Laws in Conflict

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Let go my arm,’ said Mara irritably to Anthony Skerrett. ‘Let me go. I must talk to him. He might listen to me. He is making a terrible mistake. I must get in there. I must get into his house and go after him.’

  ‘Let her go,’ said Henry Bodkin, who had fought his way to her other side.

  But it seemed as though it was too late. No one took any notice of her. The stone buildings of the city resonated to the cry of ‘Kill, kill, kill’, and the timbers of the door began to splinter. The well-trained soldiers’ iron discipline had collapsed in the face of the mob’s fury and now they fought for their own lives, desperately trying to escape the trap in which they were placed with enemies on both sides of them. There was nothing Mara could do. The noise was too great. Even Margaret’s shrieks could no longer be heard as she stood with her hair streaming loosely down her back and her mouth widely opened in anguish.

  Blake, the blacksmith, was to the fore now and he had an enormous hammer in his hands. He shed his tunic and swung the hammer a few times, as if testing his muscles as well as its weight. The O’Malley called to his men and they began to scale the wall of the tower house, using slightly protruding stones as if they were steps on a staircase and swinging themselves upwards by the protruding drip ledges above the windows.

  Then the blacksmith hit the door. The hammer bounced off the iron studs and he frowned calling for another. A smaller hammer was put into his hand and with that he split a board. A gaping hole, the size of a man’s head, appeared in the door. Other men with hammers and cudgels fell upon door, blows rained on it and it began to crumble. A cheer went up, but then it was followed by a sudden silence and a terrible scream, a scream like that from a banshee, and it came from Margaret.

  ‘Oh, my God, look! He’s going to hang my son himself.’

  There was a dead silence. The noise of blows ceased; no one spoke; every eye went upwards. A gasp ran through the immense throng and then silence again.

  A candle had been lit in a window at the top of the tower house. One of the two casements had been pushed open and the rope knotted to the stone mullion between the windows. With almost supernatural strength James Lynch lifted the body of his son on to the windowsill.

  ‘You’re wrong, Mayor Lynch,’ called Mara into the silence. Her voice had been trained by her father from a very early age, trained to be heard in an outdoor court where hundreds of people stood in a five-acre field. Project your voice towards the stone cliff at the back, he used to advise. She spoke now without strain and without emotion, and the cool, calm tone took the man’s attention. He stopped and leaned out of the window. Walter’s legs were still inside the room. It was impossible to know whether he was dead or just unconscious, but the body slumped helpless on the stone sill of the mullioned window.

  Mara continued. A life hung by a hair; she knew that.

  ‘The murder of Carlos Gomez of Spain was not committed by your son, Walter Lynch,’ she went on. Her voice was pitched at the roof of the tower house and she knew by long experience that the stone there would act as a sounding board and would bounce the sound back to the crowds that thronged the crossroads. Let the guilty take warning; the innocent had to be saved.

  ‘On that night, the night of Shrove Tuesday,’ she continued, just as if she were giving judgement at Poulnabrone in the Burren, ‘many young men went outside the city gates. The mayor kept strict order within the town and no drunkenness or fighting was tolerated there. Outside the city gates was a different matter,’ said Mara, her tone crisp and assured, her eyes on the roof of the tower house.

  ‘Carlos Gomez,’ she went on, ‘was one of those who went outside the gates.’

  ‘Enough of this,’ screamed James Lynch. ‘You’ve claimed to know the truth in this matter. Give me the name of the murderer, or hold your peace while I make sure that justice is carried out.’

  There was a faint sound of splintering wood and Mara made a slight gesture of her hand to silence it and spoke quickly and firmly.

  ‘Carlos Gomez,’ she said, ‘was murdered, but not murdered in the place where the body was found, on the hill overlooking Lough Atalia, on the grass beside the windmill. He was murdered just beside The Green, not far from the Great Gate itself.’

  There was a slight stir, a murmur from the crowd and she waited courteously until it had subsided. James Lynch had turned away and she had to get his attention back on to her. When she spoke again, her slightly raised voice was severe.

  ‘James Lynch, you are a judge without judgement. You claim to represent the law, to act as a lawyer, but you have not studied the law. You carried out a trial without ascertaining the merest facts. If you had examined the body of Carlos Gomez you would have found abrasions on the back of the head, a quantity of fine limestone gravel in the hair around the abrasions and a bruise under the chin. Carlos Gomez was probably knocked to the ground by a blow to the chin, knifed as he lay there and then either dragged or carried to the windmill and his body deposited in that place just beside the windmill where an innocent boy slept.’

  She had got his attention now, Mara noticed, feeling a slight thrill. Mad as the man was – and by now she had little doubt that he was insane – he was as he was said to be; a man of integrity, a man who upheld the law as he understood it. That image was central to his belief in himself and perhaps she had momentarily shaken it. She pursued her advantage.

  ‘And when Carlos Gomez was killed, Walter Lynch was already insensible from the effects of the strong drink that he had consumed.’

  Mara held her breath, her eyes raised. Was it going to work? Could anyone accomplish this impossible deed?

  James Lynch gave a groan that echoed around the street.

  ‘Mad woman; you are mad and bad!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was Walter Lynch’s dagger that killed the Spaniard. A life for a life! Never let it be said that a murderer’s unhappy father allowed him to escape from the gallows.’

  Reaching down he hoisted his son into an upright position. Now everyone could see from the violent trembling of the boy’s limbs that he was still alive. He stood there for a second looking downwards, the noose around his neck, and it seemed to Mara that his eyes found the face of his mother.

  ‘Now may the Lord have mercy on your soul,’ called James Lynch, and looked up towards the heavens above as he pushed the boy over.

  But he was too late. If he had looked a minute earlier, he might have still carried out the execution, but now he did not have time.

  O’Malley’s son, Donal of the Pipes, his ankles held securely by two men on the roof, had leaned over between the parapets and had grabbed Walter by the cluster of curls on top of his head and dragged him up. With one quick movement another of the O’Malleys sliced through the rope of the noose with a sharp dagger.

  And at that moment a throwing spear, aimed with deadly accuracy from the crowd, found its mark in James Lynch’s breast. He toppled over and fell dead on to the street below.

  Eighteen

  Bretha Crólige

  (Judgements of Bloodletting)

  A killing is described as dúinetháide if the body is left in a remote place and the killer does not acknowledge the crime. The penalty for this is double the penalty for an acknowledged murder. The murderer, or his clan, must pay to the family of the dead person the following recompense:

  The honour price of the victim – ranging from one sét for a servant to forty-two séts for a king of three kingdoms.

  Double the fixed penalty for murder – forty-two séts or twenty-one ounces of silver or twenty-one cows.

  ‘I called to say goodbye.’ Mara looked at the figure in front of her wearing his striped robe, coif and cap of office. She had deliberately not gone to his home, but to the guildhall; this was a business matter.

  He gave her his good wishes for her return journey, for her continuing health and happiness, issued an invitation for whenever she was next in Galway, but there was a slight air of uneasiness about him. After a few minutes, she decided to come to th
e point.

  ‘I wanted to tie up all loose ends,’ she said, accepting with a smile his offer of some wine.

  ‘Loose ends,’ he echoed, glancing at her rather nervously.

  ‘Loose ends,’ she repeated. ‘As you might guess, this case of the murder of Carlos Gomez presented me with a dilemma,’ she said, sipping the choice wine that he had provided.

  He looked at her and said nothing.

  ‘I would have spoken out to save the boy’s life,’ she said, ‘but even so, I would not have wanted it to be at the expense of your life. The laws of England make the investigation of crime to be a very difficult one. Only God himself knows all the truth. Man can always be mistaken.’

  He smiled a little at that. ‘But not woman,’ he said with a vestige of his old teasing manner.

  Mara did not smile back. The matter was too serious. A young man had lost his life.

  His face changed. He was good at reading feelings, interpreting emotions. He looked an appeal at her.

  ‘This crime is different to any other crime that I have ever uncovered, and it is different because of the savagery of those laws,’ she said soberly. ‘I am as sure of the facts as I can be, but I cannot find it within myself to condemn you to death by hanging. It has never been part of my brief to take lives; rather it has been my aim to mend them.’

  He looked more cheerful at that, his expressive face lighting up and a slight flush darkening the colour in his cheeks.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ she said emphatically, ‘I don’t want to slide over this deed as if it were a matter of no account.’ And when he did not reply, she continued, ‘I want to handle this as if it were a crime committed in my own jurisdiction. I want you to make full confession and I want to impose a penalty. And I swear to you that if you agree, no word of this will ever be spoken by me after I leave this place.’

  He nodded reluctantly, listening to her opening preamble.

  ‘How did you guess?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘I reasoned,’ she contradicted him.

  ‘I don’t see how,’ he said reflectively. ‘What on earth connects me to the murder of Carlos? I was not jealous of him; he had not robbed me of a girl. His plans to import horses did not trouble me; I was in a different way of business, entirely. I had committed no fault that would allow him to blackmail me or to put me in jeopardy. I was no relation to the Gomez family; I could gain no Spanish gold by his death. There was nothing whatsoever to connect me to this killing and yet you say that you deduced my name by reasoning.’

  ‘Ah, but you see the killing of Carlos Gomez was not the real object of this murder,’ said Mara quickly. ‘The real object was to destroy James Lynch.’

  That alarmed him. He stared at her with an amazed expression.

  ‘You wonder how I deduced that,’ said Mara. ‘Well, I suppose that the answer is partly that the corpse told me. I was, of course, only able to make a very covert and cursory examination of the body, but it was enough to see the gravel and blood at the back of the head as well as on the breast, and also the thick mud on the back of the clothing. Why should it have been moved from the place where the murder occurred?’

  ‘Nobody but James would have laid out the corpse for all to see without even washing it,’ he muttered between his teeth.

  ‘It was a help,’ said Mara evenly. ‘When I saw that gravel, then I guessed that the man was knocked to the ground, on to that limestone gravel path, not far from the gate and then stabbed. The only puzzle was how Walter’s dagger came to be in the wound, because Walter, I reckoned, was nowhere near that spot, but had probably – and this is guesswork – passed out in the room on the ground floor of the windmill sometime earlier.’

  ‘So how did his dagger end up in the dead man’s chest?’

  ‘We’ll come back to that later,’ said Mara. ‘You asked me why you should kill Carlos Gomez, and I suppose you are surprised at my knowing the reason for the murder. But, you see, you and your sister told me the answers to that question. You told me when you displayed your son and showed your huge love for him – you would want the best for this late-born son of yours – but could you even afford to keep that magnificent castle that you had built? Your sister had told me that your fortune was founded in salt. But the Barbary pirates from the Ottoman Empire had stopped your trade of salt importation, and your future now looked bleak. I guessed that unless something was changed that your son might not have a prosperous future. But there was some hope. You were a bailiff and the other bailiff was an old man, unlikely to be elected to the office of lord mayor, so when James Lynch finished his term, then it was almost certain that you would be the new sovereign if he were not re-elected once again. The example of other mayors had shown that vast sums of money could be quickly accumulated for the post holder. But James Lynch was popular with the townspeople, who recognized his integrity and trusted him to do his best for the city. But if only James Lynch could be voted out of office, if only he committed a deed that would make the people of Galway think that he was as corrupt as other mayors whom they had rejected, if only these things could be brought about, then your future could be bright.’

  Valentine Blake was watching her now with narrowed eyes, but she did not allow herself to fear. Terror, she knew, weakens those who experience it. She had to remain strong, remain in the dominant position.

  ‘You are a man of strong affections, all of the Blake family are, I think,’ she said. ‘Family feeling is very strong in the Blakes. I have heard it said that even the women who marry into other families still consider themselves to be Blakes. Once a Blake, always a Blake! And you Blakes find it hard to understand those whose head rules, not their heart. I do believe that you had not the slightest notion that James Lynch would condemn his own son to death. You judged him by what you would do in similar circumstances. You probably imagined that the trial would be postponed for a month or so, long enough for feelings to die down and for a few pieces of evidence to accumulate that would give an excuse for an open verdict to be given. The most the young man would suffer would be a few weeks’ stay in the gaol before his father found that there was not enough evidence to hang him. The abrupt notice of the trial took you aback and you did your best to stop that.’

  ‘And then he found him guilty – guilty with hardly enough evidence to hang a dog!’ said Valentine bitterly.

  ‘You forget the dagger owned by Walter was found in the dead man’s chest,’ reminded Mara. ‘And now we come back to the dagger. I had a number of possible suspects in my mind, people who would have benefited from the death of Carlos Gomez, but the dagger puzzled me. You see, every man, and possibly many women, who were present at the Shrove Tuesday festivities, would have had their own dagger in their belt. It would have been easy, on that night of chaos and drunkenness, for anyone who desired the death of Carlos Gomez to have stabbed the Spaniard somewhere outside the city walls, to have cast his body into Lough Atalia, where the ebbing tide would have dragged it quickly out to sea. It may not have been ever found, but even if it turned up, then it would have been hard for any judge to say what had happened after the body had spent a few days being dragged by the tides and eaten by fishes.’

  Valentine Blake groaned; his head in his hands. He seemed utterly defeated, but Mara kept alert and watched him carefully.

  ‘You see,’ she continued, ‘once I had decided that Walter himself had nothing to do with the killing, I saw the use of Walter’s dagger to be of huge importance. The only reason for the use of it that I could come up with was that someone wanted to injure Walter, wanted him to suffer. But who could that be? The boy was well liked, affable, a threat to no one; Catarina’s attitude to him was of indifference – nobody but his adoring mother could have thought that she was in earnest about him. People like Carlos Gomez, or even Anthony Skerrett would have seen at a glance that he was not a serious rival.’

  She stopped for a moment. The picture of that boy full of life and energy, polished like a new chestnut and gleaming like copper,
came before her and she had to pause for a moment. However, it was now her duty to set the record straight as far as she was able and ensure that the crime was accounted for, so she turned a stony gaze on him and resumed.

  ‘And then,’ said Mara, ‘I suddenly realized everything. I realized that it was not Carlos Gomez, not even Walter who was the intended victim. It was Mayor Lynch himself. This crime was intended to destroy him. If he pardoned or exonerated his son then he would have to resign. If he went ahead, then your popularity with the numerous members of the Blake family would have been enough to cause a riot in the streets and you would have rescued the boy, perhaps shipped him off to Spain for a few years, but probably his position would have been untenable and he would have resigned also. I think you salved your conscience with thoughts like that.’

  ‘I would not have seen Walter suffer,’ muttered Valentine.

  ‘You almost did,’ retorted Mara. ‘Without the courage, agility and sheer nerve of the O’Malley’s son, young Donal of the Pipes, then Walter would have been hanged by his father from the window of his own tower house.’

  She gave him a moment to think of that and then resumed.

  ‘So the dagger was a puzzle. If Gomez was killed by the gate, then why was Walter four or five hundred yards away from the place where his dagger was used? And then, I suddenly saw the solution. You were Walter’s uncle. You were concerned about him. He was obviously very drunk. You didn’t take him to his home because you were afraid that his father would find the boy there and would be angry. But you did what a concerned uncle or father would do. You followed him outside the gate, then you found that he gone into the mill to sleep off his drunkenness. You probably thought that he was safe there, but you took his dagger from him so that he could do no harm . . .’

  ‘To himself,’ interrupted Valentine. ‘Walter was a gentle lad, but he was sodden with despair over Catarina and had been talking wildly about cutting his throat. I was relieved to find him and reckoned that he would sleep the night through. The mill was warm – the miller had been grinding corn earlier in the evening – and Walter had enough sense left to have made himself a bed in the sacks. So I took the dagger from him and I let him sleep on.’