Chain of Evidence (22 page)

‘You look as though your mind is working as fast as that clock at Carron, Brehon,’ said Fiona with a twinkle. ‘I can hear it ticking,’ she added daringly, while Moylan raised an eyebrow and Aidan tightened his mouth and shot a glance at his audacious classmate.

Mara laughed. ‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘My mind is active.’ She looked mischievously at her scholars. ‘Think of a chessboard,’ she advised. ‘The pawns are the cows, battling their way up the hill towards Carron. Let’s make them white pawns. Now where is everybody else?’

‘Well the
taoiseach,
Garrett, has to be the black king,’ said Shane entering into her idea with zest. ‘I’d say that he is already dead. And lying on the hillside above the road.’

‘And the white queen, that is Slaney,’ said Moylan. ‘She is possibly beside him and is tying the chain around his—’

‘That’s going too far,’ interrupted Shane. ‘That’s solving the chess puzzle before the pieces are set up. Who else have we got on the Brehon’s chess board at Carron?’

‘Tomás,’ said Fiona. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he were the one that delivered the fatal stroke. He had opportunity, didn’t he, Brehon?’

‘Yes,’ said Mara readily. ‘He was walking on the hillside when he heard the cattle . . . saw the pawn formation . . .’

‘I’ll make him a knight; I’m lethal with my knights, and Tomás is a tricky type,’ said Fiona decidedly. ‘Now who else was around?’

‘Brennan, the cowman,’ said Fachtnan. ‘What shall he be, Fiona?’

‘A rook,’ said Fiona. ‘He’s that shape, even if he isn’t that important.’

‘All pieces, all people, are important,’ said Mara firmly. ‘This is a murder enquiry and the guilty person is the focus of our debate. What about Maol, the steward?’

‘He was with the cook for most of the day,’ said Shane. ‘And he was definitely with him when the cattle thundered past. They were down in the cellar, and both said that they heard the hoofs echo on the roof – I’d say that old cellar was originally a cave.’

‘Like the one at my uncle’s, at Ardal O’Lochlainn’s place,’ said Nuala. ‘Could there be an underground passageway going from the cave to the hillside, just as there is in Lissylisheen?’

‘That’s a good idea, Nuala,’ said Fachtnan admiringly and she flushed with pleasure.

‘How many people knew that there was to be a cattle raid; that’s the question, isn’t it, Brehon?’ asked Shane shrewdly.

‘I’ve been asking myself that, also, Shane,’ said Mara. ‘I had a strong feeling that Stephen Gardiner knew all about it when he came down the mountain as everyone was exclaiming and shouting. After all, he did come from O’Donnell’s place on a boat and that must have been a big cattle boat – and had lots of drovers, of cattlemen with large sticks, going on the boat, also. I’m fairly sure that he knew all about it – he certainly didn’t deny it when I challenged him.’

‘And that means that Rhona, and Peadar, probably knew about it, also,’ said Aidan.

‘And Jarlath – don’t forget that Jarlath travelled down with them,’ said Moylan.

‘Wouldn’t he warn his brother, though?’ asked Hugh diffidently.

‘That’s a good point,’ praised Mara. ‘Wouldn’t he? What does everyone think?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Fiona. ‘He didn’t seem too fond of him and he may have thought it would be a bit of a joke. I don’t think that he wanted to be elected as
tánaiste.
’

‘In that case, he can’t be a suspect,’ pointed out Shane. ‘Why kill his brother if he didn’t want power?’

‘Well, I think we should have him on the board,’ said Fiona. ‘He can be a bishop; he’s tall and slim. And a bishop moves long distances rapidly and Jarlath must have done that if he got from Mullaghmore to Carron just ahead of the raiders.’

‘So, to sum up,’ said Moylan taking charge, ‘we have a board with a black king who is in deadly danger, a herd of white pawns, a white queen – and . . .’ He stopped and then said, ‘I’ve just thought of something. You remember the letter that Garrett had in his pouch, the one where Garrett promised to bend the knee to King Henry VIII, surely, in return for that, he would—’

‘You think that he told Garrett about the cattle raid so that he could lock up his cattle or something . . .’ interrupted Shane. ‘And Garrett told Slaney, and Slaney took the opportunity of getting rid of Garrett. You’ve all heard the will. And you’ve heard that Slaney, according to Rhona, was having a huge row with Garrett on that day. Well, he might have gone out to the hillside to see whether he could see if anything was happening and she followed him and she hit him over the head – she’s a strong woman; we know that – and then she tied the chain to the millstone and waited.’

‘Could be,’ said Nuala with interest. ‘I was saying to Peadar, when we examined the body, that I thought, since there was quite a groove on the ankle, the skin must have still retained some elasticity so the tying of the chain must have taken place shortly after death.’

‘So what do you think about your chess board, now, Brehon?’ asked Shane. ‘It’s a pity that Peadar was on the mountain and then came home with us. Otherwise he might have been a pawn that becomes the young prince – you remember, Brehon, you told us once that some people from the east had the queen as a prince and heir to the throne?’

‘Yes, Peadar and – or – his mother Rhona, would have been the chief suspects if they hadn’t been under our eye all the time – but they did come back to Cahermacnaghten with us,’ said Aidan in disappointed tones.

‘Back to my chessboard,’ said Mara. ‘On it I have – as well as the stampeding pawns, of course – well, there is the unfortunate and doomed black king, Garrett MacNamara; the queen, Slaney; the rook, Brennan; the bishop, Jarlath; and the knight, Tomás.’

‘Four suspects, but do they all have motives?’ asked Moylan, ‘May I write on the board, Brehon?’ He hardly waited for the nod before he strode forward and seized the stick of charred wood.

‘Let’s give them marks out of ten for both motive and opportunity,’ said Aidan.

‘When we last wrote on this board we looked for motives,’ said Moylan rapidly. ‘Now we are looking to combine opportunity with motives. The first one is Brennan. His motive is anger and revenge because he had been dismissed, unfairly he thought, from his position as chief cowherd. He was around – he came out of his cottage when Jarlath arrived back from the mountain.’

‘Jarlath said that he was sulky-looking,’ remarked Hugh.

‘His cottage isn’t far from the road where the body of Garrett was found,’ said Moylan. ‘Shall we give him eight out of ten for opportunity and, say, five out of ten for motive?’

‘Give him six out of ten for motive,’ suggested Shane. ‘This crime, if we are right, might have been a spur-of-the-moment fit of anger – Garrett was hit over the head with a stick, that’s right, isn’t it, Nuala? All this business with the cows might be just something that occurred to him. He’s a cattleman. He would know that the cows would slow at that steep hill. He might just have a cool nerve enough to have dragged the body down onto the road and just got clear before the cows breasted the hill.’

‘You’re forgetting about the chain. How do you account for that?’

Shane shrugged; his blue eyes dark with thought and then his eyes lit up. ‘I know,’ he said triumphantly, ‘no one has thought of this, but you know how some of these people are always afraid of bad luck coming to them, like picking May blossom or touching a lone tree. Well, perhaps, Brennan believed that it was bad luck to touch a body that you had killed – that it would bleed or something – so he had a chain with him – might have been a bull chain like the O’Lochlainn suggested – and he tied the chain around Garrett’s ankle and . . .’ He shrugged again as he watched the expressions of his fellow scholars and said, ‘Well, it’s possible.’

‘It’s ingenious,’ commented Mara.

‘Let’s give him six out of ten for motive,’ suggested Hugh.

Mara watched as her scholars debated allocating three for motive and four for opportunity to Jarlath and a massive nine out of ten to Slaney for both motive and opportunity.

And then in large firm strokes Moylan wrote the name ‘TOMÁS’.

‘He, or his wife, is certainly very keen to keep Slaney in a state where she can say nothing to the Brehon,’ remarked Nuala and Shane’s eyes sparkled with interest.

‘If Tomás was the murderer then a reason to keep Slaney drugged might be . . . Let me think . . . How about Slaney noticing Tomás coming back from the hillside above the road where Garrett’s body was discovered; she mightn’t have taken any notice at the time, but later on when she realized that the Brehon was making enquiries she might have tackled him and asked him what he had been doing.’

‘That would be like Slaney,’ said Mara thoughtfully. ‘Whatever her faults, she does not lack courage.’

‘Or tackled his wife,’ suggested Hugh. ‘Cait would have run immediately to Tomás; she’s that kind of woman,’ he ended with an air of a man of the world.

‘Quite possibly,’ said Mara, concealing her amusement.

‘So Tomás has, say, eight out of ten for opportunity, but motive I would only give him three out of ten as he could not have been sure that Jarlath would have declined the position,’ said Fiona.

‘He’d guess that he would be elected
tánaiste
though and then he could always dispose of Jarlath in some clever way – or Jarlath might get lost at sea or something. I propose that we raise that to five,’ suggested Shane and even Fiona nodded at that so Moylan wrote it on the board.

‘What about Tomás’s son?’ asked Aidan suddenly. ‘If Tomás is
taoiseach,
there’s a chance that Adair will become
taoiseach
later on
.
He’s a man grown; he must be at least my age. What about Adair for the murderer? No one has mentioned him yet.’

‘Not much of a man,’ said Fiona disdainfully. ‘I don’t mean you, Aidan. But that Adair is a doe-eyed little mother’s boy. Cait is always popping choice pieces of food on his plate as though he were five years old.’

‘A man will do a lot for an inheritance,’ said Aidan wisely. ‘A woman like you would not understand that.’

And a woman who is a devoted mother, thought Mara, will do a lot to gain an inheritance for her son. Her eye went to the door. Heavy, tramping feet, a hasty knock and the door was pushed open before she could call out permission to enter.

‘Brehon,’ said Fergal, thrusting his head into the schoolhouse. His fellow bodyguard was behind him and he took up the story, saying in alarmed tones, ‘The king is not at his son’s foster home and there are two strange horses tied to the beech tree inside your gate.’

‘Two strange horses!’ exclaimed Mara.

‘Let’s see them. Bet I recognise them.’ Moylan was on his feet instantly and was out of the door and running down the road between the law school, inside its huge round enclosing wall, and the Brehon’s house a few hundred yards away. The others went after him. Mara followed rather more slowly, having stopped to wipe the names from the board.

The huge beech tree inside the wall of Mara’s garden had just begun to break into delicate, pale green foliage. It was a lovely sight in the spring, though in the summer it cast a dense, heavy shade. Mara had planted bluebells to grow underneath it and the combination in May was always beautiful when the bulbs came into flower beneath the tree buds. To her annoyance the two horses had trampled the fragile fleshy leaves of the bluebells and had broken most of the stems which were loaded with their tight dark blue buds ready to unfurl once the sun returned.

‘Whose are these horses?’ she said in annoyed tones. She could see now what had happened to Turlough. Two visitors had arrived and Turlough had whistled up Bran from his watching post outside the gate and had taken dog and horsemen on one of his favourite walks across the stony clints and grykes of the stone-paved fields opposite her house.

‘That horse belongs to Tomás, and I suppose the other one belongs to his son. Fine horse that – a bit of Arab breeding in it?’ Moylan gazed enviously at Adair’s horse and then gave a whistle. ‘I know that horse. The O’Lochlainn allowed me to try its paces last week. He said that he might have a buyer for it – a man with a son of about my age – one of Garrett MacNamara’s relations from Thomond, he said.’

Mara looked thoughtfully at the spirited young horse energetically stamping on one of her precious bluebells. Ardal, she knew, sold his horses for a good price. This would have been an expensive purchase for Tomás and probably, a few days earlier, would not have been something that he would have contemplated.

The death of Garrett had made a difference to that family.

‘I think that Tomás and his son have paid a visit to the king,’ she said aloud. ‘They’ve gone for a walk together, I’d say.’ It would, she knew, be Turlough’s way of dealing with a situation, of getting to know a person. He was a big man, her husband, always a little too large for any room that he was in, a man who liked to be out-of-doors with his hounds, striding across the land like any farmer. She thought about it for a moment and then turned to Fachtnan.

‘Could you take the scholars back to the schoolhouse, Fachtnan,’ she said. ‘Go over that passage from Cicero with Hugh, will you? Moylan, Aidan and Fiona, I want you to study that case I left ready for you. Discuss it and determine what the judge’s verdict will be and what the fine should amount to; Shane, I want you to go through the law books and find out as much as you can about “sick maintenance”, especially what the law says about the physician’s house for those who are seriously ill. Nuala, will you come with me?’

Nuala watched the scholars go with an amused smile on her face. ‘I suppose when we come back I’m going to be asked to admire Shane’s work,’ she remarked. ‘Now, don’t try to look innocent, Mara. Remember that I’ve known you all of my life. I know how you like to get your own way. You want to see me installed at Rathborney and caring for my heritage. Anyway, how are we going to find the king and his visitors? Search the one-hundred-square miles of the Burren?’

‘Easy,’ said Mara. She bent down, picked a flat blade of grass, held it between her hands and blew a penetrating musical note. ‘Don’t tell Brigid,’ she said, her eyes scanning the flat grykes of gleaming limestone. ‘She’s been forbidding me to do that since I was five years old. Ah, here he is. Here’s Bran. Can you see him? Yes, I thought so – they’ve gone over towards . . .’ She had been going to say ‘Caherconnell’ but then she stopped herself. Caherconnell had been Nuala’s home, the place where her mother had died and her father had been murdered; the place which should have been hers, but which was now
occupied
by her stepmother’s son. With a glance at the girl’s face she said gaily, ‘Bran will lead us to them.’