A Secret and Unlawful Killing

by Cora Harrison

  Mara nodded. She had noticed the gaps between the boards, but had not guessed the reason.

  ‘Well, I was looking around, holding the candle, and you know the way it is when you are in the dark and suddenly you see things by candlelight that you would never see by daylight.’

  Mara nodded again, with an anxious glance at the weary face. His voice seemed to be getting weaker, too.

  ‘Well, the water picked up the light and suddenly I saw it shining there. I went down to the lower floor and I knelt down and I could see it clearly. I think I tried to move the shaft, but then …’ His voice faded away and Mara got to her feet.

  ‘You lie down now, Niall. You have told me all that I need to know. Just close your eyes and try to have a sleep. I’ll send Maol in to you now and Fachtnan and Nuala will be riding over later in the morning to see you. Don’t worry about anything, Niall. I will see that justice is done.’

  ‘So it wasn’t young Donal that was the murderer after all,’ said Turlough happily. ‘Well, that is wonderful news. I could do with cheering up this morning and now you have done it for me. It’s always wonderful to see you, but this news makes your visit doubly good.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. She had been so full of her own affairs that she had not noticed until now how drawn and weary he looked.

  ‘It’s Conor,’ he said lowering his voice. ‘I’ve been up all night with him. He’s here, you know. His wife has gone back for a holiday to her own people. She says that it is upsetting to see her husband like this. My physician holds out little hope for him. He is wasting away. It’s almost impossible to get him to eat. And then he gets these fevers and you can see the flesh melting off his bones. I don’t know what to do about him. I try to stay hopeful, but I think that by Christmas I may have only one son left.’

  Mara gazed at him compassionately. She did not know what to say. She wished she could comfort him, perhaps put the bad news aside, but that was not possible. She could delay it for minutes, but not for hours, and certainly not forever. He patted her hand and poured them both a cup of wine.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘let’s not talk about that. Tell me all the news from the kingdom of the Burren and how you have managed to solve these two cases. My mind needs diverting, so go on, tell me everything. The main thing is that Teige’s boy, Donal, is not a murderer. I’m very fond of Teige; he and I are the same age and we were great friends from the time that we were both babies.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said lightly. ‘I do believe Donal was not the murderer in either case. I myself examined the body of Ragnall and I saw the mark over the man’s ear. What I am sure happened was that Donal struck him over the head and then went off. Guaire, the linen merchant from Corcomroe, came into the churchyard, saw the pouch, cut it off, and then Ragnall probably came to his senses and Guaire panicked. He was a very small man in comparison with Ragnall and he would have been no match for him. Ragnall would have been in a towering rage – at the best of times, he was not a good-tempered man and at that moment, with an aching head and a thief with his pouch full of silver in his hand there in front of him, Ragnall was possibly homicidal.’

  ‘So you think that the linen merchant may have killed Ragnall?’ asked Turlough.

  Mara nodded. ‘That’s the way that I see it. Guaire seized the stone cross and hit Ragnall over the head – he may not have meant to kill him, but that was the outcome of the blow. These stone crosses, even the smallest of them, are very heavy. Guaire fled, and then Donal, when he returned later on, found Ragnall dead, and immediately assumed that everyone would think that he was the murderer. He is a very impulsive, impetuous young man who acts first and thinks later. I do hope that Maeve has a brain behind that pretty face as this young cousin of yours has few brains of his own.’

  ‘So you’re going to allow them to marry,’ said Turlough smiling. ‘I thought you would. You have great sympathy with young people. And you tell me Donal wasn’t responsible for the murder of the miller, Aengus, either. In spite of the evidence of the knife?’

  ‘The knife,’ said Mara heavily. ‘Yes, of course, the knife.’ He had come to this second murder more quickly than she was prepared for. She said no more for a few moments while she organized her thoughts. The bad news about Conor was making all this doubly difficult.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she continued, speaking slowly and carefully, ‘there were two knives.’

  ‘Two knives,’ echoed Turlough, looking at her with a puzzled expression.

  She nodded. ‘Two knives,’ she repeated. ‘And each bore the derbhfine crest of the O’Brien clan.’

  She put her hand into her pouch and felt the weight and the shape of the two knives. However, when she took her hand out, it was empty. The knives would have to wait for their place in the story.

  ‘And what was it that Niall saw in the water, then?’ asked Turlough. ‘Go on, have that cup of wine. Yes, do, you’ve had a long ride, and an early start. I bet you were up before dawn. I was barely out of bed myself when I was told that you were waiting downstairs.’

  Mara took the cup and sipped a little to satisfy him. She would have to educate him into a liking for French wine, she thought as she put the cup down. Spanish wine was not to her taste. It was far too rough and the flavour in her mouth was sour.

  ‘Niall saw a knife in the stream,’ she said. ‘He saw the blade and the crest. He could see that it was the O’Brien derbhfine crest. The knife had dropped down through the wide gaps in the floorboards and into the stream. The flow of the water had washed it just as far as the paddle wheel and it had stuck there. Niall was trying to recover it. He moved the shaft and it split, bringing the two millstones down and hitting him a glancing blow on the forehead. So at least his injury was an accident.’

  ‘But the knife?’ asked Turlough, looking puzzled. ‘Was this the knife belonging to young Donal O’Brien? I thought you told me that the little girl, Nuala, had found Donal’s knife on the shelf.’

  ‘So she did. And that knife was stained with blood. And of course I suspected Donal O’Brien. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He had followed Aengus home in a drunken rage. Ragnall had gone to the mill in the morning. He may have surprised Donal in the act of putting Aengus’s body in the stream. I always guessed that was a clumsy attempt at giving a murder the appearance of suicide. This second knife, of course, had no blood on it because it had spent more than a week in the water. Nevertheless, it did have the blood of Aengus MacNamara on it, because this was the knife that killed him.’

  ‘I’m getting muddled up,’ said Turlough good-humouredly. ‘Start at the beginning! What happened about the miller?’

  ‘Well, to start at the beginning,’ said Mara patiently, ‘Donal O’Brien followed Aengus the miller to Oughtmama on the night of Michaelmas Eve. He punched Aengus; Aengus hit him with his stick and knocked him out.’

  ‘So, did Aengus drown himself then out of remorse?’ said Turlough flippantly. She could sense that part of his mind was still concentrated on his very sick son.

  ‘No,’ replied Mara. ‘Aengus did not drown himself. He was not, perhaps, a very pleasant character. He left Donal lying there unconscious from a blow from a very heavy stick and he went off to amuse himself in the way that he often spent his evenings. After he returned from vespers at the abbey, of course,’ she added lightly.

  Turlough grinned. ‘A secret drinker, eh?’

  ‘No, I think sex interested him more than drink,’ said Mara dryly. ‘There is an old stone building there at Oughtmama. It belonged to the abbot in the days when Oughtmama was an abbey. It’s in a pretty good state of repair; my lads discovered a little love nest there with its pile of sheepskins and a couple of rather fine wine cups.’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ said Turlough, tossing back his wine and pouring himself another cup. Mara wished that he would listen more seriously, but she had begun her story now, and she could not change its course.

  ‘The lovers had met there very often,’ she continued, ‘bu
t this was, I’m sure, the first time that they were aware that they had been seen. The woman probably stayed in the house, but the man went after Aengus. Aengus fled to the mill house. He managed to get through the door, I reckon, but not to shut it, before his pursuer drew his knife and cut the miller’s throat. You see,’ she said simply, ‘this man was in a position where he dared not have his wife hear of an affair with another woman.’

  Turlough stared at her with a puzzled expression on his face. He replaced the wine cup on the table. Divorce and relationships outside marriage were common in the Gaelic society, although very frowned upon among the English and Anglo-Irish portions of the country. Mara waited. She could see that he was beginning to understand. Eventually he spoke.

  ‘You said two knives.’ The smile had gone from his lips and his face was taut with tension.

  Mara reached into her pouch and took out first one knife and then the other. Both bore the crest of the O‘Brien derbhfine. The first was a hunting knife with a few jewelled stones embedded in the hilt and an enamel oval set well into the handle. In the centre of that oval were the three lions of the O’Brien crest. The second knife was more ornate. The hilt was made from silver and in its centre, surrounded by an oval line of small jewels, was a medallion made from dark blue lapis lazuli, and set within the vivid blue were the same three small lions carved from rubies.

  Turlough leaned over and picked up the second knife and held it in his hand. He looked at it for a long moment and then raised his eyes to hers. For the first time in their relationship, she found it impossible to read those eyes. Normally she had seen them blazing with fun, or with tenderness, though occasionally they had been alight with anger, but never had she seen them as today, dulled over and unreflective like the surface of the brown peat water on a foggy morning.

  ‘Is that knife belonging to your son, Murrough?’ she asked, looking at him very directly.

  He made no reply, just looked at her and signed to her to go on.

  ‘Murrough has been hanging around Carron, flirting with the MacNamara’s wife, Slaney, as you know,’ she said bluntly. ‘We talked about it, you and I, you remember? We laughed about it. Neither of us took it very seriously. You probably said to yourself something like: “restless are a young man’s desires”, as Fíthail puts it. We thought of it as just a little fling – a certain attraction on his side and perhaps on hers, also, and certainly desire for a higher position on the part of Slaney.’ She smiled at him, but he did not respond. His face looked dead. She put out her two hands and took one of his between them.

  ‘The thing is, Turlough, that it was serious. Looking back on it, I realize that Slaney was completely enamoured of him, and perhaps he with her. I don’t know. All I know is that they were meeting, perhaps on a daily basis. I should have guessed when I met her, one day, outside Carron Castle, that she was returning from Oughtmama, and Cumhal had met Murrough less than an hour previously coming from the same direction. I thought nothing of it at the time, but afterwards it came back to me. When I began to puzzle it all out, I realized that they were continually meeting – not at Carron, of course, except for public occasions, but at Oughtmama, somewhere among those ruined stone buildings. And then everything began to become clear to me. You see, I lost my way for a while in the solving of these crimes, by spending too long trying to find a connection between the two murders.’

  She thought back to that moment at Lemeanah when Shane and Hugh were pretending to search for baby swallows. She smiled slightly at the memory of Donal’s uncomprehending face when she had voiced her thoughts, saying: It’s a mistake to spend too long searching for something that doesn’t exist. She looked back at Turlough. His face bore the look of a man who had suddenly received a bad shock. She let go of his hand, waiting patiently for him to speak, looking at him with pity in her glance.

  There was a sound of loud laughter from out in the courtyard where some carefree young men were burnishing their swords. It made the silence in the room seem by contrast to be especially heavy. If only I did not have to do this to him, thought Mara. Perhaps I could have allowed this murder to go unsolved. After all, Donal had no idea of who had killed Aengus; Niall did, but he would have been prepared to keep silence if the mill had been given to him. That could have been the solution. Go to Poulnabrone; say that I found Niall to be the true son of Aengus the miller, and that Guaire, the linen merchant from Corcomroe, had killed Ragnall and that perhaps Ragnall had killed Aengus. Would that have satisfied everyone? Probably, it would have. And then I would not have to inflict this pain on a man that I esteem so much, for whom I have so much affection. No one would have cared.

  But I, she thought, I would have cared. I could not keep silence. She leaned forward and once again took one of his immense hands between hers.

  ‘Turlough,’ she said steadily, ‘Murrough, your son, killed Aengus the miller. He killed him because Aengus saw the two of them, Slaney and Murrough. They used the abbot’s house at Oughtmama for their meetings. I saw the room, with the sheepskins piled high in the corner and the brazier filled with charcoal. I saw the quality of the wine cups there, hidden beneath the sheepskins. They were made from silver. No miller ever had wine cups made from silver. Aengus went there on Michaelmas Eve and found the lovers. Whether he meant to be seen this time, whether he even thought of some blackmail, that I don’t know; but I do know that he had seen them before. You see, Aengus had previously told Niall of his suspicions. He was an inquisitive old man who meddled with what did not concern him, but he did not deserve to die, Turlough.’

  ‘You say all this to me,’ said Turlough, through dry lips, ‘but you haven’t given me any proof. Where is your evidence?’

  Strange how father and son used almost the same words, thought Mara, thinking back to the young man who had sat before her yesterday evening.

  ‘Let me just finish, first,’ she said. ‘Slaney would not have wanted Garrett to find out, but, more important, Murrough could not afford to have news of this affair with Slaney get back to his wife. You yourself told me that. Murrough is ambitious and he needed to keep the Earl of Kildare sweet, and the Great Earl, as they call him, would not be a man to forgive an insult to his daughter. Murrough had to silence the miller. Probably Aengus fled back to the mill, Murrough pursued him, killed him, probably put his own knife down in order to clean it, and then, perhaps, saw young Donal stretched unconscious on the floor. He is quick-witted, your son, because he immediately saw how he could turn this to his advantage. He put down his own knife – either then or later on, it fell through the floorboards into the millstream. That is not important now, but what is important is that he took Donal’s knife from his pouch, smeared blood on it and on the torn grey mantle. And then he and Slaney departed immediately. What part she played in it, I don’t know, but she undoubtedly knew.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Turlough. His voice was so low that she had to half guess at the words. He looked like a man suddenly stricken by a fatal fever.

  ‘And then, Donal came to his senses in the morning, saw the body, decided to try to make it look like a suicide, dragged it out and put it under the sluice gate. Probably Murrough’s knife was dislodged then and fell through the floorboards into the millstream. I don’t think that Murrough would have deliberately dropped it in there. Why throw it away when the knife could be easily cleaned and replaced in his pouch?’

  Mara paused and looked at Turlough. His face was now hidden in his hands. She had no way of guessing what his thoughts were, but she continued resolutely.

  ‘Donal told me that he had seen his own knife on the shelf, but had left it there, meaning to wash it afterwards. However, when he heard the cart coming up the lane he panicked and took himself off. Niall saw nothing, but when Ragnall returned with the damaged sack, he picked up, not the knife – he didn’t notice that lying on the shelf – but Donal’s brooch, still attached to the piece of cloth. Unfortunately for Ragnall, he decided to return it to Donal – he knew nothing about the death
of Aengus at the time, but Donal thought he did. So Murrough killed Aengus, for fear of betrayal, and Donal knocked Ragnall unconscious from sheer terror and, though he did not murder Ragnall, indirectly he caused his death, because he left him lying in the churchyard at Noughaval with his pouch full of silver.’

  Mara waited for a moment but Turlough said nothing, so she added: ‘And that is the solution to the two Michaelmas murders. I am as sure of it as if I were there at the time.’

  ‘And what happens next?’ asked Turlough. His voice was very low and his eyes were fixed on the floor.

  Mara drained her wine and rose to her feet. The king did not follow her, but stayed sitting down. She took her mantle from the back of the door and slung it over her shoulders. From outside she heard the sound of a church bell tolling for the midday celebration of the angelus. If she left now, she would have plenty of time to get back to the Burren to meet the people of the kingdom at four o’clock.

  ‘What happens next?’ repeated Turlough.

  ‘At the hour of vespers today, Saturday, 11 October,’ she said quietly, ‘I tell the truth about these two murders to the people of the Burren.’ She waited for a moment, but now he had turned towards the window and his face was closed and without expression.

  ‘And you?’ she said. She wanted to reach out to him, to tell him how sorry she was, but his stony face stopped her. She almost wanted to promise to keep the wrongdoing of Murrough to herself, but she knew that she could not do this. From the time that she was five years old she had been trained to respect the law and to know that it could never be bent or evaded. No Brehon is able to abrogate anything that is written in the Seanchas Mór, she repeated to herself, but found little comfort in the words.

  He said no more. He did not lift his head, nor did he look at her. And so she left him and returned to the Burren.