Condemned to Death (12 page)

‘Makes sense,’ said Cael dispassionately.

‘The strange thing, though,’ said Domhnall, ‘is that no one, even knowing that a man has been murdered, is willing to admit that there have been finds here in Fanore, even that there have been rumours of finds.’

‘It could be that people are afraid,’ said Finbar in a low voice and then blushed slightly as everyone looked at him.

‘I think that is a very good observation,’ said Mara immediately. ‘Fear is something that every Brehon has to take into account when investigating a murder. Death is fearful in itself and a secret and unlawful killing is something that upsets the whole neighbourhood.’ The scholars, she thought, were taking this killing very much to heart. Cormac was quite a leader of the younger ones and to him Setanta was probably more nearly akin than his own father, King Turlough Donn, whom he only met four or five times a year. ‘Now let me tell you,’ she continued smoothly, ‘about the man that Niall Martin dined with at the pie shop in Galway on the day before his death.’ She looked all around and saw the alert, interested faces – and perhaps there was a hint of relief on them all. Understandable, she thought in Art and Cormac, whose father – stepfather and foster-father – was one of the fishermen. Cian was a great friend of Cormac and Finbar took his opinions from them. If only this murder turned out to be the act of a stranger, not someone known to Art and Cormac for the whole of their lives.

‘Well, the woman who runs the pie shop thought that he sounded – she said “funny” – foreign in some way – perhaps speaking in a foreign language – or perhaps just with a strong foreign accent. I suggested Spanish or French, but she knew these languages and then Valentine Blake, the Mayor of Galway, suggested that it might be Greek, as there had been a ship from Athens in the docks up to a day ago.’

‘Greek!’ Cormac looked with wide, excited eyes at his friends.

‘Unlikely to have much connection with the murder,’ said Slevin while Domhnall frowned thoughtfully.

‘There’s quite a lot about gold in the
Iliad
, isn’t there, Brehon? I remember noticing that. Wasn’t there something about Zeus and his horses’ manes threaded with gold and having a golden whip? And about armour made from gold, wasn’t there? Perhaps Greece is a place where there are large deposits of gold, what do you think?’

The scholars looked at him respectfully. Domhnall was the only one to study Greek at the moment – the others found English, Latin, Spanish and French enough for them. Domhnall, of course, had been brought up to speak both Gaelic and English fluently and had that advantage when he started at law school.

‘So your impression, Domhnall, is that this Greek sailor might have been selling gold to Niall Martin, rather than being interested in buying it?’ Mara was conscious that faces showed disappointment as she said that.

‘I’m not sure, Brehon; both are possible.’ Domhnall, as always, was cautious.

‘But not a single fisherman here brought Niall Martin over to Fanore on either Monday or Tuesday, isn’t that right, Cormac?’ Cian had an aggressive tone as though someone was trying to cheat him.

Cormac nodded vigorously in support of Cian while Art looked apprehensively at Mara.

‘It could, of course, be a fisherman from Galway who took him over. The Mayor has promised to make enquiries and to send a message if he finds anything useful,’ Mara said in response and was pleased to see Art relax a little. He was a very sensitive boy and she wished that there was some way of excluding him from this enquiry, which seemed to involve his parents – and perhaps Cormac, also, though he seemed, according to his very different temperament, to be excited and belligerent. She would keep them occupied with this treasure hunt while she did some questioning by herself, she thought. She delved in her satchel and produced the pink linen tape that she used to tie up scrolls.

‘Domhnall, could you divide up the map into three or four sections with some pieces of tape – use your knife to cut some of the right size. Then each of you could copy out the section of the map onto a piece of vellum from your own satchel. Be very careful. I want to be able to return that map unmarked.’

Once they were all busy, she got to her feet saying carelessly, ‘I must go and find Etain and thank her.’

She had not far to go. Etain was indoors for once, standing looking disconsolately through the window on the stairs at the mist that seemed to be even thicker than ever.

‘Look at that mist,’ she said. ‘I was up at six in the morning and gathered ten basketfuls of samphire and how can I get them to Galway? Not a puff of wind for the sails and even rowing would be dangerous in this weather. Brendan has taken his load on the horse and cart inland, but Galway is our big market.’

‘Yes, when I was at Blake’s Pie Shop yesterday Joan was telling me that she was going to get a regular supply of samphire from you. She’s planning great ideas of pies with golden crust and pale pink salmon in a butter sauce and the samphire arranged like a trellis on top of it.’ Mara watched the girl’s face narrowly as she said this.

‘And she’s a new customer, too!’ Etain showed no sign of alarm at Mara’s reverting to the matter of the pie shop, just sounded disgruntled with the weather. ‘What do you think, Brehon, should I chance it? It’s slow to row the whole distance, but, who knows, the wind could blow all that away before midday and I could come back by sail. At least the samphire will stay fresh out in the mist.’

‘It’s no good asking me about the weather,’ said Mara with a smile. ‘You go and ask Setanta. He’ll give you better advice than I could.’ She pretended to peer out of the window and then turned back. ‘By the way, Etain, I was going to ask you whether you noticed who was talking to Niall Martin, the goldsmith, when you were having that conversation with Joan Blake in the pie shop. Apparently he was there at the same time, was that right?’

‘Was he?’ Etain hoisted an indifferent shoulder and rubbed a finger over the diamond-shaped piece of glass. Her mind appeared to be on the weather, but it was difficult to be sure whether or not there had been a slight tension in her voice.

‘Yes, he was sitting at the side table with a man that Joan thought was a foreigner. He was wearing his wig at the time.’

‘I wouldn’t have noticed him, then. I think I only saw him once in my life. He was climbing over the rocks and I asked Brendan who he was and Brendan said that he was an old fellow from Galway who liked to come and get some shellfish for his supper. I thought it was strange for him to come into a kingdom that was not his own, but Brendan said that the amount that one man took wouldn’t make any difference to the rest of us.’

‘Yes,’ said Mara. ‘The law allows a stranger in a kingdom to have one dip of a fishing net in the stream, a handful of hazel nuts, enough wood to cook a fire … and enough rods to make a bier, though that one always puzzled me as I couldn’t imagine a someone coming into a strange land and being accompanied by a corpse,’ she added and Etain laughed in an unselfconscious manner.

‘It’s strange, though, what you say,’ said Mara, watching the girl carefully. ‘When I heard that you were in Galway at the time when Niall Martin was eating his last meal, well I was fairly sure that you were the one who took him across to Fanore on that Monday, the day before midsummer’s day.’

‘No, it wasn’t me, Brehon.’ Etain sounded quite unconcerned as she explained again that she had only seen the man once or twice and that was at a distance. ‘Better go and have another look,’ she said, ‘that’s the thing about the mist near the sea. It can be here one minute and gone the next. I feel like trying it. I don’t want to lose my market and Brendan is a bit of an old woman about going out in a mist.’ She waved a careless hand at Mara and went running down the stairs to investigate the latest state of the weather.

Access to a ‘productive rock’, that is a seashore where the rocks bear seaweed and shellfish, can add the value of three milch cows to a holding.

D
omhnall had sorted out the work for the scholars by the time that Mara returned to the room allocated to her. She glanced quickly over the grouping for the maps, noticing to her surprise a different order to the usual. Cael was with Domhnall, Slevin with Finbar, Cian with Art and Cormac. She rolled up the original map from the goldsmith’s shop, wondered whether to leave it in the room, but some instinct of the importance of confidentiality made her replace it within her satchel and take it with her. There could, she thought, be two keys to a door, no matter how securely the lock was clicked into place.

Not the best of days for a search, she thought, as she strolled down the road, well behind the eager footsteps of her scholars. There was something quite different about mist by the sea, something strange about the way that land and ocean seemed to meld, a new world where the salt was on your lips and the waves ceased to crash onto the rocks, but just became part of an encompassing vapour, and there was something eerie about the way that the mist muffled the sounds from the voices on the shoreline.

When she came nearer, though, the orange flames from Séanín’s fire formed a glow within the universal grey and she heard his cheerful voice assuring the scholars that he would whistle when he had prepared their meal and that he would guard their boots if they wanted to leave them there with him so that they could run across the strand and splash in rock pools without worry about the effect on the leather.

Mara thought of following them down towards the beach, but her good sense told her that the scholars’ eyes were sharper and that in this mist, unfocused wandering would bring little result. She would be better off, she thought, just to go walking quietly along the road and consider the enigma of this man, Niall Martin. Often, she had thought, the root of a crime can be found in the personality of the victim and in the victim’s relationship with those around him, but Niall Martin appeared as nebulous a figure as the salty mist that enveloped her. Even Valentine Blake seemed to have no idea how old he was, knew of no one who was friendly with him, was only able to give the impression of a rich man who spent money on clothes, on an elaborate wig, which was nevertheless unfashionably long and given the aged appearance of his skin, unbelievably blond in colour. He was called a goldsmith and there had been instruments on the shelves: steel scribing tools, pitch pot for repoussé work, small picks and clippers, but all of these had been covered in heavy dust. It seemed as if, perhaps with fading eyesight, unsteady hands, that Niall Martin no longer worked in gold, but put all of his energies into buying and selling objects made from it.

And, of course, if he were excited about the possibility of a hidden hoard of the precious metal on the ‘golden slope’ in the north-western corner of the Burren, then it was not surprising that he came to visit the place and came back again and again after each new rainstorm.

This murder, thought Mara, may well have been an unpremeditated killing. She could imagine the scene. The gold merchant had eventually found his treasure. He was perhaps loading it into a bag. Someone arrived on the scene. There could have been a struggle, a struggle that would easily have ended in victory for any of the fishermen of the area, with their muscles hardened by daily struggles with the sea from boyhood.

But the temptation to have no dispute over a hoard of gold might have been too great and the fatal blow could have been struck by design.

And what could have delivered the blow? Nuala had not thought that it was metal. The skin had not been broken. Suddenly Mara thought of what every fisherman would have to hand when he walked up the slope from the sea.

The boat itself would be left moored to the pier, or drawn up on the strand, but the oars would always be carried on the man’s shoulder up to the house to remain there in safety until the boat was taken out again.

And a waterlogged oar could perhaps have delivered that stroke that Nuala had described.

But then there was the next puzzling aspect to this murder. Where had the idea come from to place the body in an old boat with no oars and to launch it out to sea? Was it an attempt to get rid of the body by pretending that this was a judicial affair, the punishment for the crime of
fingal
? But Mara herself did not remember any case of it, certainly not during her time as Brehon, and not, she thought, during her father’s time, also.

But there was, she thought, one fisherman who would have known all about this.

Setanta and Cliona were immensely proud to have their son Art attend the law school at Cahermacnaghten. It had been asked for in lieu of a fosterage fee, which, for the fostering of the son of the King, would have been a substantial sum.

And every time that Art came home, he had, according to Cliona, recited his lessons to herself and to Setanta.

So, one fisherman at least, would know that in the case of
fingal
the convicted murderer is placed in a boat with no oars and pushed out to sea and allowed to drift there at the mercy of the wind and the waves.

The sound of an axe coming from the area of the sand dunes attracted her attention, and she was glad to shelve the matter of Setanta for the moment. She had had complete faith in him in the past; she had never had a moment’s doubt in entrusting the care of her little son to Cliona and himself. She could not think, she would not allow herself to think, that he could be guilty of the slaughter of a man just for some gold, which he might find it hard to get a price for. If there was anything that he needed, he knew that he just had to apply to her – she always felt that her debt was unpaid to them for their care of Cormac. Art was a pleasure to have at the law school, sensible, hard-working, intelligent and a great companion to her mercurial son – she would probably have been happy to waive fees for the son of a neighbour, even without the foster-ship relationship, and, of course, Cormac and Art had a very close relationship: ‘
foster-brothers of the same blanket and of the same cup and of the same bed
’, as the law put it. To accuse Setanta would cause a huge breach between herself and Cormac. Determinedly, she pushed her thoughts aside and followed the direction of the axe blows towards Michelóg’s house.

Michelóg was an extremely powerful man. There was an enormous tree propped up against a low bank near to his house. Judging by the rope tied around it and by the tracks through the grey-green grass of the sand dunes he had dragged it up from the beach – some exotic tree with oddly shaped clusters of leaves, browned by the sea, and strangely scaled bark. The axe was high above his head and as she came closer it crashed down onto the wood, causing a spurt of water to shoot up and a large gash to penetrate at least halfway through the trunk. Once again the axe came crashing down and this time the trunk split into two pieces. Michelóg stopped to wipe his brow and then saw Mara standing there. An expression of belligerence came over his face and Mara could understand why. In a windswept kingdom of stone there were very few trees, except in some sheltered valleys. A find like this, no doubt come in from the sea, belonged to whoever owned the foreshore rights – Brendan the samphire-gatherer in this case. However, there were more serious things to think of just now.

‘Cutting some firewood?’ she queried politely and was secretly amused at the look of scorn that he cast at her. Of course a huge tree like this would be far too valuable to be used for firewood. There was a large peat bog in a hollow between the peaks of Sliebh Elva, owned by the clans that lived around it, including her own clan of O’Davoren. It was only a few miles away from Fanore and with a few days’ work as much turf could be cut as was necessary to fuel the fires for a winter. This tree would be used to make a boat, or perhaps a table or something of the sort. She wondered whether Brendan knew of this find and whether there had been any dispute over the ownership.

‘You own a boat, do you, Michelóg?’

‘I do, indeed, Brehon.’ He swung the axe again, now trimming the rough edge. He wiped his forehead, and stood, obviously waiting for her to go.

‘I wondered whether you had ever ferried Niall Martin, the man that was found dead, in your boat; or anyone else from Galway here and back again.’ Mara allowed the sentence to hang in the air as he stood thinking about it, meditatively swinging his enormous axe to and fro.

‘I might have done,’ he said eventually.

‘So that’s a
yes
, is it?’ she said smiling at him and wishing that people would be more straightforward. There was a caution about these shore-dwellers, an instinctive dislike about betraying their affairs to outsiders. ‘When was it?’ she continued briskly.

‘About May,’ he said reluctantly and then suddenly and unexpectedly became loquacious. ‘It was like this, Brehon,’ he said. ‘I had a piece of well-tanned ox hide and I took it to Galway to sell to a leather merchant there. This goldsmith was in there to bespeak a leather case for a ring and when he heard me speak Gaelic he asked me where I came from – spoke good Gaelic himself – and when I told him from Burren, he asked all sorts of questions and he asked me if I knew of anywhere that he could sleep for the odd nights that he spent by the sea. He had some sort of problem, so he said, where the doctors thought it was good for him to sleep by the sea on summer nights, so I told him about my grandfather’s old house and to cut a long story short, Brehon, I had a word with Brendan about allowing the goldsmith the use of it – it’s safe enough in the summer months – and I put a load of clean dry hay up in the loft so that he could sleep there overnight whenever the mood took him.’

‘I see,’ said Mara. This, she thought, explained a lot. She had been puzzled about this coming and going to Galway. It would be unusual to make the journey twice in one day, but if Niall Martin came over with, say Brendan, or Etain in the afternoon or the evening of these long summer days, then he could go back in the morning. I bet that the entire population knows of this arrangement, she thought with irritation, but she said no more. They were a cautious set of people and she had to take them as they were, just go on probing the cracks and gathering information.

‘So did Niall Martin spend midsummer’s eve in the old house by the shore?’ she enquired.

Michelóg shrugged his shoulders. ‘I couldn’t tell you, Brehon. The hay was there for him and a roof over his head and it was up to him to use it when he wanted. I’m not a man to probe into anyone else’s business.’

‘Did you take him across from Galway last Monday?’

‘Do you know, Brehon, I didn’t exchange a word with him since that very day that I was telling you about, in Galway. And you can ask the leather merchant there, if you want to know if I’m telling the truth about that conversation. He listened to every word that we said.’

‘And he was wearing a wig that day, I presume. So I’m surprised that you did not immediately recognize him when you saw the dead body.’ Mara rushed her two sentences together to prevent a denial and, as she expected, there was a short silence while he thought of what to say. When he did speak, what he said was unexpected.

‘To be honest with you, Brehon, everyone knew who it was once young Síle found him. A wig on, or a wig off, doesn’t make too much difference to a person that every man, woman or child had seen hanging around this place for almost a month. Everyone recognized him, but seeing as he was in that old boat belonging to Séan the Shark Slayer’s grandfather – well, no one wanted to have anything to do with it.’

‘And where is Séan’s grandfather now?’ Mara heard the irritation in her voice and mentally reproved herself for it. Nothing could be served by showing impatience and by allocating blame. The community had closed ranks – just like a herd of long-horned cows confronting a hungry wolf from the mountain, they had drawn together and presented a solid and unbroken front to her questions. There was, she noted, a slight look of triumph in Michelóg’s eyes. He would often have been excluded from the affairs of the fishermen. He allowed a long moment to elapse before answering her question and then pointed dramatically to the hillside where the little church stood.

‘Up there, Brehon, up there, he is buried under six foot of good earth.’

Mara nodded at this, but lingered. Michelóg was enjoying his role and she might get some more useful information from him. This rock-solid wall of denials which had met her from the start of this enquiry seemed to have been coordinated in some way, but Michelóg was a farmer, not a fisherman, and he, though of the clan, did not have a close relationship with those who took their living from the sea.

‘So was it Setanta who thought it might be best to deny everything?’ she enquired, bending over to feel the knobbly surface of the tree bark. Where had it come from? she wondered. She had never seen a tree like that in her life and the heartwood exposed by Michelóg’s axe was a startling shade of bright orange. The westerly gale had perhaps carried it from one of the countries discovered by Christopher Columbus, that intrepid Italian explorer who had made Spain rich and had honoured the city of Galway with a visit at the time when Mara was four years old.

‘No, no, not Setanta; it was Fernandez who told them what to say,’ said Michelóg with an air of scorn for her naivety. ‘He said that we didn’t want any trouble. He just went from group to group when your young lad, Domhnall, is it? – well, when he set off, Fernandez arranged it all, told everyone to say nothing. The other scholars were down by the body, they didn’t hear a thing – watching the body, they were, and him stretched out in Séan’s grandfather’s boat, like on a bier.’

He chuckled merrily to himself and then went into the house and came out with an enormous saw.

‘If you’ll excuse me, Brehon, if you’ve finished asking me questions, I’d better get on with this. The quicker I get to work on this, the easier my job will be.’