The Unlikely Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

beside her for
all of an hour and already he knew more about murder than he’d
learned in the dozen battles he’d led and from the men he’d
killed.
    He was ashamed to realize it.
    Whether a man died in battle or of old age,
Rhun had viewed death as a definitive process. But he’d been wrong
about that. Death in battle might be violent, but death by murder
was an evil thing, with darkness at its center.
    “Please come find us when you’ve spoken with
him. Prior Rhys and I will continue to search.” Gwen glanced at the
prior, who nodded. “Even if the others found nothing of interest,
it might be worthwhile to look again. We can’t pass up the chance
that the murderer left a token of himself here. A cloth caught on a
branch or a footprint could help us discover who he is.”
    “You’re assuming the murderer is a man.”
Rhun was turning away as he spoke, but he caught Gwen’s whuf of surprised laughter. Smiling, Rhun continued through the trees
back towards where the dead man lay.
    Gwen called after him. “I was assuming, my
lord. We would do well to remember not to!”
    Still laughing to himself, Rhun waved a hand
above his head in acknowledgement of her comment but didn’t turn
around. This murder had well and truly caught his attention. He
wanted to help with the work. And truthfully, the miller might
respond to his authority better than to Gwen’s. Gwen was the wife
of a knight, but Rhun had met the miller in his ramblings around
Aberystwyth over the last few months, and the man had an attitude
that was common to many middle-aged men: he’d reached a point in
his life where he was sure of the world and his place in it. A
young woman investigating a murder might very well rub him the
wrong way like a cat stroked tail to head.
    The miller hadn’t been present at the
discovery of the body, making it unlikely that Rhun would find him
in the mill itself. But as Rhun came out of the trees near the
clearing, a few yards from where the monks still guarded the dead
man, the miller drove a one-horse cart into the clearing and
halted. Spying the monks, he leaped from the cart and loped towards
the water’s edge.
    Then he caught sight Rhun and pulled up,
blanching. “My lord! I heard there’s been some trouble.” He looked
from Rhun to the monks and back again.
    “You could say that,” Rhun said.
    To Rhun’s mind, the miller was currently at
the top of his (admittedly short) list of suspects. The miller knew
his pond well. He could have killed the man and raised the level of
the water in the pond in hopes of hiding evidence of where the body
had gone in. Prior Rhys had so quickly discovered the exact spot
where the man had died, despite the water level, because Gwen had
been on hand with a working knowledge of what was to be done. If
Prior Rhys hadn’t hastened to bring her to the scene and prevented
the monks from carting the body back to the monastery right away,
much of the evidence that could ultimately point to a killer could
have been lost.
    In addition, if Rhun himself hadn’t known
that a dead body thrown into the water wouldn’t sink to the bottom,
it was easy to believe the miller wouldn’t have known it
either.
    The miller had moved a few more paces
towards the monks, his eyes on the body on the ground. “Is that—?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He put a cloth to his mouth, and
his throat contracted.
    “A dead man, yes,” Rhun said. “Would you be
so kind as to look into his face and tell me if you recognize
him?”
    “Of course, of course.” The miller mopped
his sweating brow.
    Rhun might have read guilt in the action,
but it was a hot afternoon. He should delay any conclusion until he
learned more. One of the monks had laid a handkerchief across the
dead man’s face, and now he removed it.
    “Do you know him?” Rhun said.
    The miller bent over the body for a moment
and then straightened, clear relief sweeping across his face. “No,
my lord. No, I don’t.”
    “Are you