Gareth
“This was in his bag?” Gwen turned the coin over in her fingers.
“It was,” Gareth said, “which immediately begs the question—why didn’t Conall use the coin or take the bag with him after he murdered Roger? He cleaned the room, so why leave the bag?”
“It isn’t the obvious answer,” Gwen said, “but it’s been what I’ve been thinking: what if Conall didn’t kill Roger?”
“Then he shouldn’t know that Roger is dead,” John said, “which means he should have come back for his bag.”
“Maybe he returned to the inn while we were there, and one of the workers told him what had happened. He preferred to abandon his possessions rather than face watchmen in a strange town who would be suspicious of any stranger.”
“John and I questioned the workers,” Gareth said, with a glance at John, who nodded. “None had seen Conall since yesterday morning when he left the inn.”
“Then I have no answer.” Gwen held up the coin. “But at least we have a place to start asking questions.”
“Where would that be?” Gareth said, though he had a sinking feeling he knew what his wife was going to say next.
“The brothel,” Gwen said, as if it was obvious.
John jeered. “You? In a brothel?”
Gareth put a heavy hand on John’s shoulder, hoping to get him to tone down his outrage. After they’d found the coin, John had expressed astonishment to Gareth that he would even consider allowing Gwen to accompany them. Had they been in Wales, Gareth would have taken her with him as a matter of course. But then, had they been in Wales, they wouldn’t have been investigating a brothel either.
The lack of brothels wasn’t because men were any more virtuous in Wales, but because families tended to be more closely tied together among themselves and to their lord. It was a rare woman who could fall through the cracks like these whores must have done. Because of those connections, and the way everybody knew so much about everybody else, Gareth was having a hard time picturing any family—or any girl—so desperate that a father would think selling her to a brothel was the only option. Or, furthermore, would be allowed to.
Even the camp followers who’d traveled with the army last year didn’t sell themselves in the same way. Most had men with whom they were associated, even if they hadn’t married them. And since illegitimacy was no disgrace in Wales, a child wouldn’t be rejected by his father just because he was a bastard.
John still looked amused and horrified at the same time, but at Gwen’s sudden fierce look, Gareth said in a gentle voice, “It is the one place in the entirety of Shrewsbury you cannot go.”
“Why not?” Gwen said.
“You are a lady, the wife of a knight, even if you are Welsh,” John said. “Surely you can see how uncomfortable your presence would make everyone feel.”
Gwen made an exasperated sound. “You can’t be serious. I investigate murder!”
“Not in any of Shrewsbury’s brothels,” John said.
Gwen was still looking daggers at the deputy sheriff, but Gareth had questioned John about this before, and it seemed there was no arguing with him. So instead, he tried to deflect them both. “You’re saying that there’s more than one brothel in Shrewsbury?”
John rolled his eyes. “And she can’t enter any of them.”
Gareth shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. Shrewsbury is a market town, with a charter from the king. All commerce is controlled, which means the brothels are under the authority of the town council. They have strict hours of operation, and only single men are supposed to frequent them. So … technically, I’m not supposed to enter one either.”
“Are those rules enforced?” Gwen said.
“They are supposed to be enforced by the Council,” John said, his expression clearing as they moved on from the more delicate subject of Gwen’s participation, “not by the castle, which would become involved only if lawbreaking occurred.”
“Like, for example, murder,” Gwen said.
John made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. “The Council is mindful of the need to contain what goes on in the brothels and to enforce certain restrictions. If it passes ordinances that are too restrictive, however, the proprietor might simply close the business and open it somewhere else, out of the Council’s reach.”
Gareth nodded. “It is my understanding that in other places brothel owners have been known to move beyond the limits of the town. Wales is only seven miles away, and laws there are very different.”
“Has money exchanged hands, then, between the owner of this brothel and the Council or the sheriff?” Gwen said.
Gareth had been thinking that such an exchange might be more normal than not, but at the shocked look on John’s face, he realized that wasn’t the case.
“Of course not!” John said. “What do you take us for here?”
Gwen put out an appeasing hand. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, but I felt I had to ask, and by your reaction, I’m glad I did.”
For a moment John looked as if he was going to stalk away and not accept Gwen’s apology. This conversation had started badly, and Gareth didn’t want it to end badly too. He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder. “What Gwen just did is what we do when we interview people during an investigation. Your unguarded response—angry as it was—revealed the truth far more than a considered straight denial ever could have done.”
John settled back on his heels, his expression clearing. He even managed a laugh. “That was well done.” He bowed to Gwen. “Remind me to let you interrogate all my suspects before I let my men at them.”
Gwen laughed. “See—this is why you need to include me when you visit the brothel.”
“To continue—” John took in a breath, seemingly determined to ignore Gwen’s quip, “—laws outside of Shrewsbury are very different and enforced differently. The sheriff’s writ runs through the whole of Shropshire, but he is under the authority of the Earl of Ludlow, who has no mind to prevent any legal commerce in his lands, as long as the businesses pay tax to him.”
“Brothels are allowed in most places, as long as upstanding citizens can continue to pretend they don’t exist,” Gareth said. “If a brothel is prosperous, I could even see the earl encouraging the proprietor to move it from Shrewsbury, from which he receives no taxes, to the countryside.”
“One here already has.” John gestured to the coin still in Gwen’s hand. “This coin grants admittance to two brothels: the one I told you about by the west gate, and also to one to the west of Shrewsbury, both owned by the same people. The one outside the town is called The Dancing Girl.” Then his brow furrowed. “Come to think on it, the one in town isn’t far from where we found the pool of blood.”
“Nothing in Shrewsbury is far from that pool of blood,” Gareth said.
John shrugged. “The brothel outside the town is less convenient for patrons. But, as you say, it has the benefit of being beyond the council’s jurisdiction.”
“And this coin could be used to enter either of them?” Gareth said.
John nodded. “Conall still had it, though, so he may never have visited either one.”
“Or he could have bought it for a repeat visit.” Gareth held out his hand to Gwen, who gave the coin back to him, though clearly with some reluctance. “We won’t know until we show his picture around and ask.”
“I still don’t see why I can’t come with you.” Gwen’s hands were on her hips. “Do you really think the women who work there are going to talk to you more than they would talk to me?”
Gareth studied his wife before answering. John was horrified at the thought of her visiting a brothel, which for all his explanations, Gareth thought was more a gut response rather than a rational assertion. Gwen was a married woman, soon to be the mother of two children. John knew she investigated murders and, surely, whatever went on in a brothel was no worse than standing over Roger’s dead body this morning. Still, John was determined to prevent her from coming with them, whether or not he was justified in doing so, and Gareth didn’t feel he was in a position to overrule him.
“I don’t know,” Gareth said, finally. “John is right that whores tend to avoid respectable women because they feel they are being judged.”
Gwen wrinkled her nose at him. “Which they usually are.”
“In which case, speaking to a man would be more normal for them,” John said, looking pleased with this sudden conclusion. “For now, let Gareth and me do this. If our luck fails us, I promise I will consider other options.”
“We should go right now,” Gareth said. “The trail will never be warmer than it is at this moment.”
But before John could agree or Gwen could protest further at being left out of the investigation, Cedric appeared, his expression grave, loped towards them from the gatehouse, and came to a panting halt in front of John.
Gareth bent his head, knowing what was coming.
“We found the body of a woman in the river.”
John raised his eyebrows at Gareth and Gwen. They both shrugged as their only response and started towards the gatehouse.
Cedric actually looked disappointed that his news had caused neither surprise nor consternation—but simply resignation at the inevitable. But then, like the good soldier he was, he hustled after them to lead them to the body.
Gareth had figured it was only a matter of time until they found the body associated with the pool of blood. As he kept insisting, and murderers kept not realizing until it was too late, bodies weren’t so easy to get rid of.
For one thing, they were heavy. Once a person was dead, his body made a very awkward burden for a single man, no matter how strong that man was or how small the body. Two, there were few good places to leave a corpse where it wouldn’t ever be found and the murder discovered.
In his time, Gareth had seen murderers try to get rid of bodies by, among other things, burying them, dropping them in a pond, and leaving them to desiccate inside an abandoned house, just to name a few instances. Eventually the bodies were found, and the murderer caught. Maybe it was hubris on Gareth’s part to think he was good at his job, and perhaps dozens of people whose bodies hadn’t ever been discovered had gone missing in Gwynedd in recent years, but Gareth didn’t think so.
To Gareth’s mind, making a body difficult to dispose of was God’s way of allowing justice to be done, even if it was many years after the fact.
When they arrived at the riverbank to the south of the town, two watchmen were in the process of wading in the shallows off the north bank of the Severn River, soaking themselves to the waist. At a nod from John, they grasped the body and lifted it. With the slow meander here, once the body had begun to float, it had caught on a branch hidden just below the surface of the water and hung there.
All dead bodies had a nasty tendency to float to the surface eventually. Given the blood in the alley, this girl had been dead before she went in and chances were she’d never sunk at all. The river hadn’t been the easy place to dispose of the body that the murderer had thought it.
“Look at all the blood on her skirt, Gareth,” Gwen said.
Gareth breathed deeply through his nose and let it out. The murder of a woman set Gareth’s teeth on edge—though the murder of a child would have been far worse. He was grateful he’d so far been spared such a death.
Gwen seemed far more matter-of-fact about the dead woman than Gareth, and even made a motion as if to move down the bank towards the men carrying the body. Gareth put out a hand to stop her. “Stay back, Gwen.”
If nothing else, he didn’t want her to slip on the wet grass and mud and land on her back. She was with child, and sometimes she acted before she thought. Earlier, Gwen’s arrival in the alley had raised some eyebrows among John’s men, but they hadn’t balked at her presence, and they weren’t now either. Maybe they thought women investigators were an odd peculiarity of the Welsh. Gareth himself didn’t care what they thought, but John’s authority was tenuous enough without having additional questions asked about his judgement. Gareth had brought Gwen because he wanted her there, but he didn’t have to flaunt that fact in front of these Englishmen.
She glanced at him and nodded, stepping behind him and allowing him to be the one to haul the body up the bank instead of her.
Gareth glanced at Cedric. “Who found her?”
“One of the town boys we sent to look along the river,” Cedric said. “Someone would have seen her soon enough, seeing how she was bobbing up and down in the shallows.”
Gareth was impressed. “That was a clever idea. Good for you to have the foresight to send them.”
Cedric gestured to John. “It wasn’t my idea. It was his.”
“Here we all grow up with the river. It’s the lifeblood of the town, and these boys are in and out of the river all day long.” John shrugged, though Gareth could tell he was pleased with Gareth’s praise. “Especially with the warm spring we’ve been having, they can’t stay away. I remembered our conversation from this winter about disposing of dead bodies and thought that if the murderer tried to get rid of the body from the alley that way, we might find her quickly if we looked hard enough. Though—” he amended, “I didn’t know it was a her then.”
Gareth put his hands on his knees and bent to look more closely at the woman, who the watchmen had settled face up in the grass. Gwen looked with him, and said, after a moment, “Back at the inn, I wondered if Roger’s murderer could be a local man because of how the body was oriented east to west. This implies local knowledge too.”
“We have no indication that this girl is connected to Roger,” John said.
Gwen shot him a wry look. “When was the last murder you had in Shrewsbury?”
John rubbed his nose with his palm. “Adeline, I suppose, though she didn’t die here. Before that—it’s been a year at least.”
“In that case, it’s hard to believe that two in one day could be a coincidence,” Gwen said.
“We should assume nothing as yet,” Gareth said, feeling like he was mediating between them again.
John glanced around somewhat furtively. The two watchmen who’d removed the body from the river had been dismissed to find dry clothes, and the others who’d come to watch had moved away to control the few onlookers—or simply because they felt uncomfortable with a dead woman on the ground. At the moment, there was nobody within hearing distance but Cedric, Gareth, and Gwen. “Perhaps we have a third murder to consider. We can’t be sure that this girl is connected to the blood either.”
“I grant you that we can’t be sure yet about her connection to Roger, not without even knowing her name, but—” With a heavy heart, Gareth moved into a crouch beside the girl’s body. It wasn’t that she looked like anyone he knew—praise the Lord—but simply that now he was really looking at her, he saw how young she was. From her unlined face and hands, she was more a girl than a woman. “We can determine easily if the blood was hers by finding a wound.”
The girl’s skirt was stained with blood, but even more, it had been jaggedly ripped, as had the girl’s underskirt. Pulling the fabric aside revealed a gruesome gash in her upper thigh, the tissue mangled and torn, with the remains of splintered wood still in it. It gave Gareth the shivers just looking at it. “I don’t think you need to concern yourself that there’s been a third murder, John.”
John moved closer to Gareth, his expression pained. “The crate slat from the alley.”
Gareth nodded. “A major avenue for blood flows just below the surface right where she was wounded. When a cart overturned in a river last year and I lost my belongings, one of the men went with it. He fell on the rough corner of the cart bed as it splintered on hidden stones beneath the water’s surface and bled out before we could get to him.”
“That’s horrible.” Gwen’s shoulders convulsed with the same shiver that had gone through Gareth, and her eyes were sad. “No wonder she bled so much.”
“That means that whoever killed her and dumped her in the river knows something about the human body,” John said.
Gareth put a hand on Gwen’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’ll find him.”
“I almost don’t want to.” Gwen shook her head. “He must be as cold as Cadwaladr inside.”
“We should get her to the monastery,” John said. “She can lie in the room with Roger until her burial. Hopefully, we will have a name for her by then.”
Gwen felt at the cloth of the girl’s dress. “Her dress might have been pretty before the river water spoiled it and leached the color.”
“She was a pretty girl.” Gareth stood and looked north, his hand shading his eyes as he inspected the course of the river. The Severn River meandered as it flowed, such that it passed the west gate going south, looped around Shrewsbury and the fields adjacent to the town—common land for the production of fruits and vegetables in small plots, each worked by a family in the town—and then turned north.
At that point, it flowed under the east gate bridge and past the castle on its eastern side, before finally turning east again. After leaving Shrewsbury, the Severn continued to meander north and south in long circular loops for many miles until it straightened out somewhat in its ultimate journey south to the sea.
“If the girl ended up here, near the southernmost point of the river,” Gareth said, “she would have gone in the water somewhere upstream, likely near the west gate, which wasn’t far from where the pool of blood was found.”
“I will make sure my men pay special heed to activity or footprints by the river along that side,” John said.
“I don’t understand how the murderer got her out of the town,” Gwen said. “What did he do—throw the body over the wall?”
“Oh—you don’t know.” Gareth looked down at her. “Many of the houses abut the river and have access to it through narrow doorways and gates.”
Gwen frowned. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the wall? What kind of protection can it provide if just anybody can walk through it?”
Gwen had been speaking in Welsh, which John understood, and he made a maybe motion with his head. “People need access to the river. They do their washing in it; they cook with it; the town boys swim in it. Besides, the private gates are inspected annually for their security and sturdiness, and it would be impossible to truly batter any down with a siege engine, seeing how the river prevents access.”
Gwen gave an unladylike snort, as skeptical as Gareth, who’d already had this conversation with John. Still, when King Stephen had attacked the town nearly ten years before, he hadn’t tried to force the river and instead had taken it from the castle side in the traditional manner. So maybe there was something in what John was saying. One or two spies sneaking in a back door could disable the guards at the main gates and let in an army, but that weakness was always the worry for a defending force, regardless of how many holes in the fortifications they had to contend with.
The vagaries of Shrewsbury’s defenses weren’t Gareth’s problem today. They had two murders now, a missing Irishman, who was looking less like a suspect and more like a third victim with every hour that passed, and a murderer who, as Gwen had said, might have a heart as cold as Cadwaladr’s.
Gareth hadn’t thought that anyone could be cold as the traitorous prince. Without a doubt, they had a villain on their hands.