fist behind his back. Nothing about this case can go normally, he thought angrily.
‘I don't recall,’ the old man shook his head. ‘No one by that name lives here.’
‘Twenty years ago, the boy moved to the capital to study. Later, he joined the City Watch,’ the earl tried to clarify.
‘Twenty. . . Rocha. . .’ The old man fell deep in thought again, racking his brains. ‘Rocha. . . No one by that name lives here.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘They used to, but that was a long time ago.’
‘Can you tell me anything more?’ Darius asked, his interest piqued. No matter how insignificant the information was, it was better than nothing.
‘It’ll be twenty-five years now.’ The old man glanced between Darius and Rex. ‘We had a plague back then, bandits, and generally a bad time. At that time, there was a family in the village known as the Rochas. They’d moved here a few springs earlier. Just the three of them, as you gentlemen have described them.’ He gestured towards the corporal. ‘Felipe, if my memory serves me right, was a carpenter. He used to help me out sometimes; I even remember that. His wife worked in the inn, but back then that wasn’t anything to boast about. In the centre of the village stood a ramshackle house, as the visitors called it. And the gods gave them a son, and they named him Caim. Only, when the plague came, the little lad was one of the first to be taken by Fate.’ The old man shook his head, and Bleist felt like screaming. ‘Less than a week later, Ines passed away too, and Felipe... Afterwards, he just knelt by the graves all the time, until one morning he breathed his last himself.’ He clicked his tongue heavily. It was clear that the man was speaking of all this with a heavy heart. ‘Then I buried him too. If you’d like, I can show you the spot; I go there myself, because apart from each other, they had no one.’
