127 - The Sunroom Assailant, the Aftermath
Leonardo, who said he wanted to hear the story from the manager, was guided to a reception room in a separate building. The main building was open as a lodging facility, but the separate building seemed to be used as the office of Cidur the manager and as a break room for employees. Since the facility was originally remodeled from a mansion, there was almost no difference in interior decoration. But perhaps because it was intended as a work space, the impression was that opulence had been restrained.
"Originally, I should have come to you to explain the situation..."
"We prioritized seeing my sister's face first. That is not your fault."
Leonardo stopped Cidur, who had started with an apology, and prompted him toward the main topic. Skipping formalities might have been a problem if the other party was a noble or royalty, but Cidur was a merchant, and Leonardo, though a knight, was a commoner. Their thinking likely aligned that spending time on greetings would be a waste. The two of them quickly finished the greetings and sat down in chairs.
"...Will you let the young lady hear this as well?"
Looking at me sitting next to Leonardo, Cidur furrowed his brows skeptically. Since I had been told by a pharmacist from the Sedovara Church to rest quietly, I had been obediently staying in my room, but it seemed the fact that none of the subsequent investigation findings had reached me was due to my age or something similar. Certainly, under normal circumstances, this might not be the kind of story to tell a nine-year-old child.
"I brought her because she said she wanted to hear it."
"Is that so."
After that, the conversation proceeded between the adults. Since a child's interjections would basically only be a nuisance, I quietly just listened to the two of them talk. I only spoke when occasionally asked a question or when my agreement was sought.
The story began with me being picked up by a suspicious person in the sunroom and Kalisa immediately taking me back, then moved to what happened while I was unconscious. Black Knight guards and hotel security chased the fleeing culprit, and during that time I was carried to my room. By the time the pharmacist from the Sedovara Church arrived, Ethel appeared in the sunroom with Diet, and upon learning of the commotion, Ethel apparently lent me his attendants Yahachi and Okin, who were skilled in stealth operations.
...So they really were here. The windmill person and the bath person.
The Black Knights and security guards had confidence in their physical strength and combat ability, but once the culprit escaped into the complicated back alleys, they apparently could not catch him. Putting aside the security guard who lived in Lagarette, it seemed the Black Knights, who were not familiar with the local geography, had difficulty tracking the culprit.
In the end, it was Ethel's attendants who found the young man believed to be the culprit. Yahachi, who had been searching for the culprit all night, found a corpse with a broken arm floating in the river. Around the same time, Okin, who had been conducting interviews separately from Yahachi, apparently traced the identity of the dead young man.
The young man apparently worked at a shop that supplied meat to the hotel's restaurant. According to the shop manager's testimony, the young man had a diligent work attitude and did not seem at all like the kind of person who would get involved in kidnapping. So then why did such a young man do it... but apparently, the young man's fiancee had not returned home since the previous day. That fiancee had also been found discarded in an alley trash bin as a corpse bearing traces of assault.
...His fiancee was taken hostage, and he was forced to help with the kidnapping?
Based on the information available at this point, this was about as much as I could think of. Nothing particularly convoluted or unexpected. But there was one thing I could be certain of.
...The real culprit is someone else entirely, right? This.
If the young butcher had been alive, it might have been considered a lone perpetrator. But with the young man dead and his fiancee also dead, it felt more fitting to think they were used and then silenced by murder. Of course, this very line of thought could also be a red herring planted by the true culprit.
Perhaps thinking I was worried from furrowing my brow with a "hmph," Leonardo's large hand reached out and pulled me close, so I decided to indulge without reservation.
"...So in the end, the reason Tina was targeted remains unknown."
"To be precise, it is unclear who exactly was targeted. That sunroom has been used as a play area for the young lady and her friends since a few days ago."
"Is that girl from a family that could be a kidnapping target?"
To Leonardo, who tilted his head in puzzlement, I looked up, thinking this was a topic I could chime in on. The noble lord himself had said it, so there was no mistake.
"Basilia-chan is apparently the daughter of Lagarette's noble lord."
"To be precise, she is the daughter born from his mistress."
Cidur added information to my overly simple explanation. Basilia had been mostly ignored by her father, who only paid child support to his commoner mistress, but since she was close in age to Prince Dietfried, she had recently been taken into the main household and had just begun her education as a noble's daughter. As a result, she still strongly retained the habits and speech patterns of someone raised as a commoner, and was a somewhat rough-mannered girl.
"Basilia-chan is a little... a little? She might be a bit rough, but she has not seemed that bad lately...?"
At Cidur's rather harsh assessment, I found myself taking Basilia's side. I wanted to deny that she was as rough as all that, but the first thing that came to mind was the water-splashing incident from our first meeting, and it could not be said she was a demure girl by any flattery. When I fell silent with a troubled expression, Leonardo must have sensed something. He asked if she had done something to me.
"...Kalisa protected me, so I was fine, you know? I got back at her properly, and I made her cry and apologize too."
"You made her cry..."
"Tina is Tina wherever she goes, as always," Leonardo said, lightly holding his head. I felt like it was not exactly praiseworthy behavior, but being exasperated felt different too. As I was thinking about what to say, Cidur corrected the topic that had started to drift sideways.
"Since his daughter may have been targeted, the noble lord is also searching for the culprit."
"...Did he not neglect her?"
After hearing that he had neglected her as a mistress's child, hearing that he was putting effort into finding the culprit because Basilia might have been targeted felt a little inconsistent. As I tilted my head in puzzlement, Cidur explained that the noble lord was an easygoing person, but had a nature that showed no mercy to those who opposed him. Of course, Cidur himself had no intention of letting the culprit who had sullied his lodging facility, whose selling point was safety, get away either.
With that reassuring declaration that they would absolutely identify the culprit and the connections behind them, we asked them to continue the investigation and left the reception room.
When we returned to the room, Diet and Basilia were not there. According to Kalisa, who had been tasked with looking after them, they had apparently gone home, saying that with Leonardo back, there was no longer any need to forcibly stay in the room.
It was the moment this room finally became a space where I could truly relax. Until now, it had not been a space where I could feel completely at ease and unwind, whether because my guardian was absent or because children I did not get along with had taken up residence.
Waiting for Leonardo to finish washing off the dust and sweat of travel, I hugged him with all my strength when he returned to the living room. Pain shot through my left shoulder and arm again, so it was a one-armed hug. In any case, my feelings of "welcome home" were bursting forth, and I think even I was amazed at how giddy I was. After calming down from a good round of hugging, I sat closely next to Leonardo as he settled onto the couch, sticking to him like glue. Even Leonardo gave a wry smile at my unprecedented clinginess.
"...How did you spend your time while I was away?"
"For the most part, Diet barged in and was a nuisance?"
When I thought back on my stay during Leonardo's absence, terrifyingly enough, I could only remember Diet. I had encountered him right after seeing Leonardo off, and he had shown up almost every day since. There were a couple of days he did not appear, but after that he kept showing up again, so it was almost every day.
"Oh, speaking of which, I went to the city's art gallery to escape from Diet, and there I met Basilia-chan's father."
Remembering that he had rather persistently invited me to his mansion, I reported it as an aside. I told him I had of course refused the invitation.
"He said he was an acquaintance of Leo. Do you know him?"
"...He is a passing acquaintance, I suppose."
Finding his evasive wording suspicious, I asked about it, and apparently there had been various issues when Leonardo was in the capital. It seems he even competed with Siegwald over who would adopt Leonardo as a son.
...When Leonardo was in the capital, that was around the time it became the trigger for him to escape to Grenore because relationships became troublesome?
I thought the betrayal by his fiancee was the final straw, but since even Siegwald apparently wanted to adopt Leonardo as a son, he must have genuinely gotten fed up with human relationships. Simply thinking about it, having two potential adoptive fathers appear would be bewildering. And when one was a silver-white knight and former commander of the knights, and the other was a territorial lord with a large city as his domain, there were probably all sorts of schemes and agendas beyond just the individuals themselves.
...Leo is popular in a bad way too.
Feeling a little sorry for him, I scooped up some of Kalisa's pudding with a spoon and brought it to his mouth.