A Fatal Inheritance Read online

  And then Cian looked solemnly around all of his friends. There was a slightly scared look in his eye, Mara thought, as if he had suddenly realized how good his arguments were and that an old man whom he had laughed at and regarded as a fool had, perhaps, really killed his nagging wife. Cian, she thought, might not be quite as clever as his twin sister, but he had made his points well for the prosecution.

  ‘I call on the lawyer for the defence,’ said Domhnall.

  Cormac didn’t make at all as good a case as Cian had done. His arguments were built on the premise that Aengus was a nice fellow and would not murder anyone, even someone as nasty as his wife. He was clever enough to read the verdict of the court in Domhnall’s eyes as he wound to an uncertain finish, and then, typically Cormac, decided to play the fool and he said quickly, ‘I call on my witness for the defence: the law school dog. Come into the court, Dullahán.’

  On hearing his name, Dullahán dragged himself to his feet and went to sit obediently at his master’s feet. His mouth dropped open in a wide yawn and his eyes were fixed on the leather pouch that hung from Cormac’s belt, expecting that some tasty morsel, salvaged from the breakfast table, was lurking there.

  ‘Dullahán,’ said Cormac solemnly, inserting his hand into his pouch, ‘bark if you believe that Aengus is innocent.’

  Since this was the latest of Dullahán’s tricks, he barked vigorously and was rewarded with a piece of honey bread.

  ‘I rest my case,’ said Cormac.

  ‘There can, I think, be no verdict from the court before the facts are established,’ said Mara, rising to her feet. ‘I propose that we ride down to Nuala’s place and save Fachtnan the journey. I’d like to hear what she has to say before I do any more thinking. Cormac, put Dullahán back into his kennel before we go. You know that Nuala doesn’t want him trampling on her herb garden with those enormous feet of his.’ And then as Cormac hauled the dog out, she said, ‘I was very impressed by your performance, Cian. We’ll do this again, perhaps make a performance with an imaginary murder case and argue it out in front of the king. I’m sure that he would enjoy giving his verdict.’

  That was a popular suggestion and the scholars all chatted about it as they went down towards Rathborney. Cian and Cormac seemed to be best of friends and were laughing over the wolfhound’s evidence, but Mara was not deceived. Cian was sharp and clever, no cleverer than Cormac, but Cian saw his future as a lawyer, perhaps at the king’s court at Bunratty, or perhaps as a wandering legal adviser for the defence or the prosecution of cases in Brehon law courts throughout the west and north of Ireland. Cormac, she guessed, had no such plans so he didn’t care how well, or how badly, he could argue a case. Quite soon now, Cormac would force upon his parents a decision about his future. The law that was ever fresh and intriguing to his mother bored him. As the horses made their slow way down the path that circled around the stony hill, she meditated on the parting that would have to come sooner or later.

  Nuala was at the door when they arrived. ‘I heard that you were sighted on the hill,’ she said. ‘Come in all of you. Come into my room.’

  Nuala’s room was a business-like place. She had a large quantity of medical texts that she had purchased in Italy, thanks to the substantial legacy left to her by the former owner of the property at Rathborney, and the printed books, ranged on shelves by the fire, were interspersed by handwritten scrolls. There were shelves filled with surgical instruments on one side of the room, and on the other side, where the light would not fall, there were flasks of medicines, all neatly labelled. In one corner of the floor sprawled Saoirse, carefully gluing leaves of dried herbs to a large scroll of parchment, held open with two weights from the scales that stood on a table. The child was writing in the names and the medical use of each herb and all watched her for a moment until the quill was back in the inkhorn, waiting for the eight-year-old to leave the room before the question of cutting open dead bodies would arise.

  Nuala, however, ignored the presence of her daughter. She appeared to Mara to be over-compensating for the grievance that she bore about the way she had been excluded from medical matters by her own father who had been unsympathetic to her ambitions. Fachtnan, when he came in, looked rather uneasily at his elder daughter, but said nothing, just taking a seat close to her, as though to shield her from harsh realities.

  ‘Well, I opened the body of Clodagh O’Lochlainn,’ began Nuala, glancing once only at some notes on the table beside her and then fixing her eyes on Mara. ‘She had been a healthy woman – eaten well all of her life, I would say. The cause of death was manual strangulation, someone with quite strong hands, I would say, and who was standing or sitting behind her. The bruises on the throat definitely come from fingers, not thumbs.’

  From the corner of her eye, Mara saw little Saoirse surreptitiously place her hands on her own neck and then nod wisely. Her mother gave her an approving look and then went on with her exposition.

  ‘The victim’s last meal was porridge and she would probably have died about three hours after it.’

  ‘Porridge!’ exclaimed Mara. ‘Not pottage?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Nuala. ‘There’s no possible resemblance between the two, even after they have been in the stomach for some time.’

  Mara passed over this quickly, for her own sake as well as that of the child at her feet.

  ‘So when did she die?’ she asked.

  Nuala referred to her notes again. ‘About two hours before she got here. About half an hour before noon, I should say.’

  ‘What?’ The word escaped Mara’s lips before she could stop it.

  ‘I knew it; I just knew it.’ Cormac was blazing with triumph, turning around to his fellow scholars in the absence of his dog, Dullahán, with whom he could have done a triumphant dance.

  ‘Did you?’ Nuala was looking at Cormac with interest. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Of course, there are certain subtle signs, the skin colour. The body, as you can guess, Cormac, would have cooled rapidly in the heavy rain, but there are other indications. It was clever of you to notice.’

  ‘I just knew it,’ said Cormac, with a slight grin. He had realized the reason for Nuala’s praise. ‘I am your godson, after all,’ he ended modestly, but with a flash of his green eyes at Cian.

  ‘Anything else that you want to know, Mara?’ Nuala turned her attention away from Cormac and his friend.

  Mara yearned to say, ‘Are you sure?’ but she resisted the temptation. Nuala never spoke unless she was sure. She got to her feet, thinking ruefully that it was a good lesson to her personally about the dangers of speculation before all the facts were established. It now appeared sure that Aengus could have had no hand in Clodagh’s murder. He had been seen by Gobnait going up Ballynahown towards the Knockauns Mountain in the early morning soon after dawn. He had made no appearance near Oughtdara during the whole morning while the three brothers were on the foothills, checking their sheep and their goats. And he had been discovered on Knockauns by one of Ardal O’Lochlainn’s men after Cael had arrived with the message seeking help.

  No, although the crime looked as though it were committed by an angry husband, driven to his limits by an overbearing and foul-mouthed wife, Mara had to admit that it did not seem possible that Aengus had done the deed.

  So, thought Mara, as they rode back up the hill, since Aengus is struck off my list of suspects, now I have to fall back on Pat, with, or without Deirdre; I have Gobnait, also, and Dinan; Finnegas, the fourth brother was probably not a suspect. It had taken him a good half hour, she reckoned, to get from his mine to Oughtdara and during the morning he had been under the eye of his workers for most of the time. But what if Finnegas was the mastermind behind the crime? There was no doubt that he was the sharpest of the brothers and would be the best organiser. What if he had planned the scene of the corpse in the embrace of the Fár Breige in order to lay suspicion on the husband of the dead woman? Or else to hint at supernatural involvement? He had, she reckoned, little to ga
in personally. The land that was his allocation from his uncle’s property was poor land, as each of the brothers had agreed to take the portion of his uncle’s land closest to their present holdings. Finnegas’s riches came from under the ground, not from the grass that grew on top of it. And would any man risk involving himself in a murder that might take from him all that he possessed for the sake of enriching his brothers? Somehow Mara could not see a clever business-like man, such as Finnegas, doing this. And for what; for some barren, mountainous acres, strewn with rocks? Land fit to graze only seven cows, Ardal had deemed the whole four parcels to be worth only that and Ardal was a person who knew about grazing land. So, if Aengus were not the killer, who was the most likely suspect?

  She turned towards Fachtnan. ‘Who could it be?’ she asked. ‘I suppose that of the four brothers, Pat probably had the most to gain as he has a lot of goats, but I’m not sure that he’s the type. I’d say that he is cautious and basically a kind man. Would he choke the life out of a woman just for the sake of some acres of ground? And don’t say that it was the Fár Breige,’ she added hastily as she saw a tentative, uneasy expression cross his face as though he were about to say something that he knew she would not like.

  Fachtnan laughed, but still slightly uneasily. ‘I was thinking about little Orla, I must confess. You could see for yourself what it’s like. You know how Nuala is. From the time she was a child, as far back as I can remember, medicine has been Nuala’s life. And now she has one daughter who is just like her mother. Saoirse is so dedicated, so involved in her work that Nuala has no time for Orla, who is just not interested. I’m worried about her. I was wondering whether you might rethink your decision about waiting for her eighth year before admitting her to law school.’

  ‘I said that I would wait until she turned eight years before I would assess her,’ said Mara shortly. ‘My own daughter, Sorcha, Domhnall’s mother, was quite unsuitable for the degree of study and application. It may well be that Orla, also, is not suited to this life and if that were the case then it would be sheer cruelty to your daughter to try to make her fit the mould. We’ll see in another few years.’ What a time to bring this up when he knows that I am busy with this murder case, was her thought before she continued, ‘Who, in your opinion, is the most likely suspect, now, since it looks to be impossible that Aengus could have returned from the mountain unseen and killed his wife about half an hour before midday. You remember how the brothers recounted seeing him on the hillside in Ballynahown just at dawn.’

  ‘I can’t tell at the moment, Brehon,’ said Fachtnan. He looked around at the cheerfully arguing boys and said, rather poignantly, ‘Those days of being a scholar here, were the happiest in my life. I wonder whether they realize how lucky they are.’

  ‘What do you think about Dinan?’ Mara’s thoughts went to Nuala’s words earlier this morning when she had come to collect the body. ‘Nuala thinks that he is dangerous.’

  ‘I think that she is talking nonsense,’ said Nuala’s husband in an irritated fashion. ‘What harm can those old stories do? Orla loves them. She’s quite a talented child, you know, Brehon. She listens to these stories and draws little pictures about them and they are very clever for her age.’

  ‘How lovely,’ said Mara. It was, she thought, a good way of putting a stop to this conversation without hurting Fachtnan’s feelings. ‘I understand what Nuala meant, though. She thinks that Dinan’s stories might provide a cover for the murderer, who might hope that this murder would be laid at the door of one of the gods of evil.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Fachtnan indifferently.

  ‘I think that it is also just about possible that if a man truly believed in one of those gods of the Tuatha Dé, that he might persuade himself that one of them had sanctioned, and even required of him, that he should murder one who had blasphemed them and made a mockery of them.’

  But even as she said the words she could hear a lack of conviction in her own voice and Fachtnan received her idea in a discouraging silence.

  But as they turned their horses and ponies into the enclosure at Cahermacnaghten and Brigid popped out of the kitchen house to greet them, Mara suddenly thought back to Father Eoin O’Lochlainn. Now he, she thought, might be a more likely murderer than the essentially sane, though imaginative Dinan.

  There had been, she acknowledged, at the back of her mind, the feeling that there was a sexual element tangled within this crime. Cian had been correct in his reading of the scene.

  If Brigid were right, that there had been some sort of relationship between the priest and Clodagh when both were young, then perhaps she had blackmailed him, tried to insert herself into his bed again, threatened to betray him to the bishop.

  A priest was a man like other men.

  And there are, she thought, probably few feelings as strong as when sexual love turns into disgust and hatred.

  Six

  Uraichecht Becc

  (Little Primer)

  There are seven orders of clerics: lector; usher; exorcist; sub deacon; deacon; priest and bishop.

  The wife of a priest must never be seen in church with an uncovered head.

  Father Eoin O’Lochlainn must have been a very good-looking man thirty years ago, thought Mara when he opened the door to her himself the following morning and invited her to come within. He had a pair of very large, very blue eyes, a broad brow and a delicately chiselled nose. There was nothing effeminate about the face; the chin was firm and the mouth well-cut and the thick iron-grey hair was clipped closely, in the English fashion.

  Mara was alone. This, she knew, was a delicate matter. She hoped to induce him to confide in her, but knew that there was no prospect of that if her scholars, or even just Fachtnan, were witnesses to the conversation.

  ‘You wanted to speak to me, Brehon.’ He was eyeing her in a slightly apprehensive manner.

  Mara nodded her head as though confirming the hint of fear in the blue eyes.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ she said. She wouldn’t, she decided rapidly, call him ‘Father’ if she could help it. The less he was reminded of his priestly vocation, of the expectations of the very old and very fanatical bishop, the easier it would be to talk about Clodagh.

  ‘As you can guess, I came to talk to you about the secret and unlawful killing of Clodagh O’Lochlainn, less than twenty-four hours ago.’ She wasn’t sure whether he grasped the significance of the time lapse and so explained to him that it existed in order to give the killer a chance to make a confession and to show remorse for something that might have been merely a momentarily overwhelming impulse. She had seen Pat, Deirdre, Gobnait and Dinan this morning and had explained the same matter to them, but it had not resulted in any new facts about the previous morning.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Father O’Lochlainn, unexpectedly, ‘placed no such limits on his forgiveness.’

  ‘Ah, but we Brehons do not have his divine powers. We do not presume to offer forgiveness or condemnation for an offence. We exist purely to keep the peace between neighbours. If loss is incurred, whether the loss of a life, or the loss of goods, or, indeed, even the loss of face because of satire or mocking taunts, then the Brehon calculates the remuneration needed to endeavour to compensate for that loss. That is our function in the affairs of the kingdom.’

  ‘The church, of course, has always disagreed with you on this. The Bible says that there should be an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; and a life for a life.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very Christ-like.’ Mara was getting tired of this and she could see from the triumphant expression in the man’s eyes that he was pleased to have engaged her in debate. A cross of swords, she thought and then, before he could throw another argument at her, she said briskly, ‘As I mentioned, I’ve come to talk to you about Clodagh O’Lochlainn.’

  There was a few moments’ silence. He didn’t, she noticed, utter any of the usual and conventional, priest-like, holy comments. There was no ‘Lord have mercy on her’ or ‘May she rest in peace�
��. He just sat very still and let the silence elapse, until eventually he said, ‘Yes?’ and the slightly interrogative note in his voice irritated her.

  ‘I understand that you knew her very well,’ she said and watched his response.

  He had great control over his features or else he had anticipated and was prepared for the question.

  ‘You are mistaken.’

  ‘She was your housekeeper.’

  ‘A very, very long time ago, too long to remember anything about her.’

  Mara’s patience snapped. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said forcibly. ‘Of course you must remember. She was your housekeeper. There was some scandal. The bishop intervened and she was married off to Aengus O’Lochlainn, still here in Oughtdara. You probably saw her almost every day of your life afterwards. Don’t tell me that you remember nothing about her. A lie like that will only serve to make me disbelieve everything that you say.’

  He went very white. She saw a flash of panic in the blue eyes. For a moment she was sorry for him. These priests were being forced by Rome to lead unnatural lives. The Celtic church did not enforce celibacy, so why allow Rome to inflict its alien laws on Ireland?