The Renegade Merchant by Sarah Woodbury Page B

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