Eye of the Law

by Cora Harrison

  He was standing at the back of the tower house, gazing down the sheer drop of the glen, when she arrived. An ugly man, she thought compassionately as he turned at the measured sound of her mare’s feet on the stone road. He had the red hair of the O’Lochlainns, but where his brother Ardal had a head of crisp, copper curls, Donogh’s hair was faded and hung sparsely around a bare crown. Ardal was tall and well made. Donogh was small and barrel-shaped with very long arms and rather short legs.

  ‘B-b-b-rehon,’ he said, but said no more when they met together at the gate into Glenslade.

  How we do rely on words to smooth our daily intercourse with our fellow human beings, thought Mara, hearing her own voice chattering on, commenting on the weather, expressing hope for the good health of Donogh’s wife, Sadhbh, and of his son, Donogh Óg, and of the four younger children. Donogh, in comparison with his brother Ardal, always seemed to be abrupt and ungracious. But if the fluent, mellifluous speech of Ardal had been granted to Donogh, who knows what difference this might have made.

  ‘I just want to talk to you, Donogh, and to Donogh Óg, about this young man from Aran who was murdered. Shall we go inside?’

  He opened the door silently and ushered her into a small chamber just inside the entrance. Mara was surprised. This room would normally be just used to receive goods from a messenger or to talk to an unimportant guest. She would have expected Donogh to take her upstairs to the hall and to offer refreshment. However, this suited her better. She still had to visit Lemeanah and then go on to Poulnabrone so the shorter her visit to Glenslade the better. She seated herself on a hard stool near to the window and turned to him.

  ‘You were there at Lemeanah for the wedding feast,’ she asserted. No point in any unnecessary questions. He was there; she had seen him herself. She hardly waited for his nod before she went on. ‘Were you told of the young man’s, of Iarla’s, claim to be the son of your brother Ardal?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Who told you about it?’ This time she would have to have an answer from him.

  ‘N-n-not Ardal.’ There was a world of resentment in his voice, but this did not surprise her.

  ‘Liam?’ She raised her eyebrows enquiringly, but he shook his head.

  ‘Who then?’ The question was blunt, but she had many more to ask and could not afford to waste too much time.

  He thought about this for what seemed like a long time, almost as if he had actually forgotten who had brought the information to him.

  ‘P-p-porter,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I see.’ No wonder that he looked angry. Ardal should really have made time to see Donogh himself, but no doubt he was so bowled over by the news that he had not afforded his brother the careful courtesy which marked his normal behaviour.

  ‘Have you heard that Iarla was found dead outside Balor’s Cave on Thursday?’

  He hesitated for a long time, but that need not have significance. She had noticed on a previous occasion how he often sought for a word that he could pronounce without embarrassment. Eventually, however, he just nodded.

  ‘So what I am doing now is going around and asking everyone if they saw Iarla on that morning from sunrise onwards.’ Mara’s tone was brisk and businesslike, and when Donogh didn’t reply, she continued quickly. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘H-how do you know that he was killed in the morning? Could have b-been the n-night b-before.’

  That was a long sentence from Donogh and Mara tried to show that she was giving it her full consideration.

  ‘Malachy did examine that body,’ she explained carefully. ‘From the degree of stiffening he is sure that the young man was killed that morning.’

  ‘Malachy is a fool.’

  The short sentence was rude and ungracious, but Mara persisted.

  ‘Why do you think that Iarla might have been killed the night before? Did you see or hear anything?’

  He looked at her shrewdly. He had all his wits about him, thought Mara. He was reputed to be, like his brother Ardal, an excellent farmer. It was a shame that something could not have been done about that terrible stammer while he was still a child. It seemed unfair that this had deprived him of the chance to be taoiseach and allowed his younger brother to supersede him.

  ‘I heard him, I heard Iarla, near B . . . near the cave last night. Talking to Ardal.’

  ‘Really? Ardal didn’t mention that. I must ask him about it.’

  Was he suggesting that Ardal murdered his putative son? She eyed him with sympathy. She could just imagine his life as a child. How galling to be always put in the second place by this gifted younger brother of his. What an insult that Ardal had been elected by the clan as the tánaiste, subsequently taoiseach, when he, Donogh, was the eldest son.

  ‘So, where were you yesterday morning, Donogh?’ Mara purposely made her voice light, yet decisive.

  ‘H-here.’ Now his voice was sullen.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Checking the stock on B-B-Baur South.’

  ‘Was there anyone with you?’

  He shook his head wordlessly. Of course, checking stock was a one-man duty, just a leisurely saunter through fields and lanes counting cows. There would have been no one with him. Mara’s interest sharpened. Baur South was quite near to the caves at Kilcorney. She was beginning to wonder about Donogh. Perhaps her scholars were right. This unexpected late arrival with a claim on Ardal’s fortune might be of consequences to the family at Glenslade.

  And then Donogh Óg came in.

  He wasn’t as handsome as Ardal, but he had the same form, the same crisply curling copper hair, not quite the breadth of shoulder, the height of forehead, nor the charm of Ardal’s smile, but nevertheless very much more handsome than his father. Donogh, Mara noticed, was smiling at his son with an air of worship. In her experience parents of adolescent sons often found them quite a trial, but obviously this father adored his fine-looking son.

  Donogh Óg greeted Mara with a ready smile; he and his brothers were companions of the older boys at the law school and spent nearly every weekend either at Glenslade or at Cahermacnaghten.

  ‘Eoin MacNamara was telling me that there were some wolves heard in that pine forest between you and Sliabh Elva, Brehon,’ he said after the opening salutations. ‘He’s getting a hunting party up for tomorrow afternoon. Do you think that Fachtnan and the others would like to come with us?’

  ‘You can ask them yourself at Poulnabrone this afternoon. That is if you are coming . . .’ Mara allowed her sentence to end on an interrogative note.

  Donogh looked quickly at his son, but Donogh Óg seemed unperturbed.

  ‘I’ll leave that to my father,’ he said with an attractive grin. ‘I find these things drag a bit. I’ll be busy anyway at the quarry. You will ask them, though, won’t you, Brehon?’

  ‘I’ll have more important things on my mind than hunting this afternoon.’ Mara tried to make her voice sound severe, but could not help smiling at his shocked face. Then she relented; after all to an eighteen-year-old boy hunting was important. ‘But I will try to remember. Anyway, Donogh, while you’re here, you can perhaps help me. I’m trying to trace the movements of Iarla, the man from Aran, on Thursday morning. No one seems to have seen him after he had his breakfast at Lissylisheen.’

  Donogh’s smiling boyish face hardened a little. It was hard to say exactly how the change came – perhaps a slight tautening of the muscles in the cheeks, a veil over the sparkle in the blue eyes – whatever it was, Mara strongly sensed a quivering alertness from the boy.

  ‘No,’ he said in a voice that strove to sound normal. ‘No, why should I?’

  ‘I thought perhaps that you might have gone over to ask him to go hunting with you or something. It would be normal behaviour towards someone who was new in the kingdom, someone near to your age . . .’ Mara watched him carefully before adding lightly, ‘Someone who was perhaps a first cousin to you.’

  ‘T-t-t . . .’ Donogh had become even more ton
gue-tied than usual, but his son, Donogh Óg, interrupted him quickly, a ready smile now back on his face.

  ‘I might have done, Brehon, if there was a hunt in prospect, but on Thursday no one had planned anything. I spent the morning at Lemeanah. The O’Brien has got me building an extension to his gatehouse and the day before, that wet Wednesday afternoon, I was with Malachy as he is thinking of building on to his house and I said that I would be glad to do the work. I’m good at stone cutting. I met him in the quarry, and we spent some time together there talking about his plans.’

  ‘I see.’ Mara kept her face bland but her mind was working fast. There would be no doubt about the truth of this story – Donogh Óg would know that she could verify with Teige and also check with Malachy and she had heard before that he was a very good builder. However, the quarry between Kilcorney and Caherconnell was very near to Balor’s Cave. If Donogh Óg were carrying stone from there for the building at Lemeanah, it would have been quite easy for the boy to slip over to Balor’s Cave. There was a dense thicket of hazel between the two places; it would be almost impossible to see someone moving cautiously through it.

  ‘I didn’t kill him, Brehon.’ There was a half-smile on his face as if he guessed her thoughts. ‘I had no possible reason to kill him. Why should I? I hardly knew him.’

  No reference to the fight on Monday night, mused Mara as she sedately rode her mare at a walking pace down the road from Glenslade towards Lemeanah. Still that was understandable: why should he involve himself deliberately in this matter? In fact, he had probably only involved himself because his sister, Mairéad, had championed Saoirse’s cause. Boys had fights all the time and often the protagonists were the best of friends the next day.

  Mara passed Poulnabrone while she was still deep in thought. She cast a hasty glance upwards, realising from the position of the sun that she would have to be back there quite soon to make the formal announcement of Iarla’s death. It would have made more sense to have gone to Lemeanah first, as it was nearer to the law school than Glenslade, she thought, feeling exasperated with herself. The truth was that ever since Turlough had presented her with this wonderful Arab mare, Brig, she had become used to galloping at high speed around the Burren and seldom worried about saving her steps.

  ‘Poor Brig,’ she said, patting the pale-gold neck. ‘This is as hard on you as on me. This baby is putting us all out.’

  And then as she thought about the baby a feeling of warmth crept over her and her lips curled in a small secret smile and she passed the meeting place at Poulnabrone lost in a happy dream.

  It was only afterwards that she remembered a dark figure standing there beside the ancient dolmen.

  The bawn outside the tower house of Lemeanah was in a state of confusion when Mara arrived in the late afternoon on Saturday. She clicked her tongue with annoyance. She had chosen a bad time to come. Obviously Teige O’Brien had taken his sheep down from Mullaghmore Mountain this morning; the dry weather meant that the rich grass of the valleys would soon be available for them.

  But before turning them out, each sheep was being marked with a large B, the mark of the O’Brien clan. In one corner, just where the storyteller had woven his tale of the one-eyed Balor and the caves of the Burren, there was a great cauldron of hot tar bubbling above a roaring fire. One by one the sheep were seized by a shepherd, manhandled over near to the fire, held while the mark was stamped on its fleece and then driven out of the gate. A line of temporary sheep hurdles made a path between the gate and an old enclosure about fifty yards away and a group of small boys and girls were driving the sheep along this.

  Teige himself was standing with the enclosure, checking each sheep as it came in. He had a crook in his hand which he used to pull any sheep showing a trace of lameness towards him. Behind Teige, his farm manager was efficiently corralling the sheep into pens and his assistant was doctoring the lame ones. He’d probably manage better without Teige, decided Mara, dismounting carefully and handing over her mare to the harassed-looking porter. She walked circumspectly along the outside of the sheep hurdles. It was strange how careful she was these days, she thought. The consciousness of holding her baby within her had curbed her natural recklessness. Every step she took was calculated and tested.

  ‘Brehon, how are you? You’re looking well.’ Teige strove to sound welcoming. ‘You’ve come to see Ciara. If you can wait for a moment we’ll manage to clear a way for you through the bawn.’ There was a hopeful, but not very convinced note in his voice. Mara was not someone who paid too many social visits; her work at the law school, coupled with her function as law enforcer for the whole kingdom, meant that she had little time to spare.

  ‘No, it’s you I’ve come to see, Teige, but there is no rush.’ Mara seated herself on a large smooth boulder. Her face was bland, but her eyes were sharp. Teige, she realized, did not want to talk to her. It wasn’t just that he was busy with the sheep; normally he was, like his cousin the king, a most sociable person; in any case there was no need for him, a taoiseach, to be undertaking work that any seventeen-year-old could do. She watched him carefully. He seemed oddly subdued now, almost as if his heart was no longer in the work. After about five minutes, he abandoned his role and his crook to his farm manager and came out and sat beside her on the boulder.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it, how these old enclosures are still used when there are no longer houses inside them? Toin the briuga planted a pear orchard in one, Ardal uses another for the lambing ewes on Oughtmama Mountain, Malachy and Nuala live and grow herbs in theirs and you use this one to check your sheep. And of course, I have my law school in another.’ Mara purposely kept her tone light and chatty.

  Teige smiled and relaxed a little. ‘When we were young boys, Turlough and I used to play here. There were the ruins of an old house just here.’ He waved his hand towards the centre of the enclosure and then turned back to her with an expectant face.

  ‘I was just wondering if you could help,’ she said. ‘You see, I have a bit of a problem with this death of Iarla of Aran. The last time he was seen on the day of his death was at breakfast at Lissylisheen. The next time was late afternoon at Balor’s Cave in Kilcorney. You didn’t see him over here at Lemeanah, did you?’

  Teige shook his head wordlessly. He was watching her face carefully, she noticed, but she went ahead in her most confiding manner.

  ‘You can see my problem. If I could account for even an hour of his time it would help me. I just wondered whether he might have come over here. After all this was the first place that he came to on the day that he arrived from Aran. It would be natural that, if he had enjoyed his evening here, he might come to pay you all a visit.’

  Teige’s face darkened. Like his cousin Turlough, he was no actor. However, he managed to contain himself. She could see the sentences behind his eyes – that the man would not have been welcome here, that if he had turned up he would have been instantly thrown out, that Teige had felt like killing him after the near rape of his very-loved daughter; but somehow he managed to stop the words spilling over.

  ‘No, Brehon,’ he said eventually. ‘I did not see the man.’

  The bell was tolling for vespers by the time that Mara rode slowly up the road towards Poulnabrone. She was dead tired and somewhat worried. If she felt like this when she was only five months pregnant, how was she going to manage during the months to come? Perhaps she should ask Turlough to engage some young aigne to look after the kingdom under the supervision of Fergus, the Brehon of Corcomroe. Still, normally it was a peaceful place. This had been a bad year. Making a huge effort, she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and turned her mare in towards the ancient dolmen of Poulnabrone.

  The dolmen of Poulnabrone stood at the eastern edge of the four miles of flat tableland called The High Burren. Four huge upright slabs, each of them the height of a man, supported the soaring capstone of rough lichen-spotted limestone. The field around it was paved with limestone clints, the grykes between them dotted with
primroses, and the dolmen stood silhouetted against the sky, towering above the clints.

  Standing beside the dolmen, in the place where Mara normally stood, there was a man. He was a dark man, swarthy of face and hair. His hands and arms were huge and he had several burn marks on his face as well as the hands. It was Becan, the blacksmith from Aran.

  ‘Becan, how did you get here?’ The words blurted out of her – not like her normal self, she thought critically, and suddenly saw herself as an exhausted and pregnant woman dismounting clumsily from her horse, clutching at the arm of Cumhal and betraying a surprise that the normal cool and collected Mara, Brehon of the Burren, would not have revealed.

  He said nothing for a moment and then just shrugged. By this stage, she had herself in hand, had pulled a few potent drops of energy from her indomitable will and she turned a beaming smile on him.

  ‘It’s good to see you here,’ she said with sincerity, and then turned to her scholars, all looking neat and tidy in their snowy-white léinte, their warm cloaks and well-polished boots.

  Fachtnan stepped forward and solemnly presented her with a scroll. There was a glint of humour in his brown eyes and she bit back a responding grin. The fact was that she had been too busy and tired to write up this case yet. However, she never faced the crowd at Poulnabrone without a scroll in hand so it had been thoughtful of Fachtnan to bring one along. She sat down for a minute on the edge of the rock that lay beside the dolmen. The bell for vespers had only just ceased. She would give a few minutes so that those who were further away might have time to arrive before she started. It seemed to be mainly those of the O’Lochlainn clan who were already there. Donogh and Donogh Óg were there, the younger man chatting brightly to his uncle Ardal. Finn O’Connor, taoiseach of the O’Connors was there with a scattering of his clan members around him. A few of the O’Brien clan, though not their taoiseach. Of course, this murder of a stranger to the kingdom did not concern many, except perhaps those of the O’Lochlainn who had known the reason for the arrival of the young man from Aran. In theory each household was supposed to send a representative to these solemn gatherings, but in fact, unless it was one of the four big festivals of the year, most people were content to be represented by their taoiseach and a few others. However, the sparse number of people gave Mara an excuse to rest for a few minutes and she availed herself of it gratefully.