An Unjust Judge

by Cora Harrison

  The fifth knife had a line of dark, reddish brown caught in the join between blade and hilt. The knife itself was suspiciously clean, the blade shining and the wood of the handle was pale in colour, considerably paler than the other four knives. It had, she reckoned, been recently rubbed down with wet sand.

  ‘Whose knife is this?’ Mara looked keenly along the line of faces that had turned towards her. They all looked guilty, confused and worried. But what did that prove? There was a moment’s silence. They all knew, of course. A man’s knife was a most important possession, something which never left him, day or night. These five were close friends, they would know each other’s knife almost as well as they knew their own.

  ‘It’s mine,’ said Ciaran after a moment.

  ‘You’re sure? Look closely,’ said Mara, but she only spoke to give herself time. This had been a surprise. If blood had been found on any knife, then she would have expected that it would have been on Peadar’s, the leader of the group and the man with most to lose because of the unjust judge.

  ‘It’s mine, all right.’ Ciaran stretched out his hand, but Mara did not relinquish it. This might be important evidence in a murder trial, but even while she thought that, she wondered. Was Ciaran capable of murder? Ciaran, she thought, might have had less motive than the other three, and certainly far less than Peadar. All this business with Emer was just malicious nonsense on the part of her mother. However, she gathered that he and Emer had been quite drunk that night when they went into the bushes outside the alehouse, and a man who drinks heavily can often commit a crime which he would not have done in his sober moments.

  ‘Have you lent this knife to anyone recently?’ Mara still held it, gripping it by the well-cleaned handle.

  ‘No,’ said Ciaran.

  ‘But you have cleaned it recently, sanded it, that’s right, isn’t it?’ Mara held the knife up to the sunlight, but she kept her eyes fixed on Ciaran and saw his lips tighten. He had now seen the telltale evidence of blood.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said after a minute. ‘Caught a few bass off the rocks the other night, so I cleaned them and took them back up to my mother to cook for our supper.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. It was, she thought, a reasonable explanation. Art was looking at her closely and she nodded permission to him to ask a question.

  ‘Where did you clean them, Ciaran?’ Art’s voice was perfectly natural, a question from a boy to a young man only a few years older.

  ‘Just down by the rocks,’ said Ciaran warily.

  ‘In one of those big rock pools, I suppose.’ Art seemed to be thinking about that.

  ‘That’s right.’ Ciaran seemed to decide that Art as a fisherman’s son was interested in his method so he went into a long description of the bait that he had used, and of the length of the line. He had caught, it appeared, ten fish and they all had a great supper from them.

  ‘And you cleaned your knife afterwards.’ Gently Art brought him back to the subject of the knife.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ciaran cheerfully. ‘Strung the ten of them on a piece of twine from my pocket, small ones, you know, about the size of my foot, but these are the tastiest. And then I cleaned my knife and my hands and went back up.’

  ‘And the handle of the knife?’ Art leaned over slightly to examine the knife in Mara’s hands.

  ‘That’s right,’ repeated Ciaran. He was slightly less sure of himself this time. ‘Must have missed that bit there, between the handle and the blade.’

  ‘Well, that seems to be an explanation for the blood on your knife, Ciaran,’ said Mara. Art, she was pleased to see, immediately ceased to question Ciaran. It was time, she thought, to wind up this meeting. There was, however, one more question to be asked.

  ‘The law,’ she said formally, ‘distinguishes between a murder committed on the spur of the moment, in the heat of anger, but then repented and confessed to. It is slightly after the twenty-four hours since the body was found, but I am sure that I can persuade the king to extend the period of mercy and allow for just half of the fine to be paid. So now, I ask each one of you whether you had any hand in the unlawful killing of Brehon Gaibrial O’Doran.’

  Her eyes went along the row of young men in front of her. Even if one owned to the murder now, the penalty would still be three milch cows, or three ounces of silver added to the honour price of the newly appointed Brehon which would, she thought, amount to seven séts, three-and-a-half ounces of silver, or four milch cows. Only Peadar would be able to find that fee to pay to the family of the dead man, and it would leave him with nothing to graze the fields of the small farm that he had inherited from his father. Even as that thought crossed her mind, Peadar himself spoke up.

  ‘Like we told you, Brehon,’ he said. ‘We found the man dead. It was none of our doing.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Mara. ‘Surely it was possible for one to slip away while the others drank. The cliffs are only minutes away from the alehouse.’

  ‘We stayed with each other,’ said Peadar doggedly. He cast a quick glance at Ciaran standing with his knife in his hand and then turned his eyes back to Mara. ‘The man was dead when we found him,’ he repeated. ‘None of us is a killer.’

  ‘Well, you know where to find me if any of you recollects anything that will be of use in finding out the truth about the death of Brehon O’Doran. In the meantime, Ciaran, I would like to keep this knife. You will get it back when I have finished with it. You others can take your knives now. Thank you all for your help. You may go now,’ said Mara and nodded to Domhnall who returned the knives, one by one to Peadar, Ronan, Seán and Donal. They stood awkwardly for a few minutes and then with muttered words of farewell, they went soberly down the road.

  ‘Interesting that they went off like this; that they didn’t go back into the alehouse like the rest of the parish,’ said Cian looking after the five figures.

  ‘Makes one think that they have something to talk about,’ observed his sister and earned a nod of approval from Domhnall.

  ‘What did you make of Ciaran’s explanation, Art?’ asked Mara.

  ‘I don’t think that anyone cleaning fish, just beside a rock pool, would get blood on the hilt of his knife, not to the extent of having to sand it off afterwards,’ said Art, examining the knife again. ‘He’d just slit the fish, flick out the innards into the sea and then do the next one. Even if a drop of blood got onto the handle, he’d just dip it into the salt water. He wouldn’t need to sand it down. That would only happen if there was a lot of blood and if it had soaked into the wood before being cleaned off.’

  ‘They’re coming back,’ said Cael in a low voice.

  They had been talking hard, in very low voices, with several glances over their shoulders towards the Brehon. Now Peadar had turned on his heel and was marching back up the hill followed by Ciaran. The other three lagged a little behind.

  ‘Ciaran wants to tell you something, Brehon,’ said Peadar when he reached the small garden. He nudged Ciaran. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Nothing will happen. The Brehon will understand.’

  ‘That’s not my knife, Brehon,’ blurted out Ciaran. ‘I took it from the sands down by the harbour. It was just lying there. It’s a good knife, much better than my own, so I just took it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mara. She took the knife and held it up. ‘Did you make any enquiries about whether someone had lost this knife?’

  ‘No.’ Ciaran looked uncomfortable.

  ‘And where is your own knife?’

  ‘I threw it away, threw it into the sea. It was useless. I had broken the blade of it. I broke it last week. It wasn’t worth keeping.’

  Mara studied him. He had a hangdog and rather hopeless look on his face.

  ‘I know you don’t believe me,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Should I?’

  That simple question seemed to embarrass him hugely. He turned helplessly to Peadar.

  ‘He found it this morning, Brehon,’ said Peadar in a low voice. H
e, too, sounded hesitant. ‘We were coming to Mass and Ciaran just spotted it. It was lying there on the sand, just where the tide had left it. We reckoned that it had been lost from a boat and that it came ashore with the tide.’

  ‘And it was just the two of you?’

  ‘That’s right. I stayed last night with Ciaran. I had twenty-four hours before I had to leave the kingdom.’

  A strange explanation, thought Mara. Still, perhaps it was true. It was natural that these five young men who had been involved in the death of Brehon O’Doran would cling together, whether guilty of the ultimate death, or not.

  ‘I see,’ she said eventually. ‘Thank you, Ciaran. I will return the knife to you when I have finished with it.’ She waited until they had gone back down the road before laying the knife on the small table in front of her scholars.

  ‘It’s a good knife, not fancy, not much used, I’d say,’ said Cian bending over it. ‘May I pick it up, Brehon?’

  ‘Alder wood, what do you think, Art?’ he said after a minute.

  ‘Definitely. It’s very white. Looks a good knife, not much used, I’d say, not like a fisherman’s knife, but then Ciaran works mainly herding his father’s cattle. I’d say it could be his knife. He could have whittled the wood some time while he was up in the mountains, picked a branch of alder and shaped it. They get very bored these herdsmen. Perhaps he did it last winter.’ Art sounded dubious, running a finger over the handle.

  ‘New, or not very much used,’ said Domhnall, taking it from him.

  ‘Could it have been in the sea, washed up on the beach? It doesn’t seem to be waterlogged.’ Cael reached out and touched the knife. ‘Yes, the wood is quite light,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing about wood from alders; it doesn’t absorb much water,’ said Art. ‘That’s why people use it for buckets and for boards to chop fish on. My father swears that you can’t beat a pair of oars made from alder wood. They’ll last you a lifetime. That’s what he always says.’

  ‘It still could have been a group decision to cut the man’s throat,’ said Domhnall. ‘But they would have had to choose one man and one knife. Not necessarily a knife belonging to the man who slit the throat. None of the other knives were as good as this one. The blade on Peadar’s was chipped and the handle was very worn. Donal’s was fancy but didn’t look strong and Seán’s knife and Ronan’s knife were both in a bad way with very thin-looking blades.’

  ‘So Peadar to do the deed and Ciaran’s knife to do it with.’ Cael made a grimace. ‘It feels wrong, somehow. And yet, perhaps, they saw it as justice, passed sentence on him, not too far from the place where he passed judgement on them.’

  ‘What we haven’t considered is that four out of the five could be speaking the truth,’ said Mara. ‘I know they said that they were together all of the time, but is that likely? Surely one might go outside to the bushes, or go up to get another drink, without any of the others even noticing. Barra was explaining to me that the majority of his customers get drinks put on the slate so that they can pay later with goods, so getting a drink would not be a quick process. And certainly a man could run to the clifftop in the time that his friends might reasonably expect him to be missing in order to relieve his bladder.’

  ‘If we put the matter of the knife aside …’ said Cael tentatively.

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Domhnall. ‘Let’s put that aside. A knife can be lent, can be picked up from a table in the semi-darkness. They would have been eating bread and cheese, slicing an onion, I know what these alehouses are like; they would have all had their knives in their hands or else lying on the table. It would have been possible to pick up the wrong one. So if we do forget about the knife, then I would say that the most likely person to kill would have been Peadar.’

  ‘He had the most to lose,’ said Art thoughtfully.

  ‘And we must remember that on Friday night he was still under a sentence of banishment. Once the twenty-four hours were up, then he had to be gone out of the kingdom or else he could be killed as a fugitive. I think that you are right, Domhnall,’ said Cian. ‘What do you think, Brehon?’

  Mara took her eyes from the knife. It puzzled her. The plainness and simplicity of the handle and yet its quality, and its lack of wear all added to the conundrum. Who did it really belong to? She picked it up and looked at the blade. Well-honed, but again without any visible signs of wear. A knife that might have sliced an onion, or cut a chunk of cheese, the lack of wear pointed to that sort of use, not a knife for a farmer or a fisherman where it would be in constant use for all sorts of purposes. Aloud she said, ‘Cian, go and collect Niall from the alehouse. It’s time that we made our way back up the hill to the Brehon’s house. Brigid and the cart will be arriving soon.’

  Eight

  The Wisdom Triads of the Judge Fithail

  There are three things that ruin wisdom:

  1. Ignorance.

  2. Inaccurate knowledge.

  3. Forgetfulness.

  An odd boy, this Niall MacEgan from Ossory, Mara thought as they all went back up the hill towards the Brehon’s house. Her scholars did not like him much, she could see that. Art, Cian and Cael cast sideways glances at him, answered a question from him with perfect politeness, but volunteered nothing. What was it about him that they didn’t like, she wondered. He was the same age and had the same background. She would have expected that they would have been eagerly comparing notes about his experience at a MacEgan law school, questioning him about the place of Brehon law in that alien territory of Ossory, but they did not. Cael had made one remark about the weather, and then said no more. Even Domhnall, the poised and courteous Domhnall, eyed the boy speculatively as he climbed onto the borrowed pony and said nothing. She was not tempted to enquire, though. Over thirty years of dealing with scholars had taught her that boys liked to sort these relationships out for themselves. If anyone was to speak, it would be Cael, and, though they quarrelled and argued, Cael was intensely loyal to her brother. Mara turned her thoughts back to the murdered man.

  This knife, she thought, as they rode up the hill, this knife, not a working man’s knife, not a rich man’s knife, the knife was a puzzle. She wished that she could make time to ride over to Rathborney and to show it to Nuala while the corpse was still viewable. Nuala had a room, more of a cave, really, chipped out of the rock over which the stream flowed. She had it built at the same time as her hospital. A corpse could be stowed there in the icy chill for a week at least at this time of year. Nevertheless, there was bound to be a subtle deterioration in the condition of the flesh as the days passed. Mara compressed her lips. It was not a new feeling: the wish to be in two places at once; but now it was very strong. She had promised that she would be here at the Brehon’s house and the people of Corcomroe had to feel that she was there to listen to them and to act as though this was her kingdom. They could not be left without a Brehon and Sunday afternoon was a traditional time for making calls. No, she would have to stay. She half-turned and beckoned to Cian, waiting until he was beside her before she spoke to him quietly enough not to be overheard by Niall.

  ‘Cian, I want you to ride back to Cahermacnaghten with Domhnall and then to go on to Rathborney. Show Nuala this knife and ask her to consider whether it could have inflicted the wound on Brehon O’Doran’s neck.’

  No need, she thought, to send a request to Nuala to examine it carefully. Nuala did everything carefully. She would have slightly preferred to ask Cael who was the more intelligent of the two, but Cael would be best for befriending Niall and finding out a little more about him. In any case, Cian, though lacking the superior judgement and brain power of Domhnall and Cael, nevertheless, possessed an excellent memory and could repeat a conversation, almost word for word, hours and even days after it occurred.

  Brigid and the cart had already arrived when they reached the Brehon’s house at Knockfinn. Mara smiled as she heard her high-pitched voice directing someone to fill up the pot because gallons of hot water was n
eeded and someone else to find the bars of soap and the bag of sand. In a couple of hours, the grimy, dusty house would be shining with cleanliness and smelling of lavender-scented wax polish. In the meantime, she thought, she would keep out of the way after a quick greeting. Brigid, she thought with compunction, was getting too old for this sort of work. She must be almost seventy. She had been a young girl in the household when Mara’s mother died and it was Brigid who had brought up the baby, cared for the little girl, looked after Mara’s own daughter while the adolescent Mara coped with a bad marriage, with the death of her father, with her studies and her struggles to become Brehon in his place, to take on the school and the affairs of the kingdom. She had worked hard, but she would not have managed without Brigid at her side.

  ‘Dear Brigid,’ she said going into the kitchen, ‘now don’t you go tiring yourself. The girls will do everything. And I see you have brought Seánín and Aodhan with you, too. That’s good,’ she added as a couple of boys came staggering in with buckets of water.

  ‘Now you just go for a walk, Brehon,’ said Brigid decisively. ‘This place is not fit for you. I don’t know what’s being going on here at all. The poor man, God help him. How could anyone let this place get into a mess like that? You can hardly see out of those windows. Covered in dust and salt and God knows what. You might as well not have glass. Shutters would be as good.’

  ‘We’ll help,’ said Cael. ‘Come on, Art. Get rid of your cloak. Roll up your sleeves. Give us a couple of aprons, Brigid. Me to sand down that table. I love doing that. It will be fifty shades lighter by the time that I am finished with it, Brigid. Give me that scrubbing brush, Art. Slosh a bit of water onto it, Seánín.’