followed the footprints down the side of the barn wall until they reached the front door again, where they became lost amidst many others.
Catrin studied the body for a moment, made thoughtful by what had just occurred to her. “We should take off one of Hugh’s boots to compare it to the prints.”
Rhys instantly agreed, motioning to one of the servants, who had not understood Catrin’s Welsh. “Our apologies. We won’t be a moment.”
The servants had wrapped Hugh well, but Rhys unfolded the bit of cloth that covered his feet and managed to get one boot off him. Another few hours and the body might have been too stiff to accomplish it without breaking the bones in his foot.
Instantly, it was clear that the boot was of similar size to Rhys’s. Moriddig had been a small man, but Hugh was of average height, just an inch or two less than six feet. The boots showed wear on the outside of the heel, enough that it was hardly necessary for Rhys to place the boot in the print.
Catrin grunted to see the perfect fit. “We had it backwards. It was Hugh who followed someone else to the barn.”
Rhys looked up at her as he concluded, “And that someone else killed him.”
