The Renegade Merchant (5 page)

“And you are?” Gareth said.

“Rob Horn, the proprietor.”

Gareth gave the man a quick once over,
noting that the backs of Rob’s hands were clean and unmarred and
that he had no wounds showing on his face. Then Gareth crouched by
the dead man’s side and touched him gently here and there, looking
for a less obvious wound that might explain the puddle in the
alley—just to make sure they weren’t wrong about the cause of death
and that this really wasn’t the body they’d been looking for.

“He wears no purse,” he said to Gwen in an
undertone, speaking in Welsh this time, regardless of whether or
not it was rude or if it excluded Cedric. At other times, Gareth
would have used the next hour as an opportunity to explain to
Cedric how he knew what he knew, but with the innkeeper present, he
felt a need to keep the discovery process of the investigation to
himself for now until he knew the people involved better.

“He could have been murdered for it.” Gwen
leaned in closer to Gareth, also speaking softly. “Or we were meant
to think so.”

“It would have been easy enough for a sneak
thief to have seen him in the tavern and followed him to his room,”
Gareth said.

Gwen tipped her head. “The room is cleaner
than I would have imagined a simple thief would leave it—and look
how this man is laid out east to west.”

“The whole scene implies that the killer
gave what he’d done some thought. This man’s death may not have
been planned, but the aftermath—” Gareth nodded his head as he went
through in his mind the steps the murderer must have taken in order
to leave the room as they saw it now, “—that definitely was.”

“What do you want me to do?” Gwen said.

“Nothing in front of these two.” Gareth
lifted the man’s arm and laid it down again. “I’d put his death
after midnight and before dawn. He’s isn’t completely cold, but
he’s stiff.” Gareth looked up at the innkeeper and returned to
English. “I gather this man was a guest? Can you tell me his
name?”

After a dismayed glance at Cedric, Rob said,
“He wasn’t a guest.”

“We both know him well,” Cedric added. “His
name is Roger Carter, and he is one of the most important men in
Shrewsbury.”

Gareth

“
T
his man was Adeline’s betrothed?”
Gareth gazed at the body as if seeing it for the first time. He was
having trouble accepting the way his two worlds had just
collided.

“Yes, my lord,” Cedric said.

“Why didn’t you say so when you came to get
us?” Gareth swiveled on the ball of his foot to look over at
Cedric, who stood to the right of the doorway.

“I didn’t think it mattered since I didn’t
think you would know him,” Cedric said. “Obviously, I was
wrong.”

Gwen was shaking her head back and forth
repeatedly, seemingly unable to muster up the appropriate words to
convey how she felt.

The questions tumbled over themselves in
Gareth’s mind, but he asked the first one that leapt to the
forefront. “Why would Roger Carter rent a room at this inn?”

“He didn’t,” Rob said.

Gareth sent him a piercing look, at which
point the innkeeper got the hint that his answer wasn’t
sufficient.

“The room was rented to someone else.”

“Who?”

Rob gestured helplessly. “A stranger. Came
two nights ago. Kept to himself.”

Gareth rose to his feet. “What was his
name?”

“Irish, wasn’t he? Could hardly understand
three words out of ten that came out of his mouth, but he said his
name was Conall.”

“Did the proprietor just say that the dead
man was Irish?” Gwen said in Welsh to Gareth, apparently having
lost the thread of the conversation due to Rob’s rapid fire
English.

Gareth nodded, but he kept his attention
focused on Rob. The innkeeper was one of the first men Gareth had
encountered who hadn’t blinked an eye at Gareth’s foreign
appearance or his Welsh accent. And if Roger Carter was on the town
council, his murder would send shock and panic throughout the town.
Gareth didn’t know if that would make it harder or easier for him
to get the residents to tell him what they knew. “Why would Roger
Carter have been in his room?”

Rob shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never saw
Conall but twice: when he paid that first night and when he
returned home the second. He let himself out in the mornings before
the dawn.” His smile was apologetic. “With the tavern, I’m awake
past midnight most nights, so I have others to look after the place
during the morning hours.”

“How many nights did Conall pay for?” Gareth
said.

“Just the two,” Rob said. “I expected him to
have been off this morning—before dawn again, he’d said, so I was
coming to see to the room when I found Roger lying there dead.”

 “Do you know why Conall was in
Shrewsbury in the first place?” Gareth said.

Rob shook his head. “At the time, I thought
it strange for an Irishman to come to Shrewsbury at all, but he
said he had business in the town.”

“Apparently, some of that business was with
Roger Carter,” Gwen said, finding her voice.

Another shrug from Rob. “I wouldn’t have
said so—no word of them meeting came to my ear—not before today,
anyway.”

“Might it have?” Gareth said.

Rob raised his eyebrows. “I own a tavern,
and people talk. If Conall and Roger Carter were doing business,
it’s more surprising to me that I didn’t hear of it.”

“What did Conall say his business was?”
Gareth said.

“Wool,” Rob said.

“Buying or selling?” Gareth asked.

“Selling.”

Gareth grunted. To have an
Irishman come to Shrewsbury to deal in wool would be a strange
thing, since there were already more sheep in this part of the
world than people. Shrewsbury didn’t need more wool merchants, a
fact so self-evident that he’d even heard people say the
phrase
it’s like bringing wool to
Shrewsbury,
to imply that a deed was
unnecessary and redundant. “Did you believe him?”

“There wasn’t anything to believe or
disbelieve. I don’t meddle in my customers’ business. If they pay
and don’t damage the room, they can stay as long as they like.”

“So you don’t know the last time Conall was
in this room, or if he ever had visitors?” Gareth said.

Rob gestured to the body on the floor.
“Other than Roger, obviously? No.”

“You didn’t hear them fighting?” Gwen said,
and Gareth was glad not only that she’d asked the question—since
coming from him it might have sounded accusatory—but that she’d
been able to follow the continuing conversation. Trained as a
musician, and thus already conversant in Latin and French, she had
a good ear. He wasn’t surprised that she was starting to find her
rhythm with English too.

Rob grimaced. He seemed genuinely disturbed
by the death of Roger Carter—maybe not for the man himself, but for
the circumstances. “The common room is loud. Earl Robert’s army
could have been attacking out here, and I wouldn’t have known.”

He genuinely seemed to be trying to help,
which under other circumstances might have made Gareth more
suspicious of him rather than less, especially given Gareth’s
experience with Prince Cadwaladr, who tended to overthink things
and tie himself up in knots. Gareth found it as hard to trust an
Englishman as an Englishman might find it to trust him, a
Welshman.

Still, while it was too early to make
judgements, Gareth found it unlikely that Rob would have murdered
Roger Carter and left the body in his own inn, especially if it was
he who called the watchman. Roger was a worthy of the town. Even a
man unused to murder would have known to dispose of the body in a
far less incriminating fashion. On top of all that, Rob’s hands and
face bore no marks of a struggle.

“Do we have your permission to question your
staff to find out if they encountered Conall more than you did, or
if they noticed when Roger arrived last night?” Gareth said.

Rob gestured with one hand. “I have no
objection.”

“Did you arrange Roger’s body this way, or
was he like this when you arrived?” Gwen said.

“He was like this.”

“Did you have guests in the other rooms last
night?” Gareth said.

“I had two merchants passing through with
their apprentices, who slept in the stable. The merchants attended
a guild meeting that didn’t break up until after midnight. The
apprentices spent the time until their masters returned in the
common room. They all left this morning early, like they’d planned.
Heading east, I think.”

Gareth groaned inwardly. If he rode from
Shrewsbury this very instant, it might be possible to track them
down, but if they’d taken a side road, it would be wasted effort.
If they were guilty of murder, he would regret letting them go, but
it was too long a shot. And in truth, not his problem, as he needed
to remind himself again. He was helping out—standing in for John
Fletcher who hadn’t yet arrived. This was neither Gareth’s
investigation nor his problem.

Gwen, however, either didn’t see it that
way, or had forgotten it, and said to Gareth. “Our first step,
then, appears to be to track down Conall.”

Gareth looked again at Rob. “Can you
describe Conall for me?”

Rob snorted. “He looked like a bloody
Irishman, didn’t he? Red hair, freckles, and skin as white as
snow.”

“Red hair like Roger Carter’s?” Suddenly
inspired, Gareth pulled a piece of paper and charcoal from the
inner pocket of his coat and drew a quick outline of a face.

“No,” Rob Horn said. “Not dark like
Roger’s—bright like fire.”

“Long hair or short?”

“Short—cropped to almost nothing.” Rob
stepped to Gareth’s side to look at what he was doing. He proceeded
to answer Gareth’s questions about the size of Conall’s nose and
the shape of his mouth. In a matter of a few strokes of Gareth’s
hand, a picture of Conall took shape on the paper. Before long, Rob
nodded, satisfied. “That’s him, all right.” Then Rob pursed his
lips. “I know you’re thinking Roger came here because he had
business with Conall and Conall betrayed him, but I never pegged
him for either a renegade or a killer, even if he was Irish.”

“What makes you say that?” Gareth said.

“He liked to laugh,” Rob said. “Come to
think on it, I thought I heard his laugh in the common room
yesterday evening. I didn’t think of it until just now, since I
didn’t actually see his face. Maybe it wasn’t him.”

“It seems obvious that Conall is the
murderer, but—” Gwen canted her head to one side. “Do you know of
anyone else who might want to murder Roger Carter?”

“Now that’s a question.”
Rob barked a laugh. “But what you really should be asking is
who wouldn’t?”

Gareth

“
W
hat do you mean,
who wouldn’t
?” Gareth asked this
question even though he might have made a good guess on his own,
just from the little he’d heard about Roger Carter from John
Fletcher. Gareth distinctly remembered John mentioning that,
although Roger had achieved a certain stature in the town, he had a
temper. For that reason, few had been surprised when Adeline had
run away rather than marry him. Gareth, however, wanted to hear Rob
say that himself.

Instead, Rob shook his head and looked down
at his boots. “I hate to speak ill of the dead.”

This was no time for mincing words. “The man
was murdered,” Gareth said. “If we are to find Roger’s killer, we
must know the truth about him, and the only way we’re going to find
that out is if you, and everyone else, tells it to us.”

Rob still didn’t seem to want to speak, so
Gareth turned to Cedric, eyebrows raised.

Cedric wrinkled his nose, his eyes on Rob,
and then shrugged. “Rob’s right. Roger had enemies. Many, in
fact.”

“Why would that be?” Gareth said, again
feigning ignorance.

Cedric cleared his throat and then said very
clearly, as if reciting a Latin lesson. “Because he was a son of a
bitch and a bastard.” Then he looked sheepishly at Gwen, though she
might not have even understood the English profanity, and added,
“or so my father says.”

Gareth assumed that Cedric didn’t mean
either of those epithets literally and waited patiently for either
Cedric or Rob to elaborate.

Finally, Rob sighed. “Cedric’s right. Roger
Carter had a cruel streak and a temper. When he was in a foul mood,
woe to the man who stood in his way. From what I heard, he beat his
apprentice every other day for his mistakes or for not doing
exactly as he was told—or maybe even because Roger liked it.”

Cedric nodded. “I heard that Roger was
elected to the town council because the other members were afraid
of him.”

“He threatened them?” Gareth said.

Rob shrugged. “Maybe not in so many words,
but he is rich and influential.”

“Influential with the sheriff?” Gareth
said.

Cedric shook his head. “Not him. The Lord of
Ludlow thinks highly of him and his work, however.”

“I have to admit, his carts don’t lose
wheels often,” Rob said, “and if they do, he fixes them for no
charge. He is rigid, but when he says he will do something, he does
it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought a man could become
rich as a cartwright,” Gwen said.

“It isn’t the carts but the carriages,” Rob
said. “When the Lord of Ludlow orders a fine carriage for his wife
and Roger makes him one fit for a king, more orders follow. He made
one for Robert of Gloucester earlier this year.”

“Robert of Gloucester supports Empress
Maud,” Gwen said, “and this city stands for King Stephen.”

Rob quirked one eyebrow. “Money is money,
miss. It doesn’t matter who buys a man’s goods as long as someone
does. We were for Maud before we were for Stephen, and the Earl is
as good as his word and pays well.”