The Renegade Merchant (11 page)

And secondly, his father was at peace with
both King Stephen of England and Robert of Gloucester. If Cadwaladr
had sought sanctuary with either party, despite Hywel’s personal
desires, he had sense enough not to jeopardize that peace with
ill-considered action.

Like a cat stalking his prey or a snake
lurking in the grass, Hywel could bide his time, waiting for the
opportune moment. And then he would strike.

Gareth

“
T
his 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.”