A Fatal Inheritance

by Cora Harrison

  And, of course, seven years ago, Brigid had been very much younger and could take over the care of these small children when the law school was busy with serious legal matters. Mara would never have dreamt of involving a child of the age of little Orla in gathering evidence during a murder investigation in the way that Fachtnan seemed to be doing by bringing his small daughter with him. She would have to talk with him and settle this matter before the day ended.

  But Fachtnan was not in the church; it was empty except for the figure of the priest praying earnestly in front of the altar. Mara gave a swift backwards movement of her hand to warn her scholars to keep at a distance and went up the church and sank to her knees beside him. She had been about to ask him a question about Fachtnan until she saw his face.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked with concern. The day was dark and murky, the narrow window slits emitted virtually no light, but the candle on the altar faintly illuminated his features. From what she could see of him, his eyes were heavily shadowed and lips bloodless. His shoulders sagged and he looked as though he would collapse. His hands were clasped together, fingers firmly interlaced, but even still a strong tremor ran through them and she could hear his breath come short and quick through a half-opened mouth.

  ‘How are you, Father?’ she asked again, moved by his utter misery and this time he seemed to hear her. He turned his face towards her and she now could see a horror in his eyes.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘It was the bishop,’ he said, his voice barely audible. ‘I’ve only just realized that it was the bishop.’ And then he turned away from her again, burying his face in his hands. ‘I had thought that it was the god. It should have been the god. She had disgraced the god and the god should have been the one who had vengeance on her. Holy Mother Church should not have contaminated anyone by putting its hands on her unclean flesh.’

  The man was unhinged, thought Mara.

  ‘Come now, you must not give way like this,’ she said in firm, authoritative tones. She beckoned to Domhnall and Slevin.

  ‘Father O’Lochlainn is not feeling well,’ she said, endeavouring to keep her voice soothing and unthreatening. ‘Take him over to Deirdre. She’s in her house, I know. I heard her pumping water. Tell her that Father O’Lochlainn has become weak and faint with too long hours of praying and fasting. She’ll look after him. Go with my scholars, Father. You will be quite safe with them; they will look after you.’

  They were two strong, well-grown boys and in a moment they had raised the man from his knees, each with a firm hand grasping his upper arm. He hung between them, shivering like a man who has received a terrible shock. Mara hoped that he was not going to have some sort of an epileptic fit. Perhaps she should despatch him to Nuala, but she had a feeling that Deirdre’s mothering might do more for him than Nuala’s practical, common sense. Nuala had little time for illnesses caused by the emotions, saying that the body was complicated enough without having to understand humours and such-like nonsense. No, Nuala would be the wrong person to deal with a man who did not have a fever, nor a stomach ache, but was nevertheless sick to his soul. A cup of buttermilk and a slice of freshly-baked bread might work better than medicine for this strangely childlike man.

  ‘Oh, and ask her whether she saw anything of Fachtnan,’ she called after them as they set off down the small church, walking at a smart pace, half-dragging, half-carrying the priest.

  ‘What on earth had he meant by the bishop?’ asked Cael when they had disappeared through the door.

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Mara. The church was freezing cold and reeked of damp. Spots of bright green mould bespeckled the white cloth on the altar table and a faint miasma hovered over the burial slabs beside the wall. What a dismal substitute for a wife and a family. And Father O’Lochlainn had about thirty years of this, after perhaps a couple of years of the company of a pretty and intelligent young girl.

  ‘Is the bishop going to be a suspect?’ enquired Cormac with a mischievous spark in his eyes belying the innocent air he had assumed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous?’ snapped Mara. She could not imagine the stately and very elderly Bishop Mauritius O’Brien coming down to this obscure valley, strangling a woman, tying her to a pagan god and then going back to his princely home in Kilfenora.

  Father O’Lochlainn, now, that was a different matter. Guilt, shame, repentance could have wrought upon a mind that had never been very stable and madness could have been the natural outcome. If the murder were proved against him, then the bishop would, according to the law, have to take charge of him, treat him humanely, but ensure that he was never unsupervised and that he posed no threat to any other person. Father O’Lochlainn would confess; he might have done it there if she had pressed him, but she would have been reluctant to cross-question a man as distraught as that. No, let him rest and be comforted and perhaps tomorrow morning she would come to him, accompanied by two witnesses: Fachtnan and Domhnall, she thought. She would make the accusation and hear what he had to say. If he admitted his guilt or if he was incapable of rational thought, then she would send for the bishop and inform him what she was going to do. The case, she thought, might be finished, but it was not going to be wrapped up in clean linen and stored out of sight. The people of the kingdom had to know what had happened; had to be told the truth. No violent death should ever be left without public acknowledgement if she could possibly help it. Peace and order in the kingdom depended upon open government.

  ‘Where can Fachtnan have got to?’ she said aloud, hearing her voice sound both irritable and uneasy. Cormac looked at her rather anxiously and she forced herself to apologize for her rebuff. Her scholars had to feel confident to put forward their opinions without fear of ridicule.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cormac,’ she said, ‘you were quite right to query that; and, as always, we should keep an open mind. And of course, no one, not even a king, is exempt from the law. I do feel, however, that the bishop would be a most unlikely murderer. I think that he would have taken a very different course, don’t you? Sent a message to me, probably, and asked me to deal with the matter.’ As she spoke she began to walk quickly down towards the small north-facing door. Where was Fachtnan?

  Domhnall and Slevin were returning as she emerged. Domhnall shook his head when he saw her looking at him.

  ‘No, no sign of Fachtnan,’ he said. ‘Deirdre didn’t see him at all. She was busy all through the morning. She was churning. She told me to tell you not to worry about the priest. He would be welcome to stay with them until he is more himself. That,’ said Domhnall in his precise manner, ‘was the way that she put it: more himself.’

  ‘But what is himself?’ Cael picked up on the note of query in Domhnall’s voice.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Mara responding to the glances that passed between her two cleverest pupils. ‘I suppose that in a case like this, it is our task to peel back the layers and to discover what lies beneath. People are seldom exactly as they appear to be on the outside.’

  ‘And, of course, sometimes, extreme fear and guilt can do the peeling, like Brigid when she pours boiling water over the onions.’ Cael proffered this thought, not to Mara, but to Domhnall who responded with an approving nod. Cael’s freckled face turned slightly pink.

  ‘The priest said something interesting, Brehon, when we were walking back with him. He was rambling on about the bishop killing Clodagh and I thought that I’d better try to distract his mind from that in case he upset and annoyed a lot of religious people, so I said—’

  ‘You should have heard him, Brehon,’ interrupted Slevin. ‘He sounded like you or even the bishop himself. He was so definite.’

  Domhnall blushed a little, but then recovered when she did not smile, just looked at him inquiringly. ‘I just said to him, “Oh, no, no, no. The bishop doesn’t have a rope, Father.” But it was what he said in answer that was interesting. He stopped dead in the middle of the path and looked at me as if I were the mad on
e and he said, “Oh, he didn’t need to bring a rope; he just used her own rope.” And do you know, Brehon, Slevin and I were talking it over afterwards and we both can remember seeing her at a fair with her rope coiled over one shoulder, underneath that terrible old cloak of hers.’

  ‘So she used,’ said Cian. ‘Yes, I remember it now. Slanting across her chest. I remember it. Loose enough to be pulled off in a hurry. She could have just slipped it over her head without even taking the cloak off, or, I suppose someone else could have done that, too. After all she was strangled by someone’s hands. It was only afterwards, only after she was dead, that the rope was wound around her.’

  ‘Do you think that it was really the …’ Art stopped and then said nervously. ‘You don’t think that she did it herself, tied herself to … do you think it might have been something like that? Something to do with the Morrigan?’

  ‘It’s the rope that we’re concerned with now, Art,’ said Mara firmly. ‘Let’s not get involved with any of those old stories. Where is that rope, by the way?’

  ‘Cormac took it. Cormac, what have you done with the rope? You did take it; don’t deny it; I saw you myself.’ Cael faced Cormac like an angry mother, ignoring Art’s mutterings.

  ‘Calm down! I’ve got it. I knew it was important evidence.’ Cormac swung the cloak from his shoulders, opened the loops on the short leather jacket that he wore beneath it and revealed the rope coiled around his waist and chest, over his white léine.

  ‘Yuck!’ exclaimed Cael. ‘Imagine wearing a rope that strangled a woman.’

  ‘It didn’t strangle her, birdbrain, don’t you listen? Nuala told us, don’t you remember. She was strangled by a pair of hands, just the way that someone will do to you some day if you don’t mind your tongue.’ Cian, these days, was at odds with his twin sister who seemed to be growing up a lot more quickly than he was doing himself, but still that reaction was unwarranted. Mara wondered whether, though tougher and less open than Art, he also was worried by the possible supernatural element in this law case. Even Cormac had looked a bit taken aback at the venom of his intervention.

  Nevertheless, she gave Cian a long, cold look that caused him to flush uncomfortably and after a minute, he muttered, ‘Sorry.’ Mara decided to leave the matter. She took the rope from Cormac as soon as he had uncoiled it and examined it carefully. Of course, Clodagh had a pair of nanny goats of her own, presumably given as some sort of dowry by her father, so she would have as much use for a rope as would her cousins.

  Forgetting about the puzzle of Fachtnan’s whereabouts, Mara sank down on a convenient flat-topped boulder and looked at her scholars.

  ‘This is very interesting,’ she said, her eyes going from one to the other. ‘To my mind, this changes matters. What do you think, Cian? Speak quietly, won’t you?’

  ‘Makes it possible that the murder was committed by someone who would not be expected to own a rope,’ he said pointing with his head in the direction of the church. The allusion to the priest was obvious and the others nodded agreement. ‘Now we know,’ Cian continued, ‘that the rope was there, to his hand, probably slipped off her shoulder when he was strangling her, the murderer, I mean,’ he added, looking defiantly at Cael in case she suspected him of believing in the Fár Breige.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mara, nodding approval at him.

  ‘And makes it possible that the murder could have been unplanned and possibly unintended,’ said Cael, her blue-grey eyes focussed and intent.

  ‘Two very interesting points,’ said Mara. To her mind both points seemed to indicate the priest. He could have been driven past bearing point by Clodagh’s obscene mockery and rushed out and strangled her, perhaps hardly knowing what he had done. And then the mind shutting down the consciousness of wrongdoing, he told himself that it was the work of the god of evil; and then came the effort today, to cast blame on Bishop Mauritius who had probably told him to get that woman out of his life, but who had given no assistance to do so.

  And yet, somehow she was not sure. It couldn’t be the bishop, of course. That was nonsense, but the priest had said, ‘he used her own rope’. Somehow, that sounded as though he had witnessed the murder rather than perpetrated it. She remembered thinking that there was a very good chance that he had looked out of his window and seen something on that morning. Although the mist was thick, he could have seen a figure, heard the obscene cackling suddenly cut off, and then had seen the rope being wound around the body.

  And, as for the bishop, in the mist, Bishop Mauritius was just like any other man.

  ‘So anger seems to be the more likely motive than greed,’ mused Domhnall, looking thoughtfully around at the rocky landscape.

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite as far as that myself,’ observed Mara. ‘If Clodagh’s own rope were used, then I would say that the big difference that this new discovery has made is that it might turn the crime into something which was not planned, something which perhaps happened on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘Finnegas, for instance,’ said Slevin and Mara nodded.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘It’s quite feasible that he came across to reason with her, found her there, shaming his family, embarrassing the priest and that he strangled her. In the struggle the rope could have slid from her shoulder, as Cian suggests, and he got the idea of blaming the stone god.’

  ‘And the same could go for the other brothers,’ pointed out Domhnall. ‘I agree with you, Brehon. If that really was Clodagh’s rope, then this murderer could have been someone who just seized an opportunity.’

  ‘I think that we should endeavour to get a second opinion on this rope. We won’t bother Deirdre; she’ll have enough to do with the priest, but Cael, would you just slip along to Anu’s house and ask her whether she recognizes it, and if she can’t exactly identify it, just ask her whether she remembers Clodagh carrying a rope under her cloak.’ There was no harm in getting confirmation, though Mara knew that her scholars were keen-eyed and observant.

  As she expected, Cael was back in a very short time with the information that, according to Anu, Clodagh definitely carried a rope, over her shoulder as Cian had remembered. ‘She said to tell you, too, that the taoiseach came over early this morning to say that they didn’t need to worry about Aengus, because he was going to stay in one of the workers’ cabins at Lissylisheen until the weather got better,’ she added.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Mara. ‘And did she think that the rope looked like the one that Clodagh carried?’

  ‘She said that she couldn’t be exactly positive, Brehon, but that she thought it looked like it. She said that Clodagh made her own ropes, she had seen her out twisting them and she knew that she used ivy because about a year ago she had asked Gobnait to bring her some and then did nothing but complain about it when he brought back a huge load to her, according to Anu!’

  ‘So it looks as though it was Clodagh’s, then,’ said Cormac enthusiastically. ‘There’s lots of ivy in that rope, it’s good stuff, Cumhal always says, as long as you have enough of it, and you soak it well beforehand, that’s what he says.’

  The crime, thought Mara, was a simpler and more haphazard one than she had envisaged. Someone had suddenly seized an opportunity on that morning when the mist was almost impenetrable and had murdered Clodagh, either because of the property, or because of hatred for the woman, herself.

  ‘Tomorrow, we must try to pin these six people down to exact times,’ she said aloud. ‘We’ll have to do it properly, perhaps interviewing all of the people who live around here, and the herdsmen on the hills. It will be a matter of careful examining of detail,’ she said to her scholars. ‘I’ll get Fachtnan to make out …’ And then Mara stopped. ‘I was forgetting about Fachtnan. Where on earth is he? Cormac, run over to Dunaunmore and check that his horse is really there.’

  Cormac was back in a moment. ‘His horse is still there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But, I’ve been thinking and I’ve got a sudden inspiration. I know where they might be, Fachtnan and
little Orla. Do you remember yesterday that she was moaning about not being allowed to come with us, you know, when she was left with Deirdre, do you remember she was saying something about moon milk? Perhaps she persuaded Fachtnan to take her there, to the Moonmilk Cave.’

  ‘But they can’t be still there. Anu said that they arrived not long after we left for Ballyryan. That must have been about three hours ago.’ Mara gave a hasty glance upwards. There was no sun to be seen among the lowering clouds, but a slightly brighter patch towards Ballinalacken showed that midday was approaching.

  ‘Where is this Moonmilk Cave, anyway?’ She looked at Art who knew more about the locality than the others did. His mother ran her sheep on the common land of the foothills of Slieve Elva, close to the O’Lochlainn commons on Knockauns Mountain.

  ‘I’m not sure which one of them it is, there’s such a lot of caves there, all lined up along the cliff,’ he said hesitantly, looking at Cormac.

  ‘I’m not sure either, I know we went there with Dinan, but I got in a bit of a muddle with them all. Dinan would know. Hey, Ug! Go and find Dinan, like a good boy.’

  The sheepdog was trotting in the direction of his home, soaked wet, but with the air of a dog who has done a good morning’s work. He turned his one pricked ear towards Cormac, and then stopped and waited, looking back, checking with his master to see whether this was an official command. A moment later Gobnait came into view.

  ‘How’s the lambing sheep, Gobnait?’ shouted Cormac.

  ‘Well, well, thanks be to God. A lovely little girl-lamb, she’s had. Me and Ug got the two of them into the shelter of a cave and we hung a dead fox up on a sally bush next to it, just to warn off the other fellows. You should have seen Ug smile when I did that. He killed it himself, this morning. Smile, Ug!’