The Twelfth Night Murder by Anne Rutherford Page A

not, my dear. We close up at sunset. Lock this place up tight, we does, or the folks tramping this way and that over this here bridge would rob us blind.”
    “You don’t have anyone to guard it? An apprentice, perhaps?”
Someone who might have witnessed something amiss?
    “Nah, nobody. Our last apprentice worked out his contract, then went home to his family last summer. We’ve nobody since then to stay the night and watch over our wares.”
    “So you don’t know exactly when or where the murder happened?”
    The woman shook her head again.
    “Do you know anyone who may have seen it happen?”
    She thought a moment, her sunny smile disappearing into a rather folded-looking expression that made her face seem toothless, though it wasn’t. “Well,” she ventured slowly, “there’s a pie seller on the bridge who may have seen it. At least, he’s the one who first told me about it. He came in here, all excited-like, and told me the whole story.”
    “Where is he today?”
    The woman gestured vaguely to the north, farther across the bridge. “Just a bit up thataway. He’s always there, selling them pies. Good pies, they are. Makes them himself, and buys his flour here, he does, so I know he has a care for ingredients.” Suzanne thought she might know whom she meant, and they were excellent pies. Though she didn’t know his name, she’d seen him often in her frequent crossings and tasted his wares on occasion.
    “Did he say he’d witnessed the incident?”
    “No, but he had a lot to tell about it he’d heard elsewhere. I figure he knows something.”
    Suzanne’s hopes were not high on that account, but she nevertheless bade the woman good day to go in search of the pie seller who might know something.
    First she had a look at the two nearby spots on the bridge where only a wall stood between the street and a precipitous drop to the rushing water below. At the upstream side what she found discouraged the idea that the murder had occurred on the bridge at all. It was a corner where even in the daytime sunlight was scarce. Tucked away from the roadway, the place was dark at the moment, and at night would be pitch-black. She saw no sconces for torches, nor braziers of any kind.
    It would be the perfect spot to kill someone, but only if one could see what one was doing. And not only was there no source of artificial light here, but she remembered the night of the murder had been so thickly overcast there was no possibility of even momentary moonlight. The buildings to the north and south of this spot were built with overhangs that at three stories blocked the sky in any case.
    Then there was the wall itself. This bridge had taken decades to build during the late twelfth century, and though it was worn by hundreds of years of weather and calamity, it had been well maintained during its lifetime, and this wall was as solid as any in London. Furthermore, it was higher than she was tall. Not that she was so very tall, but even a large man would have had to struggle to throw a person—even a small, deceased person—over it.
    She looked down at the stone beneath her feet, where the accumulation of rubbish and natural detritus was kept to a minimum by publicly paid bridge maintenance. Though there was some buildup of leaves blown from the shore and things dropped by people crossing the bridge, for the most part the area was clear. She looked for any indication of past violence, and found nothing to appear even suspicious. The stone was swept regularly, and drainage was not a problem here. The area was clean and dry, and though she found some very old stains, there was nothing to suggest anything untoward had happened here recently. No blood puddle, no bloody footprints, not even a footprint or scuff mark in the small amount of rubbish directly beneath the wall. Nothing on the wall, either. Nothing about this spot caught her eye to make her think there had been a struggle here.
    She stood in the spot, like in an eddy